A Grain of Enjoyment- Sands of Destruction Review

There was a period, during mid-to-late Nineties, when you couldn’t swing a stick in a Babbage’s without knocking over a shelf full of Japanese RPGs.  It was during this time that a lot of great, genre-defining games, like Final Fantasy VIII, Legend of Dragoon and Vagrant Story were released, but for every Chrono Trigger, there were a dozen half-hearted flops.  It is remembered as an era of innovation, but to be more accurate, it was also an era marred by a desire to abuse new tools, like FMV cut-scenes and 3D environments, without precedent or understanding of how these elements might affect the game.  Sands of Destruction evokes many of the same criticisms of 32-bit-era games, harkening back to the second-tier franchises that I enjoyed at the time, but 10 years later, I find myself much less forgiving.

Developed by ImageEpoch, Sands of Destruction is the brain child of Kyoki Mikage and Masao Kato, whose name has been attached to Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy VII and Xenogears, just to name a few.  The game serves as a spiritual successor to Xenogears, as it borrows heavily from the Xenogears battle system and many overarching story elements parallel events that occur in the 1998 Squaresoft classic.  The story revolves around a young boy named Kyrie, who discovers that he has a devastating power hidden deep within him, after he accidentally destroys his hometown.  A girl named Morte seeks him out in an attempt to convince him to destroy the world, in order to rid the planet of the Ferals, an overbearing race of beast-men that have been using humans as slaves for generations.  Morte takes the reluctant Kyrie on a tour of the world in the hopes that he will share her world view and help her to destroy the planet once and for all.

The premise is very unique, and I really appreciate that, however the delivery is downright vanilla.  Each character is a one-dimensional JRPG trope: the clumsy young protagonist, the violent but emotionally fragile female lead and the adorable but tough teddy-bear – if you’ve ever played a JRPG before, you can probably fill in the blanks from there.  The story is told through a variety of “cutscenes” where the player is subjected to a seemingly endless stream of voice-acted dialogue, which cannot be skipped, each line of which comes equipped with its own load time.  It sounds as if each line is being recited via satellite phone.  It would be far less agonizing if one were simply allowed to skip through the scenes at the speed of their own reading level, but the voice acted scenes are used as a delivery method for “quips,” which are randomly activated in-battle buffers.

Xenofans will find themselves pleasantly familiar with the pace of battles, although the interface will feel a little archaic, even in comparison to an old PlayStation RPG.  Each character has two attack types which can be chained together as a combo, provided that they have enough time slots available during their turn.  Everyone comes equipped with a variety of healing and attack abilities as well, which use SP, similar to traditional magic spells.  Between fights, the player can use points to decide which abilities and combos to upgrade, and to unlock new attacks.  The back of the box boasts “Dynamic Dual Screen Battles,” however, the vast majority of the game takes place on the bottom screen, with an occasional flying creature thrown up on the top screen to disorient you.  In reality, the top screen is generally forgotten.  Dungeon exploration feels reminiscent of early experiments with 3D dungeons on the Sega Saturn.  Each tap of the shoulder button turns the polygonal world 45 degrees around the Kyrie sprite, and most of the puzzles rely on this antiqued mechanic for hiding treasure boxes and switches.