The Witch and the Hundred Knight Review - Bewitching

NIS America have been faithfully bringing us some of the most niche and unusual games Japan has to offer for years now and The Witch and the Hundred Knight is just another gem in the collection.

A 3D dungeon crawler RPG, bursting with personality and a nice action-combat system, is one of the better dungeon crawlers of recent memory.

 

The premise is simple enough; you - The Hundred Knight - are summoned by the Swamp Witch Metallia to help her turn the known world into her swamp so she may roam it as its ruler. This perspective gives the game a nice juxtaposition when compared to most RPGs, and knowing that I was in fact helping the “bad guys” made the game feel like a truly refreshing experience. Metallia and her assistant - Arlecchino - are both instantly likable characters. Metallia is bratty yet endearing, whilst Arlecchino is sarcastic and a bit of a mystery man.

Combat is performed through five actions, and each action can be assigned its own weapon. The attack button pressed once will perform with your first weapon, pressed five times and it will cycle through each weapon equipped, with bonuses given to damage if you equip the correct weapon ranks. Combat is all action-based and real time, with you dodging around enemies and swinging whenever you have an opportunity. Certain enemies will be strong against physical damage or certain types of damage, forcing you to constantly reassess your equipment and strategy.

The storyline is mysterious and intriguing enough to keep playing, even when the game can at times become frustrating. Side-characters can seemingly be introduced and done away with quite quickly, but it keeps the pace of the game quite speedy.

In dungeons you’re primarily tasked with heading to Pillars to destroy, which act as checkpoints and help Metallia spread her swamp. Larger Pillars are guarded by bosses, which are often lots of fun to battle with.

Away from all these positives notes, gameplay can get repetitive quite quickly. The combat doesn’t hold attention for as long as you’d like, for as long as you’re dodging enemies and avoiding attacks it’s fun and frantic, but once you have weapons stronger than the area or can easily defeat enemies from a distance the combat loses much of its thrill. There’s also an “Invasion” mechanic where you can invade houses of villagers to earn an item, but it requires only to be a certain level, no real skill or involvement is required. Although towns and villages are very pretty, they’re actually quite shallow areas that you pass through quickly.

But those points do not detract from what the game does so well, and that’s a cute JRPG storyline wrapped in an actiony-dungeon crawler skin. And it’s a good fit!

Graphics stay interesting from start to finish. You end up staring at the floor for most of the time, as you’d expect from a top-down dungeon crawler with limited camera movement, but the floor is actually detailed everywhere. Patterns and designs coat the floor, with magical patterns being formed by tree roots and glowing radioactive swamp waters to be seen everywhere. There’s plenty of detail everywhere to be seen.

Audio is a strong point for this game, as the voice acting is mostly fantastic and the backing music is something else entirely. The songs are bursting with more personality than almost anything else in this already hugely endearing title. They have an atmosphere which could be seen as creepy or childish, but somehow perfectly suit the personality of Metallia.