Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Town of Mirrors

March 3,2008 - While Dragon Quest IX is nearing completion in Japan, Square Enix has decided to bring out a few spin-offs to give Dragon Quest fans something to do. The latest spin-off brings the Dragon Quest charm to the Wii to take advantage of the Remote for a more hands-on approach to combat. That approach keeps the game from offering long single-player campaigns, does Dragon Quest Swords manage to offer enough content for a full price purchase?

Dragon Quest Swords takes place in the town of Avalonia, which is five years removed from the defeat of the terrible monster Xiphos. The game starts on the celebration of the fifth anniversary of this joyous event and on the eve of the hero’s 16th birthday, which means he must take a journey to a nearby cave to prove his worth as a warrior. Being the son of Claymore, one of the four heroes that defeated Xiphos five years earlier, it’s an important event for the town as a whole since something is stirring that is about to break the peace the town currently has. The story as a whole is clichéd as it gets, as you can probably guess the big hook right now. Though there’s not a long of chat in the game, it’s great to see a lot of voice acting for the main characters in the game, which adds to the well-written English and French characters in the game.

With just eight chapters, Dragon Quest Swords is very much a structured game that doesn’t stray from its initial formula much throughout the game. Each chapter begins with you traveling around Avalonia to buy new weapons, or accessories, and then traveling to the castle or wherever you need to be to move the story along so you can head out to the next area for some combat. That typically takes about an hour for each chapter, which with the rather long time it’ll take to walk around the town to the various shops, it means that the combat isn’t very long at all. By our calculations, a straight run through of the game contains roughly three hours of actual combat versus about ten hours of total playtime, which isn’t helped by the simple structure of the areas you fight in. The difficulty is fairly easy up until the final chapter, as the entire combat sequence features plenty of tough enemies that make this one chapter feel almost exponentially tougher than the rest. The difficulty curve just doesn’t feel smooth at all compared to other RPGs on the Wii, though level grinding through previous could certainly alleviate that, but that shouldn’t be the case when the game pushes you along quickly like it does.

The combat itself in Swords succeeds in bringing a more intuitive combat system to the Wii that most Wii games don’t even bother to attempt. Sword slashing is done with a quick slash of the Wii Remote horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. It’s nice to see that there’s some nuance to the slashing, so you can get slash more closely to a 1:1 system, but it’s still not quite that free. Though you can get away with normal slashing for a few chapters, you have to start placing a cursor on the screen to center your attacks for enemies that don’t line up in the middle of the screen. That skill also becomes important when enemies cast offensive spells that can be sent back at them with a timely slash of the sword, but if you’re not so good at that, you could simply block, by holding the B button, them and wait until the enemy runs away. The shield’s not the ultimate defense, as it can break down with wear, so you have to keep a few potions to fix the damaged shield. You’ll also see a meter below the health bar that fills up with each hit that connects to your Master Strokes, which are basically your specials. Once it reaches 100%, press the 2 button, pick the Master Stroke you wish to perform, you follow the motion-controlled actions it requires to perform a devastating special that’s as good for large groups of enemies and bosses alike.

The other nice part of Swords’ combat is that you can take one of three companions along with you, with each offering slightly different abilities; though you really need to baby sit their health since the potion to revive them is exceedingly rare. You could get around that by playing through levels multiple times to not only level up yourself, but your companion, as well. You can also tailor their AI in the menus to have one of a few personalities during action, such as following your orders, focusing on healing, or disregarding MP to use spells as they see fit. This part of the game keeps the game flowing nicely through the rather tedious part of the chapter that takes place in Avalonia.

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