Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled Review

If a new game developer wanted to make a name for themselves by crafting a lengthy (and I do mean lengthy) RPG modeled on the ye olde schoole style of turn-based combat stat management sims we grew up with, then it would be tough to find a better example of the genre than Final Fantasy VI. Maybe Chrono Trigger, but I maintain that Final Fantasy VI is the premier title among the never-ending franchise, though Final Fantasy XII comes in a very close second. But what happens when the new game, in this case Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled, doesn

The intention of Black Sigil seems to mirror that of Star Trek by pulling all of its material from a game that many of us hold in high esteem. That isn

It may sound strange, but I actually have no beef with Black Sigil

One major knock I do have against Black Sigil is that it frontloads a massive, unwieldy dungeon within the first few hours that absolutely will stomp low level characters. Unless you run from each encounter (and even then you

When players walk the lands, they will encounter many a foe. As mentioned earlier, holding down the B button causes your team to flee. Outside of boss fights, I was able to run from every fight. Sometimes the best offense is to turn tail and haul ass. Once you are ready, or in need of elevating your characters’ levels, combat is fairly easy to pick up. You use three characters, who can be swapped with other party members through the menu. When it is a certain character’s turn, a little menu pops up over their head giving you the choices of attacking, performing a special move, initiating a combo move involving the group’s spell caster, or using an item. Players can also run to better position themselves on the combat board.

Topography plays a more crucial role in determing how well combat goes. Soemtimes your characters will be blocked into a narrow hallway. So unless the group is uniformly spell casters, you have to move one character to shift the others. Of course, this uses up a turn for the characters who reposition themselves. One thing that is great about the fighting mechanism at work here is how it forces you to adapt on the fly. The combat in Black Sigil may be more frequent than you’d like, but it is rarely boring.

The sheer volume of places to see, people to talk with, and items to purchase would keep you occupied for a long time. Now factor in a plot that spans the globe, is rife with political intrigue, strong heroes, nefarious villains, and non-stop action and you have a rock solid first effort. As I mentioned at the top of the review, you could do a heck of a lot worse than use Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger as your inspiration for building an RPG that looks, feels, and acts exactly like the games we grew up with during the early 90s.

Yes, I’m dating myself for the Twittering class out there. But there is a depth here that I have not seen a great deal of in today’s RPG generation. When Fable is referred to as an RPG, I snicker. It is about as much an RPG as The Sims, which is to say “not at all.”