I remember when I first bought the Saturn. Dark Savior was promoted on
the back of the box, or possible in one of the booklets that came with
it. I was totally wowed by the graphics. Looking back today I still
think they're very good, I would like to say that Dark Savior is like
slapping Paper Mario in Vagrant Story's world. That sounds pretty damn
weird, but it's true. Of course though, Dark Savior came out long
before either of those games.
Dark Savior is the spiritual successor to Landstalkers. I loved alot of
aspects to this game, including the storyline, characters, graphical
style, but the platforming was terrible. The Dark Savior, like
Landstalkers, is presented in a isometric view but it's also in 3D.
While I love the move to 3D, I hate not having full control of the
camera. You can move the camera with the L and R buttons, but they
would always revert back to it's locked position after you look around,
so platforming can be a total guessing game sometimes.
Either way, Dark Savior presents multiple storylines, and interesting
story, it might be short but it's worth playing multiple times.
----------Battle System----------
Dark Savior is a action RPG / Platformer. There's a ton of platforming
in this game, and actually I would say the camera and controls are your
biggest enemy.
All battles are presented like a 1 on 1 fighter. All battles are pretty
much boss fights too, because there's only a couple dungeons that have
any enemies in it. You'll kill a couple bats, but other than that you
won't entire any real enemies in dungeons, just boss fights at the end
of them. The boss fights have basic fighter game mechanics, but
crappier. To win the battle you have to defeat the enemy in battle
twice, like say Street Fighter II. You can attack, block, jump and run.
You can also charge your attack, and then unleash a mega powerful move
but it's easily countered. I had a ton of trouble with this system at
first, but all enemies use the same tactics, so you can easily figure
it out. The game actually gets easier later on.
You can also capture enemies, sort of a finishing move. When you
capture an enemy, you can use them in battle as a replacement instead
of Garian. When you lose a battle, the game is completely over, start
again from your last save. When you win, you get some experience
points, you'll get bonus experience points depending on how well you
fought. You can use these experience points to either heal yourself,
get tips or level yourself up. Leveling up requires 500 points, but
each time you level up, they add another 100 points, so to get to your
2nd level up you will need 600, then 700, etc. I only leveled up twice
in the entire game because of the few fights in the actual game.
Ok, now to the platforming and dungeons. All dungeons are basically
platforming puzzles. Each room have their own specific puzzle to them,
no rooms really care puzzles over like in Zelda, so they're fairly easy
to figure out. While puzzle solving is easy, platforming is NOT. With a
combination of terrible controls and bad camera angles, it's about
impossible to play this game without getting frustrated. If you do fall
into a hole or water pit, then Jack will save you before you die. The
trick is he will always take away 20 experience points from you when
you fall. This is a total kick in the butt everytime.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Garian, a bounty hunter and you are accompanied by fellow
bounty hunter and bird Jack. Garian and Jack were hired to safely take
a prisoner across the sea to Jailers Prison, where all prisoners go to
rot for the rest of their lives. On the way to the island, one of the
prisoners turned into a giant monster, killed most of the crew and
jumped ship towards Jailers Island. It's now Garian and Jacks job to
track down this monster before he kills again.
The storyline had some obvious influence by some John Carpenter movies
like The Thing and Escape from New York. I love that quite a bit. The
game was only 5 or so hours long, but they did pack in enough storyline
and characters to make the story entertaining. The localization was
pretty good too, as all the background graphics, like shop signs and
writing on the wall were all written in English. This is pretty rare
for a game back then.
----------Graphics----------
I love the graphics style. While there are a bunch of problems
including framerate drops, flickering pixels and terrible camera
problems, I do love the style. All characters in the game are giant 2D
sprites, but the world is entirely 3D. This kinda reminds me of Paper
Mario a little bit. The camera is locked, but you can change views to
look around corners or to get different views. The when you're done
panning around and ready to move along, the camera will revert back to
it's locked state.
----------Sound----------
The music is good dark and spacey synth tunes, although it's bit
repetitive. There aren't character voice overs in the game but there is
a couple scenes that involve a female narrator. The sound effects are
very basic.
----------World Map----------
There really isn't a world map per say, but you mostly follow a
semi-linear path of connecting areas, which kinda reminds me of Vagrant
Story. You'll eventually backtrack through a few areas but for the most
part it's linear
----------Time to Complete Game----------
4:28
Wow this is a short game, but you can play through it multiple times.
Each playthrough gives you entirely different storylines. There are up
to 5 different endings that I know of.
