Destiny's Blades

Destiny's Blades is a well made demo on all accounts. It tells a story of adventure and bravery, betrayal and mystery.. all of the potential is here for a great game, but does it end up so?

The game does have a fatal flaw however.. that being the storyline. The story in and of itself is well executed, however RPG veterans could find it to be very cliche. The story starts out with a great war that has started again because one of eight seals was broken by an evil Lord. The seal contained a very powerful sword infused with magic. When the game boils down, the story is no more than your run-of-the-mill RPG. However.. there are enough twists thrown in there to keep most people interested, though some might just get bored with it. There are some flaws in the grammar, though none of it really impacts the overall game too badly. Actually, the dialogue itself overall could use some improvement. I often found myself able to predict the party members motives before the crucial plot twist occurred, based solely on the way they spoke to the hero. Like I said before, the story is not the strongest I've seen in a game, though it was execution and simple pacing/progression is well enough that the game is not ruined by it.



Audio was pretty good in Destiny's Blades. Most of the music fits well with where you are. (I actually found myself just sitting in the overworld, trying to figure out where it's from.) Having not played older games in a while, I can't say for sure whether or not the music was ripped from certain games directly or not. But.. even though every track was ripped I didn't really have a problem with it. The music choices are fitting in the game, props to Supa on his sound choice. The only real complaint I had with the games sound was the few RTP ones used. But this really doesn't impact the overall quality of the game much. I am sure that it would annoy some of the hardcore (if applicable in this case) RPG players out there. Despite it's few faults, sound is well utilized within the game and definitely adds to the overall immersive nature through out.

The graphical side of Destiny's Blades was by far it's best aspect of the game. The mapper had the sense to walk the fine line between empty and overcrowded maps. Though I cannot see very many custom made graphics in the game, Destiny's Blades utilizes what it has to work with quite well. Your character walks along the overworld untill he gets to a town or cave, and there the maps get much more detailed. Supa adds those little details like shrinking your sprite when on the overworld, a technique I've always liked.. as well as it's consistent style and feel. Though the maps were well done in the game, the graphics of the characters.. more specificly the fact I had seen most of them before was a bit of a let down. At the very least, make the walking graphic for the HERO original.



Gameplay mechanics within this game were simple, but used effectively. The opening cutscene is a perfect example. In it, the story is layed out, showing the wars of the past fought over the power found in the meteor that hit the earth (which later would become the swords). The cinematic in and of itself was still told quite well. Never did I find that this game suffered from a cutscene that froze the game, or seemed out of place. As far as the telling of the story goes, everything seemed to work fine. I would have really liked to see something unique of it's own included in the game though. For example, the game uses the default battle system, default menu system, and has.. random encounters for almost all battles, other than bosses of course. This might not have posed a problem to some, but to me hating random encounters as much as I do found traveling through caves almost unbearable at times. Overall, everything was simple, but functional.

In conclusion, the game Destiny's Blades is a game with great potential. It has exelent mapping and a nice simple story progression. However, there is still a lot of room for improvement here.. I guess seeing as it's been cancelled a while we can all still enjoy what's offered here.