Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled

[syuviel]

I wonder how a GTA game will do for the DS.  It doesnt seem like a natural fit.  Id still pick up Black Sigil and Suikoden before a DS GTA though.

qj.net says that the GTA game for the DS was a flop, only about 88,704 sold... but lots of people think its a good game so idk.

[KingMike]

Wow. GameStop's latest reported delay for this game was only two weeks.
(June 9 to June 23)

[Nightcrawler]

What is this? Duke Nukem Forever? I have to wonder if this game is real sometimes!

[KingMike]

Well, they said it actually shipped.
Though I mail-orderded it, I guess I'll have to check when I go in the store to pick up Starfy.

Release confirmed:

[KaioShin]

So how is it? Was it worth the wait?

[Dragonsbrethren]

The story seems decent so far, but I'm only two towns in. The battles, on the other hand, are ridiculously slow on the fastest battle speed. Additionally, the game has a high encounter rate, and the walking speed on the world map is also ridiculously slow. I don't see myself having the patience to play through this.

It does really take me back to the heyday of SNES RPGs (mostly because a good deal of its graphics are clearly edits of graphics from various Square RPGs). I wish the battles didn't suck so much because I'd like to see how the story progresses.

Edit: Speaking of the story, another thing that annoys me (though not enough to stop playing) is how poorly formatted the dialogue text is. It's written like a bad translation where they were only allowed so many characters on each line, and didn't bother hacking that routine to count pixels instead. You end up with things like one word on a line, or one word on the next page by itself.

[enigma]

I thought that this game was alright, I would give it like a 6.5 or 7 out of 10.  It was nice to play an rpg for the DS that wasn't just a port or a remake.  The game overall was pretty nice although there was some really annoying flaws and glitches that detracted from he gameplay, nothing that was truly gamebreaking though. Here's my review for it:

Story: 9/10 Easily the best part of the game.  A surprisingly original story that keeps you interested, with a few plot twists that I didn't see coming from the beginning.  The characters were good, with the protagonist Kairu being a surprisingly normal character that I could actually relate to, unlike some other video game characters that I think should just be put out of their misery.  The prologue type section of the game takes like two hours to complete before the actual story starts.

Gameplay: 5/10 Probably the worst part of the game, there were many flaws here that because really frustrating throughout the game.  The encounter rate was extremely high, and made the whole game feel like a grind between storyline advancing areas.  This, coupled with the low number of save points and some of the longer dungeons can make this game very tense, because if you die you will probably have to restart from quite awhile earlier.  The difficulty is also poorly designed, with the beginning of the game being much harder than the endgame, as you start to get screen affecting skills that can kill enemies in one or two hits.  During battle you can move your characters manually, in order to bring them closer for physical attacks or to separate them so that monsters attack won't hit multiple characters at once, but the collision detection is awful with sprites having large boxes which you can't pass through that take up an area about three times as large as the actual sprite.  Experience and gold rewarded for battles is ridiculous and has no apparent correlation with the difficulty of the battle itself.  There are also glitches which result in your game freezing up, with different people experiencing different amounts of glitches. I personally had it freeze on me one time, at a point where I lost very little time, so it wasn't a real issue for me, but if this happened frequently it would ruin the game completely.

Music: 7/10 I found the music to be good.  The music seemed relevant to what was happening, and was enjoyable throughout the game.  I never really noticed the music that much, which I personally think is a plus, as it meant I was focusing on actually playing the game.  However the sound effects in battle were atrocious, the worst I can remember ever experiencing in any game.  There seemed to be about three different sound effects that were used for every action available to you for use in battle.

Graphics: 8/10 Modeled after the SNES greats, if you enjoyed those you will enjoy these.  They reminded me of Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana, which I thought had great graphics.  Characters and overworld graphics were good, as were the battle animations.  However these largely depend on personal taste.

Replayability: 3/10 No.  There are apparently 7 different endings, but I doubt most people will care enough to get more than one.  All of the endings are pretty similar I believe, and generally you can slightly alter the ending by doing one of the sidequests near the end of the game, with each sidequest you do changing the ending in some way.  There is no New Game+ or additional content to unlock with a second playthrough as far as I know(I'm positive on the New Game+ part).

Misc.: This game has some serious programming issues.  There is a skill for a character that apparently was never implemented into the game, so he got shafted by having less skills than other characters.  You can sell items to shops for more than you buy them in several cases, with profits being something like 300% in some cases.  Some npcs say different things to you depending on what character is displayed in your party, which is neat.  

If you have any questions about this game then feel free to ask and I can probably answer them.