Introduction

Considering the game's title you'd think this game would be based around King Arthur and he's many knights. After all, he is famous for pulling a sword from a stone after all. Of course, you'll quickly realize that idea is completely off the mark as soon as you read the game's description. Unless they were inspired by "Fate/stay night" to make King Arthur a woman, but considering the actual story has nothing to do with King Arthur. I'm left with the notion that the choice in name in this case is highly literal. After all, you do spend your time and energy towards proving yourself worthy of pulling a sword from a stone.

Bugs


Normally, I'd save this section of the review for last, but this game locked up on me so many times during my Let's Play that I seriously wanted to stop and play something else at points. In fact, at one point I needed to fight the same group of enemies four times in order to get past them.

As far as I can tell, the instabilities are tied to having too many negative status condition and positive buffs in play at the same time. While this issue can be avoided to a certain extent by carefully playing around it. But there's no denying that I really shouldn't have to limit myself in a game in order to avoid major bugs.

Story

While the underlying story itself is rather simple. The way the game goes about telling it's story feels convoluted. After all, you spend the bulk of your time in this game playing through a flashback that contains additional flashbacks. It's almost like dwart was trying to tell his story in a similar style to "Final Fantasy X". And that's not even taking into consideration the fact that the game also includes time travel for some reason.

Gameplay

Combat wise the game starts out rather slow in my opinion, but I can't help but feel the bulk of the slowness was the result of my own actions. After all, I tend to be rather conservative when it comes to potion usage. Especially when I have access to other options. And this game does provide the player with the ability to slowly regenerate SP by using the guard command. As such, I would sometimes burn away half a dozen turns or more in order to refill my SP bar before I would finish off the final enemy I was fighting at the time. That way I could readily cast heal on myself after battle and save my potions for later boss fights. As a result of this practice, I went into the final boss battle with 29 red potions, 12 blue potions, 11 purple potions, 12 green potions, and 6 bombs.

And there's no denying that the game tends to be pretty generous with potion drops from enemies as well as provides the player with a large number of potions if they go searching through the various pots and barrels they run across while exploring the game's only dungeon with Sarah. So, it's not like I had to be conservative with potion usage. In fact, I switched over to a much more offensive style that relied on consuming blue potions to fully restore my mana after combat in the later sections of the game. Albeit, at that point I had access to rather powerful skills like paralyze wave as well as an accessory that allowed me to attack twice in a single turn. So, I was much more regularly finishing off my enemies before they had a chance to inflict serious damage.

As a whole though, combat tended to be in favor of the player for the most part. This isn't to say that its impossible for the player to be defeated, but such defeats were largely a result of me forgetting that smash or heavy smash makes you take actions after the enemies or forgetting to factor in that if you've been hit with agility down in this game that you'll also attack after your enemies have done so. As such, I can't help but feel that losing in this game is a byproduct of player error rather then because the enemies deploy powerful or effective tactics against you in order to win.

As far as the puzzles go. They aren't that difficult once you understand the underlying principles behind them, but the game isn't always clear on what your supposed to do. So, it's possible to get majorly hung up on them at times.

Graphics

Graphically speaking the game appears to largely rely on the assets found in the RTP. As such, the game looks alright, but really lacks anything to give the sort of visual pop it needs to stand out.



On a more positive note, I do like the fact that the game flashes the potions you find in barrels and pots over your head for a little bit as well as the fact that the barrels and pots are clearly damaged after you've smashed them up a bit in search of hidden goodies.

Conclusion

I can readily forgive the slow pace of early combat in this game. After all, I'm of the opinion that the slow pace was a byproduct of my own actions rather then because of how the game itself is set up. On the other hand, I really can't forgive just how buggy this game is. As such, I really can't recommend this game to others in it's current state. Nor I can give it a particularly high rating. After all, a game that constantly locks up is a frustrating experience to play through. And, I imagine a lot of other players would give up rather then push their way through this game. Especially when there's a lot of other games of roughly the same level of quality on this site that won't regularly lock up after you've used a move like paralyze wave.