Summon Night: Twin Age – Review Blurb

Nintendo DS – 2008

Quick Summary
In the world of Clardona there are two races, the humans, and the Kascuza. The Kascuza have beastlike features and are more in tune with nature than the humans. The two races didn’t get along due to their differing views on how magic should be used and in the end the Kascuza were forced to live on a small island. There are also Summon Beasts which are summoned from a different dimension. Seven years ago at a human research summon facility an accident occurred due to a young girl whose summoning powers went out of control. The girl was assumed to have died along with her family. However she survived and lived hidden among the Kascuza, near her coming of age ceremony the spirits of nature suddenly began to go wild, and she and her summon Aldo leave to discover why the spirits are becoming dangerous.

Review Blurb
If you’re playing this game for a good plot…just stop reading right now and give up. This plot is quite predictable and doesn’t provoke any emotions. The characters are fine but I’m not particularly attached to any of them. The voice acting is ok but enemies you’re up against have a habit of going “SILENCE!!” every time you try and reason with them, that kind of annoyed me. Reiha also goes “Booooo” a lot and that bugged me too, I thought it was cute the first time though. The music was fine but I often played with the sound off because almost everything that was said out loud was written on the screen and I’d often play in the car while my friend was driving and it seemed rude to have my headphones in.

At this point you’re probably thinking I hated the game right? Well no I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, I had fun with the gameplay. The characters would move to wherever you would point the stylus, and I had fun with attacks where you would draw a line across the screen and the area you just drew would burst into flames (or something else depending on the spell chosen). I also liked the skill tree setup. There was some strategy that was fun too, you could use the environment to your advantage. For example if you placed yourself behind say a slime pit and agro’d the mobs from there they would be forced to approach you at a very slow pace allowing you to cause more damage to them before they have a chance to damage you.

Although I did discover a few glitches in the gameplay, if you ran ahead of your group and turned a corner sometimes 1 or 2 of your party would get caught on a corner. Sometimes party members would wander too far away and not join the battle quickly. Another time one of my party members died and when I went into the next screen (while he was dead) he appeared again before the time was up before he revived. After defeating the game there were a bunch of extra dungeons that I went through. I felt the need to finish this game to completion for some reason.

My main complaint with this game was that it was far too easy. I think I only lost 1 battle in the whole game and that was because I went up against someone who could put my whole party to sleep and I didn’t have many of the potions that cure sleep. I was playing this game in front of my 10 year old cousin at her birthday party and her friends were saying a lot of the kids in the class were playing this game…I felt really old.

I recommend this game if you like Atlus games and want to experience the gameplay. I must admit I may have been biased towards liking the gameplay because it was my first DS game and the unique experience of using a DS drew me in. This game is also an ideal choice if you want to give a beginner kid an RPG DS game. They should be able to defeat it without getting too frustrated at any point.

I haven’t played any of the other Summon Night games so I can’t comment on how it compares to the rest of the series.