Brandish: The Dark Revenant

Yes, it took me about seven months to finish Brandish: The Dark Revenant. In my defense, however, I've been adding games and other material to my review schedule almost constantly since January. And I've been trying to balance my currently hectic home-life while playing four games at once and putting out a review every Sunday. The good thing is that I haven't missed more than one or two weeks of reviews, and I also haven't missed two weeks in a row.
The unfortunate thing is that it was about two months between my Legend of Zelda review and part 2 of my Fire Emblem Awakening review. (Stay tuned for June of 2016 when I finally finish that game) There were far too many movie reviews and not nearly enough game reviews this year. I'd like to try and fix that if I can.
I know I say that immediately following a movie review, but the thing about that was: A) It was a recent release. B) I hadn't finished Brandish yet. and C) I'm the Editor in Chief around this corner of the internet, and I decide what goes out on this site. I'm the admin, so I don't have to explain it!
Ha. Ha ha. Let me know if that was funny.
Anyways, let's start talking about the game.
As I mentioned in the first episode of my Let's Play series, Brandish: The Dark Revenant is a PSP remake of the 1991 NEC PC-9801 and FM Towns game by Nihon Falcom titled Brandish: Unlock The Underworld. It was ported to the TurboGrafx-CD/PC Engine CD-ROM² on June 17th of 1994, and then for the SNES/Super Famicom on the 25th of June in 1994 in Japan and in February in The United States.
Then you have this game. Released for the PSP on March 19th, 2009 in Japan and on January 13th this year in America (And still no release date for Europe or Australia) The Dark Revenant was developed by Nihon Falcom, and published by XSeed (at least in the NTSC regions).
The very first issue is the fact that The Dark Revenant only got a real release in Japan. Everyone else got a PSN release, unfortunately.
Not that I can really blame XSeed, considering their financial situation and the need to turn a profit off of their projects, and it's hard to do that when you're having to spend money pressing discs for a PSP game, when it's easier to try and bank on the combined audiences of the Vita and the PSP.
That doesn't mean I'm any less disappointed we didn't get a real release, nor does it excuse the lack of a European PSN release at this times.
Now, as you can tell, there was a massive gulf between the Japanese release-date for this game and the American one. As best I can tell, this was due in-part to a struggle between Atlus and XSeed as to who would be localizing the game, which apparently lasted until sometime in 2013. And the release was announced at E3 2014, and then the game was finally released in 2015.
Apparently Atlus was working on their Brandish: The Dark Revenant English release sometime between the initial release of the game in 2008 and the budget re-release in 2010. One must wonder how far they got, and if any prototype units of the Atlus production exist.
Anyways, now that we've finished talking about the really boring stuff that I find interesting, let's talk about the game itself.
Brandish: The Dark Revenant is an action-RPG for Sony's PSP handheld gaming system that was recklessly and needlessly abandoned by Sony in a rush to release the Vita when there were still plenty of games being developed and localized for it. I blame Sony for the lack of physical releases outside of Japan for a lot of PSP games.
But then again, pretty much everything about the eighth generation of systems is based on reckless and needless abandoning of technology everyone has in favor of overly expensive and imperfect new technology that everyone wants to like, but can't, because they've ditched backwards and sideways compatibility between generations and platforms for absolutely no reason.
No, instead we've gotten further into the depths of digital distribution hell, because it's cheaper to publish games on PSN, Nintendo eShop, Steam, or XBLA than it is to put out a real game. Instead of, you know, putting out a bunch of games in a single physical collection like we used to. All the way back to the freaking SNES!

So, you play as an adventurer named Ares Toraernos, who is pursued by Dela Delon, a sorceress who is out for Ares' blood because he killed her master who was apparently some evil sorcerer dude. None of this is actually mentioned on-screen, mind you. It's all stuff that I've found out by reading the Wikipedia article. The lore you actually experience in the game is almost entirely centered around the dungeon you fall into.
So in the opening sequence of the game you get a massive lore-dump about a kingdom called Vittoria, and a king who wanted to harness the power of a magical dragon who was the guardian of the land. The guardian dragon shuts the king away in the tower at the center of the kingdom and builds an entire planet on top of the rest of the kingdom and then pisses off to go do something else.
A thousand years later, Ares and Dela do battle over a thin part of the planets crust. Dela busts a hole in the surface of the planet, and both of them fall down a rather ridiculous height to the surface of the original planet.
Seriously, the amount of levels that you climb in this game have to add up to freaking miles. But, then again, falling between levels in this game doesn't damage you, so I suppose it makes sense from a mechanics perspective as opposed to a logical sense.

Anyways, I wound up taking 64,317 steps in my playthrough. Assuming each step is about five feet (Using Dungeons and Dragons logic to divide up the maps into 5 foot squares) that means that I walked about 60 miles and 1,595 yards in my entire playthrough.
Sounds like a lot, but think about this. From the dialogue, I figure the game must take place over the course of a few years at least. And considering I walk at least a mile a day via excercise alone, that adds up to over 365 miles a year at the very least. So that opens up a rather strange plot-hole, wherein the estimated length of travel doesn't match up with the apparent time-scale, even taking into account the amount of puzzles you have to solve.

Here's the other weird thing. You meet NPC's and other obviously sentient creatures that have been living in this weird underworld for centuries, but none of them have managed to get to the surface. And you can tell that because all of the traps and puzzles in your way haven't been set-off or solved, respectively. Even if you assume that people haven't been living here for the full thousand years it's been sealed off, human-beings have been living there long enough that they should have figured out how to get through these puzzles by sheer accident. And I know how tough some of the monsters have to be, but what are the odds that literally nobody of our prowess has fallen into Vittoria in the past thousand years and survived long enough to solve all the puzzles?
So the set-up could use some work. For instance, if they'd reduced the amount of time between when the story starts and when the actual game starts. Or if they'd mentioned something about Vittoria changing its layout every now and again.
Then again, maybe they did and I just forgot. It's a bloody long game, and I took a bloody long time to finish it.
So anyways, the controls consist of using the L and R buttons to rotate, the directional-pad to move, the X button to jump, circle to attack, triangle as the general action button, and square to open your inventory. Select lets your rest to regain your health and mana, and start to pause the game, save, view the map, view your status, configure the controls, and quit to the main menu.
You configuration options include changing whether your stats display all the time, whether camera rotation is normal or inverted, and the ability to swap the functions of the L/R buttons and left and right on the D-pad.
There are also three Zelda-style quick-select slots, for three items. Except it's implemented a lot worst than it was in Ocarina of Time. You can sometimes accidentally activate an item when you're trying to attack or block, and that tended to get me killed in my playthrough.
Here's the thing, there's no dedicated block button in the game. Circle is block when you're not in immediate range of an enemy, it's attack when you're adjacent to an enemy, and it's the use key when you're holding a direction on the analog stick. That's a fairly big issue when you're trying to block a ranged attack after having used an item and you accidentally use that item again. So depending on what item you were using, you could either waste a potion, waste some mana, or waste a valuable item, on top of possibly getting yourself killed.

You can also change the volume of the music and sound-effects, as well as changing the music between the music composed for the remake, or the original music.
Personally I prefer the remake music, because the original music seems to lack much variety.
That's not to say that the remake music didn't get on my nerves eventually. Because it does. There's not enough music in the game to keep me from tiring of it, and had I not been Let's Playing the game for my YouTube channel, I would have been listening to a podcast or just different music while I was playing, like I did for Fire Emblem Awakening and Story of Seasons. That's not to say the music is bad, Falcom just didn't put enough variety into the music, especially considering that there seems to be less musical tracks than there are levels.
There's a reason why Sonic The Hedgehog had a new song for every level, because the same song played over and over gets old fast.
So, the level-design can be a bit irritating at times, and the puzzles are sometimes a pain to solve too. A member of the XSeed localization team said that The Dark Revenant was like a combination of Dark Souls and Etrian Odyssey on the official blog, and I can see why. There's a heavy focus on mapping out each level, like in Etrian Odyssey. The whole purpose of mapping out each level is so you can get an item at the end of each level, but the items aren't anything special, and I usually wound up leaving the levels partially unexplored at the end because I couldn't be bothered to traipse around the whole level again, because movement speed is pretty slow compared to the size of the levels.
Plus, I didn't do any backtracking because there's no fast-travel system.
The closest thing to a fast-travel function is a warp spell, which only lets you travel around on the same level that you're already on, which is helpful on some occasions, but I only remember using it a few times in the entire game. Plus, it's expensive, and you don't get it until about halfway through the game if I remember correctly.
Some of the bosses are fairly easy to beat, since enemies don't follow you out of the room they're in. You can easily go into the room, take a few shots at them, and then hightail it out of there. Then you rest, save the game, rinse and repeat. This is actually mentioned on the official XSeed blog, by the way.
This is a fairly decent tactic for most enemies, in fact. You clear out one room, open a new door and then stand in the doorway until an enemy starts to attack you.
This is especially useful when you're attempting to grind certain stats, like when you run into an enemy that jacks up your magical resistance when it hits you, or enemies that you get a lot of strength from hitting, or the like.
That is when the game doesn't just throw you into a locked room with a bunch of heavy-hitters, or if you don't stumble across a room full of ranged-hitters. In which case, you have to whip out the fireball spell and blast them.
Unless of course those monsters are immune to magic, in which case you gotta get into the room and hit them with your sword.

And there's this one spider-monster that spits web on you and freezes you in place that ambuses you out of nowhere at one point. It's immune to magic, and since you don't have a bow in this game (At least that I found, and I'm not about to play through a game this long more than once in the same year), magic is literally your only ranged attack. So you gotta be quick with your jumping and maneuvering to keep from being frozen in place.
And if you happen to be accessing your inventory at the time, you can't even get out of the web. Which means that you just gotta die and respawn.
You see, you get out of paralysis by wiggling the D-pad around, and you can't do that from inside the inventory menu.
Yes, you read that right. Accessing your inventory doesn't pause the game. I should also mention at this point in time that there's an equipment set that is all extremely powerful, but causes very negative side-effects for using it. It's the Demon Equipment, and this was where I first ran into the issue with the paralysis thing, because the Demon armor can freeze you in place. In order to take it off, you gotta access your inventory. But you can't do that when you're frozen. And the time you're unfrozen for is fairly short. So it's entirely possible for you to get frozen in place long enough that you wind up getting killed, and you can't do anything about it.
I wouldn't exactly call it a glitch that you can't access your inventory while frozen, but I would say that not being able to exit your inventory while paralyzed is a massive design flaw.
Anyways, there's basically no good reason to use the Demon Set in game, because the downsides are so big. Except on one level where you can use it without consequence. I sold the entire set (Sans shield, because I left that behind on an early level) for more inventory space.
Speaking of which, I missed an inventory expansion (Known as an Otherworld Box) at some point and I never felt like going back for it.
Speaking of which, I was reading on the XSeed localization blog, and apparently there's a casino that's hidden early on in the game that I never managed to find. Partially because I didn't know it existed until I sat down to write this review.
Now, you'll notice that I tend to refer to monsters by descriptions, accompanied by an occasional screenshot a lot in this review. The reason for that is the fact that the game doesn't actually tell you what the name of the monsters are unless you hit the triangle button while adjacent to them. And considering the games pace, it's not a good idea to waste time trying to figure out what the names of the monsters are.
Plus, I can't find a complete bestiary anywhere. The one on the official American website is incomplete, and the official Japanese website doesn't even have a bestiary!
Plus, the Wikipedia page for Brandish only has a basic summary of the plot and mechanics of the games, listing The Dark Revenant on the same page. And I can't find an XSeed wiki, a Brandish wiki, or a complete Nihon Falcom wiki anywhere. I also looked on GameFaqs and IGN and nobody had a complete bestiary that I could find.
Anyways, they've got a pretty good selection of monsters. Mind you, they could do with spacing them out a bit better, maybe with more variety of enemies around. It's the same problem I had with the music, they don't really change up the monsters all that often, and they could do with shaking things up more often than every now and again.
On the whole, I think Brandish is well worth the twenty bucks XSeed is charging for it on the PSN. I just wish I felt more compelled to explore the levels.
The problem is that unlike the only other PSP game I've beaten, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I don't feel particularly compelled to go back to any of the levels, due in part to it being a massive chore to trek back to the entrance of most levels. Plus, there's the fact that some levels are mazes that connect to other levels which are also mazes. In addition to that, the closest thing you've got to a fast-travel system is fairly difficult to use. For one thing, the maps can be kind of confusing, as a lot of the later levels have multiple exits and entrances, and the map doesn't actually tell you which is which.
The other is that it uses a massive amount of mana to transport you across the map, and mana takes forever to regenerate. And considering I like to save my mana potions for when I need them, I never really used the teleportation spell more than a couple of times towards the end of the main game, like I said earlier.
The other problem is that the map in this game isn't as good as SotN's map.
I know the map in SotN could be a little obtuse, and not tell you where certain things were, but this map is even worse.
See, even though this map marks off doors, holes in the floor, water, walls, entrances and exits to a level, treasure-chests, and item-shops, there are some issues.
For instance, it only marks a door on the map when you open it, and marks it as a piece of wall when you walk by it. And it doesn't differentiate opened treasure-chests from closed ones, which led to a lot of confusion on my part.
Plus, while you can scroll through the maps of the levels, there's no clear connections between any of the maps, which makes it a real pain to try and backtrack. Which is why I didn't bother going back to explore any of the levels I skipped.
If it had been easier to backtrack, and if there were more clearly defined benefits to backtracking, it would make Brandish: The Dark Revenant a much better game. As it is though, it's still pretty a good game, if a bit drawn out.
Now, after you beat the main games as Ares Toraernos, you unlock a secondary part of the game where you play as Dela Delon. Fortunately, all of the levels in Dela's part of the game are original, they don't reuse any of the level design or puzzles from Ares' part of the game.
What they did reuse is all of the enemies and all of the music, so if you got tired of those a long time ago, you're not in for much in the way of new combat mechanics, or soundtrack-wise.
As Dela, you can't use shields, regular armor or swords. But you can still block attacks with your staff. Plus, you start off with a fireball spell in your inventory, since Dela is a mage, after all.
What passes for a shield is a set of ridiculous costumes, and inventory-filling special items.
I remember seeing a statement from someone who worked on the game (Either from XSeed or Falcom, can't remember who) saying that they estimated the main campaign of Brandish: The Dark Revenant to take about twenty hours to complete, and that Dela Mode would take about ten hours to complete.
I know that the screenshot I posted earlier of the ending screen of the game showed a twenty-one hour completion time, but the sum of all the footage I recorded comes up to about thirty hours, in the main game.
As of writing, I haven't actually finished Dela Mode, but I'll follow up on it later if there's anything I haven't already covered.
Now, Dela Mode is supposed to be a lot tougher than the main campaign, but I can't really see that so far. There are certainly a few puzzles that are tougher than the ones in the main game, but the enemies don't seem a whole lot tougher. They use a few boss monsters as standard enemies, but other than that, I don't think it's too much more difficult than the main game. It might just be that I've gotten used to its difficulty, and that this seems like a natural continuation of the difficulty level in the first part of the game.
I have to applaud Nihon Falcom for having Dela Mode as an unlockable part of the game as opposed to being DLC or putting it out as a standalone expansion. And they easily could have, let me tell you.
But I'll take a standalone expansion released on a physical disc over Gaiden DLC. And unlockable extras are always great.
Before I end the article, I'd like to mention that the artwork on Dela is kinda weird, at least in-game. The drawing of her on the cover is perfectly fine, but everywhere else she looks a little off. The detailing on her torso is what gets it for me, because while she's fairly skinny, she doesn't have much in the way of muscle definition on her stomach, even though her abs should be visible, if not a six-pack.
Plus, despite her rather voluptuous figure, she appears fairly flat-chested at certain angles due to the weird way she's drawn, with very little in the way of shading on her chest. She's essentially made up of a single shade of slightly off-white, with a few pink highlights around. She almost looks like she was drawn by a completely different artist than that of the other characters you meet in the game.
Plus, the model styling on Ares and everything else in the game looks fine, but the way Dela's model is rendered just looks a little weird. Especially given the way she's dressed. It's the same kind of problem that Anna in Fire Emblem: Awakening had, where her somewhat exaggerated features make her look kinda ridiculous.
Dela looks especially weird when she's at somewhat of an angle. Since there's not much visible definition to her breasts, it sometimes looks like she has one massive shoulder and one really tiny one.
But that's just an aesthetics quibble. I would have preferred slightly more detailed portraits for her, and possibly a different, less strange-looking model, but what we've got works just fine.
So all in all, I liked Brandish: The Dark Revenant. For twenty bucks on the PSN, I'd say it's well worth it, and for the amount of time and fun you can get out of it, it's a great deal. And who knows? Maybe we could try and get a physical release here in the States!
In the end, I'll give it an 8.3* rating. I'll see you next week guys!
If you want to buy Brandish: The Dark Revenant, check out the PSN store page: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/brandish-the-dark-revenant-psvita/