Threads of Fate

Okay, so next up on the list of games to review is… Threads of Fate! Woohoo! Wait, you’ve never heard of it? It’s also know as Dewprism. Still no? Well, I guess there’s some good reasons for that. It came out around the same time as Chrono Cross, and so it might have slipped under some people’s radars. That said, it does have its own issues. Without further ado, let’s dive into this under-appreciated action RPG.

One of the interesting features of this game is that you have two choices of main characters. Rue’s a guy on a quest to save someone very important to him, possessing bizarre shapechanging powers. Mint’s on a quest for revenge and world domination. Together, they fight crime! Both characters have some pretty interesting mechanics. Rue’s monster transformations drive his puzzling, and Mint uses magic spells to the same effect. Rue actually stands out a little as being on the boring side, compared to all the energetic characters in the game, which can be a little annoying. You kinda don’t care about Rue at all. Mint, on the other hand, is not a sympathetic character, but she’s still pretty fun in the way she acts. There’s a host of quirky characters in the background of this game, and you get to know a fair number of them pretty well, even some characters that might seem like fairly generic npcs. Overall, the characters immerse you in the game world, which is usually a plus.

The gameplay is super simple. Equipment is the only thing that increases defense and attack. Once you get the next piece, the old one is removed from your inventory. You level up the other two statistics hp and mp, by losing the relevant point. Get damaged to level up hp, use magic to level up mp. For an RPG, that’s about as simple as it gets. In a long game, that could really get annoying.

For better or for worse, Threads of Fate is not a long game. It’s really short for an RPG. Reeeeally short. I beat it twice in 18 hours, and I’m not one to speed run or skip side quests and stuff. Threads of Fate barely has any side quests, and I think a good speed runner could get through in about 4 hours, most of which would be dialogue. It’s a good thing that the game encourages you to play through twice, because otherwise this game would be too short by half. On the sliding scale from  “Do not WAAAANT!” to “The Only RPG you’ll ever need,” this guy clocks in at about “twice through, play it again for kicks, then to the dust bunnies with it.” It’s fun, even though Mint and Rue’s storylines don’t have much difference in their dungeons or anything, and the two paths together just about make up one very short RPG.

Don’t worry though. It’s also a platformer! Yay, horrible camera angles, precision jumping, and blind leaps! Seriously, I died more times my first time playing the game from missing jumps and running out of hp than from anything else. Most bosses only took one try. The platforming’s some of the toughest stuff in the game, because it’s not very polished.

Graphics? Who cares? It’s an RPG, graphics seldom make much difference there, I’m not gonna talk about it. That’s it. Game over.

My conclusion? Well, this game is not as good as some RPGs. It feels rushed, since Rue’s shapechanging mechanics are much less complicated and mostly recycle the monster specs, as compared to Mint’s magic, which has a whole system of colors and shapes. It’s almost like the developers finished Mint’s half of the game, called it good, but then realized that the game was too short, and inserted Rue’s section at the last minute. The simplicity of the RPG system attached to the game supports this reading. But, on the other hand, the well developed characters, and significant interpersonal relations argue for a well planned game, if one that was planned to have a small scope. My numerical rating for this game is 7.2. It’s pretty fun while it lasts, and you’ll want to charge right into the second playthrough, but even when you’re done with that, it leaves you wanting more, while at the same time knowing that it couldn’t deliver a better product if it did give you more of the same. It's not a great technical accomplishment, and the leveling up would get really old over a longer game, but it's just short enough a game that these technically inferior aspects don't detract too much from the game, but the game is too short, which is another problem.

Fun Fact: Ken Akamatsu was briefly engaged to do a manga adaptation of this game, which, when the game didn’t sell well, got repurposed into Negima!

Quick Tip: Don’t sell anything “Legendary.” If you give them all to the barkeep, he’ll make you power-ups, at the (relatively) low cost of around 50 of a certain monster coin.

If you liked this game, you might want to try playing one of these games. Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2 are very similar in their basic combat set-up, and Sora handles quite a bit like Rue. Dual Hearts has a nice, encapsulated world like in Threads of Fate, and both are action-RPGs with a fairly simple level-up process.