TGS 2008: Sorcery Blade Hands-On

TOKYO--Random encounters: Where would we be without them? We're not sure, but as far as we can tell, developer Kemco would like to ride the wave of this age-old role-playing standard to WiiWare glory with Sorcery Blade. As we wandered about the Tokyo Game Show halls, we glimpsed a girl with pink hair, a giant white tiger, and a floating thingamabob doing battle on a television screen, and we decided to see how much life was left in our old friend, the randomly triggered monster battle.

Our adventuring party consisted of the participants noted above. As the girl, we meandered about a bland desert environment without any sense of purpose, waiting for battle to start. And indeed it started, over and over and over again. Once initiated, we found ourselves bashing on various meanies, like brown bees, giant blue wolves with horns, and hulking green dragons. The twist is that special attacks involve short minigames, according to a Kemco representative on the show floor. The one example we saw was a rune-drawing mechanic, in which you slice a pattern across a rune in the center of the screen to do massive amounts of damage.

Combat is turn-based, as you would expect in a role-playing game of this sort, but in order to attack when it's your turn, you slash the remote. Your own character has a few weapons available to her; the ones we saw in action were a sword and a boomerang-type object, though Sorcery Blade's visuals are so sparse and blocky that it was impossible to tell the difference between the two. Each weapon has its own special attack, and the other members of the party have their own individual attacks as well. The tiny floating thing sort of bumps into enemies to do damage, while the tiger can perform a roar that looked dangerous enough.

For now, Sorcery Blade is scheduled to come to WiiWare only in Japan. According to the Kemco rep we spoke with, Americans don't like role-playing games, which is why he believes it probably won't come out in North America. If it does, we'll keep you updated.