Once upon a time in a fantasy land, there lived an evil, spiteful swamp witch.  She wanted to take over the world, but she couldn’t leave her swamp home, or else she would lose her magical powers.  So one day she summoned a magical creature called the Hundred Knight, who could leave her swamp and fight for her.  Unfortunately for her, the Hundred Knight ended up being a cute little critter and not very fearsome.  But with a little bit of her magic, the Hundred Knight could at least fight.  In The Witch and the Hundred Knight for PS3, YOU get to play as the Hundred Knight and do the evil witch’s bidding.  Will you extend her swamp to the four corners of the earth?  Find out in this action RPG from NIS.

After the tutorial, you’ll start out at the witch’s house and can’t go very far.  Leave the area and you’ll open a world map with areas you can visit.  In each area, you must fight off bad guys and find special pillars.  Destroy these pillars and they’ll bloom into flowers that help extend the swamp.  Each time you make a pillar bloom, it’ll act as a warp point that you can come back to if you leave the area.  At the end of each area is a larger pillar that is guarded by a boss.  Defeat the boss and make the pillar bloom to complete the area and extend the witch’s swamp grounds.

The game is an action RPG, so you’ll be battling enemies in real time, like a Zelda game.  One button is for attacking with equipped weapons, another is used for dodging, and the rest are for special attacks and magical abilities you’ll learn as you progress.  You’ll also have to watch out for a special kind of energy that is represented by a flame on your head.  This energy lowers every time you take an action, or even when you are sitting still.  If it runs out, you’ll lose energy very quickly and if you lose all your energy, you’ll have to start the level over and lose most of your collected items, if not all of them.

As you play a stage, collected items are stored in your stomach, and you can’t use them right away.  You’ll need to complete the area or at least leave it to go back to the witch’s house and barf up the items so you can use them later.  In some levels you can run across a small village.  Raid each house successfully to take that house’s treasure and extend your domination even further.  Later on you’ll learn to summon powerful monsters and use special magic attacks.

The graphics in the game are very detailed and the music has a charming, jazzy feel to it.  The action plays pretty good, but it gets quite difficult even on the ‘casual’ easy setting.  Really the only problem I had with this game is that a lot of the item management and level upgrade features felt more fiddly than fun.  And the game wasn’t very clear on how to use certain items.  But if you enjoy action RPGs with a healthy dose of the brand of humor NIS is known for, than you may enjoy the game anyway.

Kid Factor:

The Witch and the Hundred Knight is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Blood, Crude Humor, Fantasy Violence, Language, Partial Nudity, and Sexual Themes. When you destroy enemies, red and purple goo can sometimes appear, so I guess that would be blood.  But most of the enemies you fight are cute little things like sprouts and pumpkin heads and caterpillars, so the violence isn’t too grisly or horrific.  There is lot of crude humor, and the swamp witch curses quite a bit and doesn’t wear a whole lot of clothes, so that’s where the language, partial nudity, and sexual themes come in.  Sometimes it can be fun to play as the bad guy, but the witch wasn’t a very likable character to me so I didn’t enjoy it as much.  Really the best reason why this game is better for teens and older gamers is because of the complexity of the gameplay and the high difficulty level.

Tags: Game Reviews