You can have up to four characters in battle at once--but you can only baby-sit them one at a time.
Outside of this, neither your melee characters nor your ranged characters have any sort of autotargeting available. With the ranged characters, you can adjust your targeting with a fair amount of precision by using the right thumbstick, but you'll be endlessly circling and hammering the attack button. The melee characters have a limited number of simple melee combos, and once these combos begin, the characters build up some inertia. This inertia can carry you right past an enemy who happens to get bumped the wrong way.
Succeeding in battle and finishing quests will earn your characters experience points that go toward leveling up. When your characters level up, you'll get advancement points that can be used to either raise a number of attributes or purchase new skill strikes. Various quests and exploring will net you all kinds of different weapons, as well as special items that can be offered at special locations so that you can receive a character's "ultimate" weapon. Tetsu grants the characters various armor upgrades as you progress, and you can further customize both weapons and armor at a blacksmith's shop. Weapons and armor have special slots that a blacksmith can attach runes to, and these runes have various effects, like raising a chance for a critical strike or guarding against status effects.
Happily, Sudeki is at least pretty to look at. Its various landscapes are bright in color and rich in detail, and the game has some nice areas and vistas. The characters themselves are also well detailed, though their movements are a little on the stiff side. Special effects in battle aren't overdone but still manage to be dazzling--although after seeing a particular skill a plethora of times, you'll start to get tired of it (however lovely it may be).
Side quests don't have a whole lot of depth, so you might want to just avoid talking to the game's twangy NPCs to save yourself the aural anguish.
Voice-wise, just about every NPC has something to say, though the quality of the voices varies from character to character. The main characters manage to be mainly inoffensive, though they have some pretty stilted dialogue along the way. Meanwhile, the various other people you'll meet have a wide, inconsistent array of accents, inflections, and acting abilities. When you meet someone new, you never know what you're going to get--so sometimes you'll find yourself wincing and hurrying to skip the speech when you've made a bad choice. The music in the game ranges from elevator tunes for some towns to pseudo-techno in battles. Most of it is completely forgettable, and most of it also loops badly, skipping or stopping suddenly.
Sudeki can be completed in fewer than 20 hours of play, though you can spend a bit of extra time filling out the side quests and acquiring all the available weapons--if you like. The game may be easy on the eyes, but the clunky battle system strips much of the fun from this title, and the sometimes horrifying voice acting will scare you away from attempting to lose yourself in the story by talking to all the people you encounter. Sudeki is, unfortunately, more style than substance. Those longing for a meaty Xbox action RPG should only consider this game for a rental.
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