Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade
There’s a reason why some legends aren’t told; they can be kinda boring.
Published: April 4, 2005
“It’s like Norrath minus all the bullshit.” That was my first description of Untold Legends, courtesy of the wonderfully frank John Davison. It’s really about as good a description for Sony Online Entertainment’s hack and slasher as I can come up with. The game feels like Snowblind’s Champions titles without the EverQuest stuff tacked on, basically leaving the same potion gobbling, sword swinging gameplay without any extra fuss.
Sure, there’s some storyline to string together the dozens together, involving a city called Aven that chooses a ceremonial leader at the annual Festival of the Crown, now in its 2000th year. Along with the cute little whipper snapper chosen this year, there’s the Tournament of the Guardian that determines a warrior that will serve as her protector (psst, that’s you). And that’s about as much story as you get. It’s told as a few scrolling blocks of text over still painted images every time you start up the game should you forget it, but you probably won’t care, as the in-game story is left to about a paragraph at a time dispensed by a handful of Aven’s denizens.
This means you’ll repeat the process of talking to someone to get a quest, venturing outside the city to kill or retrieve (after killing) someone or something, grabbing items along the way to equip or sell for cash (yes, so you can buy more stuff to equip), and then the whole process starts all over again. Sure there’s a mysterious plot by shadowy figures that you’ll end up exposing, and a few basic twists you’ll probably see coming from a mile away, but these games don’t usually make for engrossing stories anyway.
What they do make for is endless seas of enemies to blast with spells and cleave into itty bits with blades. It’s fun in that mindless sort of way, though you mileage with the game will vary in direct proportion to how much you like to mash on the X or O buttons.
While the controls are pretty simplistic (like most of the game’s distilled gameplay), there are some deeper bits. The R button works like something of a shift button on a keyboard, modifying all your other actions, so while pressing L along will douse you with a health potion, holding R and pressing it again will reward you with a power (read: magic) boost. The d-pad is used for quick selecting spells (effectively making it useless in the heat of battle when about 20 enemies are launching at you at something resembling the speed of sound), but modifying that with R turns it into a camera rotating smorgasboard of zooming and re-centering. A normal melee attack with X becomes a way to quickly swap weapons in inventory, a spell attack with O becomes block, and… well, you get the idea.
Surpisingly, the analog nub, the little Velcro-like button that seems to be giving more responsive games so much trouble compared to the sexy Lucite d-pad and face buttons, works here admirably, but that’s mainly because the only fast reaction times you’ll need are a tap of the L button and many, many taps of X or O.
So with simple controls, a simple storyline and simplified gameplay mechanics, what’s left to enjoy? Well, that’ll again depend on how much you like this genre. If you can handle endless hours of hacking and slashing, you’re going to be set here to the tune of some 20-25 hours before you get into the Champions-style play-it-again-after-finishing-with-your-beefed-up-character-or-another-character-class replay option.
It’s a nice, bulky experience that the PSP needed to show that disc-based games offer a whole hell of a lot more then their cart-based counterparts (yes, that’s a dig at the length and breadth of Game Boy games, I’m petty and hate blowing $30 on a game that’s less than two hours long like that), but it could be argued that games like WipEout Pure has almost as depth and actually makes you a better player by the time you’ve exhausted all there is to offer. Still, there’s quite a bit of game here between the story and side quests.
Sure, there’s some storyline to string together the dozens together, involving a city called Aven that chooses a ceremonial leader at the annual Festival of the Crown, now in its 2000th year. Along with the cute little whipper snapper chosen this year, there’s the Tournament of the Guardian that determines a warrior that will serve as her protector (psst, that’s you). And that’s about as much story as you get. It’s told as a few scrolling blocks of text over still painted images every time you start up the game should you forget it, but you probably won’t care, as the in-game story is left to about a paragraph at a time dispensed by a handful of Aven’s denizens.
This means you’ll repeat the process of talking to someone to get a quest, venturing outside the city to kill or retrieve (after killing) someone or something, grabbing items along the way to equip or sell for cash (yes, so you can buy more stuff to equip), and then the whole process starts all over again. Sure there’s a mysterious plot by shadowy figures that you’ll end up exposing, and a few basic twists you’ll probably see coming from a mile away, but these games don’t usually make for engrossing stories anyway.
What they do make for is endless seas of enemies to blast with spells and cleave into itty bits with blades. It’s fun in that mindless sort of way, though you mileage with the game will vary in direct proportion to how much you like to mash on the X or O buttons.
While the controls are pretty simplistic (like most of the game’s distilled gameplay), there are some deeper bits. The R button works like something of a shift button on a keyboard, modifying all your other actions, so while pressing L along will douse you with a health potion, holding R and pressing it again will reward you with a power (read: magic) boost. The d-pad is used for quick selecting spells (effectively making it useless in the heat of battle when about 20 enemies are launching at you at something resembling the speed of sound), but modifying that with R turns it into a camera rotating smorgasboard of zooming and re-centering. A normal melee attack with X becomes a way to quickly swap weapons in inventory, a spell attack with O becomes block, and… well, you get the idea.
Surpisingly, the analog nub, the little Velcro-like button that seems to be giving more responsive games so much trouble compared to the sexy Lucite d-pad and face buttons, works here admirably, but that’s mainly because the only fast reaction times you’ll need are a tap of the L button and many, many taps of X or O.
So with simple controls, a simple storyline and simplified gameplay mechanics, what’s left to enjoy? Well, that’ll again depend on how much you like this genre. If you can handle endless hours of hacking and slashing, you’re going to be set here to the tune of some 20-25 hours before you get into the Champions-style play-it-again-after-finishing-with-your-beefed-up-character-or-another-character-class replay option.
It’s a nice, bulky experience that the PSP needed to show that disc-based games offer a whole hell of a lot more then their cart-based counterparts (yes, that’s a dig at the length and breadth of Game Boy games, I’m petty and hate blowing $30 on a game that’s less than two hours long like that), but it could be argued that games like WipEout Pure has almost as depth and actually makes you a better player by the time you’ve exhausted all there is to offer. Still, there’s quite a bit of game here between the story and side quests.
