The Sword of Hope II

I finished The Sword of Hope II recently. It's a 1992 GameBoy game by Kemco that tries to cross an adventure game like Shadowgate with a JRPG, without being great at either. (It may be worth noting that Kemco had actually published Shadowgate.) I had played and beaten the original Sword of Hope growing up, and, while the original had the same general defect of underwhelmingly trying to mix genres, it was a decent enough game, so I was interested to see what had changed in the sequel.

Story
You play Prince Theo, who, in the original Sword of Hope had resealed an evil dragon who had controlled your father, the King of Riccar. Years afterward, troubles begin brewing again in the kingdom, and you must journey to stop them. As luck tends to have it in these types of stories, one thing leads to another.

Mechanics
There are two main modes of gameplay: field and battle. As with Shadowgate and games of that nature, the field is divided into distinct screen, and you navigate from one screen to another. Each screen may have one or more objects with which you can interact (Look, Open, or Hit). Unlike Shadowgate, The Sword of Hope II (as well as the original) list out these objects for you; you don't have to (and can't) click on the view of the area to try to find things. It's a simpler and more limited system.

Both Sword of Hope games lack the really sinister, deadly traps for which Shadowgate was famous. At practically any point in Shadowgate, you could easily unwittingly do something that meant Game Over. In The Sword of Hope games, a trap generally means a mild loss of progress or a few hit points or an extra random battle, nothing too serious. This makes the adventuring aspect less frustrating.

As I mentioned though, interaction with the environment is relatively limited, and even more so in The Sword of Hope II, where, in later dungeons, several rooms offer nothing with which to interact. This was not the case in the first game, whose final dungeons were interesting to explore; it's almost as if the developers ran out of time in the sequel.

Each time you move to a new area, you have a chance of a random battle. The battle mechanics are fairly standard JRPG fare, involving attacking, magic, fleeing, items, etc. Unlike the first game, which was a solo adventure, The Sword of Hope II has additional playable characters, and the maximum party size is 3. These additional characters join and leave at fixed points in the game and have different strengths.

The second game did revise the spell selection heavily. Support spells are now more prominent (and in some cases, essential). There are no direct attack spells that could end up backfiring and hurting you.

The weapon/armor selection is broader than the first game, and there are some weapons later on that can target a group of enemies, or all enemies. All allies can equip all weapons and armor, but your mage's base strength will limit his attacking ability throughout part, but not all, of the game.

One interesting element is that you have a good chance (1/3 to 1/2) of winning a "coin" after each battle. This allows you to play a casino side game in which you can win useful items (and some of which can be sold for roughly 10 or even 80 times the value of the coin).

Pacing/Difficulty
This is where I have problems with the game. There are very pronounced level/equipment "checkpoints", meaning that an area will be very often be difficult to impossible without having gotten certain levels, spells, and equipment, but then usually become an absolute cakewalk once the checkpoint is attained. True, to some extent, many JRPGs have these, but there's very little of a difficulty curve in this game; it's more like a series of huge valleys with steep mountains in between.

In and of itself, I could forgive this, because, as I said, it's a common trait of many games. I think, though, that the epitome, and most ridiculous occurrence, of the problem is the last checkpoint. After you've maxed out your equipment and are in the final dungeon, the final floors contain enemies that will almost one-hit-kill you at level 25 (out of 32). However, at level 25, you learn a spell called Empower, which doubles your entire party's attack, defense, and agility for the duration of the battle, for a mere cost of 2MP (the character who learns it has 56MP or so at this point in the game, and you have the ability to buy way more MP-restoring items than you need). A 80-100 HP attack suddenly becomes 1-5 HP. You can steamroll through the boss rush at the end until you reach the final boss, and even he isn't a threat as long as you're at all mildly careful with watching HP. This was quite comically absurd.

The other problem with the checkpoints is that, when they involve equipment, you'll almost certainly need to spend a lot of time there racking up the requisite money. Because you can save the game at any point, you can (ab)use this to make the money-gaining process somewhat faster perhaps, but you'll still have play the casino a lot unless you want to spend inordinate amounts of time on weaker enemies. I am one who usually doesn't mind "grinding" for levels or money, but doing this was too mind-numbing in this game, due to my perception that battles seem slower-paced than in many RPGs. I have to think that the casino route was the one intended by the developers, given the frequency at which coins are dropped.

Music, Graphics, and Text
The music was merely okay at points and quite awful at others. This is subjective of course, but I thought that it was too repetitive and not nearly compelling enough, even for 8-bit standards. I actually think that the original, though musically unremarkable, was decidedly better in this regard.

The graphics are actually fairly well-done for a GameBoy game. They're more detailed than in the original, but there's still generally little in the way of actual animation, given the nature of the field view.

The dialogue is grammatically correct, if a bit simple. Limited menu screen space leads to some slightly obscure abbreviations (though not as bad or inconsistent as those in Paladin's Quest).

Conclusion
Overall, The Sword of Hope II has some elements that sound interesting on paper, but the execution was lacking. The battle mechanics themselves were significantly improved from the first game. The elements borrowed from Shadowgate would have been more interesting if they bothered to use them more than occasionally in the last third of the game. The casino would have been nice if it weren't a necessary money supply. And reliance on a single overpowered, cheap-to-cast support spell to get through the final dungeon and bosses is ridiculous. It's a sign that the designers didn't put much thought into game balance.

This game is skippable. If you liked the first Sword of Hope game, I'd say to leave well enough alone unless you're an absolute stubborn JRPG nut like me. :) There's a possibility you might like the second, but the second is in some ways more flawed, and sometimes significantly so.