Sands of Destruction
9.4
10
8
8
Treasure of a lifetime.
I loved this game so much, i played it twice. It is unique like Kingdom Hearts, without the cliché Disney Characters. It has the RPG style of Shin Megami tense. You can customize the characters fighting styles, the elements of their weapons, and so on. Another great feature is that this game has a different ending from the anime. Basically, it's just awesome!
4/25/13
A Good Game, but held back from being Great
Sands of Destruction is a very solid game in terms of story, but the gameplay itself suffers from a few flaws that end up holding it back from being truly great. I would recommend it to anyone that is a fan of turn-based RPGs though.
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Story
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The story of this game is interesting in that you are questing to destroy the world under the pretext that it is so rotten and broken that the only way to save it is to end it. This view is reinforced by many of the rulers of the land that you come across that are simply known as beastlords.
The story suffers from a few minor flaws in my opinion. Many of the beastlords aren't given any clear motivation for their behavior outside of them being evil. I'm also a bit frustrated with how long it took the game to give any of the playable characters any sense of depth.
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Gameplay
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The game features a turn-based combat system where each of the face buttons offers various attacking options. Of course, a major aspect of this game is that each character can only use a limited number of moves each turn which is represented by battle points (BP). All of your actions require a single BP to use, but you can increase the amount of BP available to your character if you score a high enough hit chain on the enemy. All of this is well and good, but the biggest problem with the combat system is the flurry attacks. Once you level these moves up to customization level seven you can chain all three of your ground flurry attacks together as a single move that costs only one BP to use and is way more powerful than a power attack. It also unbalances the game since you'll now hit the enemies enough times to earn additional BP as well.
I also have a few other issues with the combat system as well in the form of wasted BP and special attacks. Your character is only allowed to select a single enemy to target on their turn so if you have any remaining BP after killing the enemy it isn't used since you can't switch to the next available target. I'm also bothered a bit by the special moves which happen when your character maxes their BP gauge. These attacks do way less damage then your flurry attacks and only serve to slow down combat since you can't skip the animations that happen when you perform them.
And finally the game suffers from combat feeling way too easy since most regular enemies and bosses will go down rather quickly if you hit them with your enhanced flurry attack abilities.
Outside of all of those problems the combat feels rather quick and the power attacks allow you to inflict status effects onto your opponents.
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Graphics
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Graphically the game is nice and colorful, but some of the characters suffer from some pixelation and the CGI looks rather gritty both in game and in the opening sequence before the title screen.
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Sound
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The BGM tracks are rather nice, but the voice acting work is terrible for the most part. Many of the voice actors struggle to hit the emotional tones of the scene and feel a bit flat in places. The voice acting also suffers from long pauses of five seconds or more between lines at times as well.
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Lasting Appeal
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Sands of Destruction offers a rather unique story, but lacks any sort of New Game+ or different levels of difficulty so has little to offer in terms of replay value. I'd imagine most people would play through the game once and then put it away until years later.
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Scores
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Story: 9
Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 8
Sound: 7
Lasting Appeal: 1
Overall: 6.57
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Overall Calculation
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[(9*2) + (6*2) + (8+7+1)]/7
4/4/13
Time consuming RPG
This is one of the BEST RPGs I have played in a while. I like the fact that it is turn-based, the voice actors aren't too crummy, and the story is great overall. The animation could use some tweaking to make it look a smidge betterm but it's great overall. One thing I can say about this game, is that it's not like a bad Wii RPG that you can beat in like two days, NO this will take at least a month to beat tops.
6/24/12
Just like the anime...
First off, the storyline is amazing; it's just like the anime, with a few minor differences. I really enjoyed playing through it, especially after I had watched the anime. For those who do not already know the story, they will find themselves drawn into the storyline, anticipating what is to come next. The characters are just like the ones in the manga/anime, the playable ones being the 6 main characters. A new feature is the "quips" equip, which are quotes from the dialogue of the game from each character, and by equipping them, they trigger a special effect during battle, such as attack up or heal at the beginning of battle. The controls were a bit confusing at first, but I got the hang of it after playing for awhile. An attack is assigned to each button, and depending on the order you press the buttons, the attacks may change and lead to chain attacks. The number of attacks is limited, but sometimes you can overcome that by dealing critical hits and etc. The in-game graphics are okay, but not amazing. The CG cut-scenes are a nice addition, but they could be better or be replaced with anime cut-scenes for the same effect. The BGM was typical, but the voice acting was really poor. I feel as if they could've done a better job with the voice acting, so I wouldn't have to play with the sound off. It's one of my pet peeves, but even so, the characters all sound monotone except during the few times when they inunciate, and even then, they inunciate the wrong part of the sentence. The voice acting was an overall failure. Everything else was fairly good except for one thing: the camera angles. Although the camera angles only matter in towns, it can still get quite irritating when they turn for you. Sometimes, I'd be heading in a direction and the camera angle would change for me, while my reactions to the changes are a bit delayed, I continue to walk in the same direction, while heading towards a different direction because the angle has been changed. Other than that, I am very satisfied with this game overall.
5/22/10
Can you destroy the world?
If you've played the Chrono games then this game will remind you a lot of the series. Sands of Destruction takes place in a world ruled by beasts; where humans are treated like dirt and are enslaved by 12 beastlords. You take control of a young man named Kyrie, who soon discovers that he has the power to destroy the world. The controls on this game are very fluid and you can easily execute commands for your characters. Like Chrono Cross, you have a certain set of battle points that you can use to execute your commands. You can increase the power of these commands through custom points. It is rather easy to get used to the controls of the battle system. One of the things I did not like happened to be the sound. While the music was beautiful, some of the voice acting was rather bad and because they translated the game from Japanese to English, during the cutscenes it would sometimes take 3-5 seconds for them to move on with a piece of dialog. There wasn't a good balance between the background music and the voice acting, but thankfully you can adjust these settings in the options menu. The graphics looked rather nice at certain points in the game, but when they zoomed in on your character, you could see how pixelated they were and it just didn't look as nice, looking like something from the Playstation 1 era. The backgrounds were gorgeous though during the game. I did have a problem with the CGI cutscenes, they looked very pixelated and just not very good at all. Other games such as the Final Fantasy remakes for the DS look great and don't suffer from this problem, but the CGI for Sands of Destruction just doesn't look and bad. I loved the plot. Destroying the world instead of saving it? Well that's different! However, at certain points of the game the storyline does get rather confusing and isn't as straight forward. When you do follow it, it is often very predictable at call that great as they are rather blurry. There aren't that many of them though and they aren't that long. The length of the game wasn't as long as I thought it would be, I was expecting maybe 20 hours or so for some reason, but I clocked in at around 13, which disappointed me a bit. Gameplay while not in battle was rather frustrating. There was no overworld to explore and was very much a point and click adventure in that department much like the second Tales of Symphonia game. At times it was refreshing, but adding an overworld to explore may have made the game longer and a tad bit more enjoyable. Another thing about this game that bugged me happened to be the vast amount of puzzles. They were often difficult and I found myself frustrated at many times during the puzzles. Still they are easier than Professor Layton. Now the storyline is something that is both good ertain points. Still you feel yourself drawn in, despite these flaws and wish to know the ending, even if you know what is going to happen. Overall I thought this game was very good, but not perfect. It does have it's flaws, but it is still a great RPG that you should definitely add to your collection.
1/16/10
Correction
The anime of World Destruction (in America: Sands of Destruction) is based off the game. The game was the original content, the anime/manga are adaptations of the game.
1/4/10
Cool
wow a game based on the anime World Destruction: Sekai Bokumetsu No Rokunin and it looks great, i love game like this and i hope they dont disappoint.
1/2/10
Sweet
this game is going to be awsom
12/7/09