Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Chris Miller

At first glance, Gyromancer looks like a match made in heaven.  Take the super-addictive Bejeweled Twist, stick it in a Puzzle Quest style storyline format, and sew it together by the undisputed masters of the RPG, Square Enix.   It’s a game that immediately jumped to the top of my personal most wanted list from the moment the very first trailers were released, and I thought that if there was ever a “can’t-miss” gaming proposition, this would be it.  No one is better at casual games than PopCap, and no one is better at RPG’s than Squeenix.  How could it go wrong?

You’re probably sensing a “Yeah, but…” here, and unfortunately you’re correct.  It's not that Gyromancer is necessarily a bad game, but rather one that seems to really squander its potential, and does everything in its power to frustrate the player.  Sadly, it could have been a great game, if not for a series of truly baffling design decisions.

Gyromancer tells the story of Riven Ardell, an all-powerful court mage who gets caught up in a battle against a disgruntled warrior faction called Temperance.  Through the struggle, they drawn into a battle with some sort of forest spirits and powerful woods, and the entire thing had a very “Princess Mononoke” vibe to it.  I was originally quite excited about the story, as it was penned by some of the same folks who were involved with the superb Final Fantasy Tactics:  War of the Lions, but the narrative in Gyromancer falls completely on its face.  The storytelling is absolute garbage, even by JRPG standards, and it isn’t helped by the use of stodgy dialog such as, “If thou dost wish to procure my assistance, one need only to make a humble request.”  This dialog sometimes works for games with strong characters and an interesting plot, but Gyromancer has neither. 

While the story is dull, the artwork and music are far from it.  The entire package has a very typical Square Enix polish; it both looks and sounds fantastic.  The talking head character portraits, backgrounds, monster images, and even the main gameboard are all beautifully rendered.  It’s unfortunate that each character only has a single static image, as I would have loved to see additional artwork for them.   The Bejeweled-based combat looks fantastic, with all sorts of eye-candy in the form of particle effects and explosions.  The music has a sweeping, epic feel, and fits the game perfectly.  This is a soundtrack that I’ll definitely need to track down for my collection.

If you ever played Puzzle Quest, you’ll feel right at home with Gyromancer – just swap out the high fantasy aesthetic with a Japanese RPG one.   The story doles out missions, which are broken up into different stages, which show up as glowing spheres on an overworld map.  Choosing one mission transfers you to the mission map, on which you will move your character one space at a time (board game style) through a winding map towards the mission objective.   Between you and your objective will be all manner of nasty beasties, roadblocks, pits that spawn monsters, and teleporters – which leads us to the first strange design decision.

These maps are typically very large, and contain all sorts of branching paths and dead-ends along with monsters and roadblocks.  Since the map camera is fixed on your character, you have no way to actually look ahead and try to map out a strategy to get to your objective.  This leads to a lot of aimless wandering around the map until you can find the one path that leads to where you want to go.  You’ll also occasionally see messages such as “A beast has destroyed a treasure chest” or “A monster has devoured another”, but you have no way to move around the map and see what actually happened and how it might affect you.  It’s a bizarre decision that makes moving around the mission maps far more difficult and frustrating that it needed to be.

One of Gyromancer’s main hooks is the ability to summon beats into battle.  At the beginning of each mission, you will choose 3 pets from a large stable.  These behemoths will have specific affinity colors (more on that in a moment), as well as damage-dealing and status altering attacks.    As you progress, you will find Gyro codes that will allow you to summon stronger and more powerful beasts to fight for you.    As you try to reach the mission objective on each map, you’ll invariably run into monsters that are represented as skulls.  Touching one of these skulls shifts you into battle mode, and you choose one of your three summonable pets to duke it out against the monster you just pissed off. 

The basic mechanic behind combat is Bejeweled Twist.  I was a big fan of this particular flavor of Bejeweled (my original review), so I won’t completely rehash all the mechanics for this review.  Suffice to say, very little has changed.  To quickly sum things up, it boils down to standard match-3 gameplay, but instead of moving one jewel at a time, you’ll rotate a set of 4 gems clockwise to make matches.

Both you and your enemy have 2-3 skill bars, and creating gem matches causes these bars to fill.  Once they are full, a glowing ability gem randomly appears on the board.  Make a match with that gem, and you deal damage to your opponent.   However, your opponent’s bars are also filling along with yours.  If their skill bars fill, one gem becomes a skull with a countdown.  If you don’t match this skull before the countdown runs out, the monster’s ability activates and either deals HP or status damage to you.  An extra level of strategy is added since both your summoned beast and the monster you’re fighting against have a specific affinity color.  Matching your affinity color gives an extra boost to your skills, while matching your opponent’s causes their skill bars to stop for a turn.  This causes you to weight each move and think about whether it’s best to try and fill your bars more quickly, or keep your opponent from filling theirs.

In the early game, I really enjoyed the combat.  Unfortunately, about halfway through the game, they introduce the second baffling decision:  the Idle Twist mechanic.  Once this came into play, my enjoyment of the game took a pretty significant hit, and it started to become far more frustrating than fun.   An Idle Twist is any rotation that does not make a gem match on the board.  Whenever you make an Idle Twist, the countdown on your enemy’s ability gems goes down one, and they get a major boost to all their skill gauges.   The problem is, these Idle Twists are often necessary in order to either move one of your ability gems into place for a match, or to keep one of the monster’s from blowing up in your face.   When you start getting penalized for them, it takes much of the skill and planning out of combat, and turns it more into a luck-based system.  You can just hope that your ability gems randomly appear in a spot where it’s easy to match, because you’ll pretty much be screwed if they’re not. Same goes for your enemy’s gems.  If they show up in a spot that requires an idle twist for you to move them, you may as well simply forget about them.   It felt like this Idle Twist mechanic really took the strategy out of the player’s hands, and you’re simply left hoping for a lucky placement.  If they eliminated this penalty, I think Gyromancer would have been significantly more enjoyable.

In addition to the battles, you’ll also run across lock puzzles.  These puzzles typically provide access to either treasure chests or Gyro codes that allow you to summon new creatures.  Instead of pitting you against an opponent, these puzzles instead require you to meet a certain condition.  These range from the simple (Make a 4-gem match) to the absurd (Create a 7X gem Cascade).   Again, many of these locks are completely dependent on luck instead of any really puzzle-solving ability on the player’s part.  A 7X Cascade is solely determined by which gems happen to fall next, which is something you have absolutely no control over.  Unfortunately, many of the late-game summons are locked away behind these puzzles, so you’ll either spend hours trying to catch a lucky break, or simply give up and do without

Gyromancer is billed as a “puzzle-RPG”, but there really isn’t much RPG to be had.  You’ll receive XP after each combat which will give your beasts additional hit points, but there are no real skills or attributes that you can improve in any way.  The abilities of each beast are predetermined, and the only real decisions the player makes as they advance are which 3 to bring along on each map.  It’s a bit disappointing for there not to be any sort of player interaction in this regard; especially considering the game was co-developed by the masters of the RPG.

I developed somewhat of a love-hate relationship with Gyromancer.  While I enjoy the Bejeweled Twist-based combat system, the Idle Twist mechanic damn near ruined the entire game for me.  It takes a fun game format that required some skill and planning on the part of the player, and turns it into something that is almost entirely dependent on luck.  That being said, I’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours playing this game, and I still find myself going back to it – frustration and all.  It’s a testament to how addicting the core game actually is.  In the end, however, Gyromancer feels like somewhat of a wasted opportunity because of some poor design decisions, which is a major disappointment.

Gaming Trend Score

73

1. Graphics: 88
2. Audio: 91
3. Controls: 71
4. Gameplay: 60
5. Value/Replay: 70
6. OVERALL:73