Sands of Destruction (DS)

[Flabio]

It's been out for ages in Japan as 'World Destruction', but now it's finally available in English. I picked it up mainly on the strength of the dev team (being mostly people who worked on Chrono Trigger and Xenogears).

First impressions are that it plays very similarly to Xenogears. The 3D field (rotated using the shoulder buttons) with sprite based characters overlaid on it is pretty much identical to the way it worked in Xenogears.

Battles are random, no way to see the enemies on the screen before the fight starts, so it's quite old school in that sense.

Combat uses both screens, but mainly because there are different attacks against ground based enemies and air based ones. I think that some of the later abilities you can get allow you to knock ground enemies into the air so that you can use air attacks on them and vice versa.

It uses a very similar combat system to Xenogears as well, you have a certain number of action points per turn, and strong and weak attacks that you link together.

The plot so far seems to be more lighthearted than Xeno though, but I do get the feeling that it might get quite grim later on.

Good music in it, it's nice to play a Mitsuda scored game again, been far too long since his last (western) release. The major cut scenes are voice acted as well, and fairly well so far. It makes a lot of use of Star Ocean style emoticons (tear drop, pulsing vein etc...) to sell the characters, because they are only small sprites. Decent animation work as well.

I'll need to play it quite a bit more before I decide if it's anything more than a by the numbers RPG with a decent score though.

[abigsmurf]

Waiting on this from VG+ now

[Flabio]

My word the difficulty curve is all over the shop in this. You go from a dungeon area where everything is barely able to scratch you to one where you can be party wiped in one turn in the space of about half an hour.

Very rare to play an RPG where you actually have to use the 'defend' command to stand a chance.

Definitely liking the voice acting now, the choice for the character 'Taupy' is inspired

[abigsmurf]

I've got this now and have put a couple of hours into it. The dialogue is entertaining and the premise interesting. The battle system is a bit weird and unpredictable but fast moving. There definately seems to be inconsistant design. One dungeon had a battle every 10 steps, the next had next to none. Sometimes the music is bland and generic, sometimes it's great with shades of Chrono Trigger.

Impressive amount of voice acting it even manages to out-do Suikoden teirkris withoutresortingtoincrediblyfastspeaking

Seems to be a quality RPG at the moment with a lot of effort put into it. Shame the low DS resolution really doesn't lend itself to the sprite scaling of the graphics.

[abigsmurf]

Still enjoying it this but god some of the dungeons are a nightmare. Spent hours in the second prison. Also can see the combos being vastly overpowered when you link them. You're basically doing 2 sets of attacks in a single action.

I'm guessing the anime adaptation for this is typically awful?

[Flabio]

Also can see the combos being vastly overpowered when you link them. You're basically doing 2 sets of attacks in a single action.

I'm up to three sets, and yes they are.

The only reason to use blows rather than flurries is the special effects on the blows like stun and delay.

The game itself does seem pretty easy. If you're struggling on something just levelling up once is usually enough to get you past it. One boss was doing 30 or 40 a hit, I levelled up once and it went down to 1 or 2 a hit.

[abigsmurf]

yeah, there's a fundamental flaw in the way damage is calculated. One or Two levels is the difference between enemies doing huge damage or doing trivial damage.

Just beaten the

->Open Spoiler<-

Water Dragon

boss. It's incredibly frustrating the way it has a 'quip' that bassically ensures he'll attack after every character's turn (and attack twice in a row if it was his turn anyway). The boss wasn't expecially hard but I had to spam revival items.

It's still a great little RPG, it's just they seem to have hired someone utterly inept to code the stats, damage and encounter tates.