Arcade Adventures #7

Lord of the Sword (1988)
By: Sega Genre: Arcade Adventure Players: 1 Difficulty: Hard
Featured Version: Sega Master System
Also Available For: Nothing

For the second review in a row I've found myself in the not-unstartling position of apparently having had a game's genre wrong for 35-odd years! Last time was It Came From the Desert and now it's this MS exclusive from Sega. It got rather mediocre reviews in its day so I've never shown a huge amount of interest in it, but from screenshots I always assumed it was a Rastan or Legendary Axe type deal. It kind of is I suppose, but it's a more adventurey kind of game than those two. We'll come to that later though. You play through the game as a fellow known as Landau. I assume this isn't meant to be classic actor Martin Landau, star of Mission: Impossible and Space: 1999 amongst many others, probably including even more examples with colons. No, this Landau is just some guy with long hair.

I'm not sure he's even a lord which makes the accuracy of the game's title debatable. He's described in its short, texty intro as simply a 'brave lad' who has resolved to challenge the evil that now threatens to take over the land of Baljinya in which he resides. The evil in question is some flange known as 'Demon Lord Ra Goan' whose followers seek to restore him after he was defeated thousands of years ago. To restore order, Landau must perform three tasks: find the Tree of Marill, subdue the goblin of Balala Valley, and destroy the Statue of Evil (why hadn't something with a name like that been destroyed already?). To do this he must wander around Baljinya, and that's the part of the game that isn't as straightforward as I had been expecting.

It's not exactly one of those tactical warfare games with 400-odd page strategy guides, admittedly, but it is what people these days like to call a Metroidvania. If I'd had it in its day, it would've been the first such game I'd played, in fact, and probably would've seemed pretty innovative. The adventureyness mostly, however, relates to the stage structure; namely, that there are several towns linked by stages filled with enemies, and you sometimes get a choice of which way you want to go. The towns usually feature an NPC in a hut and you need to speak to them all, often more than once, to get the required information, and you'll need to have been to a particular place, performed a particular action or obtained a particular item before you can do certain things or go certain places such as the castles, as I discovered the first two times I met a boss creature, and the first time I found a castle.

There are only two of these mighty fortresses but there are many other towns and locations to visit. It can be rather confusing at first knowing which way to go (or not). You need to repeat some sections anyway but you might end up wandering backwards and forwards through the same sections over and over as you try to find where you should go (or at least until you have made a map/diagram, as would have been the case at the time), and some of them are much tougher in one direction than the other due to enemy placement, but many are just tough anyway. This is partly due to the respawning occupants. It's not just a case of them being there again if you go through the same section/stage again; that would be understandable. No, here, an enemy respawns the moment its point of origin scrolls off screen. This is irritating enough but there are also a couple of problems with Landau himself.

He may be a 'young lad' but control of him is a bit clunky. He has two methods of attack (sword and bow & arrows) so you have to use 'up' to jump for one thing. This isn't ideal in the best of circumstances but his weapons aren't great either. His sword is rather on the small side (hey, size matters) - it's more like a knife really (which I guess means the game should've been called Lad of the Knife) and your 'thrusts' (snigger!) with it need to be well-timed. The bow, on the other hand, is okay now and then but takes too long to fire. The pesky enemies mostly consist of larger (roughly Landau-sized) warriors, monsters and creatures, and there are also smaller, flying enemies, some of which zip around faster. I'm not sure which of the weapons to recommend either. You'll have to wait until enemies get close to use the sword, and mistiming it results in energy loss, but if you try to use the bow/arrows, the enemy might've reached you before the arrow is fired!

In addition to this, you only have a single energy-meter of life, and there is no save feature or even a password system either. This isn't great news for a game that will take most players a good while to get to grips with. If you knew exactly where to go and what to do, and you were skilled enough to not get killed doing it, you could finish the game in under two hours, but it will take awful lot longer to reach that level of skill with no saves. There are a few continues but even so, it's a mighty tough game, at least at first. The big question I've been asking myself since starting this review is whether it's worth the trouble. As if often the case with Master System games, there aren't many other examples on the system quite like this.

It plays a bit like a less-structured Spellcaster, and that is certainly a stonking game, but is that alone enough to make Lad of the Knife enjoyable? The audio/visuals don't do too much to beckon you if I'm honest. Actually, the music is quite pleasant, even if there are only a handful of tunes, but the graphics are no better than average. The sprites are reasonable but not well animated, and there is even some glitching where an enemy disappears right in front of you, then reappears falling from the air behind you (unless they are teleporting wizards or something). There are only three different backgrounds/locales too (not counting the towns and castles), and they aren't particularly pretty. On the plus side though, as mentioned earlier, it was quite an innovative game for its time and it does provide a good challenge.

I think I can sum it up by saying: if you received this game as a gift for Christmas when you were young and you had precious few other games to play, you would've spent many hours battling through it, making notes and maps, becoming as good as the guys who do the speed-runs online today, and you would almost certainly have fond memories of doing so and be championing it as one of the best adventures on the MS accordingly. It hasn't aged too well though, and if, like me, it's a game you hadn't played until recently, you may not have the patience to persevere, even with the benefit of save states and the like, when there are many better examples on almost every system in the universe. It has some value to collectors as it's an MS exclusive, and as a game there are some good ideas and nice touches, but it's too frustrating for traditional play nowadays.

RKS Score: 5/10

Gameplay Video: here's a video of the whole game being played by one of the talented fellows at World of Longplays (check out their great channel here). Oh, and don't watch if you want to avoid spoilers!