Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (Game Boy Advance)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.4 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Greg Mueller
• Reviewed on: 08/01/2006
• Released on: 07/26/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (Game Boy Advance) Review

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story is an action role-playing game that wisely keeps things simple and has a good time doing so. It isn't as captivating as a good, story-driven role-playing game, and the action isn't especially complex or gratifying, but Summon Night is still an enjoyable game that offers plenty of goofy humor, likable characters, and an easy but fun battle system. And while it offers some unique twists on role-playing conventions, it doesn't get bound up by nonsensical gimmicks. The result is a game that certainly won't knock your socks off but will keep you sufficiently entertained for a good 20 hours or more.

In the world of Lyndbaum, there's a city known as Wystern, the City of Swords. The city gets its name from the various guilds throughout town that specialize in creating powerful weapons from a variety of materials. The skilled workers known as craftknights are able to derive materials from everyday items and then summon magical creatures known as guardian beasts to transform those materials into weapons. At the head of each guild sits a craftlord, and the seven craftlords act as the leaders of the city. When the story begins, a tournament is being held to determine which craftknights are worthy of becoming the next craftlords. When you start the game, you can choose a male or female character, and although the characters behave slightly differently, the general plot is the same for both characters. As the story goes, your father was a powerful and highly revered craftlord who died three years ago. You don't know much about him, but you know that you want to follow in his footsteps and be a craftlord as well. So you join the tournament, hone your skills, and piece together the puzzle of what happened to your father. In doing so, you also uncover a sinister plot among the current craftlords, and it's up to you to put an end to their devious scheme.

The first half of the game is focused mostly on the events of the tournament, so you'll spend your time in the town's convenient underground labyrinth where you can collect materials to create weapons and fight all kinds of stray summon creatures to earn experience and level up. The labyrinth has 50 floors, with another 50 that are unlocked after you beat the game. Not all of those floors are open to you right away, though, so you have to fulfill other minor quests before you can progress. After you fight through a few floors of monsters and gather enough materials to create a weapon, you usually have to go to the arena and participate in a tournament battle. Winning this battle lets you move on to bigger and better quests. Later in the game, you'll get to travel to other dungeons in other cities, but they're all very similar, and the experience is practically identical. The dungeons aren't especially difficult, but they can be time consuming because you usually have to search several large floors before finding what you're looking for, and occasionally you'll have to do some extensive backtracking. This becomes tedious because, while in a dungeon, you'll be drawn into a random encounter every five steps or so, which drags down the pace of the game.

The battle system in Summon Night is simple and easy, but it can be fun. When you are in battle, the camera switches from a top-down view to a 2D side view. The battle then plays out like a beat-'em-up type of game, where you move around and attack your enemies. You can equip three different weapons to take into battle, and while you're fighting, you can switch weapons by pressing the L button. This is important because each weapon takes damage as you use it, and if all your weapons break in a battle, you'll quickly get massacred. You can also use magic while in battle, but the magic system is barely useful, and you'll only ever need it during boss battles. As you level up, your guardian beast will also level up and learn magic spells. You can equip your guardian beast with up to four different spells, which can be used during battle. You can cycle through the spells with the R button while fighting and then press the B button to cast them. The problem is that cycling though a list of five different commands while trying to fend off as many as four enemies at a time doesn't work very well. It doesn't matter much anyway, though, because the magic isn't particularly effective, and you're far better off simply mashing the attack button.

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