Summon Night: Twin Age (DS)

Summon Night: Twin Age
Flight Plan/Atlus

Review by Anthony

Ever see a movie sequel that left you feeling disappointed that the filmmakers failed to capture the essence of the original, yet it wasn’t a bad movie so you couldn’t be mad? Such is the feeling I had after playing Summon Night: Twin Age for the DS.

For those who hadn’t played Summon Night: Swordcraft Story or Swordcraft Story 2, the games followed a young hero or heroine on an innocuous quest to save the world with a summon spirit by their side and a knack for crafting progressively more badass weaponry. Players could choose from five different weapon types to wield, and then would do battles in a 2D screen that was more inclined to Street Fighter 2 than it was to an RPG. It worked though, as battles were fun and the different weaponry meant very different tactics.

In Twin Age... well uh, the ideas are still there, but the rest bears little resemblance to the GBA originals. For instance, there are only three weapon choices, and they make little difference, as the attacking commands work exactly the same between them. Battles now take place as you explore the maps, leaving it more akin to a traditional action RPG. There’s a summon spirit, but instead of choosing a hero/heroine and his/her summon spirit, you simply choose the melee inclined summon spirit or magic inclined heroine as your main character. Aside from scenes, even that makes precious little difference, as you can switch between them on the fly almost the entire game.

So there’s the Summon Night shell, but how’s the Twin Age filling? Not bad, but definitely lacking. We’ll start with the good.

What’s good:
- You have creative control over the hero and heroine’s progress in a level-dependent skill tree. So you can work on the skills/stats you’re most interested at your own pace without allowing you to get totally overpowered.
- Battle interface mostly works well, as they allow you to put several shortcuts... whether weapon changes, skill shortcuts, or even item shortcuts on sidebars of the screen for each character. So there’s no menu needed to do what you need to in battle.
- When exploring, the edges of a screen have a color-coded box to let you know if what you’re about to zone into is a new area or a boss/cutscene. That’s very appreciated.

What’s neutral:
- They included quests available from the shop, but they’re basically worthless. They always involve trekking through an area already explored and getting a probably-useless item as a result.
- Weapons and Armor can be created, a seeming nod to earlier series, but it still costs money and as a reward for collecting items around the stages, really only nets you a piece of equipment one level higher than can be bought. Even then, I never felt like I was doing great damage or taking way less as a result.
- Various scrolls can be added to customize weapons, similar to Swordcraft Story 2. However, they’re beyond unnecessary... they don’t have cool effects and one can very easily beat the game and bonus levels without ever touching this.
- They allow you to spend time with a side-character of your choice for extra scenes at night to increase your affection between each other. Despite promises that affection would help the character’s performance in battle, I saw little change.
- Bonus levels are available post game. But, they’re easy and have no payoff.

What’s bad:
- Battling outside of bosses is a bore. If I wasn’t fighting a boss, I got through every single enemy type in the entire game by using an ability that lets you tap multiple enemies to dash and attack them in succession. Occasionally I used a one-hit special attack on ones with more HP. That’s it. Even hack-and-slash games have more strategy than that.
- Battling bosses is overly hard. Well, that is, unless you figure out pretty soon that the way to win is to switch immediately to the mage female and take over healing duties for the whole battle. Otherwise, expect her to not heal you or the partner when needed, and to have no reservations about sitting idly in a stream of fire until she dies. Thanks! Bosses do a lot of damage even if you're well equipped/levelled, and the slow movement makes evasion a chore or impossible, so there’s really no way to win without her.
- The storyline is yawn-inducing. Spirits? Gotcha. A misunderstanding between races? Noted. A race with powers being exploited by humans? We always seem to do that! Negative points too for making you be nice to the traitor that joins your group – even scolding you if you so much as criticize her.

I’ve seen other reviews commending Twin Age for good use of the touch screen in battle. Well sure, but if all that amounts to is you sitting and idly trading attacks with an enemy or using the same skill to fight every monster in the game, will you really care by the end how good or bad the touch-screen interface is? I would’ve preferred D-Pad controls and actually doing attacks myself.

It’s a bummer of a situation; Twin Age took the general elements of the Summon Night series, tweaked them all, put it into a DS game, and the result is... just fluff. With no major graphical upgrades, a slower and less exciting battle system, a story that’s still uninteresting, dumbing down the equipment creation, and adding the bonus of bad partner AI... it doesn’t feel much like a sequel. It’s just an average DS RPG. Here’s hoping that in the next iteration, I can go back to crafting an oversized axe, make it be -on fire-, and then watch myself swinging it battle. Those were the days.