Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light

"One of the Worst Games I have Played in a Long Time"

I finally got to sit down and play Blade Dancer a few weeks ago. While some impressions were good, most were not. I'd first like to warn anyone that may read this review, or be considering purchasing this game, that Blade Dancer is not a typical JRPG. It's far from it. It's more like a single player MMO with turn based battles. It's similar in style to the Monster Hunter games, but Monster Hunter has real time battles. So, if you like Monster Hunter, read on, otherwise, you might want to look elsewhere for your RPG fix.

As I said, this game pretty much plays like a single player MMO. You will be hunting mobs, trying to get drops from them, and trying to give a crap about the paper thin story witch is standard for MMO type games. The game starts you out in the first city, and the game seems alright at first. You will play as Lance, who looks like quite possibly the most vanilla and generic hero I have ever seen in an RPG. The town looks okay, the controls are easy enough to use, and the game explains a good bit of what you need to do. You'll pick up some fetch quests (Much like an MMO) and gain some gold and experience. Once that is all taken care of, it's time to go hunting!! At this point in the game, you have seen the good things that this game has to offer. You would be better off turning it off now and never playing it again. I'll explain a little more below.

Graphics

Blade Dancer starts out with a fairly cool (and misleading) anime intro, which will catch your attention right away. After seeing the intro, I was wondering how this game got such bad reviews, well I found out. Once the game starts, the graphics seem pretty generic in general. The character models are very plain, and look about as quality as characters in Shadow Madness. Seriously, Chrono Cross blows this game away graphically. The towns are decorated okay, but once you venture out to the countryside to go hunt some monsters, the backgrounds change. The battle fields are very drab, and have about 3 colors in them. Once combat is initialized, the game cuts to a side or back view of the fight. The closer views of the characters and monsters in battle look just about as bad. The characters are plain, ordinary, and have little to distinguish the themselves from any other RPG characters. Some monsters have a little more detail than the character models, but for the most part, they were just as bad as the characters in your party.

Story

Well what can I say. It's an MMO style gameplay romp. Anyone who has played something similar should know that the story is paper thin, and hardly worth reading the text, unless you are getting a quest from someone. While reading through dialogue in the game, I found myself daydreaming about what mobs I needed to kill to get certain items.


Sound/Music

The sounds and music in Blade Dancer didn't really bother me, but I tend to not notice music unless it is really good or really bad. As long as it's there and decent, I'm okay. With that being said, the music in Blade Dancer is average, nothing special. The sound effects are okay as well.

Controls

I found the controls for Blade Dancer to be set up quite well. I've played a lot of PSP games that have issues getting the camera right since there is only one analog stick, but I never had an issue with the controls in Blade Dancer. Using the L and R buttons to rotate your camera may seem old school, but it gets the job done and keeps you going in the right direction.

Gameplay

Okay, my review has been kind of okay so far, but now is the part when we talk about really bad stuff. Once you go to the battle fields to find mobs of enemies, you will notice a bunch of floating skulls. These are enemy mobs, which you can agro and fight, or avoid if you need to. They will be the standard encounter type for the game. Yeah, that's right, monsters don't even get their own field sprites in Blade Dancer. They all have to share one. To make things interesting, the skulls are different colors based on difficulty, much like color coded enemies in MMOs. You can press the “square” button to see what the mobs are. Speaking of the “square” button. I forgot to mention it.

In any area you are in, you will need to press the square button to target objects to interact with. You can not just walk up to someone and talk to him, you have to target him first and then talk to him. Basically it makes a one button thing, a 2 button thing. You can cycle through targets to get to your desired target, but it's still a dumb thing to have in a game these days.

Okay, back to the field combat. The color coded skulls will react to your strength as well. Weaker skulls will run from you and stronger mobs will chase after you. I'm not sure if there is a glitch with this or what, but when I found a mob that I over-powered, it would hiss at me (like they always do at first), and just kind of sit there convulsing in the same spot. So I'd walk past it and move on.

It's about this point in time that you notice another meter at the bottom right of the screen, underneath your health. In most games it's an exp. Meter, to show you when you are about to level. Not in this game. In this game, your second meter is none other than the dreaded weapon durability meter. Wait, it gets worse. Every time you attack your enemy, the durability of your weapon goes down. So you think to yourself, “well that's okay, I'll just go to a Blacksmith and have him fix it right up.” Wrong, there are no blacksmiths that fix things in this game. Yes, you have to use stuff until it breaks, and then replace it. How can you replace weapons so frequently you might ask? Well it's all done with the wonderful crafting system in Blade Dancer.

Now first off, I'm not taking away anything from the actual crafting system in this game. I thought it was very well done and easy to use. I did have an issue with how it was used though.

Basically the crafting system lets you make most items in the game with materials from fallen mobs, or stuff you can buy in the stores. This is good, since during a long trip through the battle fields you may go through 3 swords. So your inventory is always stacked with weapons, hoping that you don't run out before you get back to town, which can often be a long time. You are able to craft anywhere, so if your sword breaks in the field, and you have the proper items, you can craft another one right away and start using it. Nice, but is it really necessary? It just seems like a way for them to shove their crafting system down my throat. Another thing that you will notice in the game is that most of the weapons are incredibly expensive, and money is hard to come by. Again, making you use the crafting system to get what your characters need to survive. It's just a tedious system that didn't need to be forced onto the player in so many ways.

Now that we have run into a convulsing skull mob, we are ready for battle. In battle, you will quickly see a spinning circle, which is your meter to show you when you are ready to attack. Once it gets to the top, it stops, but you don't attack. The enemy will start hitting you. Then you will realize that you must hit the “x” button to bring up your turn based menu in battle. Yep, every time, for every one of your characters. It's okay for one person, but while in the heat of battle, it can get annoying to watch this all take place, and make sure that you characters' menus come up when they should. Again, why couldn't they just make the menu pop up?

Well, I've already rambled on far too long about this game. My suggestion on this game is to stay away from it. There is little reward for playing this. There are plenty of better games out there for PSP and other systems.

My rating 4/10

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 11/12/07

Game Release: Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light (US, 07/18/06)