Saviors
of Sapphire Wings by developer Experience Inc. and publisher NIS America Inc.—Nintendo Switch review written by Pierre-Yves
with a copy provided by the publisher.Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
For those that may not be familiar with
Experience Inc.'s work, they are designers of some fairly intense wizardry style first person dungeon crawlers
loved by many on the team. Having designed titles to make you cry such as Stranger of Sword City which originally
released for the PlayStation Vita and Microsoft Xbox One, they are back again
for both a remaster of that brutal classic and a brand new challenge with the
Saviors of Sapphire Wings.
Note: Because of the amount of time investment required for just one dungeon
crawling experience, the following review is solely for Saviors of Sapphire
Wings as The Stranger of Sword City - Revisited deserves its own forthcoming
review.
Taking it from the top, Saviors of
Sapphire Wings is the story of a knight who falls to the evil overlord and dies
in the first act. Fast forwarding one-hundred years into the future, our hero
makes a return by reincarnating to a new form of their choice for another
chance to face off against the evil that won a century ago. While this is
nothing new in terms of RPGs, it allows for both an easy setup to the premise
without having to go into too many upfront details. Those details will
eventually come to us when our protagonist finds out for themselves the current
state of the world as they move from region to region while preparing for their
rematch.
Getting a “crash course” in your new
body, it doesn’t take long for you to get roped into what can only be the start
of your rehabilitation quests! With the influence of evil having spread, not
even small quiet and remote towns are safe anymore and as such, a young man hot
headedly rushes to rescue another of the locals who was snatched away and being
prepared for a sacrifice. It's a bit of a trope in terms of a setup but it
launches into one of the main systems that Saviors has to offer,
"character customization."
Unlike the Stranger of Sword City, Demon Gaze (Demon Gaze 2 PS4 / Vita), and the Operations Abyss (Vita / PC) and Babel (Vita) where you build your crew from the
ground up, Saviors gives you your party members in a story based approach.
While working well enough from an RPG' actual role playing perspective, it was
also a bit on the harder side at first as this is still a dungeon crawler
designed to put you against tough foes and not having a full party at first
makes grinding for experience points almost necessary.
In a bit of a twist from your general,
here's person a, they do this. Here's person b, they do that. Here's person c,
etc., persons a, b, and c can be whatever you want them to be. While their
personalities won't change from a story perspective, as Saviors relies on your
party members for the story's flair, how you get there is entirely up to you.
Human, Elven, Dwarven, Migmy, Fairy, etc, each of these characters can have
their base stats swapped for a soul of another race and allowing them to
properly be any class they want. This keeps things fairly in line with the rest
of Experience Inc.'s dungeon crawlers which lets you fully customize your party
for what you see fit to dungeon crawl through with.
While it can seem a bit odd at first that
you are given these people with potential palette swaps, it adds a bit more
depth than what can normally be found. Channeling its inner RPG, it felt more
natural to have your party members chatting along instead of it always being
someone from the outside. Sure, others can drop in and say hi, but overall, it
creates a tighter knit connection to those that you'll be spending hours upon
hours traveling with instead of them just being a selected face, name, and
imaginary backstory they you made up in your mind that has absolutely no
bearing on the actual events in question.
While the direction for the characters is
new from Experience's Inc.'s standpoint, there's unfortunately a lot with
Saviors of Sapphire Wings that doesn't quite meet the mark. If you're coming
from Stranger of Sword City or started with Stranger of Sword City - Revisited
there's a lot of elements in Saviors that you'll say "didn't I just see
that"? Character sprites, enemy sprites, environments, there's a lot that
has basically been reused and there's a few times while in some of the
environments I thought I was in a reused map making me wonder if it was the
same world. It's not. So while there's a bigger emphasis on actual character
interaction with your hero, there's a lot that's just been reused and it
doesn't feel new or even fresh from a visual standpoint.
Now I know what you're thinking, you love
Dragon Quest. And I do. But going from one Dragon Quest to another, while
enemies are reused they've always been revamped to a degree in the main cast
were always unique not just an anime sprites sub pallet option in the third tab
of four that were available in Stranger of Sword City. I know this isn't
something to actually be hung up on, but it made the adventure feel a little
more lazy than it should have because of the massive amount of the reused work.
The other portion that doesn't quite seem
to line up, and this isn't just comparing one title to the other, is in the
execution of the dungeon crawling. Normally, there's a manner in which
"loot" can be acquired in order to make life a bit easier especially
when everything is out to kill you. That and the shops that seem to think
somehow you’re super rich for some reason as the prices alone could kill even
the most robust of adventurers. For the loot though, some of it can be found on
enemies, some within chests, but generally with Experience there's a "way
point" of sorts that exists to help out.
In Saviors, these points are points in
which you have to place something down, most often food, and then either walk
away for a certain amount of steps or get into another battle in order for
something to take the bait. Or hopefully take the bait as even if you drop
something that enemies may be interested in, they may just like fishing, take
the bait and get the hell out of there. Thankfully while acquiring the loot may
be a bit more difficult, the loot that is given is generally decent enough to
start making a difference one dungeon crawling adventurer at a time. I just
wished that the process had been a bit easier like being able to use it “X”
amount of times per dungeon run instead of having to use items to get items as
sometimes with the limited inventory space what you need is something that
you’ve just stored away.
Loot aside though, the rest of the
dungeon crawling is as robust as it’s ever been. Moving either forwards,
backwards, or strafing from side to side, your map will auto-update itself with
everywhere you’ve been and tell you if there’s something of interest such as
traps, doors and whether they are one-way passages or not. Actually one thing
that I really enjoyed was that often enough your party members would call out
if they’ve spotted something of interest that could be anything from an item on
the ground for your inventory or a secret passage meaning that as long as
you’re walking by you don’t always need to check every single surface hoping
that one of them will lead you into the next passageway forward.
Summary
Overall though, even if I felt like it
took me a while longer to get into the swing of things compared to their
previous work, Saviors of Sapphire Wings is a decent dungeon crawler. Do I wish
they did more in regards to the visual presentation to make it unique and not
simply a reuse of previous work? Yes. Can I live with it? I can and with the
value of Stranger of Sword City - Revisited it's even easier to do so even if I
kept finding myself comparing one to the other.
Score: 7 / 10
Note: We'll be back soon with our review of Stranger of Sword City -
Revisited for the Nintendo Switch!
