Blade Dancer - Lineage of Light (USA) ISO

Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light is a role-playing game that lets you play cooperatively with three of your friends. Alone or in a group, you must stop the Dread Knight and his dark army.

I didn't expect too much from this game and I'm glad I didn't.

The English voice acting is cringe-worthy, so you'll end up switching to Japanese pretty quick, whether you speak it or not. You'll be told critical pieces of information only once and forget what you were supposed to be doing. Every time you need to go somewhere, you have to slowly jog from point A to point B. The battle system is a more gimmicky version of the Final Fantasy ABS combat. Everyone, enemy and foe alike, shares a single Mana pool, "Luna", that builds from attacking (leftover 'luna' becomes extra experience points, divided by 10). The story is extremely forgettable and given to you in a very systematic and disengaging way, backstory even more so. Characters are two-dimensional anime tropes at best. There are occasionally game-breaking glitches (I sure hope you saved recently) that will force you to reload your most recent save. The glitch I encountered was after the wolf boss battle, the characters started walking around during the cutscene, and instead of being transported back to Costner's house, I was stuck in the faux-map cutscene area and could only fall off the edge and not leave.

The item crafting is tolerable and reminiscent of Monster Hunter, and the weapon durability adds an interesting obstacle to gameplay, as you'll end up buying weapons just to break them down and learn how to craft them.

All in all, I'm not going to recommend this game, but if you like to just grind levels in RPGs and don't expect too much story-wise, then this game is okay. But then again, a dungeon crawler is probably a better choice.