Summon Night: Swordcraft Story

2024-05-26
Great little GBA game. You play an aspiring Craftknight who must fight in a tournament to earn their place among the protectors of the city. The loop of the game is basically go into the dungeon, level up in excessive amounts of random battles, gather material by hitting containers with bad hitboxes, use the materials to craft the next tier of weapons and fight a tournament battle. Interspersed in here is a pretty straightforward fantasy anime trope-y story. You've got your gruff mentor who has the hots for your tough but hot mom, you got the glasses wearing guy who's Very Serious, and the cute tomboy girl who hates you but then actually loves you. It's reasonably generic but it's cute enough and the characters varied enough that I had a good time. Depending on the summon you choose and the gender of your protagonist it seems like the dialogue can change decently so definitely viable for replaying.

The game is very grindy. You'll have a hard time running for more than 5 second before hitting a random battle. That being said I actually quite liked the combat. It's 2D, sidewise combat where you can run and jump and attack. Attacks depend on the weapon type you're using (there's 6) and which direction your facing. I actually didn't even realize half the things you could do because it's not explained in game (this was when manuals were a thing). There's enough depth with the variety of moves and weapons paired with the fact that you can interrupt enemies moves or dodge or jump over them depending on what they're doing.

In addition you have a summon who gives you access to a variety of spells. Personally I didn't really engage with this too much because you have a limited amount of casts per rest. I will say I used Rasho's first fire ability to stunlock literally every human enemy in the game. I mean it straight up worked on the "hardest" person who fight in the game. Fucking hilarious.

Progression occurs in three main ways: moving up through the weapon tiers, leveling your character up, leveling your weapon's TEC up. Leveling up your character has the interesting wrinkle of being able to partially allocate points into your three stats: attack, defense, and speed. The last one is funny because it controls your speed while running around in combat and how far you jump and dodge so you can be a little ninja. The TEC thing is a cool idea where the more you use your weapon the more damage it does and the faster it hits. Really though since you'll end up using most weapons for a while anyway this just means there's a little warm up period at the beginning of each weapon tier. I would have liked to have seen this utilized in a more interesting way.

Oh and it's got some pretty good music. There's one or two tracks that are actually bangers and then a bunch of solid ones.

All in all it's a great time waster on the GBA, or in my case the Analogue Pocket, and now I'm really looking forward to the sequel which it sounds like has a ton of QOL improvements.