Stranger of Sword City – Review

Experience has been making strides to gain a foothold in the Western world. After having Demon Gaze and Operation Abyss published by NISA, the latest Western release of Stranger of Sword City has arrived on PC, again through NISA, following the Vita release earlier this year. Add to that the fact that Acttil published Ray Gigant a few months ago, and it becomes clear that the small DRPG developer has plans to bring the genre to more players across the world. Thankfully, these games are all fun, and they only seem to be getting better with each release.

The game’s basic plot line involves a created character ending up in a plane crash, but surviving it, only to find themselves in a new world with new powers that the world’s normal inhabitants do not possess. Other people from the character’s world are also present through a similar situation, and have formed an organization called the Strangers. The idea is that by hunting special monsters called Lineage Types for their Blood Crystals, they can eventually gain the power to return to the world they came from. There are some story bits here and there that often form the basis of the game’s quests, but that’s about all there really is to the story for the most part. It’s a dungeon crawler through and through, where the crux of a player’s enjoyment lies in the gameplay.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, it more or less uses the same traditional turn-based battle system seen in Demon Gaze and Operation Abyss. There is usually some twist to the battle system in each game, though, and Stranger of Sword City is no different. This time, the Blood Crystals collected can be traded to a party member of choice, which grants specific Divinity Skills based on the chosen character. These skills are used at the start of a turn and can do various things like reduce damage or immediately flee the battle. The skills use Morale Points, though, which restore over time or through attacks inflicted or received. There are also a few other tweaks made to the game: players can now choose to repeat the last set of actions taken on the next turn, and can even use a speed-up mode that doesn’t rely on holding down the accept button, although the button can still be held down if preferred.

In an interesting twist, the currency of the game is Blood Gems. This is not a reference to Bloodborne, as the original game released on the Xbox 360 and Windows in Japan back in 2012. Blood Gems are rather hard to accumulate: items in shops are expensive, and the primary way of earning money or equipment comes from selling whatever is gained from ambushes. Certain areas on the map, called hiding zones, let players spend Morale to hide in an attempt to ambush enemy envoys carrying random loot. Players can pass up the loot up to five times before exhausting their chances, but each time they do, the enemies get more dangerous. Once a player decides to fight, the goal is to identify the leaders and take them out before they run away with the treasure. It’s a risk-versus-reward system that works better than Demon Gaze’s item gem system or Operation Abyss’s confusing synthesis system.

There is a fair bit of challenge to the game outside of accruing and managing funds. Enemies can chew through a party easily, especially early on if a player is unprepared. There is a lower difficulty setting, but even then it’s still fairly tough. The game also has a permanent death system: characters have Life Points that protect them from perma-death, but restoring lost Life Points is either prohibitively expensive or time-consuming. Reviving a character also costs time or money, and restoring Life Points only adds to that, so death and recovery carry a real sting. The only relief is that returning to headquarters restores all Health and MP; a good tactic for dealing with character downtime is to build extra characters to cycle out the ones on the mend, since benched characters still earn experience while away, and will sometimes earn the team money as well.

Stranger of Sword City is a strong dungeon-crawling experience for those looking for a bit of a challenge, and it lacks the overly complex systems of Operation Abyss. While the game is light on story and humor, the thrill of the dungeon crawl is the crux of it. Visuals can be viewed in Classic Mode or a new anime art style, the latter of which doesn’t look quite as good as what came before; even the Classic style looks a bit rough, though it holds up markedly better. The music feels typical of Experience’s other titles, but is still decent. One letdown is the lack of an English dub, though considering Operation Abyss was English-dubbed only, it makes for a nice contrast, and the game does not lean heavily on voice acting or story to begin with.

As for the quality of the PS Vita version, the game’s script appears to be much the same, although the initial boot-up time is considerably longer. The design of the text boxes is also different, making the text easier to read on the smaller screen. The artwork looks better on the device since it isn’t blown up as much, so it looks less rough. Button functions have changed slightly since the Vita lacks the extra shoulder buttons found on the Xbox One controller, but otherwise it is exactly the same game. The PC release adds a new Picture Gate mode that lets a player take a picture of their face and use it as their avatar’s profile picture. Otherwise, the only difference from the Xbox One version is an improved resolution, so the art looks less rough on a proper monitor. There is no way to cross-save between the Microsoft platforms for this game. Regardless of which version is chosen, Stranger of Sword City is a good option for a fun, if challenging and methodical, dungeon RPG.

Verdict

A great dungeon crawler from Experience that has a decent challenge level in between the other titles from the developer. There are also various tweaks made to the engine that open up a lot of customization options.

Score: 8.5

Positives

The gameplay is improved in some ways from Demon Gaze and Operation Abyss, having roughly the challenge level of the latter but with the simplicity of the former.

Negatives

The inclusion of perma-death, and its expensive way of getting around it, makes the game more troublesome without adequate preparation.

The game lacks the humor seen in the previous titles.