The Sword of Hope

 The Sword of Hope

Recently, a little Game Boy adventure called The Sword of Hope was added to the Nintendo Switch Online service.

I decided to give it a go.

The Sword of Hope is a small dungeon-crawler style exploration RPG released for the Game Boy in 1991.

You play as prince Theo, who must defeat the evil influence of a dragon who is controlling the king. Theo must visit three wizards to gain the power to confront the dragon. ...There isn't much plot in this game aside from this. It's a basic fantasy premise.

The game is played in the classic dungeon-crawler style. You have a small window showing a first-person view of the current room, a window showing the current available directions you can travel, and a window showing your commands: "Look, "Open", "Hit", "Magic", "Item".

As you travel through the rooms, you will encounter enemies, which are dealt with via classic JRPG turn-based battles. 

The adventurey aspects of the game are fun enough. You begin in a forest, and at any time you can "Look" at the trees in each room, and the forest spirits will give you hints about where to find hidden items or passageways. You need to find three keys in order to meet the three wizards, and each wizard has a small task for you to complete before they give you their aid.

The map design is okay. There are one or two confusing mazes, but there are generally enough unique landmarks that it's not too difficult to keep your bearings. It would have been nicer if we had an in-game map though. :/

As you explore the game, Looking, Opening and Hitting every interactable thing you come across, you may see messages saying "It looks like there may be something here...!" yet, oddly, nothing further happens no matter what you try. Later on you may get a hint saying "Go back and find something in the swamp" or "look for something in the graveyard", and if you've been paying attention, you might remember which particular rooms had the funny text last time you were there. So finding your way to the next objective isn't too bad in this game, especially compared to other games of this style such as Shadowgate. You just need to interact with everything on every screen, and not get too lost.

This game's English translation is pretty terrible, but it adds a certain charm to the game. I kind of love these really unusual and awkward phrasings, and thankfully none of the puzzle hints were botched too badly by the weird choice of words, so I've got no complaints there. You don't really get games with such weird English like this any more, so I like to relish it when I see it.

However... despite being a decent little adventure game, there is one aspect that makes this game bad. Not just bad, but truly miserable to play. And that is, unfortunately, the JRPG-style combat.

The combat in this game is just plain unfair. First of all, enemy encounters are extremely frequent. Not untypical of old RPGs, but still very annoying. 

But the biggest issue is in just how completely random the numbers are. You can do an attack, and it can randomly decide to inflict 6 damage or 45 damage. You can take a hit from the enemy, and it can deal either 7 damage or 50 damage. ...By endgame, you've got around 100 max HP total, to give you an idea of how bad the fluctuations are. It's bad.

Levelling up can mitigate this effect somewhat - regular attacks from enemies will get weaker and weaker the higher your level. But annoyingly, it seems that magic attacks are completely unaffected. You cannot level up your magic defense at all in this game, which means that the final areas of the game are a nightmare to traverse through. 

And this isn't the kind of game where level-grinding is satisfying either, because all of the damage variance means that you can never feel safe in how much damage you're doing. So in order to grind, it's either fighting nothing but weaklings for hours, or trying your luck against the stronger enemies, and dying repeatedly as you do so.

It honestly kills the playability of this game because you are always dying in unfair ways against any magic-using enemies. And the final dungeon is full of them.

The final boss is the most ridiculous final boss I've seen in a while. He is entirely immune to your spells, and he will take anywhere between 1 to 40 damage from your sword attack. And he will cast high level spells at you every turn, dealing anywhere from 7 to 70 damage. It's just impossible to plan for it and there really isn't much you can do to protect yourself other than pray you get lucky.

The only way I was able to defeat the final boss was making heavy use of the Nintendo Switch Online app's ability to rewind. If I got a low damage roll versus the final boss, I'd rewind until I got a good one. And if he killed me in one hit, I'd rewind until his hit did less.

I can't imagine playing and beating this on an actual Game Boy. It's so unnecessarily unfair. I honestly just wish it was a fully point-and-click puzzle kind of thing like Shadowgate. There was no need for the JRPG combat to be in the game at all tbh.

So anyway. This game sucks. the combat design completely kills the enjoyment. I guess it's good that the NSO version exists now with the rewind functionality available, but as a game from 1991, it's horrible.