Dark Law: Meaning of Death for SFC

Image: MobyGames

Dark Law: Meaning of Death

A tale of two games being mashed together

Genre: rpg - japanese

Publisher: ASCII Entertainment

Year: 1997

System: SFC

Gameplay Score: 1

Gameplay Notes:

What a weird mix of gameplay. Movement feels good. It's fast and feels almost like an action RPG. Terranigma comes to mind. However, the way you interact with the environment is awkward, as you can press A, X, or Y to interact and doing so with almost anything displays some text. Most of this is useless, but certain events are only triggered by interacting with certain items so you have to walk around clicking on everything. Weird. Then there's the town. This looks and feels like a completely different game. You leave the overhead Zelda-esque view and navigate via a first-person view that is locked in place. Wait, it's a dungeon crawler now? And traversal is via a menu where you choose the building you want to enter (castle, shop, pub, arms, etc). Again, weird. Finally, dungeons and combat are back in the overhead view. Enemies appear right on the screen, Chrono Trigger style, but with seriously awful loading time. At first I thought the game had crashed but nope, there's a good 5 seconds or more where the game is loading in and out of a battle. These load times are frequent in other places as well. Combat is truly awful. Some of the worst I've seen. It's turn based but you move around freely in the combat zone. Actually attacking is hard to trigger. You have to stand directly next to an enemy and half the time it makes you defend rather than attack. It's horribly imprecise. This is worse hit detection than Secret of Mana. Oh and enemies will wreck you in no time.

Level Design Score: 1

Level Design Notes:

Get ready to press A a lot. I was stuck on the first screen for half an hour before I finally found a walkthrough. That was no help. I had to watch a YT video to see that I had to try to interact with a specific rock at the bottom right of the page. Nothing that needs to be interacted with looks like it can be. Terrible visual language. It appears to be a linear story with your four blank slate characters that you can recruit in the first town (D&D style). After completing the first task I had no idea what to do next so I went to a cave and was soundly defeated by a pack of slimes. Ugh, I haven't been so humiliated since Super Hydlide.

Theme Score: 2

Theme Notes:

I'm intrigued by the story and setting (set up in an awesome opening cutscene) but the rest of the game is tonally all over the place. The cutscene sets the stage for an epic fantasy, the first area feels like a light hearted Zelda game, monsters attack to sour the mood, and then you go to the town that feels like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. My head is spinning. Pick a vibe guys.

Art Style Score: 2

Art Style Notes:

Huge HUD takes up the bottom third of the screen. The sprites and artwork in the overhead areas is quite good, despite the small viewport. Battles are terrible, despite using the same artwork. Animation is non existent the aforementioned loading happens between each turn, making the game look even worse. The graphics in town are abominations of rendered polygonal art. Again, it looks like a different game.

Audio Score: 2

Audio Notes:

I'll say it again, the overhead and town sections feel like two completely different games. The music and sounds in the overhead sections are ethereal and atmospheric, which the sound in town feels like it was ripped from a stage select in a Barbie game. There is some good stuff here, but the dichotomy between these two areas is incredibly jarring.

Overall Score: 25

Review ID: 1585