O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Back when Demon’s Souls was first released internationally (which is already almost 13 years ago), I, among some others, compared the game to Blade of Darkness. Because at the time, that title from 2001 (also known as Severance: Blade of Darkness internationally) was the benchmark of hack and slash action adventure games with a more “methodical” approach to adventuring and really “meaty” combat. Now that Blade of Darkness have been re-released with some much needed quality of life improvements, it’s interesting to revisit the title again and see just how much of it still holds up and how much of it hasn’t aged well.
Blade of Darkness, as already mentioned, is a hack and slash action adventure, but it also has light action RPG elements to it. You can play the game as one of the 4 available playable characters – a knight, a dwarven warrior, a barbarian and an adventurer. And all of them have different starting stats and are proficient with only specific weapons, making them, essentially, starting classes. As you kill enemies, you gain experience, which increases those base stats, along with your total health and energy. The last is used up as you attack normally or via special attacks and replenishes on its own as long as you stop attacking, but isn’t used for any other actions like running, so it differs from what modern titles call “stamina” here. As you explore, you also find new weapons, including a couple of special magic ones, all of which have a damage benefit and a defense decrease, in addition to using more energy for basic attacks, so there are times when you find a better weapon, but must consider if you wish to use it now, or only after you level up to counter the defense and energy hit. And all classes also additionally can eventually find armour that boosts their defense, but the amount of available upgrades is different per character. And you need to find it first anyway.
So, there are indeed similarities to how the modern hack and slash “souls-likes” tend to operate, but at its core, the game was far more of a descendant of Die by the Sword, an incredibly ambitious, but also incredibly clunky title that focused on using attack + direction to control the way your character hits with their weapon. Thankfully, the controls are far more simplified here and are closer to how Morrowind handled the combat, than the detailed but horrible Die by the Sword. (And it has to be noted that Blade of Darkness was in development apparently from before Die by the Sword got released). Either way, the main focus of Blade is exploring the levels, fighting enemies and occasionally solving puzzles or finding keys to unlock progress. There are no characters to talk to, stores to buy or sell stuff at or “quests” of any kind.
Not that the adventure is fully linear, however. One novel concept Blade of Darkness did was have every single of the 4 characters to start in a unique level that is only available for them – something like what Dragon Age: Origins would do (or Temple of Elemental Evil for that matter) later on. And even apart from that intro level, you will occasionally have a choice between which location you want to visit next on a cool stylish map. The choice doesn’t actually influence anything, to be fair, as you have to visit all locations anyway, but it’s a neat little touch that makes the adventure more unique at every playthrough.
Anyways, it’s time to emphasize that this game is stupidly hard. And unfortunately, it’s occasionally hard for the less justified reasons. Most of the time, it’s just not going to let you run through rooms like an idiot, trying to eat hits or skip combat entirely. Because if you don’t kill enemies – you don’t level up and have harder time later on. If you tank hits and don’t roll or block – you lose health pretty quickly. And replenishing health is only possible via eating food that can occasionally be found on levels, drinking potions that you may find on levels or drop from enemies (if you kill them before they drink the potion themselves), or leveling up (which fully heals you). For characters that have lots of protection, like the knight, this isn’t much of a problem as apart from the high defense, you will also be blocking a lot with many different types of shields. But for characters that rely more on dodging, this can become a problem.
Issue is – the game’s inertia is more ridiculous than what you can find in Thief or System Shock 2. If you run down a staircase that has short steps – you fly off the staircase. If you roll on the staircase – you fly across half the level. And in addition to that, the camera in this game is rather poor on its own, but when locked on and trying to roll around, you barely ever see what’s going on. Back in the day I finished the game as a knight and a barbarian and it was more or less manageable, but this time I’ve played as an adventurer, and she can have a lot of issues during combat because of the outlined problems, especially since on top of that her weapons always have a heavy defense penalty, that you can never fully outlevel and she only has one armour upgrade to help. Also, quite stupidly, even though her main benefit is range, if you hit a blocking enemy from the longest possible distance you have with your spears and staves, they will still easily reach you with their short swords as you stagger, because your hits propel you forward no matter what.
Also, so much of the game is poorly explained or just entirely left for players to figure out. For example – all enemies actually have weaknesses and defense against elements and damage type. So if you’re constantly surprised at skeletons being ridiculously tough to handle, it’s because (as is often the case) they are only weak to blunt weapons. Additional problems here are that you can only carry 4 weapons on yourself (and one of them will probably always be a bow, because you need it more than you’d like), you only can find specific weapons in specific levels and some do not reappear later on, characters are limited to specific weapon type… In the end, unlike a modern souls-like hack and slash, where you switch equipment around to fit the needs of the level as your character can be anything, in Blade of Darkness you can literally be unsuited for one particular level and won’t be able to do much about it, apart from just gritting your teeth as you progress the level little by little.
The encounters by the end of the game are, frankly, just annoying too. And unless you’re on the true ending path, having found all secret runes and having unlocked the true potential of the magic sword, you will be spending too long at every blocking enemy of which there are plenty. If you have a sword, though, it’s special attack will just cut through everything, thus most of the end of the game is spent spamming the special attack, letting energy restore, spamming it again.
Yeah, some of the combat and the level design haven’t aged well, I have to say… Neither did the fact that a lot of special attacks are super hard to pull off for some reason. Or the fact that the adventurer with her staves and spears has trouble trying to hit any enemies that are very low, like spiders for whatever reason.
But when it all clicks, when the encounters are fun, when it’s about dodging enemy attacks and then cutting them into pieces… It’s such a fun, tense and exciting experience. Especially now that you can play the game with the gamepad too – even in 2001, despite growing up with the keyboard-controlled games, I didn’t like the way the game felt on the keyboard, and the ability to play with a gamepad is very welcome. It has it’s bugs, occasionally, but it’s a fantastic upgrade.
So even though I’ve had plenty of frustrating moments during this replay (and think that you’re probably better off playing as a knight or barbarian on your first playthrough), even though a lot of the game is very rough and the ending is offensively short and says nothing at all. I’m glad I’ve replayed Blade of Darkness yet again. To truly shine in the modern times it would need a remake, rather than just an enhanced re-release, but at its best it’s still an unparalleled experience. Definitely try it out – even if you decide to not finish it in the end, it’s an inspiring title that’s still worth experiencing.