Reviewed: September 3, 2004
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Microsoft Game Studios

Developer
Climax

Released: July 20, 2004
Genre: RPG
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature

8
10
8
7
7.9

Supported Features:

Sudeki delivers an impressive list of features starting with more than 100 original enemy designs. There are hundreds of NPC’s scattered throughout the world and everyone talks, a very rare occurrence for an RPG these days. And as you might expect with an RPG, there is a fairly comprehensive skill and attribute system at work that allows you to develop your characters to complement the other members of your party or your own playing style.

Sudeki introduces several other interesting gameplay ideas to the genre and improves upon a few existing ones. The first thing any great adventure needs is a great story and that is where Sudeki falls flat. The world is introduced with a very stylish narrated “puppet show” then you are taken on a fly-through of the city and deposited on the desk where a sleeping Tal is just waking up, late once again for roll-call.

Tal is just one of four characters you will be playing during the game and the only one at first. The game moves along fairly quickly, and you will meet the rest of your party within a few hours. Tal is your typical swordsman, son of a great military leader, and your primary “beater” of the party. Then you have the sorceress, Ailish; the beast-woman, Buki; and the gun-wielding scientist, Elco to save the world of Sudeki.

Back to the story or lack thereof. Everything in the puppet show happened a few hundred years ago and only now are you trying to set things right. Each of the four characters has a minor backstory but none of them are ever fleshed out or even resolved at the end. You have a lot of setup and almost no payoff. Even when the game is over you go from dead boss cutscene to closing credits with not so much as a “thanks for saving the world” or teaser for a possible sequel.

Assuming you can live without an epic story, Sudeki delivers on the action with one of the more interesting combat systems I’ve seen of late. The combat is in real-time which you may or may not like. It’s certainly a big change from the turn-based combat of games like KOTOR and Final Fantasy, but at the same time, Climax has created a funky combo system that keeps the combat from achieving the same level of intense action as Tales of Symphonia.

Combat is straightforward. You fight with the A and X buttons and the B button will do a low-damage sweeping blow to knock back multiple targets and give you time to regroup. The combo system is based on a strict timed input of three commands that can be any combination of the A or X button. If entered precisely, the final strike is a devastating blow that does massive damage and looks wicked-cool with lots of blood. My only problem (and perhaps this is just because I came off a 60hr Tales of Symphonia game) is that the timing issue just slows down the combat process. Instead of mash-mash-mash, it’s more like tap…tap…tap and if you get the timing wrong on the second or third input the whole thing is null and void. You’ll still get credit for the individual attacks but there is no triple-strike payoff.

Now, sure you can actually watch the combo meter and the circles will light up when you are supposed to hit the button, but that means taking your eyes of the real-time combat on the screen. Eventually you will get the timing down, but it never feels natural. Combos are fairly simple but they can be chained together. Oddly enough, the final boss is brought down with the most basic of combos.

One of my favorite combat elements has to be the skill strikes. These have the potential for unleashing massive power in an area-effect blast. Unfortunately, skill points are a rare commodity, so these powerful attacks are kept in check and the game doesn’t get unbalanced. Skill strikes are also used to heal or boost the abilities of the current party and later in the game you get spirit strikes, even more powerful than skill strikes.

With characters and combat in place the rest of the game is standard RPG fare. You move from city to city traveling the monster-infested countryside and visit the occasional dungeon. You’ll talk to everyone with something to say and kill everything that is dangerous. You’ll smash every urn, jar, and box, and open every chest. And horror of horrors, they brought back the crate-moving puzzles. I thought we had evolved from these logic teasers but you’ll be pushing and pulling crates within the first hour of play.

There are plenty of encounters and puzzles designed to test the abilities of your party. Each member has unique skills that come into play. Tal is your front man; ready for battle while Ailish is your token spellcaster, ready to cast or dispel a unique variety of magic. Elco is the brains of the outfit and flies around with a jetpack and Buki is a martial arts expert with some useful climbing abilities.

All of these well-designed characters would normally make for some entertaining gameplay, but the game basically spoon-feeds you every piece of the puzzle, so you never really have to think in order to solve anything. It’s all either totally obvious or the game pushes you in the right direction.

At any given time you are in control of a single character. You can cycle to anyone else in your party with the black and white buttons leaving the remaining members to fight under the direction of the AI you have chosen. This AI programming isn’t nearly as impressive as other games that feature a similar system. You basically tell them to attack, defend, or retreat, and even then they don’t exactly respond as well as you need them to. You’ll often find yourself having to step in to keep a member from taking a beating or force them to perform a desired skill strike, or even access and use an inventory item.

Manually controlling the party during combat is possible in small and medium battles but later in the game you will be horribly outnumbered and it just gets clumsy having to switch to eacg character then figure out what to do, all the while getting beat on. Opening the inventory menu doesn’t pause the combat, but merely slows it down, so you really have to learn the menus. You do have the ability to assign your four favorite items to the D-pad for quick access.

To further complicate matters, two of your party members are primarily ranged combatants and there is no auto-lock, which means lots of precise aiming, and many missed shots. I ended up letting the AI play these characters as it had an easier time with the aiming. The lack of a target lock also affects melee combat since once Tal starts a combo his inertia is set into motion, and if he or the target moves laterally he will simply complete the move in empty space.

Along with the primary adventure there are several side-quests and even a few areas that can be exploited for near-endless money and/or experience. Obviously, as you level up experience in some areas won’t be worth the effort, and you will need to move along to more challenging encounters, but cash is always easy to come by and useful for purchasing new items and upgrades.

The towns have a blacksmith that can upgrade your weapons and install runes into special slots to boost your attack, or give your weapon a vampiric critical hit that drains the enemy and restores your health from their damage. Keeping your weapons and your party continuously upgraded is a core element to Sudeki as the level of encounters ramps up and several bosses will periodically drop in to make sure you are keeping up. Unfortunately, all of the big boss battles are a one-on-one affair. There are a few sub-boss encounters that you can tackle with the entire party but the big ones including the final boss are solo.

Winning battles and completing quests will earn you experience that will eventually level your characters up at which time they are given attribute points. You are free to assign these to your basic stats or use them to purchase new skill strikes. With all of the weapons, characters, attributes, and skills, there is a lot of customization and some potential for replaying the game and taking entirely new directions despite the linear nature of the story.

The camera is traditional third-person and you are free to move it around with the right stick or snap it behind the current character. If you switch to either Ailish or Elco during combat you go into a first-person aiming mode. The framerate holds up for a majority of the game and only stutters on the largest of encounters, and even then it’s not that serious.

Character design seems to be more about costumes than the people wearing them. The female characters look like they stepped off the pages of Heavy Metal or the dominatrix issue of Victoria Secret. Brass brassieres and leather thongs might be pleasing to the eye but I have to wonder about their usefulness in combat. I was particularly disappointed that Buki, the cat-like hybrid wasn’t more cat-like. She basically has some nifty stripes that could easily be mistaken for tattoos or body paint.

Animation is varied between some rather stiff movements mixed with some stylish combat moves. Unfortunately, the clunky timed combo system creates a disjointed feel to the combat process keeping you out of synch with the character. The special effects, especially for skill and spirit strikes are amazing, and the blood flows freely enough to splash an “M” rating on the box. There are also some cool freeze-frame and Matrix-like effect to accent the action.

The interface is perfect with your quick-access items shown in the top corner and characters stats, health, and other information tucked away at the borders of the screen. The inventory menus and character sheets are all laid out nicely and easy to read and every point of interaction within the game world is cued with a button prompt.

Sound effects all serve their function. Massive doors grind open and slam shut with a thunderous boom. Swords clank; weapons shoot, fire crackles and burns, water trickles, and there are all sorts of convincing environmental effects delivered in an encompassing 3D Dolby Digital package.

Of course the real surprise in Sudeki is the speech. Each and every NPC in this game talks and there are some lengthy conversations and multiple branches to explore. It’s all high quality dialogue delivered with a vast mix of accents and emotion. My only minor complaint is that some of the voices simply don’t match the characters. I talked to one young hottie in the marketplace and she sounded like an old hag, and when I found the “old hag” who should have had her voice she sounded like one of those girls on those 976 dial-a-date commercials.

I actually enjoyed talking to anyryone I was able to interact with and that was just about everyone. My only complaint (and this goes for just about any RPG or adventure game) is that once a conversation tree is exhausted if you talk again you can trigger a chain that you have to click through to the end. There should be something to indicate that a character has nothing new to say.

There is no story branching or alternate endings so there is no substantial reason for replaying the game once completed. I supposed you could try developing your characters differently but I seriously doubt you can change them enough to make a real difference. At best, Sudeki would make a great rental, easily completed in a week or even a weekend of solid gaming. Hardcore RPG gamers will want a bit more meat in their game but this is a tasty appetizer.

And that’s pretty much the whole story of Sudeki. There is a lot of give and take, good and bad, feast and famine. It’s a careful balancing act where the good definitely outweighs the bad and style rules over substance, and your love for the genre could tilt the scales either way. It’s definitely worth sampling, and the good news is you can probably finish it before Fable arrives later this month, because we all know our lives will be over when that game arrives.