The Dabbling Continues

So after unchaining myself from the grasp of the excellent Etrian Odyssey III, I have been looking here and there for the next RPG to attach myself to. Shining Force III has been okay so far, but it hasn't really gripped me yet - which isn't to say I won't finish it. That game has been a long time coming, so I think I'm going to dabble in and out of it until I can polish it off someday.

Actually, most of the reason I haven't played too much of it is due to it being on a console. I don't have as much time as I used to and I'm kind of nomadic these days, so lugging my Saturn around (with the stupid coax-only hookups) to play the game gets old after a while, so I've been looking for a portable RPG to really dig my teeth into. So I looked at my shelf, full of DS RPGs I haven't touched yet (such as Infinite Space, Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, and The World Ends With You, among others) and decided to pop in Sands of Destruction. I have barely heard anything about this game, despite it being a relatively lavish RPG made by Sega (I think they talked about it on Active Time Babble last year, but I don't think they said too much about it).

It comes from an interesting group of developers, actually. These are the people who made Xenogears, Children of Mana, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, and Wario Land: Shake It, among others. Quite an odd collection of games, eh? The Fire Emblem game they made happens to be my favorite game in that series, and people have most certainly heard of the infamous Xenogears, yet Sands of Destruction has received very little fanfare.

Which I find odd, to tell the truth. Now, before I start, I'm only two hours in - so I doubt I've scratched the surface of the game yet. But I'm impressed, so far. The game has solid graphics - it's displayed from a (mostly) isometric perspective, and Sega has managed to squeeze out some impressive graphics from the ol' dual scrizzle - even moreso than Square, to be honest. They used a mixture of sprites and polygons, but nothing to chunky, which is a problem typical of DS games. So far, I like the graphics better than the DS versions of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, which is saying something because those games look pretty good.

The spritework in this game deserves a special mention, actually. The little character sprites are heavily detailed and have a fairly large range of animations, which you just don't see that often. They look great, too.

The music is alright, but we need to talk about the voice acting. I don't hate it, to be honest - I just wish it would go faster. The game seems to be loading the next sound byte when one finishes, so there is always this one or two second pause between one text box and the next. If it would just speed the hell up, the voiced parts of the game wouldn't be so intolerable. Hell, if it just gave me the option to skip the dialogue once I have read it, that would be awesome too! But it doesn't.

As for the battle system, it is somewhat combo based. You have a bunch of skills and some AP, which you spend to use different moves, and if you use the right combination of skills, you'll get bonus AP or free moves or whatever. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, so I'll probably post more about it later if I keep playing the game. There is also CP, which lets you upgrade your individual skills to be more accurate, do more damage, etc. which is kind of obtuse for me so far. I'm not quite sure where to put my points, yet, but I suppose that's what experimentation is for.