Game 442: The Sword of Hope (1989)

 

      

The Sword of Hope

AKA Selection: Erabareshi Mono ("Selection: The Chosen One"), original Japanese title

Japan

Kemco (developer and original publisher); Seika Corporation (U.S. publisher)

Released 1989 for Game Boy (Japan); U.S. version released 1991

Date Started: 3 January 2022

Date Ended: 6 January 2022

Total Hours: 8

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5) with modern emulation, probably at least moderate in the original

Final Rating: 22

Ranking at Time of Posting: 165/444 (37%)

    

As I mentioned in relation to The Final Fantasy Legend, I never owned a handheld gaming device, and there was never a time when I was interested in one. Even today, when I have something of a smartphone "problem," it doesn't extend to playing games on the device. I just find it too limiting.

   

But I can certainly understand the appeal of something that keeps you entertained when you can't be at your console or computer, and I was surprised to find both Legend and Wizardry: Suffering of the Queen to be more advanced mechanically than I thought would be possible with such a device. 

      

There's a power vacuum in the kingdom of Riccar.

       

The Sword of Hope, one of the earliest handheld RPGs (it was released the same year as Final Fantasy Legend, though later in it), is more what I expected from the platform: a highly-linear, single-character game with a lot of grinding and limited mechanics. It would have passed the time if I was in a situation where I needed time to pass, but I can't imagine picking it up if I had anything else to relieve the boredom. Having said that, I'm curious how readers who have owned handheld consoles used them. Did they occupy your attention on an average day at home, where they competed with (depending on the household) computers, regular consoles, televisions, and books? Or did you mostly use them "on the road" when other alternatives weren't available? 

   

The game is set in the land of Riccar, where an evil dragon was long held in check by a magic spell that involved the titular Sword of Hope thrust into a painting of the dragon. (Whatever created that situation sounds more interesting than the plot of the actual game.) But the dragon managed to get into the head of King Hennesy of Riccar and slowly corrupt him, eventually convincing him to remove the sword. Once freed, the dragon summoned an evil god named Mammon, who turned the people of the land into trees.

       

Cliff Huxtable has had enough.

      

The player character is the king's son, Prince Theo, born under a prophecy that he would put things right. The king tried to murder Theo when he was an infant, but a knight named Pascal rescued the baby, fled the castle, and raised the boy in the forest. Meanwhile, three wizards named Martel, Shabow, and Camu cast a spell to seal the king and his castle underground, limiting any further harm he could do. The child, now grown, sets out to find the Sword of Hope and deal with the dragon.

     

There is no character creation process. The character starts with copper armor and a "probite" sword, which sounds like something I should swallow for better digestive health. His attributes are dexterity, stamina, and agility. He begins with only one spell but gains more by finding scrolls and leveling up. He has some wheat, which restores hit points, and "herb," which restores magic points.

   

The Old Man (Pascal) has a few words of encouragement before he sends you out of his hut into a forest. A Shaman lives nearby and will heal the character's wounds for 5 + 1/L gold pieces. The Shaman also has a crystal ball that imparts advice, and the starting "Teleport" spell returns you to the shaman if you're in trouble. Finally, visiting the shaman is the only way to save the game, which is done through a code rather than an actual save.

      

The Game Boy let you type Greek letters?!

        

Screenshots of the game will look like it's three-dimensional, but it's not. You can't turn. Instead, you move from one fixed scene to another like an adventure game. The controls are simple: you use the arrows to move a selection cursor around the bottom half of the screen, which includes both movement options and other commands. "A" executes an option; "X" cancels. 

     

A typical screen. I can move in any direction, but there are enemies waiting in three of them. Although this looks like a first-person view, it's not. You can't rotate to face the other doors or behind you.

 

   

The three commands that you can execute in any area are "Look," "Open," and "Hit." Either because of bad game design or bad translation, none of them mean what they actually say. Instead, they serve as interchangeable "mess around with" commands, and you essentially have to try all of them with everything to be sure you don't miss anything. Throughout the game, you do such nonsensical things as "opening" a rose to find a hidden path, "hitting" a wall to uncover a painting, "opening" a dwarf to talk to it, "hitting" a chest to be healed, "opening" a vine to find a seed inside, "looking" at the same vine to climb it, and so forth. After putting you through all of that, the game has the gall to occasionally act affronted when you try to do something like "hit" or "open" a person.

       

You have to try everything in this game.

     

Combat comes along frequently. Sometimes you see enemies on your little directional map, represented as black dots. Other times, they just show up. They can appear up to three at a time and more can join in battle in subsequent rounds if there are fewer than three. Your only options in combat are to attack, use an item, cast a spell, or flee. After choosing the action, you and the enemies go in an at-least-partly-random order of initiative. Successful combat delivers experience and gold.

       

Combat options against two cyclopes and an ape.

      

I found the number of experience points needed for the next level to be completely unpredictable. The first 10 levels are hit at 10, 35, 85, 165, 265, 405, 585, 785, and 1035, which ranges from +11% to +150% of the previous level. At each new level, you get fixed upgrades in the three attributes, max hit points, and max spell points, plus one new (fixed) combat spell. Non-combat spells are typically used to solve puzzles and must be learned form found scrolls.

         

The shopkeeper. Prices go up as you level up.

     

The opening area only has 19 areas, including a shop where you can buy wheat, barley, herbs, and a suit of silver armor. You can carry a maximum of 255 gold in the game, so you want to visit this vendor when you get close to the maximum. But you can also carry only a maximum of 7 wheat, barley, and herbs, so ultimately you end up wasting a lot of money and the economy really might as well not exist.

      

The opening area is small. The other maps only get a little bigger.

      

On every forest square, you can "look" at the trees (which are actually citizens) to get a whispered hint. The major goal of the area is to find a tree in the town square and intuit that you want to "hit" it to get it to reveal itself as a treant. After a few rounds of combat, in which it's only susceptible to magic, it tearfully hands you the key to Martel's domain. Episodes like this are repeated in the other domains, and you ultimately acquire the two other keys. 

    

To get through here, I'll need to find Shabow's key.

     

Throughout the game, you progress by visiting locations in a precise order and doing things in a precise order. The Sword of Hope resembles a lot of Japanese RPGs of the era in that:

   

1. The places you visit involve a lot of backtracking, mitigated here by the game world not being that large.
2. The things you do are often nonsensical.
3. There's a lot of grinding in between.

    

For #2, I'm not just talking about the nonsensical use of commands that I already mentioned. Even the plot developments don't make a lot of sense. When you first visit Martel, he insults you, and there's a suggestion that perhaps he doesn't believe that you're the prince. Maybe some players would think, "I must convince him!" but that wasn't my first thought. I didn't much care. But after I explored his domain and found no way to move forward, I began to wonder if Martel was supposed to give me something.

      

Martel lectures me on cultural norms.

    

There's a chapel in Martel's domain, and one of the tree hints is: "Haven't you heard of seeking inspiration at the worship site?" "Seeking inspiration" turns out to involve using the "Grace" spell that I learned from a scroll inside the chapel. I guess that was fair--cast "Grace" in a chapel--but what came next was a little unintuitive. Casting the spell got me a magic charm, which did nothing for me by itself. I had to turn it into a "ruby charm" by using it in the room with the chapel's pipe organ. How I was supposed to know this, and why it worked, is a mystery known only to the developer.

       

I'm surprised Nintendo didn't quash this.

     

I had heard about a "ruby charm" earlier. One of the tree hints is that the player's mother, Queen Remy, kept a ruby charm. So using the Ruby Charm somehow proves that I'm the son of the queen, which led Martel to upgrade my sword. He then asked that I help his pigeon, who seemed to be suffering from an ailment. The solution was to "hit" the poor creature, which caused it to lay an egg, called the "W egg" for some reason, which I took. In these situations, I always wonder whether the story elements and puzzle solutions make sense in the original Japanese, or if you know Japanese tropes, or whether they were just as bizarre in the Japanese release.

       

I also wonder about the language. The translation isn't laughable, but it occasionally leaves out an article, or mangles a plural, or uses a word or phrase that just doesn't work right. It's hard to believe that such issues were impossible to detect and fix; it would have required the input of only a couple of English-fluent playtesters. Part of me wonders whether the slightly-off language isn't in fact a strategy, a way to repeatedly emphasize the "Japaneseness" of the game and thus excite the imaginations of players who in the 1980s were increasingly demonstrating a philia for all things Japanese.

      

In this world, the quality of something goes from "probite" to "3 star" to "extra" and to, finally, "adage."

           

Whatever the case, the game proceeds in a linear fashion. In Martel's domain, you make your way through a graveyard and down to the bottom of a well (the well has about a dozen screens; it's a big well). You open a chest, which releases a giant slug, who has the key to Shabow's domain. Shabow's domain is a bit larger than the first two, and you have to inspect every stone and tree for secret passages. One of these gets you behind a waterfall to Shabow's house.

   

Shabow says that you're not strong enough to wield the Sword of Hope (at least he did at my level) but says he'll help if you bring him a moon fragment. You have to find your way through a cave maze with lots of one-room passages to find the chest that has the moon fragment. It is guarded by a happy-looking "shadow." 

      

I'm going to wipe that grin off your face.

      

Shabow takes the moon fragment and then tells you he doesn't actually know where the Sword of Hope is. He raises the quality of your existing sword to "extra" (this is apparently better than "3-star") and asks that you talk to his pigeon ("look"), who has apparently fallen in love with you and thus happily hands over her "B egg" while imploring, "Please don't forget about me, ever."

   

A giant lizard in Shabow's domain has the key to Camu's domain. You've got to free a fairy and answer a bunch of random questions from her in the correct order to learn that a vampire back in Martel's domain has a unicorn horn that's keeping Camu locked in a pagoda. (I am proud to designate Hope the only RPG in which you free an enchantress from a pagoda by retrieving a unicorn horn from a vampire.) Camu is grateful for her release, upgrades your sword to "adage," and suggests you "open" her pigeon to get its egg; the pigeon naturally objects and instead just hands you the "R egg."

         

There were about 8 questions like this. I just answered randomly and reloaded until I finally got what I needed.

      

Returning to the Old Man with the eggs brings forth some revelations. First, it turns out that the sword you've been carrying all along is the Sword of Hope (also, confusingly, called "Wish"), but it needed the three eggs--representing wisdom, courage, and love--to unlock it. The Old Man then reveals that the millstone in his house conceals the way to the underground castle.

       

This sentence hurts my brain a bit.

      

You have to navigate an underground maze to get to the castle, and here you find the most obnoxious enemies in the game, druids. There are a few dozen monsters in the game, and mostly they're just interchangeable meat sacks, albeit some with spellcasting powers. They include giant moths, skeletons, goblins, apes, lizards, orcs, centipedes, and hags. Druids are so annoying because they have spells that drain your health and magic and give them directly to the druid. I died far more at their hands than from any other monster. Dying just resurrects you in the old man's house, so it's not a huge deal.

   

Eventually you find your way through the caverns to the castle gates. They're locked, but if you plant a seed pod in front of the gates, it grows into a vine that lets you climb into the second floor. You can meet the spirit of your mother if you use the ruby charm in her room. She tells you to search (actually, "hit") the throne for a secret--literally a spell called "Secret." Casting this in the den causes a mirror to turn into a portal, and you can use it to enter a "mirror world" that has the same layout as the castle, only backwards. In a room in this mirror world, you find a room with a painting on the wall (which you expose by hitting the wall). This causes King Hennesy to appear and attack you. Hennesy's death transitions directly into a combat with the dragon. Both are tough, and immune to magic, so you have to beat them by basically alternating physical attacks with healing spells.

        

Squaring off against my father in the final combat.

    

There was a bit in the final battle with the dragon that I didn't quite understand. I guess the dragon wounded my left arm, causing me to contemplate the birthmark there and to realize it looks something like a sword. Switching the Sword of Hope to my left hand activated some latent power that ensured that every attack made against the dragon was a critical hit. He still wasn't easy. 

     

Casting "RECMAX" during the dragon battle.

      

Once you kill them, the denouement has Hennesy awaken from his stupor. You return to the surface in triumph, the land is freed from darkness, the wizards lift the castle from underground, and everyone is happy again.

     

 

 

I admire how hard they tried with the graphics in the end-game screens.

            

What I didn't cover in the above narrative is all the grinding that has to happen between key boss encounters in each of the areas. I ended the game at Level 25 out of a maximum of 31 levels. Playing through the actual plot took about half the total time; the rest was spent on grinding. Grinding is slightly facilitated by an "auto" combat option that makes your choices for you. It's relatively intelligent. It mixes physical attacks with a variety of spells, heals you if your hit points get too low, and uses your consumable items if you need them to restore health or spell points. It's not great about detecting enemy immunities, but you can otherwise use it safely for most of the game's battles. This coupled with my emulator's "warp" mode meant that grinding was a bit easier for me than it would have been for a 1989 player. I also happily used save states instead of restoring with a code at every loss.

    

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

   

• 2 points for a silly game world.

• 3 points for character creation and development. There's not much complexity to it, but you do feel notably stronger after each level-up. You hit harder--eventually getting to the point where your melee attack affects all enemies--and you get a new powerful spell at each level.

• 2 points for NPCs. These are mostly the trees, which give you hints throughout the game.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The foes, as above, aren't generally anything special. Even bosses are just tougher versions of what you find on the map. (One element I like about good Japanese RPGs of this era is how boss fights usually change the rules in some way and require new tactics.)  I'd like to give more points for "encounters," and I would if there had been any logic to them.

• 3 points for magic and combat. You get a decent variety of damage, mass-damage, draining, and buffing spells, and I probably over-relied on auto-combat instead of exploring all their advantages and disadvantages.

      

I look for the right spell against a skeleton and an elemental.

      

• 2 point for equipment. Other than the usable items, you get sword and armor upgrades at fixed locations and events. I overlooked some of these.

• 1 point for the economy. Your 255 gold fills up fast. Generally, you always have enough for healing and maxing out your supply of items, which means the economy might as well have been dropped.

• 3 points for quests. There's a main quest with no choices, and I guess there are some side quests. I missed a few of them. I could have gotten some platinum armor if I'd solved a side quest involving a knight's ghost, and I could have gotten a fruit which would have fully refreshed my health and spell points in the final battles. There was also apparently a "spore" somewhere that would have had a chance of putting the king or dragon to sleep for a few rounds. I didn't strictly need any of this, but then again, I reloaded a lot in those final battles.

         

I forgot to recount this part, where you make the moon whole by climbing to the top of a tower and re-attaching a fragment.

      

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I'm really rating the platform in this category and not the specific game. I don't think the developers could have done any better with the graphic capabilities of the device (in fact, I think they tried pretty hard), and they created an interface that works well with the limited inputs, but I still didn't much like either. Sound effects are just some boops. Incessant music accompanies gameplay, so I muted the game for most of my time with it.

• 2 points for gameplay. Linear, not replayable, and a bit too simple, it at least didn't last very long. 

  

That gives a final score of 22. If this had been my first Game Boy game, I would have been unsurprised by this total, assuming the platform wasn't capable of a better RPG. Having experienced The Final Fantasy Legend and The Suffering of the Queen already, I would instead guess that this one was probably rushed so it would hit the market when it had little competition.

      

Notice how the title really only works with "sword." You'd never title a game Morning Star of Hope or Bec-de-Corbin of Hope or Sniper Rifle of Hope. There's just something about swords.

      

This is one of those games for which I might as well have just linked to someone else's contemporary review, said "ditto," and offered the GIMLET. Of course, I never know that until after I finish and then start scouting. Zenic Reverie, the "RPG Consoler," covered the game in 2014, and he offers a more detailed recounting of the narrative. He played it more honestly than I did (I let myself look at a walkthrough when I was stuck for more than 10 minutes or so) and thus got frustrated in more places. His review is peppered with phrases like "how did that make sense?" and he called it the "worst grind to date." Joseph Shaffer offered a similarly negative review in 2013 on Honest Gamers in which he also mentioned the nonsensical plot and puzzles and the grinding and backtracking. So it's not just me.

        

This was Kemco's first year for RPGs, although I think Ghost Lion for the NES was likely released earlier than this one. The company has a few dozen later console RPGs to its credit. They're still going strong as of this year. 

         

The shaman's "magic word" is the publisher and developer's names backward.

       

Why did I play this? It just came up on a random roll of the dice. I know that when I dip into console RPGs, many of my readers want me to play particular console RPGs, but I rather think my random method helps me get a sense of what the average was.