Lodoss Discovered

Not having the heart to start PSO up today, I was gonna fire up Grandia 2 but I thought I'd squint at a game I bought at christmas but never played much. Record of Lodoss War. Diablo-esque. Slammed it on the DC VGA style - lovely. Just fancied seeing what it was like. 5 hours later - I love it!

The whole levelling up is diablo - but the weapons and spells system is much more involved. The storyline is furthered on from the anime, but after the initial tutorial battles, turns out you get to search for, meet up with and fight side-by-side some of the original characters from the anime (Parn, Deedlit etc). You collect ruinic words and get the smithy to engrave them onto your weapons/armour/shield to enhance their properties. The spell system is nice, you collect spell books, learn a spell, but before you can use a spell you have to prepare it by pressing a set combination of buttons. As you become more efficient I think you do away with the need for this. Vials and bottles are collected and healing potion is topped up in them from a well. Plenty of kit to mess with, the full monty like EQ really. Even different coloured armour for that fashion conscious barbarian. The maze like dungeons can be a bit tedious to navigate at times - although they are enormous on some levels the high level map is a necessity. Theres always a save before any bosses. And the first spell you get is one to take you back to your wizard friend and top up on health juice. Which is nice.

I'm really impressed by the weapon/engraving mechanism. Gives you plenty of scope for tweaking your character's abilities. Also you can transform one weapon into another with the right amount of mithril - you can duplicate weapons and lockpicks etc, you can turn weapons into mithril and even get the smithy to make you a super-special weapon (a long oriental sword) - if you pay him enough. Luckily, as I was wading into a dungeon thick of goblins, I found a 'Goblin Killer' rune that I engraved onto my long sword and it gave it one swipe one kill loveliness. Culling the green beggars became a formality. The FMV scenes are nice. 3d rendered animey. The only thing that lets it down a bit is that 30+ goblins on the screen some casting some throwing axes makes it chunter a bit giving obvious slow-down.

I saw Lodoss going for 19.99 in Game. Might be worth a look for those PSO fanatics who need a break from the power-levelling.

http://dreamcast.ign.com/reviews/15717.html

With its excellent customization features, a huge assortment of items to find, and a good story to keep things interesting, fans looking for some meaty story for their PSO action will find Record of Lodoss War a very refreshing gameplay experience... and yes, there is actual closure to the ending as well, though you might have to play through it again.