Lady of the Winds

Lady of the Winds happened to be the last of the five Swap in the Middle with You event games I’ve played in bulk recently. It’s also by far the shortest and least interesting one of the five.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



RTP and such, with the creatures’ battlers obviously recoloured to fit the sandy desert theme, but no other notable changes. The combat music also comes from Grandia 3, apparently, but the rest is still RTP. As for the mapping, well there are weird moments like ladder descending straight into a wall on the screenshot above, but it’s mainly decent, though unremarkable. The village is fine enough for what it is, while The floors of the Sand Temple are compact, and often don’t really look like a temple as opposed to any sandy ruin. Nevertheless, there’s clearly been some effort in distinguishing one from another: two rows of urns in a room on one floor, a random chair in another, etc.

Storyline



The game begins with the guard above coming into the home of the protagonist Fiona, and telling her that as the last of a lineage of Aerolancers, she needs to go down into the Sand Temple and deal with the Sand King down there, who’s been stirring up winds that led to dust storms now threatening to engulf the village of Oasia. You embark on that quest, quickly collecting everything present in Oasia and listening to the unremarkable lines of a few villagers there, and then enter said place, whereas the narrative is put on hold until you reach the Sand King’s chamber (which doesn’t take that long), where you’ll first get a few lines of internal monologue as she progresses down the hall towards his Throne, and then you can either fight and kill him (either intentionally, or by screwing up in the first two dialogue choices), offer him to go elsewhere, or to start living in their village. (Yes, just like that.) Regardless of what you choose, the actual ending doesn’t trigger immediately. Instead, the Sand King just disappears, and you have to anticlimactically walk down towards the exit of that hall in total silence, for no discernible reason. Only then will you get the image of Fiona back at her house, accompanied for the 3 short lines for every ending you chose, which are not very good or interesting.

When it comes to typos, I think there’s only the omnipresent “Fiona has starts to flee.” Why omnipresent, you ask? Because fleeing from pretty much all the encounters is the smartest way to play this game.

Gameplay



The above is actually the least threatening encounter in the game, because they are literally unable to deal any damage to you (same goes for the “Desert Spirits”, but it’s a little more understandable with those incorporeal entities, at least). A battle with 3 Slimes is considerably more dangerous, weirdly enough, because while they only do 7-9 damage to your ~230 HP, yet it takes five of your attacks to kill one, and so that damage quickly adds up. The Gargoyles are similar to Slimes in stats, in spite of obviously looking much more threatening. Meanwhile, Desert Bodies and Fallen Soldiers (RTP zombies/skeletons) have about the same health but are encountered alone, thankfully, as they deal the same damage a turn you do (even more in the case of Fallen Soldiers). That is difficulty, sure, but it’s not true challenge, as there’s nothing to think about, and no strategy to figure out in the fights where all the enemies, up to and including the final boss, can only do their regular attack, while your only real options are a normal attack, and a regular Wind spell which usually does the same damage, with only the Sandsnakes and the Chimera boss having any meaningful vulnerability to it. ALL the other spells are useless: not just supposedly strong attack Red Wind, but also the group attack Tornado (at least the RTP animation was nice), or the Wind Spirit. Because Red Wind is the first new spell you are likely to discover (done through finding relevant Tomes), I’ve put the quote resulting from its usage as the review title.

Moreover, you’ve probably already noticed the ridiculous default menu edit. Somehow, the creator(s) not only thought that halving the size of the textbox and reducing the combat menu down to one line is a good idea, but the in-game menu is also reduced to the “Items”, “Save” and “Status” functions. As the result of this, finding new equipment in the Temple (which happens on two occasions) is useless, because you cannot enter the “Equipment” menu, and so have no way to actually put it on. In the game, you also do not level up, and you cannot leave the Temple to go back to the village (making the Inn, screenshotted above, weirdly useless.) Thus, you have no way to spend the money dropped from random encounters with the enemy, and so there’s literally no benefit at all to fighting them. Given that thanks to Fiona’s high agility, she’ll always be able to flee from those fights, there’s no reason not to do so. Just spend all the money you find in town on healing Herbs (you should have about 20 of them if you do that), then go straight down (optionally searching for the stat-increasing Orbs), fleeing from everyone up until you run into the Chimaera. You can absorb three attacks from it before needing to heal (and two from the Sand King, should you choose to fight him), and you’ll have enough of them to do so.

Conclusion

Lady of the Winds is just not a game that offers anything notable or distinct to the player in a good way. Sadly, the most memorable part of it are the skills that don’t work and the equipment you can’t use. It’s just not worth your time, especially when compared to what other developers have managed to create within the same contest.