Summon Night: Swordcraft Story Review - GBA

Summon Night is an addictive little action-RPG with a lot more to it than meets the eye. This is not another lukewarm production getting by on its good looks and charm (and pay the Banpresto bumper no mind). The graphics are fine, but beneath the eye candy, there's a surprisingly deep and replayable game to toy with.

For a snap comparison, it's like Atelier Iris, another RPG with a heavy crafting system attached. Summon Night doesn't involve brewing up potions, though. Here, you're smithing weapons, and getting plenty of use out of them too.

Apprentice Craftknights have a busy job. There's 50 floors of monster-haunted dungeon to explore, full of materials to make up new weapons. There's the tournament to select the new Craftlord (the same kind of gig, but with better job security and a corner office). And at some point you're going to save the world, but it's best not to get ahead of things.

Forge, Hammer, Action

This is an action game first, with side-scrolling combat like what Namco cooked up for the Tales series. When a battle begins, the view shifts to something like a Street Fighter arena, and you hop around slugging it out in real time. Attacking, defending, and summoning spells take place the moment you hit a button -- there's no waiting for the bad guys to take their turn, but you'd better be quick to stop them getting ahead.

On the one hand, Summon Night's combat is a bit more limited than what Tales features. There's only one player character, no party to back them up, and it doesn't offer as many special attacks and other extra options. It makes up the difference in a couple of ways, though. For one, it's faster and more responsive. Fewer combatants means it's easier to follow the action, and there aren't as many time-consuming set-up and whiff animations, the kind that slow down battles in Tales of Phantasia. For another, there's the item-crafting system. You can custom-tailor your arsenal to suit your favorite tactics.

There are five categories of weapons to craft and plenty of examples within each weapon type, plus souped-up elemental weapons you can forge with the right extra ingredients. Swords are an all-around effective solution. Axes and spears are slow, but pack extra power and range. Gauntlets enable quick multi-hit combos, providing you get right in an enemy's face, while drills are tricky to use, but launch powerful charge-up attacks.

Unless you spend hours gathering mounds of materials, you can't craft one of every weapon, and the active inventory only fits three weapons. Those limits mean there's lots of strategy to picking and choosing which weapons to forge. Different types work better against different enemies, and magic weapons confer a big advantage against the right elemental affinity. Some weapons are fragile, though, and break after too much abuse, especially against the wrong element.

A Little Bit at a Time

Smart pacing is an important part of any handheld game. You don't usually sit down with your GBA for marathon sessions at home -- a good handheld production lets you play it in small doses. This is one of the subtler things Summon Night does well, breaking up its scenario into easily-swallowed segments that don't take forever to finish. Dungeon expeditions, item quests, story events, and all the other pieces are never too lengthy or involved, so it's possible to play a short session and still feel a sense of forward progress.

The 50 floors of the Labyrinth are the main venue for combat and item-gathering. While the scenery doesn't change too much down there, the game wisely never demands too much dungeon-hacking at once. There are many other places to visit and battles to fight in between required trips into the Labyrinth, and while the story never detracts from the focus on gameplay, it's involving enough, thanks to a compact and funny English script.

For players who still want to grind deep into the Labyrinth, it's laid out pretty smartly, scattering save points and teleporters at irregular intervals on the way down. Once you've found the teleporter on floor 18, say, you can hop back to the first floor (and vice versa) at any time. This creates a neat blend of risk and reward when pushing towards deeper floors. If things are getting tight, it's possible to backtrack to the last teleporter and escape, or you can take a chance and try to reach the next one.

The default encounter rate is high, but battles go by quickly. From the transition into combat to the post-battle wrap-up screen, 10 or 15 seconds might pass, which also helps make up for an occasionally limited selection of monsters. Some types get pretty familiar after a while (and aren’t very challenging as a consequence), but it's hard to complain when those encounters are so short.

Little Cartridge, Big Game

All that and she's not bad-looking, either. On the surface, Summon Night has the air of another big-eyed fanboy favorite, but it's a bit more restrained than some, with a smartly-chosen color palette and a wide variety of characters. The main cast has personality without looking over-designed, and the beasts crawling the dungeons are sharply drawn in the Dragon Quest tradition of cute, cartoony monsters.

We can all learn a useful lesson here. It doesn’t take new hardware to crank out good-looking graphics, and you definitely don’t need to buy a PSP or DS to find memorable handheld gameplay. Summon Night is proof that there’s still life left in the GBA -- it's more fun than plenty of flashier (and more expensive) games.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video produced by: Michael Benson