Sands of Destruction

Sands of Destruction has much going for it, but it also has a lot working against it.

Where does one begin? I suppose with the positive. Sands of Destruction is crafted well from a visual and audio perspective. The environments are well-colored and adequately littered with admittedly repetitive decor, and the dungeon design borders on being a bit too maze-like, helped by the presence of the map. The characters are detailed sprites in a modest 3D environment, along the lines of the era of Wild Arms 2. The menus appear smooth and pretty and fit in well without appearing jarring or tacked on. The music is not unpleasant and almost reaches being memorable albeit only to a lesser extent. However, there are drawbacks to both the visuals and the audio which become apparent with a mindbogglingly low sprite framerate that make the game seem like an ancient port, and the features voice work which can't even be turned off during events so that you're subjected to a weak, lisping speech in the beginning of the game and the boisterous screeching of the female lead all throughout (more on her later). On the plus side, they're unable to speak over the music unless you turn the setting down a notch in the Options menu.

While the navigation remains at just slightly higher a notch than the Dragon Quest remakes for the DS, the battle system is thankfully more diverse. The menu is navigated with the ABXY buttons to avoid tedious scrolling, and it isn't too difficult to avoid getting lost here as long as you're paying attention to what the menu in the bottom right says. Players can execute combos during a character's turn with the help of two different attack buttons, but the trouble here is that there's no real cue when you can unleash the next attack in the chain. On the plus side, you can execute more than one action during a character's turn, for example to allow them to heal their allies and then go on the offensive. The out-of-battle menu navigation becomes perplexing, however, because it seems as though the developers forgot that this game is on a system with a touch screen. That's right, setting up your party, changing options, and saving the game (which thankfully allows for three slots) all take place on the top screen, so there's no need to make use of the DS's full technology, which they're already overlooking with the aforementioned low sprite framerate. And as for the cut scenes, they consist of seemingly long talky moments which you can't skip forward once you've read the next message because the game forces you to listen to its inherently subpar voicing.

Onto the bad, and that means the story. In an interview, the developers once stated that the story was unique in that your goal was to destroy the world rather than save it. If you bought this selling point, you're in for some disappointment. The mere changing of the ultimate goal does not necessarily alter the progression of events in the game. This isn't a bad thing, of course, as the game's story does retain an overall intrinsic flavor and buoyancy with the ethereal pseudo-European steampunk influence that's so trendy in Japanese media these days. On the other end of the spectrum, however, the characters, both the protagonists and the villains seem to be incredibly unmotivated. The player is thrust into the game's ennui and expected to believe the apartheid society where the humans and the ferals (slightly less humans, with some cuddly teddy bears and bunny rabbits) enjoy a tense-yet-contrived sense of prejudice for one another and oppression on the part of the apparently-ruling-class ferals upon the seemingly-oblivious humans. It's all a bit backwards, particularly in the game's morality which comes off more as a human-supremacy message, since the player is intended to sympathize with the humans who of course as a race have never been notorious for such atrocities as slavery, racism, and oppression (sarcasm). Of course, these sensibilities are all a bit typical of Japanese anime and JRPG which is not necessarily known for its appreciation of animals beyond cute kitties and the occasional mutt which usually fulfill mere "token" positions among the cast of any cartoon or video game. In other words, the game's backwards in more ways than the average player will be able to notice. Oh, and yes, there are some typoes in this game.

As far as the characters go, it's not far away enough. Like mentioned earlier, the motivation is weak. The leading male, Kyrie, follows a timid observer role which is not unwelcome until he has wholly contrived plot points literally rain down from the sky on him, rendering him merely a catalyst for plot holes to formulate around him. The female lead, Morte (often misspelled), looks like a cross between FF7's Tifa and Aeris and behaves like a sociopathic manicdepressive ("emo" if you will) wrapped up in an unconvincing cutesy albeit not unstylish package. Teenaged players will no doubt consider it blasphemy to confess that she amounts to little more than a bubbly, self-righteous, egotistical bitch with an unpoetic taste for torture that far seems to outrival the so-called "oppressive" rule of the bears and bunnies that make her want to blow up the whole world. It's silly in a way, but not a good way. What's worse is there's no justification for Kyrie's submission to follow this person who's clearly more psychotic than his anthropomorphic captors could ever hope to be, and it's implied early on that his only reason for doing so is that he's recently reached puberty.

Getting back to the positive aspects, the gameplay is quite fulfilling. Characters become stronger by leveling up and equipping gear as is the tried-and-true standard. They also buy into the growingly-popular system of ascribing points to their various skills to strengthen said skills as well as unlock new ones. It can be confusing at first what affect this has in battle, but what happens is as follows: The character has two attacks in battle. They can then chain these to different attacks they've learned during their combos. It's fairly simple yet also decisive, allowing for customizability as well as variability. It's a well-thought-out method of working from simplicity to attain these traits.

All in all, Sands of Destruction is not a bad game, but it does have many ill-advised aspects, some of which are predictably blind, others which should not be happening on a DS. Thankfully it does remain one of the more solid DS titles, and if you don't feel guilty about shameless animal abuse and reverse racism and know how to contain your self-destructive urges such as through the production of bad poetry, then you too can enjoy this game. Just try to fight your way around the heavy levels of randomness and characters dropping in without earning the player's respect first.

Levels of Wapaneseness: Dangerous
Gameplay: Quite Decent
Story: Ugh