Blast From The Past: Summoner

Immensely crappy paint jobs aside Summoner 1 quite frankly sucked more than a Dyson that happened to have sucked in about forty other vacuum cleaners. I try and remember the game (one of my first ever PS2 games) and all I get are horrific images of entire cities popping out of the floor, side quests vanishing inexplicably from my journal as I’d spoken to too many people, a cast about as bland as a tasteless ryvita and some of the most bizarre and irritating combat I’ve faced in an RPG. Summoner 2 on the other hand was pretty damn brilliant (hence the delightful illustration above) so here is a little post about them both (ok, ok there was a version on the Gamecube aswell, but a cleverly renamed one so the Cube owners didn’t realize that they’d just been completely ignored by the franchise until right of the end of the consoles lifespan, damn those clever marketing ploys eh?).

Summoner

Now your eyes have gotten over the initial visual trauma of this post have an actual screenshot as a reward.

Heh.. yeh, I know, I know the first picture was better… But anyway, Summoner 1 really did suck, and in fact the only good thing about the game was the fact the combat system was at least vaguely intuitive. Combat would work in an unusual way with various directions on the D-pad corresponding to attacks, your character would hack away at a monster semi-automatically with you using the D-pad at timed intervals to strong together combos that caused more damage. This would have actually been quite fun had it not been for the games staggering difficulty level and major bugs. The game also (while I didn’t complete it) had very little to do in terms of actual summoning and while I did gain various summons along the way they all seemed to be pretty crap and irrelevant. Perhaps Un-Summoner would have been a better title for the game..

The game has (fortunately perhaps) seemed to have vanished into the mists of time with very little to find on it when I searched on the internet (other than archaic reviews) . Some nice soul on youtube has uploaded some ingame footage though so below is how the combat plays out in party mode.

In hindsight I suppose the game is worth digging out off ebay if you fancy a week of mind numbing frustration.

 

 

 

Summoner 2

On the other hand, despite the series disastrous beginnings I still purchased the second installment. Complete with a new cast, new environments, and a new combat system Summoner 2 actually really impressed me from the moment I picked up the demo. Taking the role of queen Maia Summoner 2 introduces you to a world far better looking and far more realized than that of the original. Maia was a far more interesting lead the previous games lead and has the added bonus of not needing a personality transplant. The game also allowed you to play as a substantial cast of characters aiding Maya on her quest all of which were again interesting and varied individuals. This time there wasn’t much Summoning to be done either, but instead Maya could shape shift into various huge creatures allowing her new abilities and skills as she progressed through the game, while again I think the games title was misplaced these creatures were actually useful and added some good scope to the title.

The combat this time round was a satisfying hack and slash style gameplay which while not as unusual as the original games combat style was frankly just a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

Anyway, I’m sleepy, I have games to play and that was a brief little feature on some lesser known PS2 RPG titles. I strongly recommend picking up at least the second game if you haven’t before and giving it a whirl, you may be disappointed of course, but I wasn’t.

(Videos used uploaded to youtube by users LCGame and Beriel1, thanks guys)