Stranger of Sword City is a first-person dungeon crawler from the makers of Demon Gaze and Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy. Published by NIS America, it's currently out for the PlayStation Vita and the Xbox One, and it'll also be out on Steam this summer. Set in the modern era, you are...you! You are traveling on an airplane and next thing you know, you crash-land into another dimension, one filled with strange creatures and labyrinths. You miraculously survive the crash and a young woman in a sailor suit named Riu finds you and takes you into Escario, the Sword City. You are the titular Stranger of Sword City.

Just like you, Riu is a Stranger. Strangers are outsiders of the realm, like inhabitants of the real world. Since you're both marooned in the city, you'll have to go lurking around in dungeons in order to earn your keep. As video game fate would have it, you're a “Chosen One,” which means you're definitely enlisted to fight. As a Chosen One, you're tasked to retrieve Blood Crystals from Lineage Types. Lineage Types are monsters found in labyrinths that have to be defeated by removing their crystals. These shiny rocks hold a lot of power and can only be handled by Chosen Ones. Riu gives you a Blood Crystal early on and you become a Vessel, a being whose powers have been awoken by said crystals. 

Gameplay in Stranger of Sword City is similar to its predecessors: you create a party of characters with a wide range of choices such as name, gender, race, character portrait, class and talent. The party can consist of both preset characters and custom-made characters. Preset characters are there mainly for beginners or players who don't want to bother creating characters from scratch. You can change the difficulty to suit your needs but as I've come to find out, Stranger of Sword City is not a forgiving game. You have up to six party members, including yourself, and you're divided into two rows of three, a front and back. Only the front row can be used to attack monsters unless the back row has ranged weapons. So it's generally a good idea to keep your knights and fighters in the front row, and mages and clerics and dancers in the back row.

When you're done assembling your party, you're ready to visit dungeons. Dungeons are composed of maze-like labyrinths, filled with monsters, pits, traps, treasures and the occasional safe zone. Thankfully, there's an automap feature so you won't have to break out the graph paper if you don't wanna get lost. Looting treasure isn't as easy as it sounds; you'll most likely have to disarm a trap before opening the chest and your chances of succeeding hinge on whether or not you have a character with the right instinct to disarm. Most treasures you find are unidentified and will be revealed only when you head back to home base. You'll be spending a lot of your time going back to base, considering how challenging this adventure is. Much of your time in the base will be spent selling, buying and equipping equipment, saving your game, managing your party members and reviving them.

A mechanic unique to Stranger of Sword City is “Vanishing.” When you die, you don't die permanently. You can choose to get revived by Mrs. Gurrba at the clinic immediately or in due time, however, immediate revival comes at a cost. Each character has a set amount of life points. Revival restores these life points. When a character loses all life points, they disappear permanently and cannot be used again. Another unique mechanic is the ambush. Ambushing is needed when trying to encounter Lineage Types. When finding a “shelter,” you can spend Divinity points hiding there until a monster shows up, and you can choose to fight it or ignore it. They're considerably stronger than standard monsters and they can get away from the battle before you can defeat them. There is comfort in the fact that they can be challenged again if they escape. Divinity can also be spent on your talent, such as escaping from battle with a 100% success rate (provided that you're not fighting a story specific monster or boss fight). There's a lot to do and learn if you want to go back home to the real world.

If all of this sounds convoluted, it is! Stranger of Sword City is a complex game. Japanese dungeon crawlers aren't plot-heavy compared to mainstream JRPGs and you're expected to learn as you go. The problem is that you'll spend your first couple of hours playing through one big tutorial and even then the game isn't forgiving, especially if you've made a varied party early in the game. Early on, it's best to go out for a bit, grind for experience, and run back to base when you think you've done enough since it's a pain to revive people when they get killed. It's also a pain considering you have to go back to base and speak to Anna to manage your party and level up. There's a lot of micro-managing menus, even by JRPG standards.

Speaking of menus, that's what most of the game is comprised of, with the occasional conversation between character portraits and backdrop art to advance the plot. Oh, and the game has mazes. Lots of mazes. Those looking for a technologically advanced epic are going to be disappointed. Like Demon Gaze and Operation Abyss, the mazes are maneuvered in a grid-like fashion and the character portraits are static with minimal effects displayed on the screen. I will say that the character and monster portraits do look cool and there are two art styles to choose from in the options menu. The audio department fares better, as there is Japanese voice acting and decent music and sound effects. Still, it's a pretty low-tech game compared to other titles on the Vita and the conservative approach to the game design doesn't do Stranger of Sword City any favors.

Patience is the name of the game in Stranger of Sword City. It's definitely aimed at fans of the old school dungeon crawling genre. And fans of developer Experience Inc. who continue to show their devotion to the Wizardry school of game design.

Hint: Don't forget to level up your characters by viewing their status at the base and selecting Level Up! They don't level up automatically!

by Ray n.