Summoner

Summoner is one of THOSE games. You know the type. The ones with a story and characters that stick in the back of your head for years, and will not let you go. So you finally have to go dig out your disc and play it again... and you're fine, until the next time. My disc is on my desk, somewhere. Kept meaning to look for it, because that time has been coming around again. No, it's probably not the best RPG ever made, and the graphics are now dated, but it's Volition, y'know? Strong story and characters that you won't soon forget--there's just something about it that I really like. Hint: Yes, there are sewers. Why wouldn't there be? Big hint: Don't neglect buffing ANY of your party members, or you'll be sorry!

Was not expecting this game to be that good but was very nicely surprised. Decent voice acting (although it's only during important cutscenes), a lot of RPG stuff to build and play around with. Quite enjoyable. There is one major drawback though. This game has probably the worst side quest design I have ever seen in any game. The vast majority of them expect you to walk between multiple random NPCs, none of which are marked on the map or even given the general area about where they are supposed to be located. The basic quest structure is "I have this problem, go talk to someone named X". Good luck figuring out who X is. It could have been an NPC you talked with 10 hours ago an had nothing important to say or an NPC you haven't even met yet. Then you find X and he sends you to talk to Y. And this can drag on for quite a while. To finish those quests without a guide would take hours of randomly wandering about the areas of the game, hoping you just happen to stumble upon the relevant NPC. And those are the good side quests.... For the bad ones, you have to rely on random, I repeat RANDOM encounters on the map that can trigger only in specific, non-descript regions of it. Some quests give you direction like "east of this city", which is however absolutely useless as the map doesn't even bother telling you where north is. To top it all off, as you progress through the main story, some side quests are missable and simply disappear from your quest log with no warning whatsoever. The NPC involved in 2 quests I had stuck in the quest log (surprisingly the one with random condition to complete as I later found out in a guide...) is simply gone after moving the main story forward, which I of course noticed only several hours later. Simply put, I keep playing, hoping there are as few side quests as possible, because it hugely detracts from the otherwise pretty well made main story. Could have been a 9/10, but have to drop it to 7.5 due to the atrocious side quests.

This game's demo was the first demo I ever played and until last month was the only demo that I liked enough to buy the full game. The music still gets stuck in my head. The lore has never left my head. The chaining attacks make combat very engaging and fun. The graphics were pretty good on PC at the time. Replaying it on PS2 a few years ago, I found the environments bare. There really wasn't enough power in the machines back then to have hordes of enemies and intricate environments, but this game makes the best of what it has. Methodical combat that allows tactical gameplay and hack and slash. I spent hours in completely unnecessary parts of the game just exploring. FInding lore makes sense in this game. It's not audio logs strewn about a forest. It's books in libraries, conversations with people that are interested in the summoner for in-world reasons. The whole world doesn't know everything about you from day 1. Characters have their own reasons for doing what they do. The game rewards you for exploring, but does not require obsession for completion. Sometimes the clues are weird. A drunk exclaims "Mish kish fish!" What does that mean? I won't spoil it. That one line has stuck with me for ages. I played through this game at least six times in the early 2000s and it was always fun. The weird glitch where characters' bodies partially pass through the clipping plane was pretty funny. That was the biggest glitch/bug I found. Just a funny look at the inside of a character's head. I like the summons and the different locations. Even the obligatory sewer level was fun. Lots of tactics to try and items to experiment with. They put a lot of care into this game and it shows.

Its a decent story but the mechanics are a pita, The camera is really crap at times. Combat is quite slow and the skills can be quite confusing when you are trying to build a character. The map only shows your immediate surroundings which is kinda pointless. The spell choices are quite lacklustre, I have a fire spell that can only be activated to drop on your head with an aoe that damages you as well as the enemies. Highlighting objects/people is annoying, you have to walk up right beside every box to see if it can be highlighted to be opened, you have to walk up quite close to every NP character to see if they have a quest. The city of Lenele is quite huge and bland making quest solving a complete and utter chore, trying to find characters and places is just horrendous. The map cannot be annotated, so even on return journeys to hand in quests, it becomes a huge needle in the haystack game. The quest marker over peoples heads, is the same for people with quests or NPC's with just flavour dialogue and even after the quest is solved, they still retain these markers over their heads causing a lot of confusion and time wasting. Some quest directions are quite misleading also a lot of quests close off after certain game progression. On saying that, it does have a decent story if you can persevere with the mechanics. Price can be subjective I know, but, even at 5.99 this game is over priced.

It's true that the gameplay may not feel 100% intuitive and it definitely feels clunky, but for those who are big fans of RPG's in general, it should not be completely shunned. Beautiful music and fascinating setting/world for the story. Gameplay wise, the combat mostly revolves around using spells and learning each characters different "Chain-attacks", then creating effective combos with them. The trick to learning a new chain is to keep using each of the starting ones over and over again until you "evolve" a new one, then keep using the new one to get the last one unlocked. And if you get frustrated with the combat, there ARE certain skill combinations that are practically broken because of how powerful they are (Trip and back stab, cough cough, firewall). If they could have made this game a true co-op (and I don't think it would have been too difficult), this game would be 5-star worthy.