Summoner: A Goddess Reborn is a buggy 3rd Person/Action RPG with bad dialog and camera angles.
The dialog was very bad at times. There's no much room for a progressive story when everyone spouts off 1 short melodramatic sentence after sentence. Every time someone finishes a chat with Maia, they always end the conversation with "With Faith and Honor, Your Grace". This gets repetetive really quick.
I don't think I would recommend this for anyone, even the RPG starved Gamecube crowd.
----------Battle System----------
Summoner: A Goddess Reborn is a generic hack and slash action oriented RPG. You mostly run around a maze like area until you run into an enemy and eventually complete the map and fight the boss. Once you're in the enemies sights you hold down the R button for a target and then start slashing and dashing with the B button until he’s dead. The enemies are stupid but the make it up with their general strength and numbers. You'll often be running away to heal yourself or your team mates. You can only heal a team mate or attack an enemy if you can actually see them on your screen, even if they're two inches away from you, you have to move the camera over to see them before using magic.
There's alot of playable characters in Summoner: A Goddess Reborn. Your team will be a maximum of 3 with everyone else on the sidelines. You can control any character you want but you have to set the other two's AI skills like making one a Melee attacker or one a Healer. Just for references sake, this is a bit similar to Kingdom Hearts or X-Men Legends, except those games have much smarter AI.
Your team gains experience for each monster killed. Just like every other RPG ever made you gain levels once you reach your Experience limit. When you reach your new level your health and AP regenerate and your Stats boost a small amount. After each level you get 3 skill points you have to manually distribute among your leveled up character. Each skill point can boost your sword swinging ability, defense stats, or magic ability among many others.
As the title suggests, Maia is a Summoner. Every time Maia finds a Rune Stone on a stage she can learn a new Summon. Each Summon has their own characteristics but they're all low on moves. You can find some Rune Stones that can eventually level up your Summons as well. The back of the box suggests there's 12 Summons in the game, but in reality there's only 4 Summons that you can level up 3 times, and 1 hidden one. Maia is the main focus of the game, but you'll often be going off on missions without her. Sometimes your team gets separated, or you'll have to go on single character missions.
There's a few mini-games within the game, but they're mostly generic card-based things, or find the pearl under the coconut.. or even "Guess Which Number I'm Thinking Of". Besides the crappy mini-games, there’s a ton of sidequests here, but they're all fetching and trading missions. You'll acquire many "Quest Items" and when you figure out what to do with them, you'll usually have to equip that item and use it near the person or puzzle. You'll often gain experience for completing a sidequest too.
If you are using someone with a Bow, you can go into First Person mode. This is only useful in sidequests and mini-games, the controls are to hard to use for actually attacking with.
You can save the game at any point of the game, as long as you aren't using a spell or being attacked my monsters. This is a pretty good idea for a game like this since you can die at any moment. There's one point towards the end of the game where you are going through a series of trials with your Summons, and you can't save there. At this point my game crashed and I lost an hour of work. This is the first game I've played on the Gamecube that actually crashed, kinda pathetic.
I had alot of problems with the camera at first, but got use to it eventually. The camera moves very slowly if you tilt the C stick left or right. If you tilt the C stick up and down it zooms in and out, but not enough to get more of a view. I had problems of not seeing a ramp or slope in some levels just running around trying to find where to go because I couldn't see where a road led to. Another problem I had was if I walked into a corner, my team would follow and trap me until I had to switch characters to get out. The game is full of bugs, for example if there's alot of monsters on the screen and you're hacking and slashing away, the game will freeze for a split second over and over again. This doesn't happen just a few times in the game, this ALWAYS HAPPENS!!!!! This bug is very annoying to deal with.
----------Characters / Story----------
The storyline seems rushed through out the game. There's really no time to grasp any of the story or characters as you're thrust into a new situation after the next with little storyline in between. The game starts off with a CG cutscene and then all of a sudden you're fighting on a boat. The next thing you know you're saved by an assassin. They don't explain why or even develop that character, even though she’s the first to join your party in the game. The game just keeps going on at this pace where you barely know what’s happening at all. Each time you visit a new location, Maia explains the place with a short grainy CG cutscene, then you're off to map everything out and figure out the puzzles until you reach the end and fight the boss or unlock or open something.
Since the storyline is so choppy, the characters are really hard to get into and care about. Your party gets separate all the time, so you'll have to get use to playing with everyone.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics are really bad, even for 2002's standards. The graphics are similar, if not worse than most of the PC Action Adventure games I've played back in 2000 like Rune. There was only a couple full pre-rendered cutscenes, but they look really dull. I wouldn't be impressed by these even if this was 1998, actually Starcraft had better cutscenes than this.
The dialog box is ugly, and the text is hard to read, especially for numbers. All the magic basically looks the same when you use it, but the Summons kinda look cool at first, but drag on to long after you've seen it once.
----------Sound----------
All the main characters in the game have voice overs. The voices aren't very energetic or loud. All the actors sound bore with themselves, which leaves me bored with the story. Maia has an English accent, Iari sounds like a Robot, Taurgis sounds Scottish and so on. Some of the voices are often muffled out and hard to hear at times.
The music is a mix of tribal drums, Egypition sounds and ambience, decent music overall but nothing outstanding.
----------World Map----------
The map is a generic dot-to-dot map, nothing special. There's only 2 map screens in the game. The main map features 2 towns and about 6 dungeons / fields. The other map features 1 town and 3 dungeons / fields. Only 3 towns in the game, but they're all very huge. There's no need for any transportation other than storyline given ones like pods and boats.
----------Time to Complete Game (first run through, last save before credits)----------
25:45
Summoner: A Goddess Reborn features possibly the easiest final boss battle I've ever fought and one of the most anti-climatic endings too. There's no reward for beating the game. If you skip most of the sidequests, this game might be around 18 hours long or even less. I spent 3 hours just on one, but I didn't get to finish them all since there's a ton of them and I got bored with it.