Nippon Ichi Software is the travelling carnival of videogame publishers. Silly claims require credible evidence, and no other North American publisher can boast of a lineup matching the likes Z.H.P.: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman, Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?, and all the Disgaea you can handle. Like your favorite carnival-barking provocateur, their gifts carry a certain danger of mind (if not reasonable physical threat), but come loaded with good, old-fashion fun to back up any outrageous claims. They’re good because they’re crazy, and they’re crazy because they’re good. Disgaea et al essentially follow the same formula.
Nevertheless, The Witch and the Hundred Knight, an action-RPG from the Disgaea team, has me at a loss. It pulls my critical brain in so many different directions that I’ve developed a headache the other two times I sat down to write this review. The Witch and the Hundred Knight has so many great ideas but doesn’t seem concerned in nurturing any one of them. A localization too manic to effectively produce satire and too mean-spirited to have a durable sense of humor also fails to help its cause. The Witch and the Hundred Knight is probably par for the course in its efforts to thoroughly confuse the average thirty-year-old white guy game reviewer, but at the same time maybe it’s also expertly designed for NIS diehards. I have no idea, really, but here’s some context to go along with the usual route of criticism.
The Witch and the Hundred Knight’s titular characters are the stars of the show. Metallia is a kind-of-immortal witch who dreams of expanding her swamp’s reach to swampify every other visible piece of land. The Hundred Knight – that’s you – is her tool for expansion. As the Hundred Knight you’re mostly a pawn in Metallia’s escalating series of insane schemes, but occasionally you’re granted an opportunity to speak your mind. You can confirm, deny, doubt, or ignore as a response to questions directed your way. You can’t, however, stop Metallia from engaging in lengthy, inane diatribes interlaced between every ten or so minutes of gameplay. It’s one thing to broadcast plot and personality, but another entirely to ramble on and on in a vain attempt to combine humor with storytelling.
Early on, Metallia openly declares herself one of the more heinous figures in interactive fiction. Within the first few hours of the game she transforms her mother into a rat and then summons other male rats to have sex with her visibly frightened now-rat mother. Metallia then cackles as she commands the rats to produce brothers and sisters for her by, you know, raping her mother. Later, Metallia verbally berates an otherwise innocent character, strips her naked, ties her up, and says, “I think your stupid tits are each the size of a whole cooked turkey.” Regardless of the inevitable redemptive arc this is setting up, Metallia’s dialogue is often a gross display of pure shock writing and rampant immaturity. It’s revolting.
I have no problem with profanity. I love profanity. The Witch and the Hundred Knight also loves profanity, but wields that mighty sword with the shaky grasp of naive amateur. Beginning every other sentence with, “The hell…” is an effective way to declare a complete misunderstanding of the power and potential of cursing. Couple this with a narrative that seems intent on generating its plot through schadenfreude and you’re left with a miserable tale of pointless vulgarity and mean-spiriting attempts at humor. The worst part is there could have been something interesting with the Hundred Knight’s unquestioned obedience to his delusional master, but The Witch and the Hundred Knight quickly dispels any attempt at subtlety or a long-con transition to sympathy. There’s nothing below the surface.
With a narrative born six feet under, it’s a compliment to say the gameplay at least means well. The Witch and the Hundred Knight’s is founded on tried and true principles of action-role-playing-games. From an isometric point of view, the all-consuming focus is on finding and unlocking marked “pillars” throughout each map and bashing through any bad guys along the way. Each new area ends with a boss battle and contains plenty of, in a manner of speaking, checkpoints along the way. It doesn’t take long for The Witch and the Hundred Knight to carve a groove of clearing out a map, fighting a boss, enduring a cut-scene, saving your game at the de-facto base, and repeating until the credits roll. It’s a bit like Adol’s task of mapping the forest in Ys: Memories of Celceta, albeit without the fun-loving nature of Falcom’s action-RPG stable.
There’s a lot to absorb through the seemingly simple interface. Ostensibly bashing guys until your action meter is drained soon reveals itself to be a chain-based loop of divergent attacks. Weapons are not only separated in blunt, slash, and magic but also stack five at a time alongside their chain-rating and can deal double-damage if linked properly. Hundred Knight also has the ability to switch between different classes called facets, and, in addition to leveling up those specific classes, can also temporarily level-up mid-level by earning and spending grade points. You also can’t forget about bonus points, which, assuming you can hang around a level long enough, grant extra items upon finishing or teleporting out of a level. There’s also another meter in the bottom right hand corner and I have no idea what it’s for.
The only one of Hundred Knight’s meters that requires constant attention is the GigaCal percentage. GigaCal’s govern Hundred Knight’s entire energy output; they burn faster when the replenish his life, switch over to a different facet, or respawn Hundred Knight back at the last-visited pillar. If the GigaCal meter reaches zero Hundred Knight is effectively useless, transitioning to a wandering shell of himself desperately in search of a way to exit the level with loot intact. At the generous mini-pillars throughout each level you can elect to return to base and keep all your earned experience and loot (and miss out on the goodies afforded through raising your class and bonus items), but at least you won’t lose all of the experience you earned along the way.
We’re not done yet. Tochka’s are extra magic abilities summoned to either remove artificial barriers or add a bit of finesse to your attack loadout. Hundred Knight can, for example, summon a large bomb for an AOE attack or line up a circle to devour weakened enemies and convert them into items. Earned items (and consumed enemies, which can replenish some GigaCals) take up space in Hundred Knight’s stomach, which is essentially an item storage area unloaded upon a successful level exit. Not last but certainly the last I’ll take the time to detail, there’s also a temporary time-slowing maneuver, lifted from Bayonetta, if Hundred Knight dodges out of the way of an attack at the last possible second.
There are a lot of different ideas in play here. Ambition is worthy of admiration, but execution is where it matters in the minds of a prospective audience. In this regard The Witch and the Hundred Knight feels like a standard action-RPG with a ton of unnecessary systems layered through a relatively simple foundation. Unless you’re a perfectionist or pride yourself on personal efficiency, there’s often no need to make use of the multitude of systems at play. By collecting loot normally and bailing out of maps on the occasion when my GigaCals got a little too low, I was able to cruise through the game with ease. Bosses presented a bit of a problem as each had some minor gimmick to exploit as their guard was weakened, but even that particular challenge was buoyed by generous checkpoints.
If there’s one particular aspect of The Witch and the Hundred Knight that can speak for the entire game, it’s the half-baked visit/raid option inside towns. Towns are a frequent part of Hundred Knight’s excursions, and each time he’s prompted to either visit a residence or raid it for goodies. Raid success is based on his level against that particular establishment’s level, with the victor taking the spoils. This is intended to ruin Hundred Knight’s standing with the townsfolk and result in increased shop prices, but, really, there’s not much in the shops with an equivalent that can’t be earned in the field. The wandering townsfolk don’t seem to mind either. As is frequently the case with The Witch and the Hundred Knight, the idea is interesting, but it’s just there without cause or concern for its role in the finished product.
Not even the visual package can get a pass without some weird qualification. It’s not fair to expect the world from a lower-budget game, but one should expect a retail product to keep pace with PlayStation 3 launch software. Still, The Witch and the Hundred Knight has a rustic antiquity about it, calling back to mind a reliance on obscene motion blur and nutty art direction in place of true technical prowess. The playful and free-wheeling musical score, showing no shame in its lack of variety, succeeds in painting an atmosphere of pure hysteria. It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d listen to in world where a wacky witch is obsessed with covering the world in swamps, if that makes any sort of sense.
I’ve been sort of harsh on The Witch and the Hundred Knight, but it’s not without its bright spots. I did, after all, keep playing it hours past its numerous offenses. Merely playing the game isn’t bad, per say, but rather a pedestrian experience and incapable of holding attention for the long haul. While I think the narrative and the delivery of said narrative are a scourge upon the medium I also have to admire the utter indifference of its existence. NIS is all-in here, and the theoretical audience destined to devour it is going to buy The Witch and the Hundred Knight regardless of this or any other review. Everyone else would do well to keep their distance.
