Stranger of Sword City Review (PS Vita)

After the excellent Demon Gaze and mediocre Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy, Experience Inc. brings us Stranger of Sword City. Unlike its predecessors, this dungeon crawler holds no punches and is one that likely only veterans of the genre may end up fully enjoying.

 

After a plane crash, you wake up in a vast junkyard in the middle of nowhere. You soon find out that you are stranded in a different dimension where humans are known as strangers. Because of their stronger physique they help the inhabitance of this world by ridding the land of the monsters that plague it. Naturally you end up being the chosen one and it is only through your help that you and your fellow race can collect enough blood crystals which may unlock a way back home.

 

 

Stranger of Sword City is your stereotypical dungeon crawler which has you exploring the world from a first person perspective and battling in good old turn-based battles. For a dungeon crawler the random encounter rates are surprisingly low. You can pretty much explore every tile of the dungeon at your leisure, without too many battles to slow down progress. You will come across unavoidable battles that are marked on specific tiles, but these can usually be avoided with ease.

 

Despite the lower encounter rate, leveling up takes far longer than it ever should. Even the fact that you can fast forward through the battles doesn’t help much since you will need to go through more than a dozen battles just to gain one level. This is further complicated by the fact you will need to level up each and every new character you create.

 

Stranger of Sword City Review - Battle 1

 

Gold is extremely hard to come by, so you will be budgeting your team as aggressively as possible. Buying items from shops is usually out of the question, so you will come across the majority of your equipment in dungeons. The best way to acquire new items is through ambushes. Scattered throughout the map are hiding spots. Here you can wait and ambush enemy transports, which usually haul around nice goodies. Still you have to be quick about it because if the leader of the transport escapes, so does your reward.

 

The game is challenging, sometimes to the point of frustration. You will die over and over again until you learn that you get the Flash Escape skill at the beginning of the game with a reason. Not every enemy is conquerable the moment you meet it and escape is more often than not the only smart option.

 

Stranger of Sword City Review - Story

 

New to Stranger of Sword City is the concept of permadeath. Unlike the majority of games, if a character dies they aren’t gone forever, but instead lose one life point and are incapacitated for the time being. You need to either pay a ridiculously high sum of money to heal them or let them rest for quite a while.

 

Unfortunately, this ends up making the game even harder than it should be. At the beginning, knocked out characters will need to rest for over a day in order to recuperate and later on even longer. Considering that time only passes by two hours when you successfully win a battle, you will have to make do with the remainder of your team, which usually means that the deaths will just start piling on if you haven’t prepared substitutes well in advance.

 

Stranger of Sword City Review - Battle 2

 

Every time a character dies he or she loses a life point. Once they are out of them, they vanish forever. There is a balance between stats and life points, since younger characters start out with more life points while older ones have higher stats. Life points can be replenished by leaving characters to recover in the base, but that means you will be without that character for a very long time. Since creating new characters comes at no cost, it’s easy to find yourself creating new characters over and over, just to keep the party filled with fresh cannon fodder while the old veterans are recovering.

 

Like in Experience Inc’s other dungeon crawlers, Stranger of Sword City allows you to freely create and customize characters to your liking. You can select the name, age, portrait, class and stats for that character. The game gives you a large number of varied portraits to choose from. However, some of these portraits end up being totally inconsistent with the overall art style. You can end up with a party where some characters look like they are from this game, other from an RPG maker game, and the rest from a shounen manga.

 

Stranger of Sword City Review - Character Creation

 

Despite this, Stranger of Sword City has some really stunning artwork. Its dark fantasy world infused with rusting machinery and mythical creatures make for a memorable style. However, all this comes at a price for such a small budget title. All the character, enemy and background images are static. So no matter which character you create or what enemy you battle you will be just looking at static images shaking around the screen.

 

Stranger of Sword City Review - Story 2

 

Stranger of Sword City is a hard game to recommend. The lack of any kind of character animations, punishing difficulty and permadeath are bound to put off all but the dedicated hardcore dungeon crawler players. Not everything is bad, since the game does offer a somewhat unique story and decent dungeon crawler mechanics, but if you are just getting into the genre you might want to look elsewhere.

 

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