Sword of Aegis (Demo)

Sword of Aegis is a game whose title alone will bring a smile to the face of anyone who has even passing familiarity with Latin. After all, it’s literally translated as “Sword of Shield”, which obviously makes no sense. It’s also one of the oldest games on RMN: while I typically do not assign scores to demos, this one in particular will soon be a decade old. At the end, it claims that the full game will be released on April 1st, 2008, which basically makes the demo one early April’s Fool prank. Either way, the game truly lives up to its title.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



Pretty much everything used in the game is XP RTP, with the possible exception of some backgrounds and the Game Over screen. There’s a weird design decision, in that every time you find an item through exploring the environment, there’s a jingle, and the screen briefly flashes white. Otherwise, the sound design is disappointing even relative to RTP games: the attacks sound way too soft and quiet (melee attack from your mage, Leila, is barely audible) and the boulders and such make no sound when moved during puzzles. It should also be noted that combat in the “Cave of Myst” uses pitch black background, which is hardly an attractive design decision. Meanwhile, the mapping is rather inconsistent. There are decent maps like the one above, and not so nice ones like this one here:



Storyline



The game begins with the young red-haired protagonist, named Spark, lying in his bed, in full armour, while an old woman (his mother) paces in the next room. No event actually happens until you start pressing directional buttons and Spark gets up – at first, I just watched his mother move, and listened to the crackling sounds of the flame, thinking that was all part of the cutscene. Once he does stand up, though, he starts telling us about a dream he’s apparently just had about a beast and his friends and a cloud city. It was so surprising to be told about a dream post facto, instead of the game actually showing it to us the way most reasonable creators would do, I first pressed F12, assuming I must have skipped the dream cutscene somehow. However, everything was all right, and Spark quickly dismisses said dream, because of the “secret attack move”, as seen above. This is not the only instance where “show, not tell” is violated for some key plot information: another has to do with Spark’s elder sister, who died in battle. You can only find this out by chance, if you interact with a cross in a field outside of your house. It triggers a rather long monologue from Spark where he promises to avenge her by killing monsters, talks about how their family has been doing, and how both mother and father are still grieving, etc. It would’ve been quite touching if a) it wasn’t riddled with various errors (generally speaking, the typos, misplaced capitalization and word alignment issues crop up in every second sentence in the demo) and b) if it actually matched the behavior of either his barely-there mother, or his father, who trains young heroes like himself and says brilliant lines such as this:



Though he doesn’t mind when Spark addresses him as “Sir” instead.

Once he gives you a Class I badge and teaches you that special move, he quickly says that “You are a goofball…but you have a pure heart”, etc. and Spark says he’ll always remember these words of wisdom. He’s then free to go to the Hero Academy to get up to next tier alongside a fellow graduate Leila, but is not allowed to enroll there because the demo has to end. Before that, you can check out a side quest of sorts at the cave to the south (south on the decently-sized world map, that is), which would’ve been rather disappointing, if not for stuff like this:



Though, once you do rescue her, she runs away immediately, freaked out that her father died. What they were doing there in the first place is rather unclear.

In all, the writing is unintentionally hilarious, due to a combination of typos like this, or lines like the Sensei one, or clear placeholders such as “You know the world is filled with monsters since THE DARK EVENT”. The typical “villain plotline” cutscene, which starts “Alsewhere” as you enter the town with the Hero Academy, also has a fun argument between a master bad guy who sent his apprentice to retrieve said sword and rule the world by turning everyone into demons (why he has a whole bunch of normal humans helping him do this is a little unclear) and the apprentice who refreshingly recognizes such victory is pointless, and cuts down the master and his other cronies. True, there’s some intentional humour too, like Leila being immediately smitten with a buff Lancer at the Academy and getting told off by Spark with “Earth to Leila” but it simply cannot match anything like the above.

Gameplay



There’s immediately a boulder puzzle in the basement of your house. Sure, it’s optional, but it’s still not explained what those random boulders are just doing there, and because it’s so dark, spotting the slightly lighter crate with grass (how is it even growing at all when there’s no light?) that can be moved is hardly pleasant. There another location where you get a puzzle like this, but it’s clearly empty and unfinished. Otherwise, you save at journals or at the Inns, and battle in the rather frequent random encounters with the default Fighter and Mage skills. The combat is really easy at first: your characters have ~400 HP, and enemies (Ghosts, Basilisks and Sahagin) deal 2-8, have no skills, often skip turns outright, and are killed in three attacks from Spark. The optional cave does have tougher Hellhounds and Cobolds, though, who deal 13 and 19 damage, respectively, and take something like 5 turns to kill, assuming you haven’t grinded earlier to get 1000 gold for an Iron Sword that raises Spark’s attack by 60. Those battles are still more tedious then anything else, though, unless the Hounds manage to inflict poison. Soon, I just ran away from most encounters in that cave until I made it to the boss (some troll thing, apparently), and then spammed his father’s “secret attack move” and “Fire” for 3-4 turns until it died.

The most “difficult” moment in the game is actually the one when Spark is taught “the secret move” by his father. While he did say to pay attention and watch him carefully, I assumed that he’ll still attack Spark through a battle interface. Instead, there was a cutscene combat animation, and then we are suddenly asked which 3 exact movements it consisted of. Failing the question gives you a game over, as father says Spark is useless and he won’t teach him any longer. It makes no sense why the game would end if you fail, given that if you pass it, your father will stop teaching you regardless, and that you already have the badges letting you go to the Academy. Either way, I sure hope you didn’t forget to save at the Inn before going up to this hero class! Speaking of which: somehow, paying money to sleep at the Inn heals your health, but won’t restore any SP.

Conclusion



Sword of Aegis (or is it Aeris Sword?) “first demo” is a short slice of an unfinished bad game, made back when it was still often assumed rmk was incapable of doing more. We have more-or-less moved on from these times, thankfully, and now it’s just an orphaned snapshot of an era.