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jp's Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut (DS)

[April 2, 2018 07:00:18 PM]

Finished this over the weekend (with a little help from gamefaqs, I'll admit - though, I should have used/tried the in-game hint system).

It's not a bad game - but in many places the writing and story seems incredibly...hmm..not so good. It's almost laughable at times - the main character, who is a tourist, just goes along on this treasure hunt for no good reason! And the other main character (Nico) starts off really interesting (ooh, something about her father, she's meeting people and they're getting killed, ooh, they bugged her apartment) but for the 2nd half of the game just sits in her apartment not doing anything!

As you would expect from an adventure game, the difficulty and challenge of the puzzles is all over the place, from "this makes sense" to "what, I don't understand the leaps of logic there". But, that's almost par for the course - especially for a game first-released in the mid-90s (though I played the director's cut rerelease that might be improved in some way?)

It's also weird to think about how this game pre-dates the "Templar conspiracy" stuff that kicked into high gear with the DaVinci Code. I wonder if this game started the trend or perhaps there was just "something in the water" at around the same time such that a bunch of creative people explored similar ideas and directions?

For some reason I thought this game was a sequel - but it turns out it's the first in the series! (yay! I appreciate playing the originals) and also I lost the voice acting (space constraints on the DS cart I'd guess). But still. Stuff I appreciated? The art, animation, and character designs. Story, not so much...it's a wee bit too hokey. Puzzles? Some more than others, but overall it wasn't terrible. There's a really long one at the end that was a drag - just in terms of time to do it once you knew exactly what to do. Sigh.

Oh, and there's some pretty good gags in the game. I got a special kick out of the hand-buzzer gag after having tried to use it with EVERYONE I ran across in the game.