eric__s
ass hater
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2011
- Messages
- 2,301
In my entire life, there's only been one game I've ever taken back to the store. It's an incredibly obscure game - it only has 82 hits on google - and I don't know anyone else who has ever played it. In fact, none of those google hits are people talking about it, they're bizarre Russian metasites spewing unfiltered garbage into the void or people selling pirated copies on ebay. I'm not sure if anybody has ever played this!
The game is The Holy Sword: The Ring. That's not actually what the box I had was, although I guess that's what the Russian copy looked like. Awesome. It came in a bulky white box with pictures of characters on it. On the side of the box was a big sticker advertising that the game came with 2 CDs! Incredible! It actually didn't come with two CDs, only one, and it wasn't even in a sleeve. It was a loose CD in an empty cardboard box. It didn't even come with a manual.
I didn't want to take the game back. It was terrible - TERRIBLE - but I was 13 and a bad judge of quality. I took it back because it stopped working after the first time I closed it. At first the guy behind the counter wouldn't accept it, but I was finally able to convince him to take it back when I told him it only came with a single CD and didn't have a manual.
The Holy Sword: The Ring is a very obvious Final Fantasy Tactics clone. It's hard to believe, but it's actually a PC game. I don't know much about it and there's very little information out there, but I think it's a Taiwanese RPG that was published and localized in the US (and maybe Russia???) in tiny quantities. I only saw a single copy of the game at this one store and I don't know when the game came out - maybe 2000 or 2001?
Like in Final Fantasy Tactics, you hire mercenaries and level them up in different jobs. When their job level increases, they can change to new, more powerful jobs. The problem is that the game gives no description of what each job does and didn't come with a manual, so you have no idea what classes are supposed to do or what you're changing your character into. Your main character is Gilbert, a prince, and he seems to be the best character in the game (at least initially) because he can use the strongest weapons and has some very powerful skills exclusive to him.
Each job has multiple types of skills, like in Final Fantasy Tactics. The blue text at the bottom of the screen is a very vague description of what each skill does, although many skills just don't have any descriptions at all. Unlike Final Fantasy Tactics, characters have both MP and SP. MP is what characters use for casting spells, but SP is what they use for skills. In FFT, characters could use skills indefinitely, but that doesn't seem to be the case here!
The combat is pretty bizarre. There's no indicator of how much damage any attack will do or what each of the stats means, so a lot of the time you just do things because you have no idea what you should be doing. Sometimes an attack will deal almost no damage to an enemy one turn, and then it will kill them in one hit in another. Damage formulas seem to be random and stats aren't very important. All of the enemies also have names, although each enemy of a certain type always has the same name. Green wolves (who are actually red) are all named Fred and mercenaries are all named Steve.
The most notable thing about the game though (the best??) is the dialogue. The translation is completely mangled and almost nothing in the game makes sense. It has the worst translation I've ever seen in a game, worse than Zero Wing or Space Rangers 2 or whatever else. Nothing in the game makes sense! It's just words on your screen. It's pretty awesome. "People with male and female" - they made this game specifically for the Codex.
I have no idea what the game is about. Your name is Gilbert and you go out with your father Albert on an adventure. You meet a dwarf who needs help because the holy stone of his tribe was stolen. You chase the thieves and that's about as far as I've gotten. I can't get past the third battle; it's incredibly difficult and you can't save in between battles.
The portraits are pretty good! The graphics look alright in the pictures but they're animated really choppily and look kind of bad in the game. They also have a lot of weird compression artifacts.
I've got the ISO if anybody wants it. It's almost 700 MB so I don't know where I could upload it. You probably don't want to google for it - it took me a really long time to find and I had to dig through a bunch of really shady Russian sites to get it. There are also a couple websites selling it, but they're all pirate copies and you'd be better off just pirating it yourself.
Anyway, this is a pretty bizarre game that I thought I'd share with you. This has to be the most obscure game I've ever played. Has anyone else played this, or even heard of this? Are there any other games like this??
The game is The Holy Sword: The Ring. That's not actually what the box I had was, although I guess that's what the Russian copy looked like. Awesome. It came in a bulky white box with pictures of characters on it. On the side of the box was a big sticker advertising that the game came with 2 CDs! Incredible! It actually didn't come with two CDs, only one, and it wasn't even in a sleeve. It was a loose CD in an empty cardboard box. It didn't even come with a manual.
I didn't want to take the game back. It was terrible - TERRIBLE - but I was 13 and a bad judge of quality. I took it back because it stopped working after the first time I closed it. At first the guy behind the counter wouldn't accept it, but I was finally able to convince him to take it back when I told him it only came with a single CD and didn't have a manual.
The Holy Sword: The Ring is a very obvious Final Fantasy Tactics clone. It's hard to believe, but it's actually a PC game. I don't know much about it and there's very little information out there, but I think it's a Taiwanese RPG that was published and localized in the US (and maybe Russia???) in tiny quantities. I only saw a single copy of the game at this one store and I don't know when the game came out - maybe 2000 or 2001?
Like in Final Fantasy Tactics, you hire mercenaries and level them up in different jobs. When their job level increases, they can change to new, more powerful jobs. The problem is that the game gives no description of what each job does and didn't come with a manual, so you have no idea what classes are supposed to do or what you're changing your character into. Your main character is Gilbert, a prince, and he seems to be the best character in the game (at least initially) because he can use the strongest weapons and has some very powerful skills exclusive to him.
Each job has multiple types of skills, like in Final Fantasy Tactics. The blue text at the bottom of the screen is a very vague description of what each skill does, although many skills just don't have any descriptions at all. Unlike Final Fantasy Tactics, characters have both MP and SP. MP is what characters use for casting spells, but SP is what they use for skills. In FFT, characters could use skills indefinitely, but that doesn't seem to be the case here!
The combat is pretty bizarre. There's no indicator of how much damage any attack will do or what each of the stats means, so a lot of the time you just do things because you have no idea what you should be doing. Sometimes an attack will deal almost no damage to an enemy one turn, and then it will kill them in one hit in another. Damage formulas seem to be random and stats aren't very important. All of the enemies also have names, although each enemy of a certain type always has the same name. Green wolves (who are actually red) are all named Fred and mercenaries are all named Steve.
The most notable thing about the game though (the best??) is the dialogue. The translation is completely mangled and almost nothing in the game makes sense. It has the worst translation I've ever seen in a game, worse than Zero Wing or Space Rangers 2 or whatever else. Nothing in the game makes sense! It's just words on your screen. It's pretty awesome. "People with male and female" - they made this game specifically for the Codex.
I have no idea what the game is about. Your name is Gilbert and you go out with your father Albert on an adventure. You meet a dwarf who needs help because the holy stone of his tribe was stolen. You chase the thieves and that's about as far as I've gotten. I can't get past the third battle; it's incredibly difficult and you can't save in between battles.
The portraits are pretty good! The graphics look alright in the pictures but they're animated really choppily and look kind of bad in the game. They also have a lot of weird compression artifacts.
I've got the ISO if anybody wants it. It's almost 700 MB so I don't know where I could upload it. You probably don't want to google for it - it took me a really long time to find and I had to dig through a bunch of really shady Russian sites to get it. There are also a couple websites selling it, but they're all pirate copies and you'd be better off just pirating it yourself.
Anyway, this is a pretty bizarre game that I thought I'd share with you. This has to be the most obscure game I've ever played. Has anyone else played this, or even heard of this? Are there any other games like this??
