0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Brave Sword

     

Brave Sword is a relatively unknown and hard to find strategy role playing game, developed and published by Sammy Studios. The game was released exclusively on the Playstation in Japan, on the 19^th of October 2000. Sadly information on this game is hard to come by so this entry in the 0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games may be a little light.

Notable people who worked on the game, Yasuo Takagi who was the Director of the game went on to be the Game Designer for Wii Play Motion in 2011. He was a Design Planner for the 2012 released Dillon’s Rolling Western and most recently work on the Programme Scripting for Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash, an action puzzle game for the Nintendo 3DS.

Kazuhisa Tamura who worked as a Designer on Brave Sword went to work on the 2003 released Chaos Legion working as a Character Modeller. Three years later Tamura was working at Capcom as a Motion Designer for the 2006 released Onimusha Dawn of Dreams.

Brave Sword takes place in the land of Memphis, as you join Noel and Mary in their quest to purge the land of an ancient evil. The game opens with the player able to choose between either a male of female protagonist, both of these characters allow the player to customise them. The player will also be assisted by another two adventurers Mary and Los.

The player begins his quest in a town, this town allows the player to buy weapons, items and armor, as well as traverse the town looking for new quests to earn gold which is used to be equipment, the game used two view points, the first is while exploring towns with the camera switching to a first person perspective. When out on missions or when in combat the camera view switches to a 3^rd person perspective.

When interacting with NPC’s in the game conversations are carried out like a visual novel, with a still screen of the character you are talking to with a speech text bubble at the bottom on of the screen. The game has two controls schemes, one for when you are adventuring and another for when on a mission.

When adventuring the D-Pad is used to move between the various actions you can take, the circle button is used to confirm the action, while the X button will cancel the action. When on a mission the D-Pad has several uses, the first is moving between actions, the second when a character in your party is selected you will be able to move a cursor, this cursor is used to decide which enemy that particular character will attack.

When in combat the game uses a turn based combat system with a third person camera perspective from directly behind your characters. Once a character has had their turn a wait sign will appear over their weapon symbol at the top of the screen. Next to this weapon symbol the characters HP and FP bars, these decrease from right to left, above these are the characters names

In addition to attacking enemies the player can also direct the characters to move to a different place, defend, attack, increase or decrease their speed. The third use for the D-Pad is to manoeuvre the camera around when you don’t have a character selected, if you have a character selected the camera will not move. Any actions that are selected can be cancelled with the X button.

Selecting actions is done with the Circle button, this button is also used to access the menu actions. When in combat the player can increase the speed of a character by hitting the Square button. Switching between characters can be done by hitting either the L1 or R1 shoulder buttons.

The player can also zoom in and out of the action by hitting R2 to zoom in, while L2 will zoom out the camera. The games option menu can be access with the select button. The game also supports the Duel Shock controller and vibration function. Sadly this is all the information I have been able to find on the game.

This game being a quite obscure and Japanese only released game critic reviews for it are none existent. As a result we will head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings, but sadly we find that the game has have little attention with just one user from the seven that own the game rating it.

Taking a look at this single users rating we find they rated the game at a solid 3.5/5, this user also rated the games difficulty, with the user rating the games having just the right difficulty level. Finally we have the game overall lifespan, with this single user spending around 40 hours with the game.

We also find the play statistics, this is user that have completed the game or otherwise, here we actually find two users rating this category, with one user completing the game, while the second tried the game but sadly did not complete it.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, where unsurprisingly this relatively obscure and Japanese only release is not listed on the site. The same goes for Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com, so we head over to Amazon.com in the hopes of finding at least one copy of the game listed.

Sadly even Amazon.com does not even have the game listed, the same goes for the co.uk and co.jp versions of the site as well. So as a last hope we must go to ebay.com, where we finally do find a copy of the game available.

This copy which ships from Japan has an asking price of $34.59 if you are in the United States. This copy comes complete and is in good overall condition, the game also comes with free international economy shipping This copy of the game is only shipped to specific areas of the world. At the time of writing this is the only copy available on ebay.com.

  

Written by

P J Gibbon