Summoner

The setup to Summoner's sweeping story line is so slow at the beginning that anything good that comes later in the game is masked completely. As the story begins, you play as Joseph, a young gent who has vowed never again to use his summoning powers. This is because a demon he had summoned previously to protect his village actually burned it down and killed everyone he loved. Those who stick through this heavy exposition will be rewarded with a twisting, nonlinear plot.

The environments are carefully designed, built, and textured to convey a grand sense of scale and color. The castle's courtyard, for example, is a great place to visit--its booths and caravans are festooned with colorful cloths and coverings. The place is abuzz with people, many of whom want to chat and share information with you. The castle itself is immense, and dwarfs everything and everyone around it. The game's graphical splendor is cut somewhat short, however, by draw-in problems that give it a terribly disjointed look.

Summoner's combat system is pretty cool. The idea is to chain your attacks by pressing the controller's D-pad while your sword blow is being delivered. A little chain icon appears above your character's head and signals when to time your move. By chaining attacks, you can sustain your own offensive action, and make the attacks longer, more interesting, and a lot more fun. --Todd Mowatt

Pros:

• Capable texturing gives the game a good, clean look
• Miniquests help make for deep gameplay

• Severe draw-in problems give the game a
  
  Amazon.com Review
  Summoner highlights all of the reasons that many publishers steer clear of the role-playing game (RPG) genre. Most RPGs are heavy on text, light on adventure, and thus--for most gamers--boring.

  The setup to Summoner's sweeping story line is so slow at the beginning that anything good that comes later in the game is masked completely. As the story begins, you play as Joseph, a young gent who has vowed never again to use his summoning powers. This is because a demon he had summoned previously to protect his village actually burned it down and killed everyone he loved. Those who stick through this heavy exposition will be rewarded with a twisting, nonlinear plot.

  The environments are carefully designed, built, and textured to convey a grand sense of scale and color. The castle's courtyard, for example, is a great place to visit--its booths and caravans are festooned with colorful cloths and coverings. The place is abuzz with people, many of whom want to chat and share information with you. The castle itself is immense, and dwarfs everything and everyone around it. The game's graphical splendor is cut somewhat short, however, by draw-in problems that give it a terribly disjointed look.

  Summoner's combat system is pretty cool. The idea is to chain your attacks by pressing the controller's D-pad while your sword blow is being delivered. A little chain icon appears above your character's head and signals when to time your move. By chaining attacks, you can sustain your own offensive action, and make the attacks longer, more interesting, and a lot more fun. --Todd Mowatt

  Pros:

  • Capable texturing gives the game a good, clean look
  • Miniquests help make for deep gameplay
  Cons:
  • Severe draw-in problems give the game a terribly disjointed look
  
  
  

I'm a father now, mid thirties, and frankly, I'm too old to judge a game by dazzling graphics. I don't care if this PS2 game has graphics that are at a PS1 level of quality. Although I must admit, the main character does look a bit like a corpse. :) So other reviewers can complain about dated graphics, but it doesn't bother me.

And other reviewers have made mention of the long, lesiurely plot, overly big areas to explore, and over-abundance of NPCs. Again, the reviewers are accurate -- those things do exist, and if they hate them, that's fine. But for me, a guy who likes games like BG1, BG2, and Arcanum, it was sooo nice. I get home late from work, I'm tired, and I don't want to play a game that requires lots of button mashing. I enable the options for auto-chaining my attacks, sit back, relax, and stroll through the game world, chatting with random characters, taking out a few bad guys, and working on my character's stats and inventory so that the next battle will be even better.

Of course, a few times the game's size did annoy me. I probably talked to each merchant in the Lenele market twice, just because I couldn't recall who was who. I looked online for a full complement of printable maps but never found anything. It would have helped me a lot to just have printed maps with each NPC flagged. But for some reason, that really didn't bug me that much.

What did bug me was the locked camera view in the cities. Out in the open, you can set the camera to high (overhead) view, or low (over the shoulder) view. But in the Lenele market, for example, the camera locks to high view. And since I couldn't pull the camera back far enough to see a lot of surrounding buildings, I had a horrible time getting oriented. If I had been able to use the low view, I could have at least used the horizon to know my general direction and place. This alone caused me to knock 1 star off the review.

Anyway, to conclude: Summoner has lots of characters, tons of dialogue, joinable NPCs with a little bit of party banter, plenty of stats and inventory management, lots of areas, many non-linear quests, and dated graphics with a (sometimes) annoying camera angle. And battles are very configurable -- you can button-mash with chained attacks and turn-based play, or you can do like me and set the battles to continuous mode with auto-chaining. Since I care less about graphics and more about story, this is a great game for me.


Really Strong Strenghts...Very Strong Weaknesses   January 27, 2004
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Volition's Summoner is a game in which it is easy to get lost...lost in the unnecessarily huge locations, lost in the insane amount of side quests, lost in the insanely slow pace, or lost in in the insanely high amount of text and story detail that means little or nothing; or in my case, all of them. Those, teamed up with somewhat shallow characters, a horrible frame rate, and a small scene count make Summoner one that any and all impatient RPGamer's should probably steer clear of.

However, during the last 10-15 hours (of a 40 hour quest, mind you), the game, while somehow getting slower, got much more interesting and increased in intensity very sharply. Also, later on, the game made sense finally, and from what I hear, Summoner II plays off of this game's plot beautifully, and also, from what I hear, Summoner II is so good that it's actually worth playing through this one just so that you can understand it better!

The graphics are totally a mixed bag, and actually a contradiction. You see, if you play this game with the camera zoomed in all the way, not only will the spell effects, mainly the projectile and summon effects be much more impressive, but also the textures, when viewed from up close, actually surpass any textures I've seen on even the XBox, all except for the Cube's Resident Evil titles. However, in order to win any battles, or find your way through countless obstructions, you'll have to back the camera up all the way, turning the textures to practically single colors, and turning the 30FPS to about 12FPS or so.

The sound effects are not only mostly recycled from PSX RPG foley discs, but also, during the whole second half of the game, the sound effects are almost cut out, and you hear one every few seconds, and that's while in intense combat! It's as if the programmers weren't sure if the polygons, textures, music and sound effects were too much for the new PS2 system, so they reduced the sound effect quantities to make sure it'd make it. For whatever reason, they did it that way. The voice acting is also a mixed bag, ranging from horribly dead, to perfect, to horribly overdone.

The music on the other hand, while commonly really just "ambient" music, is sometimes quite grand...I can think of three examples: the Lanelle Sewers, which is a sort of epic creepy theme, one of the forest themes, which sounds much like the Lord of the Rings themes, and the World Theme, which is simply incredible. Overall, every time you hear music, it's either good or better, but commonly the "music" is just a sort of beat or random notes.

The gameplay is cool enough with an original battle system, based off the chain attack idea, only where you can keep the chains neverending until you win if you're good enough, but that's nearly impossible, and the interface is nice and clean, with several types of equippable armor peices, a great special skill/magic system, and a great level up system (except that each character will probably only level up about once every 30 min of action, and with all the non-action parts of the game, that could stretch out to less than once an hour).

All in all, Summoner is something that's rewarding if stuck out to the end, and has certain merit, but also has severe weaknesses. Let's break it down for the end.
Plot Movement/Revelations: 6/10, Storyline: 10/10, Characters: 5/10, Battle System: 7/10, Interface: 6/10, Music: 7/10, Sound Effects: 2/10, Dialogue: 7/10, Graphics: 4~8/10 (Distant~Close), Voice Acting: 5/10, Replay: 4/10.


Summoner   September 6, 2003
 1 out of 4 found this review helpful

This is an awesome game. My daughter and I love it. I'm not a very good role model, because we are always at the computer. We have summoner 2 but were unable to find summoner until now. It was worth the wait!