Hit and Miss – The Witch and the Hundred Knight: Revival Edition Review

The Witch and the Hundred Knight Revival Edition was all in all an interesting game, to say the least. With a plethora of bad language, threats, and overall good times pressing you on in the game, how could you possibly stay away? The game plays relatively smoothly (at least for the somewhat open exploration system it presents to you), but in the long run will The Witch and the Hundred Knight Revival Edition live up the excitement?

From a presentation standpoint this game was definitely an improvement from its PlayStation 3 predecessor. The music in the game sounded better thanks to the audio improvements they made through each stage and area. They also made the game look so much better from an artistic standpoint; the forests, castles, and even the desert all looks better, cleaner, and just that little bit of detail they added in made it look so much newer. Though one thing they didn’t seem to change much was the graphics of the game, they were improved but it didn’t feel like they wanted to put much into that.

The story of Witch and the Hundred Knight though was actually quite the chore to get through for the most part. You play as the Hundred Knight, a legendary warrior that legend says can destroy a mountain with a single glance… but when you’re about two feet tall and look more cuddly then fierce? It’s quite hard to believe. You were summoned by the great swamp witch Metallia to do her bidding and help spread her glorious swamp, but despite being around 100 years old, she acts like a pissed off teenager most of the time.

The hardest part of this RPG to get through for me were the narrative cut scenes. With most of them taking anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to get through, it can easily put even the most enthusiastic gamer to bed. When cut scenes and bland boring occasionally funny conversations between Metallia and the player take up what felt like over half the game, it became more of a chore to play the game while paying attention to the story.

That said, aside from thecut scenes and talking, I actually enjoyed playing this.While the actual gameplay was not very creative or unique, it was still a joy for me. You’re not given many abilities, and the abilities they do give you really aren’t worth using. I mean, you could place a bomb on the ground and wait the seven seconds for it to explode and hope the enemy stayed near it, praying it doesn’t go off near you instantly killing you, or you could use my preferred and favorite method of grabbing whatever pointy or big blunt object is with you, and bashing enemies over the head until they eventually drop experience for you. Then for fun you can continue to beat on their corpse until it vanishes. Even as fun as the hand-to-hand combat is in this game, nothing compares to perfectly dodging an attack and getting that slow motion effect; not only does it look really intense, but it was one of the few things in the game that made me feel good about playing it.

Another thing that was enjoyable was the five star tier weapons combo you could set up for yourself. You could use any setup for weapons in any order you prefer, but each weapon is given a one to five star symbol and putting them in numerical order gives you a power boost. For weapon choices you have a sword, hammer, spear, and staff. Each has a different effect on enemies. Some would be highly effective and some would not be. Finding that perfect order to take on a group of enemies that have been holding you up making you waste your Gigacals was a great joy. Lastly, speaking of the Gigacals? That was probably one of the most annoying parts of the entire gameplay process. Gigacals affected everything in the game, from fighting to moving to dodging… they were used for all of it, and basically every time you did something the number would start dropping from 100 to 0. Then, once you hit zero you were basically useless and defenseless because it gave you a condition where you lost 30% of your defense and attack, and would drain your health with every step. It looks like they just found a fancy way of renaming “time limit” because all Gigacals did was make it so that when you’re out, you have to warp out of and then back in to the stage to refill them. I think this is utterly pointless.

Overall my experience with The Witch and the Hundred Knight Revival Edition was hit and miss. There were parts of the game that were great and really fun to play, but there were just as many moments where I was bored and just wanted to turn the game off. As a huge fan of NIS and their work, I knew I was going to enjoy this game. But, when push came to shove, I was a little less than impressed. Though, despite all that, in the future I’m still very excited to see what else NIS has to show us.

Final Score: 7.0/10