The Witch And The Hundred Knight Review (PS3)

I’m a big fan of action RPGs like Ys: Memories Of Celceta and Tales Of Xillia, so I was definitely intrigued when The Witch And The Hundred Knight came to my attention. An action RPG by Nippon Ichi, famous for the Disgaea series, with a whole new world to discover and rather odd story just seemed like an exciting thing to experience. Well what I can say is that it’s definitely an experience, but generally not for all the right reasons with myriad design choices that can, at times, frustrate.

Let’s start with the story, which casts you as The Hundred Knight, a rather unimposing silent demon that is under the control of the Swamp Witch Metallia. In this tale you have one role and that is to expand Metallia’s swamp throughout the land so she can extend her own influence over the other witches. It could have been an incredible story if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s very little depth to the characters.

Metallia takes centre stage as someone who is brash and loves to swear all of the time. At first it can be quite funny but after hours of the same with no major development it becomes tedious. The events of the story can be incredibly dark and there were moments where I was genuinely surprised by how events unfolded, but those moments were few and far between.

Gameplay wise you explore different stages looking for Pillars, which need to be bloomed to expand the swamp. There are a few small pillars that can be activated through the stages and used as warp points, as well as areas where you can upgrade the attributes of Hundred Knight. However, each stage, which are themselves decent sized open maps, have one large Pillar at the end that can only be accessed by defeating the Protector. This formula doesn’t really stray from the path, though different stages have their own unique challenges to face.

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In each stage you have what is called a Gigacal counter which effectively acts as a sort of time plus action point system. Everything contributes to the amount, which starts at 100, going down including walking and fighting. This is due to the fact that Metallia is exerting her control and if you stay away for too long you’ll die and be reawakened in her swamp base. It makes sense from a narrative point of view and, though early on it seems shoehorned in, it can provide a decent challenge. However it can be exploited by using the Pillars. Get to one, warp back to base, save, and then warp back to the same pillar to pick up exactly where you left off with a fully replenished Gigacal counter and health.

In combat you can equip up to five weapons at once which, if put in a right order, can be chained to create powerful attacks. Fighting uses stamina which is signified by a circle around Hundred Knight, and the more stamina you consume the less weapons you can use and the weaker your attacks. This stamina bar is just one of several things you have to keep an eye on and at times you’ll have quite a lot of information coming at you. Outside the HP, Gigacal and stamina bar you don’t really need to pay attention to everything.

Eventually you’ll gain access to Tochka which are creatures you can summon to perform a certain task, like blowing up a rock that’s blocking your progress. Some of those are given to you by Metallia while others can be found while exploring the maps. It’s a decent system that can help during battles too, helping to clear areas of enemies to get the upper hand.

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While going into combat is a good idea to get some of the better loot there is the possible action of just dashing through levels. If you manage your stamina correctly you can run through most areas, avoiding the majority of enemies before getting to a pillar to save before moving on. This tactic wouldn’t be advisable if enemies got stronger as you progressed but they seem to scale so you can always be sure of a decent fight, if not always a fair one as they all rush from different sides.

Design wise things seem to be a bit messy. First off the camera can be compared to the likes of Diablo III, and it would work fine for the most part if it weren’t for the fact that the environment doesn’t go transparent, but instead can obscure fights so you can’t see the action. It’s an oversight that really affects the flow of the game because there will be times when you’ll die but you don’t know why because you can’t see what’s happening.

The level design, while mostly good, does have its own flaws. There was one particular moment where I had to activate a switch by hitting it with a ranged weapon, but this switch was behind a massive obstacle and the only way to hit it was to find the exact perfect spot and hope that whatever you fired towards it would hit. It took a few attempts but before doing that I was sure I had either missed something or there had been a glitch because of how badly placed it was.

Tied in with this is the item selection so you can heal Hundred Knight which is brought up by pressing the L2. Seems simple if it weren’t for the fact there was no mention of it at all during the rather brief tutorial which only explained the bare basics, like how to attack and how to dash. Instead, the tutorial tells you to pay attention to the tips screens that appear during loading and are in a random order to learn how to play the rest of the game. When you go to the items screen in the pause menu there is no option to use the items, which seems incredibly odd considering it is something that is present in the majority of RPGs.

What’s Good:

  • The artwork in cutscenes is nicely animated.
  • Have option to have Japanese voiceover with English subs.
  • The music is very well composed.
  • In the instances everything does come together there is a fun game here.

What’s Bad:

  • Bare tutorial that leaves out a lot of guidance on the basics.
  • Characters are one dimensional.
  • Feels like too many ideas were thrown in without linking them properly.
  • Design choices could have been better.

I really want to be able to recommend The Witch & The Hundred Knight to fans of action RPGs, because when it works it does it well. The dark, twisted story is something that has a lot of potential, and the music is great. However, odd design choices like obscuring the action and cluttered menus that don’t mesh together well, along with pretty uninteresting characters makes it hard to do so.

Even though Gigacals is there to offer a challenge, it is easy to exploit and get around, removing any sense of real urgency. If Nippon Ichi had spent more time on this and maybe removed some things and made the characters a bit better I would happily say buy it, but in its current state I’d say rent it but only if you’re a fan of Nippon Ichi’s other works or action RPGs that hold strange stories.

If there’s a sequel I hope it is a vast improvement.

5/10

3 Comments

  1. A couple of those bad points are bit suspect. Possibly. If you happen to like the games NIS keep churning out. They often seem to be designed by chucking everything they can at it and seeing what works. And then leaving the rest in too.

    And then they don’t tell you what’s going on. Which, is understandable. When you’ve got exploding penguins in a game, any explanation of what’s going on seems unnecessary. If you’re trying to work out how all the mechanics work, you might not be wondering about things like plot. Which rarely make much sense.

    By this point, reviews of NIS games seem a bit unnecessary. They’ll get an average score, enough people will enjoy them a lot, and they’ll keep on bringing them over here, not expecting to sell an unreasonable amount. Just enough to make the translation costs worthwhile.

    And I wouldn’t hold out much hope for a sequel being a “vast” improvement. It’d be more likely to have a hundred new features to confuse you with, and tweak everything else. And then add more odd to it.

  2. Had my eye on this one for some time so I’m sad to see so many bad reviews for it, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I would consider still getting it if I see it going cheap enough one day, but will likely never bother as my backlog is always full of many games with better reviews and never enough time to play them.

  3. Still on my wishlist although not so far up it at the moment – still need to grab a few other action rpg’s first.

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