Confused at first, I grew to appreciate the gem system in Blade & Sword. There are a few things I feel obliged to point out, though, that hampered my experience. First and most important, one's ability to experiment with the gem refinement process is handcuffed by the inanely restrictive save system. If you screw up (and I did, more than I care to mention), you are stuck with that flawed gem, as you can't load a game without saving the game first. You also can't quit the game without saving first. Blade & Sword really wants the player to be accountable for his actions, I guess! The manual itself says to go ahead and experiment with the gem system in order to create really powerful gems, but this ends up being a crapshoot. One can risk combining the three pure gems in the hope of creating an uber gem, but the refining process is just as likely to backfire as succeed. What compounds the frustration is the relative scarcity of the gems. I found enough to fill all of the slots in my sword and armor, but I was not able to experiment enough with combining them to create the special gems. It's a shame, too, because I needed all of the power-up help I could get in order to make it through Blade & Sword.
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