“Enter Sandman,” I Choose You! – Review of Song Summoner: The Unsong Heroes + Encore

Song Summoner: The Unsong Heroes + Encore
Published and Developed by: Square Enix
For: iPhone/iPod Touch

I remember hearing about Song Summoner for the original iPod last year. The thought of a game that mixes my favorite type of RPG (Strategy-RPG) and Monster Rancher style collection gameplay seemed like a graet idea, especially since I miss the Monster Rancher series (Tecmo, a Wii version of this game would be excellent!). Unfortunately, the concept and the execution seems to vary quite differently in this case.

In Song Summoner, you play as Ziggy, a conductor who summons Tune Troopers to aid him in battle. You are out to save your little brother Zero, who has been captured by a fascist militia who strives to destroy music forever…or something like that.

The crux of the game is this: use your iPhone or iPod Touch and select tracks from your device. From those tracks, you create units of applicable strength and class. These units are given a letter ranking after they have been summoned.

Then, you go battle enemies in either the story missions, in free maps or in the “rehersal room”, where you go to battle and win Pitch Pearls, which are used to level up your characters from Bronze to Platinum.

You also level up your units through the use of “Play Points”. To accumulate Play Points, you listen to the songs that have created units. These accumulate points for all characters, but give more to the specific song that you listened to. However, the points accumulate moves you up in Levels, not in Bronze to Platinum rank (like is used with Pitch Pearls).

As you can see, just the leveling of characters seems to be confusing. And while to most outsiders, strategy-RPG’s can be considered a confusing, sometimes daunting affiar, Song Summoner confuses gamers who have been bred in the ways of Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice and Knights of the Nightmare.

Leveling and setting up your men is easily an exercise in confusion. You mean to tell me to level up my characters to be good, I have to listen to the song it came from multiple times? And all that Pitch Pearls really do is give you more abilities and level you up slightly? How do my main characters level up? Why can’t I accumulate points by defeating enemies? What really IS the point of free battles when I can only get about 15 Pitch Pearls per battle?

Leveling and gaining new abilities are easily the most fun mechanic from a Strategy-RPG, and Song Summoner does this all wrong, resulting in a confusing system that doesn’t seem rewarding and all that interesting to dive into.

Compounding the problems with the game is the actual battles. Played like a paired down, very simplistic version of Final Fantasy Tactics, battles are over fairly quickly with not much of a challenge involved. In fact, there is nary a recollection where actual strategy played into the game itself, which defeats the entire purpose of the battle system in the first place.

In fact, the biggest problem the game has is that it doesn’t feel like a whole game, even though they added to the game from the previous version. To progress or really enjoy the game in some form, it seems like a majority of your experience has to be done outside of the game itself by listening to the music attached to your army. This makes the game feel like more an add-on or a companion piece to your music, rather than a game that uses your music to fleshen out the game itself.

With a lackluster story, decrepid visuals, controls that are annoying and unresponsive and a rather disheartening feeling of being incomplete, Song Summoner: The Unsong Heroes + Encore simply fails in both the basic design and in its ambitious and unique concept.

The game seems to have too many systems that do very little in the way of progresssion and the fact that you are better at succeeding in the game when you don’t play it seems very disheartening to someone who wants to dive head first into a long, deep RPG.

Unless you want an add-on that allows you to do something different with your music, this game is best left out of your iPhone or iPod Touch. I’d tell people $4.99 is too much for the game; $9.99 is highway robbery.

Brad Wiswall
www.twitter.com/gamakarmica

Tags: iPhone, iPod Touch, Song Summoner, Square Enix

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 9:57 am and is filed under Handheld, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.