Cheap Summoner (Video Games) (PlayStation2) Price

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Customer Reviews of Summoner

I hope there's a sequel!!!
Summoner is not without its faults, but I fell in love with this game nevertheless! The characters are well developed, the storyline is complex and involving. Lots of political and religious intrigue make for plenty of twists and turns. Within the first hour of the game I had about 7 side quests! This game isn't half as linear as most RPGs out there, which is quite refreshing. I didn't always know what to do and had to figure it out myself.....not as non-linear as the Ultima series, but still preferable to being lead around by the nose!

For gamers sick of endless "pop-up monsters", you'll find the field battles more pleasing. When a "pop-up" battle does occure, you end up in a battle field you can walk around in, or run out of if you don't wanna fight! Dungeon's and towns do not have "pop-ups", it's all action fighting! The battle system is a cut above most RPGs---real time fighting, complete control through pause menus and an arcade-like combo system. The characters do beautiful spell effects, fight with intricate moves...as hands on or as computer controlled as you wish. Joseph, the summoner, can choose between several different monsters to call on during battles. The summoned monster will join the party and fight for the duration of battle. They suffer damage and power up just like the other characters. You can easily switch from one character to the next (even summoned monsters!) during battles, which makes it easier to heal, more interesting to fight.

Here's the downside. While characters and towns look pretty good, the graphics could have been improved upon for the PS2! The characters look no better than the latest Tomb Raider on PSone. More "blocky" than I expected. The towns are huge, lots to explore, but the camera angles can be annoying! You can only see so far ahead of yourself at times, which ticked me off. The dungeon maps are OK, but the world map is absolutely horrendous! Towns aren't even marked (except this one castle), it's difficult to find your way around, hard to tell if you're going N or S at first (not even that is marked!), just follow that little snaking road until it dwindles off. Then hope you find the place you need to go!

Despite these shortcomings, I found Summoner to be an overall enjoyable experience. Thanks to the storyline, characters, battle system and cool summoned monsters. There are two endings (depending on how you answer a certain question) and so many side quests you could never finish the first time, so the game has some replay value.

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The bad reviews are accurate, but so is mine
I thought this game was great, for the same reasons that other reviewers hated it.

I'm a father now, mid thirties, and frankly, I'm too old to judge a game by dazzling graphics. I don't care if this PS2 game has graphics that are at a PS1 level of quality. Although I must admit, the main character does look a bit like a corpse. :) So other reviewers can complain about dated graphics, but it doesn't bother me.

And other reviewers have made mention of the long, lesiurely plot, overly big areas to explore, and over-abundance of NPCs. Again, the reviewers are accurate -- those things do exist, and if they hate them, that's fine. But for me, a guy who likes games like BG1, BG2, and Arcanum, it was sooo nice. I get home late from work, I'm tired, and I don't want to play a game that requires lots of button mashing. I enable the options for auto-chaining my attacks, sit back, relax, and stroll through the game world, chatting with random characters, taking out a few bad guys, and working on my character's stats and inventory so that the next battle will be even better.

Of course, a few times the game's size did annoy me. I probably talked to each merchant in the Lenele market twice, just because I couldn't recall who was who. I looked online for a full complement of printable maps but never found anything. It would have helped me a lot to just have printed maps with each NPC flagged. But for some reason, that really didn't bug me that much.

What did bug me was the locked camera view in the cities. Out in the open, you can set the camera to high (overhead) view, or low (over the shoulder) view. But in the Lenele market, for example, the camera locks to high view. And since I couldn't pull the camera back far enough to see a lot of surrounding buildings, I had a horrible time getting oriented. If I had been able to use the low view, I could have at least used the horizon to know my general direction and place. This alone caused me to knock 1 star off the review.

Anyway, to conclude: Summoner has lots of characters, tons of dialogue, joinable NPCs with a little bit of party banter, plenty of stats and inventory management, lots of areas, many non-linear quests, and dated graphics with a (sometimes) annoying camera angle. And battles are very configurable -- you can button-mash with chained attacks and turn-based play, or you can do like me and set the battles to continuous mode with auto-chaining. Since I care less about graphics and more about story, this is a great game for me.

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Really Strong Strenghts...Very Strong Weaknesses
Volition's Summoner is a game in which it is easy to get lost...lost in the unnecessarily huge locations, lost in the insane amount of side quests, lost in the insanely slow pace, or lost in in the insanely high amount of text and story detail that means little or nothing; or in my case, all of them. Those, teamed up with somewhat shallow characters, a horrible frame rate, and a small scene count make Summoner one that any and all impatient RPGamer's should probably steer clear of.

However, during the last 10-15 hours (of a 40 hour quest, mind you), the game, while somehow getting slower, got much more interesting and increased in intensity very sharply. Also, later on, the game made sense finally, and from what I hear, Summoner II plays off of this game's plot beautifully, and also, from what I hear, Summoner II is so good that it's actually worth playing through this one just so that you can understand it better!

The graphics are totally a mixed bag, and actually a contradiction. You see, if you play this game with the camera zoomed in all the way, not only will the spell effects, mainly the projectile and summon effects be much more impressive, but also the textures, when viewed from up close, actually surpass any textures I've seen on even the XBox, all except for the Cube's Resident Evil titles. However, in order to win any battles, or find your way through countless obstructions, you'll have to back the camera up all the way, turning the textures to practically single colors, and turning the 30FPS to about 12FPS or so.

The sound effects are not only mostly recycled from PSX RPG foley discs, but also, during the whole second half of the game, the sound effects are almost cut out, and you hear one every few seconds, and that's while in intense combat! It's as if the programmers weren't sure if the polygons, textures, music and sound effects were too much for the new PS2 system, so they reduced the sound effect quantities to make sure it'd make it. For whatever reason, they did it that way. The voice acting is also a mixed bag, ranging from horribly dead, to perfect, to horribly overdone.

The music on the other hand, while commonly really just "ambient" music, is sometimes quite grand...I can think of three examples: the Lanelle Sewers, which is a sort of epic creepy theme, one of the forest themes, which sounds much like the Lord of the Rings themes, and the World Theme, which is simply incredible. Overall, every time you hear music, it's either good or better, but commonly the "music" is just a sort of beat or random notes.

The gameplay is cool enough with an original battle system, based off the chain attack idea, only where you can keep the chains neverending until you win if you're good enough, but that's nearly impossible, and the interface is nice and clean, with several types of equippable armor peices, a great special skill/magic system, and a great level up system (except that each character will probably only level up about once every 30 min of action, and with all the non-action parts of the game, that could stretch out to less than once an hour).

All in all, Summoner is something that's rewarding if stuck out to the end, and has certain merit, but also has severe weaknesses. Let's break it down for the end.
Plot Movement/Revelations: 6/10, Storyline: 10/10, Characters: 5/10, Battle System: 7/10, Interface: 6/10, Music: 7/10, Sound Effects: 2/10, Dialogue: 7/10, Graphics: 4~8/10 (Distant~Close), Voice Acting: 5/10, Replay: 4/10.