I try to play some DS RPGs from time to time. I’m a fan of how most use PS1-era graphics, and it can feel like extras from that generation at times. So, when I stumbled across this one and saw who composed the soundtrack, that immediately piqued my interest, and I tried it the following day. I wasn’t familiar with the development team Imageepoch, but then I found out they were the people who made that anime game with the drawn characters in 3D space. Ok, onto the review.
Sands of Destruction uses sprites on 3D areas just like many 5th-gen RPGs, and it looks good enough. There aren't really many memorable areas, but they do at least look like there was effort put into them. It doesn’t help that this game uses one of those point-A to point-B world map layouts, which, in my opinion, absolutely kills RPG world building. It makes the progression simpler, but it just looks bland. The soundtrack for this game is pretty good though! It’s composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, who composed the soundtracks for Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, and many others. It's not as good as those game's soundtracks, but it’s still great. It sounds a lot like Xenogears, but it’s the same person, so… no surprise.
The story is also really bland, mostly due to the lack of original ideas. It’s the same tired theme of humans and beasts hating each other, and this game gives barely any background on the situation. Also not helping are the characters, which aren’t awful, but they certainly aren’t good. They dump all their backstories quickly at once near the end of the game, and they don’t really get any time to be fleshed out. There’s also voice acting in a lot of the cutscenes, and to be honest, it’s alright. The main character's voice actor sounds like he barely gives a shit when anything serious is happening, but other than that, I don’t think I’m dissatisfied with a 2008 DS game's voice acting.
This game's difficulty was apparently altered during its localization, and I don’t know if that means harder or easier because I genuinely cannot find any information on it. Whether it was either of those, this game is laughably easy to the point where it’s mind-numbing. I’m talking one-shot every enemy for most of the game easy. Hell, at one point in the game, I was able to one-shot a boss. Yes, I’m serious. Although the game is very easy, I can at least respect that it doesn’t hold your hand constantly. Most DS games will not be shy about over-explaining literally everything, but this game feels like it carries more game design philosophies from previous console generations than its own.
The combat system is flawed, but it has some good ideas that are unfortunately laid to waste due to the game's laughably easy difficulty. I have to explain it since that ties into why the game is easy. It’s a little tricky to explain, but it’s not as complicated as it may seem. So, each character has blunt attacks and flurry attacks. Blunt attacks are one-hit strong attacks, which aren’t even remotely useful as they barely do any damage, and flurry attacks are multi-hit attacks, which I can only assume were meant to be weaker even though they do much more damage than the blunt attacks due to the large amount of hits that do a ton of damage. Your characters have 3 of each, and you can combo all 3 blunt/flurry attacks if you have enough battle points. Time to explain those too! Characters will start with 2 battle points, or it may go up or down 1 due to character morale, which, to my knowledge, is random when starting a battle. These basically act as character actions and let you attack, use magic, and whatnot. If you get a crit or surpass an interval of 10 on your combo meter, you get an extra battle point; this will be important in a second. Regarding the combat system, there’s also customization points, and in case anybody was wondering, yes, they do use an acronym for it in-game. You get these after battles and can use them to level up moves for your characters. Upon leveling up your flurry move 7 times, you have the option to chain it to your other flurry moves, which will make it so every time you use a flurry move, it will use the next flurry advancement in the combo without using another battle point. This will make it so that with most characters, you’ll be able to reach 10 hits in one turn, which grants another turn in battle, effectively creating an infinite attack loop until you max out at 7 battle points, which forces you to use a special attack, special magic, or defend. Special attacks in this game are extremely weak and never worth using, just like the blunt attacks. The game's balancing is super disjointed, and the combat system is not fleshed out properly. I like the idea of gaining turns for combos and using those turns to use magic, buff, or defend, but there’s no point when you’re not being challenged. I was just doing the exact same thing every battle, and that, paired with this game's large encounter rate, which made me very over-leveled, made it feel like a giant drag.
This game has some missed potential, but I can’t lie to myself; I had no fun playing this game. If you want a good DS RPG to play, just go play Radiant Historia. That’s not a perfect game either, but it’s much better than this.
Sands of Destruction uses sprites on 3D areas just like many 5th-gen RPGs, and it looks good enough. There aren't really many memorable areas, but they do at least look like there was effort put into them. It doesn’t help that this game uses one of those point-A to point-B world map layouts, which, in my opinion, absolutely kills RPG world building. It makes the progression simpler, but it just looks bland. The soundtrack for this game is pretty good though! It’s composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, who composed the soundtracks for Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, and many others. It's not as good as those game's soundtracks, but it’s still great. It sounds a lot like Xenogears, but it’s the same person, so… no surprise.
The story is also really bland, mostly due to the lack of original ideas. It’s the same tired theme of humans and beasts hating each other, and this game gives barely any background on the situation. Also not helping are the characters, which aren’t awful, but they certainly aren’t good. They dump all their backstories quickly at once near the end of the game, and they don’t really get any time to be fleshed out. There’s also voice acting in a lot of the cutscenes, and to be honest, it’s alright. The main character's voice actor sounds like he barely gives a shit when anything serious is happening, but other than that, I don’t think I’m dissatisfied with a 2008 DS game's voice acting.
This game's difficulty was apparently altered during its localization, and I don’t know if that means harder or easier because I genuinely cannot find any information on it. Whether it was either of those, this game is laughably easy to the point where it’s mind-numbing. I’m talking one-shot every enemy for most of the game easy. Hell, at one point in the game, I was able to one-shot a boss. Yes, I’m serious. Although the game is very easy, I can at least respect that it doesn’t hold your hand constantly. Most DS games will not be shy about over-explaining literally everything, but this game feels like it carries more game design philosophies from previous console generations than its own.
The combat system is flawed, but it has some good ideas that are unfortunately laid to waste due to the game's laughably easy difficulty. I have to explain it since that ties into why the game is easy. It’s a little tricky to explain, but it’s not as complicated as it may seem. So, each character has blunt attacks and flurry attacks. Blunt attacks are one-hit strong attacks, which aren’t even remotely useful as they barely do any damage, and flurry attacks are multi-hit attacks, which I can only assume were meant to be weaker even though they do much more damage than the blunt attacks due to the large amount of hits that do a ton of damage. Your characters have 3 of each, and you can combo all 3 blunt/flurry attacks if you have enough battle points. Time to explain those too! Characters will start with 2 battle points, or it may go up or down 1 due to character morale, which, to my knowledge, is random when starting a battle. These basically act as character actions and let you attack, use magic, and whatnot. If you get a crit or surpass an interval of 10 on your combo meter, you get an extra battle point; this will be important in a second. Regarding the combat system, there’s also customization points, and in case anybody was wondering, yes, they do use an acronym for it in-game. You get these after battles and can use them to level up moves for your characters. Upon leveling up your flurry move 7 times, you have the option to chain it to your other flurry moves, which will make it so every time you use a flurry move, it will use the next flurry advancement in the combo without using another battle point. This will make it so that with most characters, you’ll be able to reach 10 hits in one turn, which grants another turn in battle, effectively creating an infinite attack loop until you max out at 7 battle points, which forces you to use a special attack, special magic, or defend. Special attacks in this game are extremely weak and never worth using, just like the blunt attacks. The game's balancing is super disjointed, and the combat system is not fleshed out properly. I like the idea of gaining turns for combos and using those turns to use magic, buff, or defend, but there’s no point when you’re not being challenged. I was just doing the exact same thing every battle, and that, paired with this game's large encounter rate, which made me very over-leveled, made it feel like a giant drag.
This game has some missed potential, but I can’t lie to myself; I had no fun playing this game. If you want a good DS RPG to play, just go play Radiant Historia. That’s not a perfect game either, but it’s much better than this.