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> Results: Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light
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Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light offers a deep and robust crafting system that goes so far as to have the phases of the moon influence each character's crafting skill. That is good because you will be crafting weapons, potions and other items constantly as you progress through the game. Unfortunately the rest of Blade Dancer is not so great. The characters are generic to every game of this type and the story is similarly simple and cliché. The interactions between characters don't lead you to care about them very much, and if anything along the way comes as a surprise, you haven't been paying attention.
Fortunately the combat system contains enough interesting and challenging battles to keep you engaged through the relatively short campaign. Battles occur in real time, but each character has a clock that tracks when you are able to take action. Time doesn't stop while you decide your next move, and your enemies act when their time is up. There is a ﾑLunability' meter that is shared among all combatants (including enemies!) that allows for special moves once a certain level is reached, but if you don't use it your enemies will. There are even moves that can be done only when more than one party member is ready to attack. This provides a fair amount of variation and potential strategy in combat situations. If the rest of the game was half as well thought out and interesting as the crafting and combat, this would easily be the best role-playing game for the PSP. But after a while it gets tedious, and nothing can save the experience from sinking into mediocrity. Everything becomes bland and repetitive until you are pleasantly surprised that the game is over in about a dozen hours. This ends up as another lost opportunity on the PSP.  
In terms of content, Blade Dancer is the type of Japanese-style role-playing game I love because there are no hidden surprises. The characters are all drawn in very broad strokes, the motivations are simple and clear, and the dialogue is simple and generally charming. There are abrasive characters and those who use some slightly inappropriate language, but nothing extreme or out of place, nor anything that kids haven't heard in PG-rated movies. This makes it an easy choice to share, and given the crafting and combat system it is the type of game that I want to share with my kids.
The game doesn't address any big issues, but there are different types of people and races involved, and therefore tolerance issues arise and are handled gracefully. The main character is young and brash, but of an age more appropriate for traveling alone than in most games of this type. The dialogue is pretty good, with solid voice acting and well translated lines. The only issue is that despite the game itself having a balanced approach to combat and exploration, the superior quality of crafting and combat compared to the rest of the game will lead you to spend more time pursuing those than dealing with the main plot. This isn't a bad thing, but the nature of the combat makes it more intense than strictly turn-based games in the Final Fantasy tradition. The crafting system of managing components and sub-components is something that older kids who enjoy fantasy books will like since it requires the same type of resourcefulness shown by many characters in those stories. This review edited by Dave Long Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Browse Amazon.com's selection of "blade dancer" themed games Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light |
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