Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors

Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors

The Dragon Quest series is one of the most popular and successful videogame franchises in Japan. While, to the western consciousness, Final Fantasy is the name synonymous with the JRPG, Dragon Quest is every bit as famous and revered in the country that birthed the genre. The games take a more light-hearted and cutesy approach to role play, presenting lush, green pastoral vistas, delightful monsters you’d sooner hug to death than cut up, and witty, knowing storylines set in medieval worlds of knights and castles.

Dragon Quest Swords is no different pushing the Wii graphically to create a beautiful world of bright colours, cheery monsters and miles and miles of sunlit plains. Likewise, the characters herein are funny and likeable, speaking their witty dialogue with believable (if pantomime) British accents that bring the world to life and draw you into an otherwise mediocre story about a queen who’s gone missing.

However, being a spin-off to the mainline series, the actual gameplay takes a rather different approach to the RPG than you might be expecting. For starters, the game is viewed entirely from your character’s eye view. Using the Wiimote’s d-pad control system you can move forwards and backwards, and turn left and right as you explore towns and dungeons. The game doesn’t support the nunchuck so there’s no sidestep button and you can’t look up and down so the control system feels a little dated and clunky, but generally this new view on the RPG is an interesting change, at least for a one-off.

Battles take a very different form to the usual RPG fare, and it’s here that the game gets its ‘Swords’ moniker. The Wiimote must be held like the hilt of a sword and used to quite literally swipe, slash, hack and stab at the enemies you encounter on your travels. The game approximates your real life movements into either diagonal, vertical or horizontal slashes on screen. By default your sword swipes are centred on the screen but, as enemies will run around the environment freely, you’ll need to lock onto them with the A-button. The control system works fairly well, even if the fact that the game doesn’t exactly recreate your motions on screen does break the spell a little.

You also have a shield which must be used to block attacks (and when fighting bosses you’ll need to parry and counter carefully to expose their weaknesses) and it’s even possible to hit arrows and other projectiles back at long range attackers. As you battle enemies you fill a gauge, which can be deployed to execute a kind of ‘summon’ style special move.

It’s a relatively short and sweet experience that doesn’t offer much in the way of character progression or customisation. Your three AI controlled teammates don’t add much to the experience (they simply cheer on from the sidelines in battle casting the odd spell here and there) and so this is a game best recommended to younger players or those looking for an RPG-lite to provide a few hours of characterful adventuring and not much more.

3 out of 5