Skipping ahead a few decades since Super Ghost and Goblins, Jay and I spent the majority of last weekend playing Dragon Quests Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors for the Wii. I still can’t tell if the game had bad writing or just didn’t take itself too seriously. There are some awkward momments in dialogue like the the Armor Shop Lady greeting you as her lover but also some clever momments like characters being able to fin your house because they figure you don’t live in a shop or a church, the only other buildings in the kingdom.
Upon starting the game we got some history of the world. It’s your standard JRPG story of a great evil that took over the world and 3 people were able to defeat him and lock him in a volcano. Now 5 years later the kingdom is enjoying this time of peace.The story starts with our main character turing 16. We played 8 hours of this game and still don’t know what the main characters name is.In order to become a man or something he has to go complete a dungeon to prove his worthiness. This particular dungeon is guarded by Dirk the Knight of Worth who talks to you the whole battle in a charming British accent. Once we defeated him and he deamed us worthy we are allowed to go back to the kingdom.
All the background we get of the main character is his father used to be the best swords man in the kingdom until he lost his sword arm fighting Xiphos that great evil him and 2 other people locked in a volcano. Now dad just goes to the pub and hits on women. So after the MC goes to the cave to prove his worth he returns home to find the plot. The queen has disappeared and her son the prince is concerned because the last few weeks she’s taken up wearing a mask around. I would hope that if I took up wearing a mask around someone would at least tell me it was a little weird.
So we take the prince to go look for his mom who is wandering around the woods looking for a healing hot spring. Instead of finding the queen we find a random french girl living in the woods who saw the queen. She’s convinced she has seen the mask before as a child and remembered it being frightening and apparently this is important. I mean the mask is kind of creepy so I wouldn’t be surprised if a little kid was scared of it. So we take her back to the kingdom where we learn she used to be a nun and do absolutely nothing with this information. Later the towns people are freaking out beacuase a monster has been seen near the beach. Naturally they asked the One Handed swordsman father to do it and he agrees. But dad’s been drinking a bit too much and asks the main character to come along.
So here I am thinking ok this mission should be easy, Dad should be super overpowered even with one arm, he did help imprison the greates tevil the world has ever seen. But it turns out when dad switched classes from fighter to Mage he started back at level one and now we have a level 11 mage who only knows Kaboom…but thats ok because it pretty much one shots everything when he uses it. Me and Dad kill the scary fish man at the beach and return to the castle to find the Queen has gone into the Tower of Mirrors. Naturally the main character follows her in there and at the top of the tower the group confronts the queen. Someone finally does someting sensible and remoes the mask from the queen via sword to the face which shatters the mask. Unfortuanelty it turns out the mask was the only thing keeping Xiphos imprisoned in his volcano and now he’s free to destroy the world again DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUN. And this is where we ran out of time and stopped playing, quite a cliff hanger.
The games main shtick is using the Wii-mote as a sword to fight the packs of monsters you run into. That works out better than I thought it would. The game kind of plays like a rail shooter except you can choose when you want to move forward.There isn’t a lot of free roaming in the outside world but you can click on some objects and get loot. There’s only one direction to go and that’s forward. Every once and a while your given the option to go left or right where one path leads to the next part of the dungeon and the other usually leads to a treasure chest.
The fighting actually works pretty well, it’s kind of like fruit ninja with a Wii-mote. Some packs of monsters move around making them harder to hit while others actually attack you which you have to block with your shield. Some projectiles can be hit back and helpful colored dots appear on the screen to assit you in feeling awesome about deflecting a fireball back at its creator. As your going about slaying slimes and such there is a gage that also fills up that lets you use a super move that usually kills everything in sight.
The boss battles are especially fun as they combine all the mechanics you’ve learned so far. While most of the game is pretty easy, the boss battles can actually be a bit challanging and we actually died a few times.
As a side note the only mini game was this thing, the Tambola. After you spend an arbitrary number of coins at a shop sometimes they give you a Tambola ticket. The game has you click the end of the handle and then spin the wii-mote around as fast as you can and somehow it determines a prize for you. Even after almost throwing my shoulder out trying this out, we never managed to get any result besides 5th prize and fail…But you can bet we tried it every chance we got.
While we didn’t beat the game I think we played the majority of it. Whenever I make it back home again I’m definately looking forward to finishing it.
Many Welps 