Summoner's Soul

Intro

"Summoner's Soul" was developed by coelocanth and Marrend using RPG Maker MZ and is another entry in the Swap in 3 Middle with You event. An event where one developer would begin a project and another would finish it. An event that would probably make me want to pull my hair out since I can't imagine I'd like giving creative control over to anyone else. I sometimes want to pull my hair out just dealing with people taking trash out at work while I'm there since it's one of my primary jobs now. Though, I suppose it doesn't help that some of my co-workers like to throw bags full of trash into the recycling unit and I have to climb inside of the container in order to get those bags out at times.

Though, I suppose I should get off this tangent before I start ranting about specific people. At any rate, "Summoner's Soul" is a short RPG that can be beaten in around 70 to 90 minutes depending on how much time you spend on grinding, but like always I'll delve into the story before I discuss how combat functions in this game.

Story

You play as Prendon, a young summoner, on a pilgrimage to gain the power of various summons by defeating them or their chosen representative in combat. A task made a lot easier with the aid of Emily and Derek. In fact, Derek's so broken he basically makes the summoning mechanic useless, but I'll get into why Derek is insanely broken in the gameplay section. At any rate once you've gathered the summons of Wind, Water, Earth, Air, Light, and Darkness you can choose to either return home or perform the final summoning. This choice actually does impact the ending. If you choose to go home you'll return in high spirits, but failed at gaining the title of High Summoner.



On the other hand you can become a High Summoner and lose your mind since the ability to manipulate the void is simply too much for Prendon to handle.



So ironically enough taking down the game's final/ultimate boss actually results in the player suffering a bad end. I guess some forces simply weren't meant to be under the control of elves.

Gameplay

The game features an active battle system that has been set to wait mode. At least that appears to be the most accurate way to describe it since the playable characters have bars under their name that need to fill before they can perform an action. The bar also needs to refill in order to perform an action. Albeit certain actions are so fast you basically perform them instantly such as using the basic attack command or most healing skills. On the other hand special skills and offensive magic take a little time to charge up before performing them which reminds me of "Growlanser Generations".

Though certain aspects of the combat system might be broken. In this game there isn't an MP requirement to cast skills, but a TP one. This is fine in and off itself, but using magic doesn't actually consume TP. So while you have a TP requirement for casting powerful spells like Tornado.



The fact magic doesn't actually consume the player's TP means you can effectively spam your best magic spells as much as you want. Which is really useful for Prendon since his best healing skill Esuna basically acts as a full party heal as well as grants your characters immunity to status effects like poison. Albeit the effectiveness of Esuna is reduced if your characters are wearing armor like silver mail for some reason.



This makes me wonder if the game takes the player's resistance to magic damage in mind when calculating how much health you'll regain which is highly unusual. Oh well, at least the player doesn't dodge healing spells like the ninjas in "Disgaea: Hour of Darkness" do. And you'll take so much less damage from enemies while wearing the armor that the reduced healing you'll receive isn't a big deal.

Albeit the most broken character in the game at least offensively is Derek since he gets access to spells that inflict both status as well as damage. This is important since one of the best ways to damage bosses in this game is by poisoning them since poison reduces an enemies health by 1/10th of their maximum HP every turn. At least it will do so if possible since this status condition can't be used to kill enemies. So if their current health is less or equal to 1/10th of their maximum health they'll simply be left with one hit point.

But beyond being useful for making early boss fights a lot shorter. Derek can also stack additional status effects on a target like silence, blind, and confusion. The only way Derek could be any better in my opinion if he's abilities had a high change of inflicting negative status conditions. As it stands he has a 75% chance to inflict various status effects with some of them like silence being able to dole out hundreds of points of damage. And considering most bosses love to spam magic in this game. If you manage to silence them their threat level will decrease dramatically.

On a more mixed note equipment in this game is both too expensive while also being too powerful. On one hand it will cost you a massive amount of time to properly outfit your party. On the other hand shoes in this game offer up massive speed boosts which makes them the one piece of equipment truly worth pursing since more speed means your characters get to go more often. This turns Derek from a good character into a godly one in my opinion. Especially if you outfit him with the best boots in the game.

On the other hand most trash enemies only give out a couple hundred gold at most while the best gear costs around 4,000 gold coins a piece which means you'll need to defeat 10 groups of enemies in the dark or light shrines in order to afford a single piece of equipment if you want to buy the best stuff. And you'll likely need to defeat more then that since certain enemies are worth a lot less money than others.

But as already mentioned even just giving everyone the best boots in the game will make them so fast they'll be able to run circles around the enemy. And even without armor Derek only died once during my Let's Play through the game. So you can readily get through the game without buying chest armor all together as long as you get better footwear.

And the game does changes things up a little bit in the dark temple by including a puzzle where you need to turn the entire carpet a single color. A puzzle where stepping on a piece causes it to change. So you'll need to plan out your route carefully if you want to solve it in the shortest amount of time. Albeit, I basically blundered into a working solution in a few minutes while barely applying myself. So this puzzle isn't that difficult in my opinion.

Graphics

Graphically the game is a mix of the RTP for RPG Maker MZ as well as the SeraphCircle monster packs. I suppose on the bright side this means the game isn't entirely comprised of RTP graphical assets. On the downside some of the spirits that challenge the player are represented by sprites that don't resemble the monster your about to face. The most obvious is the water spirit which appears as a fish outside of combat.



But in combat is revealed to be a 'kracken', a giant squid monster. While the summon you gain for this fight appears to be an undine.



I suppose some would argue this is just splitting hairs since the monsters you need to touch in order to activate an encounter in this game are clearly zombies. And are always zombies regardless of which shrine your in and what kind of enemies your about to face, but this really stuck out to me since most developers use a monster sprite that represents the boss your about to face.

Sound

Sound wise the game features tracks from a few different artists. An aspect this is both a positive and negative. On one hand it means the amount of RTP music in this game is limited if any appears at all. And on the other hand it means some of the audio is copyrighted which means I had to worry about my videos getting blocked in certain countries. Thankfully that isn't the case with this project.

On a more meaningful negative to the project itself. The audio track played during the opening cut scene and on the world map is way too loud. I had my sound mixer set the audio for this game to 30 percent and it sounded like I was listening to music videos on youtube at full blast.

Conclusion

On one hand this game lacks anything to truly make me recommend it since the character's lack depth, the combat is overly easy, and the overall narrative leaves little impact since I really don't care whether the main character rides off into the sunset in the "east" or if succumbs to the power of the final summon and takes over the world. On the other hand, this is an event game where two different developers worked on this game over the course of the event. So having something that is at least fully function and complete is a victory in and of itself. So while I wouldn't recommend this game for it's merits. I also can't hate on it that much considering it's nature.