Review by Zamble

"A hardcore RPG for hardcore gamers"

Blade of Destiny is the first part of a trilogy made by SirTech eons ago. The other two are called Star Trail and Shadow Over Riva. This is an RPG of the old times: It has bad graphics for today's standards and sound is not very good (IF you can make it work), but it's quite deep and have a nice gameplay.

First of all, this is not a RPG for the casual gamer, or the players used to Final Fantasy and the like. It's quite hard. More than that, it lacks the action. Sometimes you'll just wander around dungeons without finding enemies trying to solve a lever puzzle. For hours. It doesn't mean it's not funny to play. The storyline is good and will keep you hooked. The system is the strongest point: Blade of Destiny is one of the most similar to the pen-and-paper RPGs, even comparing to the ones we have now. There are many abilities and actions you don't see anywhere else: you can order any of your six xharacters to hunt, look for water or gather herbs, and based on their attributes on the respective skills, you'll get different results. That's just an example of how complex it gets.

Another draw-back for the "normal" people to play this game is the rythim your characters evolve. Enemies give a lot of exeperience when you first meet one of the kind; after that, they numbers drop quite a lot. So fighting over and over doesn't make much difference. Even if it did, you wouldn't be able to do it easily, as enemies don't respawn at all. There is a chance of random encounters when you are travelling though. The story is quite long, but to make it short, your characters will have to find a sword that will make the monsters run away from your land. It's not that it's a holly sword or anything, but the stupid orcs think it is, so the effect is the same. The AI of the enemies is OK, I guess. There's not much to do in the turn based battle anyway.

Gameplay: 8
It's good, but you'll really need to get into it. It's not easy to learn about all the skills and choose an efficient party.

Graphics: 5
They are really crappy for today's standards. But its an old game, for the time I guess they were OK.

Sound: 4
The music is too repetitive. The sounds don't add anything to the gameplay.

Replay value: 4
There's not much to do in that world. Playing it to the end more than twice is no fun.

System Requeriments: 386 SX/25 or higher and 640K of RAm (!). The game doesn't run under windows, so you'll have to restart to DOS mode to play it. And those 640 K required are of the conventional memory. And it's quite hard to free all the 640 K if you don't know anything about DOS configuration. It will run with less too, but without sound.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10 | Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99


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