Title: Summon Night X: Tears Crown
Console: NDS
Genre: Turn-based RPG
Language: Japanese
Company: Namco
Summary:
Story: 7. Described to be more “political” than the typical Summon Night. It’s kind of interesting, but nothing breakthrough. I just miss the humor :| If it had to take the humor out, at least the story could be deeper and more engaging. Instead, it’s all slightly bland and cliche.
Characters: 8.5. loliiiiii~~ Also, I’m a fan of surprise transformations of characters, and there were quite a few in this :D
Graphics: 8.5. Really don’t like the scrunched sprites, but I got used to it after a while. The battle sprites are awesome though.
Sound: 9. Fully voiced . That’s the best part of this game. XD The music was very similar to other Summon Night games, which is good, although it lacked anything really catchy like the GBA ones had.
Gameplay: 8.5. My playthrough went around 35 hours, excellent for a DS RPG. At about 8-10 hours of gameplay, you get side missions, a surprising long time before you get those… The side mission system surprised me as well–Mini court meeting sessions and your own party decides whether or not they’ll actually do the mission. XD Grinding gets repetitive, but there are enough Brave challenges and the bosses are challenging enough to keep things interesting. The summon system is pretty good here too with such a huge selection of summons. Very similar to the Golden Sun Djinn system now that I think about it! Dungeon maps weren’t too challenging, which I honestly don’t mind because I prefer the challenge in battles. And there were definite challenges with some of those bosses. I would give this a 9, but… THE LAST BOSS BATTLE TOOK WAY TOO LONG. At some point challenge just turns into TROUBLESOME, and that last boss battle definitely hit it. It seriously took me over an hour to beat that boss, and it was always because one character would be down– there was never a time when I was in real crisis of losing, but I have my team set up so that I need all four of them alive to be effective, so it just felt TROUBLESOME. So minus .5 for that.
Replay Value: 8. You can play as the other gender to see the other person’s side of the story, if you’re interested. In the new game, your summons get carried over and you get 99 of each kind of mana stone… not a bad deal! But like most Summon Night games, you’ll have to re-play the game dozens of times (or just use save states if you have them ;3~) to see all the character conversations, which is a grossly daunting task.
Overall: 8. Jam-packed DS cartridge is definitely worth a play. I’m tempted to score 9, but it just didn’t bring in the extra umpth that really brought me in. An obvious lot of (seiyuu) work was put into packing the DS cartridge for every dollar’s worth. I think I’ve just gotten pickier ^^;

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