Okay, so I finally beat Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords on Nintendo DS, and here are my thoughts.
I'll just open up by saying that I loved every second of this game and I'm sad that I finished it. It's a wonderful concept and I'm glad to see that this unique game became such a hit. However, there are shortcomings that I can't overlook. I'm going to try and focus on stuff that hasn't been covered ad-nauseum by gaming sites, so I won't carp about the music (it's awful), the writing (it's awful), or the glitches (uncommon but awful).
For one thing, it's simply way too easy to break the game for yourself in the last chapter. By that I mean, at around Level 40 (max is 50), I was able to kill most monsters with almost all my Life Points remaining. Winning in one or two turns wasn't uncommon. Even set to Hard, the game was a breeze. I ended up un-equipping my forged items in order to actually play the game. The only place these items were necessary were sieging some particularly difficult cities and the final boss. Even then, I was able to take out the final boss on my second try with almost all my LP remaining (first attempt, I got poor drops and died quickly).
I already knew not to expect any end-game content, but it was still disappointing. The game is plenty long, but most of that length comes from the fact that most battles take 5-10 minutes. Outside of battle, I imagine the game time is less than an hour. It would've been very easy to lengthen this game with some sort of end-game area full of monsters with powerful abilities and equipment.
This is exacerbated by the fact that when you boot the game up, you're greeted by a vast, beautiful hand-drawn map with only your small country charted. Unfortunately, most of it will remain uncharted. I'm willing to estimate that about 60% of the world map is actually un-explorable. I don't know if it simply didn't occur to the designers that having a vast world map that you can't even explore would be incredibly disappointing, but it was to me. Using the world map to guess how much more of the game I had left, I thought I was only halfway through. In reality, I was near the end. The entire left side of the map is empty, along with an empty island in the middle of the map teasing. Would've been a perfect place to put some end-game content ...
The RPG aspects are ultimately what make this game so fulfilling, but there is definitely room for improvement in them. When you level up, you gain four skill points to allocate to different attributes. Unfortunately, by the time you hit the level cap you will be lucky to have one skill at Level 100. Skills max out at Level 256, which means that the only way to max out skills is to spend absurd amounts of money. There's nothing to use these skills against though, so I guess it doesn't matter.
The lack of online multiplayer in the DS version seems like a pretty glaring oversight. None of the reviews I read seemed to point this out, which I found odd considering the game isn't exactly ancient. Then again, I don't think the studio expected the game to be so successful. As far as I can tell, the DS version of the sequel doesn't seem to have online multiplayer either.
It's just come to my attention that XBOX 360 version of Puzzle Quest has an expansion pack. Well, time to get a 360 I guess.
It's a shame they didn't see fit to release some sort of add-on for the DS as a GBA cart or something.
Also annoying is that there are only two save slots in the DS version, but there are four classes. If you want to play as them all, you'll be deleting a file.
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix comes out this month and I'll definitely be picking it up when I can. I'm not too crazy about the space theme, though, and I'm not sure how I feel about the hexagonal playing field. But, if it's half as addictive as this game was, it'll be worth it.
Now, to start a new file as a different class ...
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