Guardian Wars: review by William Garrett

Text by William Garrett <garrett@carafe.gte.com>.

Introduction :

The following is my evaluation of Guardian War, I'm posting it because I could have used something similar to this in determining whether to buy the game (of course I bought it anyway), and because the manual is bad enough that this might help someone who already owns the game.

Guardian Wars :

Guardian War is a combat oriented RPG with some very innovative additions to the RPG systems and a distinctly Japanese flavor.

The Plot :

You are a golem, a disciple of the Goddess, it's your job to defeat the Evil Lord Azrael. You do this through building a party by reviving Frozen Golems from all over to join your party (your party could also include various beasts). And by engaging the enemy in combat in those areas of the game map, that the enemy holds.

The Game :

Thats the basic plot, It's not complex at all but the actual mechanics and strategy of battle more than make up for it.

As a golem you began with a Knight body, and shortly add a golem with a Priest body to your war party. Each golem in your party has the unique virtue of being able to use multiple(upto 3) bodies, with each body having it's own unique skills and powers. In addition once a particular body has gained maximal experience through combat and through casting spells, there are two "upper class" variants of that body that the golem can also use. It sounds more complex than it is. Each body has the typical RPG stats of Quickness, Mobility, Offensive Power, Defensive Power, Magic Offensive Power, and Magic Defensive Power, Hit Points and Magic Points associated with it. In addition each body has a set of "attributes" that are specific to that body and affect combat. What this gives you is an incredibly rich choice of options to call on in a combat situation. Each golem body is a stylized rendered character, very reminiscent of the typical super deformed japanese RPG characters. Possible body types include Knight, Archer, Priest, Shaman, Birdman, Wizard, Ninja, and so on.

The game begins with an intro that is very much Japanese it reminded me a lot of certain Japanese live action adventure shows, and certain Japanese anime. The music is extremely good throughout the game and the voice acting is fine. The quality of the digitized voices is, unfortunately, easily the worst of any 3do game out there. Samples vary from adequate to incredibly noisy with large amounts of hiss. Luckily there's not much digitized speech and none of it is integral to the game.

The game is played on two different playing fields, a world map and a field map. The world map has two different detail levels and contains three basic types of locations:

Towns:
Where there are shops that items and bodies can be bought and sold at.
Shrines:
Where other sleeping golems are that can be revived and used in your party.
Battle Points:
Locations in the world that are controlled by Azrael and his minions.
Battle Points are totally impassable until they have been cleared of the enemy. Clearing out the enemy means combat, and that takes place on the field map. Each Battle Point can be entered, at which point it turns into a more detailed field map. Your main character represents your entire party as he moves around the field map. The field map is a very well done fully rendered 3-d environment. In addition there is a small auto map on screen at all times, and a larger map of the area that can bought up with a button press. The player can use the right and left shift buttons to rotate the 3d environment around the character. Along with normal terrain the map features areas that obstruct the use of magic, automatically regenerate hit or magic points (or both), automatically damage anyone on the area, and Warp characters ten spaces away. There are also treasure chests containing special items scattered about the field maps. This all leads up to the reason for this games existence:

Combat :

When your party approaches the bad guys (all fully rendered in that strangely cartoony style) you are automatically placed into combat mode. Up to six members of your party can actually engage in combat (selected on the world map). When combat begins all the participants on your side separate from the leaders body and take up a predetermined position relative to the center of the combat zone. You can set up the formation you characters will take ahead of time. This is strictly turn-based combat, where each character can move a fixed number of spaces and has a fixed number of attacks. The player is directly in charge of the golems in his party and can give general strategy instructions to the other members (including commands to heal companions with magic, target particular enemies, use a magic attack and so on).

Combat in this game is very time consuming but also very satisfying. As the game progresses the need for more and more strategy pops up and making use of the terrain on the playfield becomes important and it becomes better and better. Another reason why combat is so time consuming is due to the animated nature of the attacks and the magic system. This animation can be switched off, but it's so beautifully done, that I suspect most players will leave it on and keep staring at how beautiful it is. As a couple of basic examples the priest who joins your party almost immediately has two basic attacks and a combination attack (combination attacks are done in concert with another character and do a ton of damage or help, two priests can, for example, heal all of the members of your party at once, where one priest alone could only heal a single character). The first basic attack is healing, when you instruct the priest to heal someone, you first select the character by moving a cylinder of light around. The priest than pulls out some magical item and points it at the character to be healed a glowing white ball slowly engulfs the character to be healed and then flashes outward temporally flashing the screen white. The priests other option is a "Holy Light" attack, he selects the victim as before and from the heavens a rainbow cylinder of light engulfs the victim and inflicts damage.

There is a multitude of magic in the game and it all looks very impressive. Magic is based on nature (there's fire magic, lightning magic, wind magic, water magic, and earth magic). Although there's also light and dark magic. This light and dark magic has some correspondence to the Upper Class bodies that I mentioned earlier, as one of these upper class bodies is light based while the other is dark based.

During battle a character can also choose to use a special item to do things such as restore hit points, or to perform various attacks. These items are either found on the field map or can be bought in stores. Special items include Bells of Love which persuade monsters to join your party, Black Orbs which strengthen the power of darkness, Robe of Wind which strengthens the defending power of wind and so on.

This is a very quick and simple summary of the combat in this game, but I hope it gives you a basic feel for it and a taste for playing the game firsthand.

Conclusion :

All in all I am really enjoying this game. As I mentioned before the manual is horrid, the quality of the digitized sound is pretty bad, although the music is wonderful. The game succeeds in creating a very particular atmosphere, and also totally succeeds in drawing you into what little plot there is. While I'm enjoying this game greatly I can only imagine how good it would be if a more complex plot line which involved interacting with non-fighting characters were included. I'd probably not have the time to do a write up.

-- Bill Garrett INTERNET: garrett@gte.com GTE Laboratories Incorporated UUCP: garrett@bunny.UUCP 40 Sylvan Road PHONE: 617-466-2283 Waltham, MA 02254 FAX: 617-466-2677
michel.buffa@essi.fr