System: Wii
Score: 6.75
Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors is a unique new game for the Wii that is unfortunately disappointing. You play as the son of one of your nation’s most revered heroes who helped to defeat some kind of wicked enemy five years before the game takes place. Once the game starts, you find out that the queen of the land has been acting strangely, and later find out that it has some sort of connection to the evil villain who your father had helped to defeat prior to the game’s beginning.
Honestly, the story isn’t interesting at all and moves so slowly that it’s almost painful. The characters in this game (especially the momma’s boy prince, who is an adult) aren’t interesting in the slightest, but instead are actually pretty annoying. Another problem with this game is that it seems like you’re constantly being stopped by a loading screen, especially while you’re in town. These screens get annoying really fast and make the already terrible and slow moving story take even longer to get through. If the graphics were at least up to par for current generation consoles, the loading screens would be a little easier to sit through, however the graphics are pretty poor, even for a Wii game.
Most of the game consists of very simple shapes put together and looks pretty grainy, which is something that one might expect to see on an older game, but is really just unacceptable by today’s standards. Aside from these glaring problems, the game does have at least one semi-redeeming quality. Most of your time (when you’re not sitting through loading screens while moving through town) is spent on doing different missions. In these missions, you travel through an area while battling monsters which will attack you along the way. The game is entirely in first person and has a real time fighting system, which means that you have to swing your sword (the Wii-mote) around as you slice enemies up. This has been done very poorly in several Wii games, but is actually fairly well done in this game and is entertaining. In fact, the only reason to even consider playing this game at all is for the combat.
Aside from the interesting combat system, missions unfortunately don’t have much else to offer and are extremely linear. In fact, the missions are so linear that there are only two ways you can walk: forward or backwards. You can’t explore any of the areas at all, but are stuck to your path as if you were riding a roller coaster or a train. I honestly don’t even know why they make you press the forward button; they might as well just make you automatically move forward since that’s the only way you can go anyway. This is extremely disappointing because it is usually fun to explore the environments which have been created. Overall, Dragon Quest Swords is a disappointing game which doesn’t have much to offer at all. The one thing that makes it entertaining, at least for a little while, is its combat system. Other than that, there is absolutely no reason to play this game.
