Sands of Destruction
Sands of Destruction has quite the pedigree featuring the talents from RPG classics like Xenogears and Chrono Trigger but can it hope to stand tall among the already stellar DS RPG line-up?
One of the strongest points in Sands of Destruction is the original story concept. You are Kerie, a youth from a small village who has recently awakened his destructive power he never wanted. This has caught the eye of the World Annihilation Front, an organization dedicated to ending the world, which he reluctantly joins. It seems the world has been host to natural disasters and humanity is enslaved by oppressive beast-men and the Front believes the only way to save the world is to destroy it so it can start anew.
The game deals with a lot of darker themes like death, loss and living in an oppressed society. Strangely enough the game maintains a fairly light-hearted feel throughout even the darker moments. Death and murder is a common event in the game but any sign or genuine remorse is rare and it is not uncommon to just kill your problems away before skipping off to the next objective. Even still, the events are interesting and the characters have personality. The ideas in the story are clever but the way it is told feels amateurish.
Gameplay-wise, this is about what you would expect from an RPG in the mid-90’s Playstation era. You will explore towns and dungeons on a 3D map hunting down treasure and spending hard-earned gold at shops to outfit your party outside combat. There is little customization and the player is left to figure out its intricacies on their own.
Sadly the combat is the game’s weakest point even though it had some serious potential. On your turn in combat the four face buttons are mapped to different actions in combat. X and Y correspond to your light (fury attack) and heavy (fatal blow) attacks. Fury attacks do less damage but can be strung together to perform longer combos while fatal blows are stronger but less accurate. A button scrolls over to your items and magic menu and B is a block command.
The fury attack/fatal blow combat system seems strategic at first with different combo chains depending on which attacks you use, but before you hit 10 hours into the game you will pretty much just ignore fatal blows since they become useless. As you upgrade your skills you gain the ability to chain fury attacks together so that one button press will automatically chain two or more moves together. This means you can rack up massive combos easily with fury attacks which will always outclass fatal blows. When you add that to the fact that offensive magic is all but useless and the random luck involved in some boss encounters you have a broken RPG system.
What the game does right is the soundtrack with contributions and direction from legendary video game composer Yasunori Mitsuda, of Xenogears and Chrono Trigger fame. The game’s theme song on the title screen is especially beautiful.
Visually, the game is about on par with DS RPGs of its style. The characters are 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds with a rotatable camera. Oddly enough it is not possible to rotate the camera while moving; the player must come to a full stop while adjusting their view. The environments themselves are varied and fairly pretty with a wide range of colours to make them visually appealing. The characters are competently animated without ever going above and beyond.
In the end, Sands of Destruction is just average. Even with its broken battle system it can still be fun, if shallow. It has one of the best soundtracks on the platform and the story is interesting enough to keep most people going to the end. You can do much worse on the DS than Sands of Destruction, but on a platform with an already robust RPG line-up and with such strong competition as early as next month it is hard to recommend.
Likes:
- The story concept is original and characters are all likable in their own way.
- The soundtrack is one of the best on the platform with some memorable and beautiful songs.
Dislikes:
- The combat is a little too shallow overall.
- The English voice work comes off as cheesy and awkward.
- Camera controls are awkward, forcing you to come to a complete stop to ajust your vantage point.
Review Score
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The review scale at LevelFortyTwo is between 1 and 5. A score of 5 is considered an amazing game, 4 is a well-done game with only minor issues, 3 is in the middle; not great, but not bad, 2 is a very problematic game, and 1 is absolutely terrible.
