Playthrough Journal, June 27 2009 (Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled)

By: Jamie Obeso | June 27th, 2009

I usually have tons and tons of thoughts and musings running through my head as I play a game, especially if I’m going to review it. You have to pick and choose the most important stuff to put in a review though. I’m going to give Playthrough Journals a try, to see if it helps me cut out the fat in my reviews by letting me get things off my chest. Without further ado:

So, I’ve been given the task to review a ‘new’ RPG that was released earlier this month, Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled. I use quotations on ‘new’ for two reasons: The first being that the game was originally going to be released waaaay back in November 2008, and the second reason being that it’s a deliberate mimicry of 16-bit era RPGs, specifically, Chrono Trigger.

In fact, if I had to compare it to anything, I’d say that it’s basically a Chrono Trigger clone:

- The sprites look almost exactly the same (The main character, Kairu, walks, holds his sword, and attacks exactly like Crono)

- The combat is the same (Active Time Battling with weapons, magic, and combination attacks),

- There’s even some sort of otherworldly element to it (although I’m not far enough to understand it yet).

The strange thing about Black Sigil’s combat, though, is that it removes just about everything that made Chrono Trigger fun. For one, random battles are implemented, instead of seeing enemies on the map. If you were solving a puzzle or looking for the right path in Chrono Trigger, you weren’t pestered by random battles, which is when they’re by far the most obnoxious. You could also take advantage of the enemies appearing on the map to avoid combat if you really wanted. Black Sigil not only introduces random battles into the system, but the encounter rate is pretty crazy, and you can even get into random battles on the world map now (did I mention that you walk horrendously slow on the world map compared to towns and dungeons?).

The worst thing, though, is that the combat is just slow; when you just have one character in your party, a lot of your time in battle is just watcthing the command gauge fill. Worse yet, Kairu usually can not kill a foe in one hit, which sort of adds this arbitrary difficulty to the game; you can’t do much to kill enemies faster, but you still have to worry about them pecking away at your life.

Still, for all I’ve said about it, when you have a second person (there’s a max party of three I think, but I haven’t got a third character yet), battles pass by much faster, due to the fact that command gauges fill while allies and enemies perform their actions.

There’s a bit more to be said about the specifics of combat, and the story, but I don’t think I’ve gotten far enough to make definitive statements about either, so I’ll hold off on talking about those.

To wrap up this journal, let me throw something out in the open about the game’s general reception: 

If you make a game that’s deliberately old-school, you have to - at the very least - match the fun factor of the subject material of which you’re basing your game on. The year is 2009, and Chrono Trigger might have been well-received in this day and age if it were a new game, but it would hardly have been revered as the groundbreaking masterpiece that we know it to be.

My initial impression is that Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled is not as terrible as critics make it sound, but I also don’t blame them for reviewing it as harshly as they have been. After all, it just plays like a sort of “worse Chrono Trigger.” Had it came out in 1995, it might have been fine, though not particularly groundbreaking. These days, it just feels like a SNES RPG that has aged about as gracefully as a 1920′s supermodel with a drug addiction.