I’m on a Summon Night roll! Since I liked Summon Night X ~Tears Crown~ so much, I went out and downloaded the remake of the first Summon Night for on the Nintendo DS. I like isometric strategy RPGs anyway, so this was right up my alley. But then I loaded it up and UGH! The character designs are FUGLY! Right from the main character you select, everyone in the game looks like they were drawn by a third-grader! And the battles are slow, you spend half the game walking towards the enemy because they’re standing on the other end of the field and usually won’t move unless you come into their range.

And the story is YYY and the music is XXX and this and that…and before I knew it, 26 hours had gone by and I had finished the game. Just like that. Definitely one of the most painless game progressions I’ve ever experienced in my life. Long before I had time to start getting bored or start wondering where the story was going and who did what, it was over. On one hand, that’s called a shallow, simplistic story, on the other hand after several “deep” storylines in a row, it was a real breath of fresh air. If I had to summarize,

Pros:

– Very easy after the first few battles. Keeping everyone alive is kinda hard in the beginning, after that it gets way easier
– But not too easy: you have to do free battles if you want to keep everyone equipped ‘cos they’re very stingy with money.
– Lots of characters join your party and most of them are pretty useful
– Characters are automatically healed and revived after battle
– “Brave” system rewards you for not being overlevelled by giving you special party abilities.
– Game isn’t too long and isn’t too short. You can finish a first playthrough in 20-30 hours even if you grind.
– Lots of different beasts to summon, some very powerful, some very useful. Experimenting is fun!

Cons

– Fugly character designs. The cover art is a lie!
– Boring, cliched story. The original is over 10 years old, so that explains some things.
– Music is nothing remarkable
– Battles are really slow and take forever to finish.
– Battles are very repetitive, the same thing every single time: kill the boss/kill everyone, game over if your MC dies. Every single story battle, all the time.
– Trying to get new summons using summon stones is a crapshoot, and virtually useless in battle.
– No items to refill MP with makes using summons inconvenient in the first half of the game.
– Too many characters means you’ll be at a loss who to use and who to toss aside in the latter half. I just picked a party and stuck to it, since the game is easy enough.

So anyway, that was actually pretty fun, as far as strategy RPGs go. I was thinking of playing again with a different MC instead of Aya, but maybe I’ll wait a bit before a replay. In the meantime I’m playing Summon Night 2 DS!