Since all the big JRPG franchises have seemingly fled from consoles, I have needed to turn to portable systems for my RPG fix. Sands of Destruction is a recent JRPG published by Sega, that was done by the same team that brought us classics such as Xenogears and Grandia, and the same composer who did the score for Chrono Trigger. These two tidbits of info were more than enough to get me to go out and purchase the game on release day. I was hoping for an experience that reminded me of RPGs past, of classic tales of love and adventure, of saving the world and fighting god and ….

OK, I’ll stop the charade right there. Sands of Destruction just-fucking-sucks! That’s it, plain and simple. Somehow, teams from two of the greatest classic RPGs of all time got together and made something that I can barely stand to look at much less play. I might be overly harsh because I was expecting something amazing, but honestly, I don’t know what the designers were thinking. This is not what JRPGs need to make a brilliant comeback. This is, well, it is just depressing.

Sands of Destruction is set in a world that is mostly covered with sand, so take all your normal oceanic imagery and apply it to the desert. There are sand whales, sand ships, sand pirates, and just about anything else you can think to tack the word “sand” in front of. The human race is ruled by a race of anthropomorphic beasts called Ferals whose cartoony appearance makes them more suited to show up in a furry convention than an epic game about the destruction of the world. It is really nothing more than furry bait and I should know, I’m a furry, and I still found the Ferals to be dumb, uninteresting, and vastly out of place from the get go.

Your main character is Kyrie Illunis a young kid who just so happens to have the ability to destroy the entire world. A political faction called the World Annihilation Front takes interest in him. No one really likes the World Annihilation Front, because their political platform is “solve the world’s problems by destroying it” which seems like a bad thing to most of the people in the world. However, Kyrie is a spiky (well… more disheveled than spikey) haired protagonist, so he has to be on the right side. Anyway you fall in love with a murderous psychopath named Morte and you join the front and blah blah blah are you bored of this yet?

Cause I was. Nothing about this game’s story was even remotely interesting to me, and it’s an RPG, you play it for the story! All of the “twists” were easy to see, and by the time you get a quarter way through the game you simply don’t care about it anymore. This is only compounded by the game’s absolutely atrocious voice acting. The actors do a horrible job with their already horribly written dialogue. There are so many scenes that are cringe worthy … in fact every scene is cringe worthy! God, you think you could have gotten at least some semi competent voice actors, or maybe at least included an option for the original Japanese voices!

Look past the monstrously stupid story and horrible voice acting and you’ll find an equally stupid gameplay system. Its HP and MP all over again with a little twist, in that the battle system tries to be what Xenosaga’s was and fails, and Xenosaga’s battle system wasn’t that good in the first place. Basically you have attack points that go up when you critical hit, or do enough hits in a combo, or raise your party’s morale, or something. I don’t know, I never really got the hang of it, or understood how it worked even in the slightest. You can use these attack points to do weak attacks which have a high chance of hitting and low damage, or strong attacks which have a low chance of hitting and high damage. You can spend points on customizing these attacks, but all that customization does is either make them more likely to hit and less powerful or less likely to hit and more powerful, so you are spending resources on a net gain of zero. Customize enough and you get more follow up moves that you can inject into your combos, which are never as good as your already customized moves. So you can spend time customizing them to make them usable, only you can’t turn them off in the mean time so you are stuck with combing into them even if you don’t want to!

You can cast spells which are ludicrously powerful but immensely draining on your SP, or use items, which ends your turn for some inexplicable reason. Your equipment is the standard weapon, armor, accessory getup with the tiny added bonus of being able to customize your equipment with different materials. You can also equip “quips” which are catchphrases that trigger over the course of the battle and give you buffs. These too … are voice acted, and some are truly horrible. One of Kyrie’s most useful quips raises his defense every time he his hit. Unfortunately, it means that every hit he takes prompts him to say “it’s probably my fault”. Since enemies can combo you as well as you can combo them, he sometimes ends up vomiting up this line 3 or 4 times per enemy turn. I ended up turning it off and losing the defense bonus just so I didn’t have to hear his mopey emo ass.

Outside of battle, the game is your basic dungeon crawler linear RPG. You go where you are told, go through some sort of maze like labyrinth, solve some puzzles, beat a boss, and repeat until the story ends. The dungeons are immensely frustrating because of the game’s ludicrously high encounter rate. Sometimes walking across one room will find you in 3 or 4 battles, which is annoying enough, but imagine how annoying it gets when you have to partake in the game’s tedious puzzles which more often than not have you running back and forth between a set of switches. Half the time you can’t even remember what you are doing because the encounter rate is so high. Even worse, is the fact that you can save anywhere. Normally this is a strength for an RPG, but you get frustrated so often with Sands of Destruction that you will routinely save your game and shut it off in disgust at totally random points. When you finally get the courage to boot it up again, you are totally lost as for where to go and what to do.

Inside battle, the stat system is just totally broken. The combo system does not work the way the designers intended it to. In an early game dungeon I found myself fighting sand pirate bears, and I had leveled up so much from the ludicrously high encounter rate. The bears had two basic attacks, their light attack which resulted in 8 fairly quick and accurate weak strikes, and their strong attack, a large claw swipe which was supposed to be one huge strong but inaccurate blow. Now, I was filed with manly toughness from all the leveling, so the most the bears could do to me was one damage, but one damage appeared to be the minimum, because when they did their 8 hit swipey attack, they still did 8 hits all worth 1 damage. They generally did two to three attacks per turn, so a full string of weak hits would be 24 damage. I would normally fight 3 or so at a time and since I had only two characters and about 50 HP at the time, I would ROUTINELY DIE FROM WEAK HIT SPAM!!! What … the … hell!?! If a bear attacked me with all his might I survived but if he held off I died. What world does this fucking make sense in?

The rest of the game is more of the same. You never seem to be able to accurately plan a battle strategy because sometimes weak hits are devastating and sometimes strong hits are ineffective and which is which appears to be totally random! What’s even worse is that there is no difficulty curve whatsoever. Most of the time enemies simply died with as little as a poke, but randomly they would just kill me for no particular reason. The game has less of a battle system and more of a random mish mash of numbers flying at your face.

Sands of Destruction can be described in one word, disappointing. This is not the JRPG you are looking for. Shitty games coming out of Sega is just par for the course in these days, but this game just had so many big names attached and accomplished so little. Even Mitsuda’s soundtrack are much worse than the stuff you heard in Xenogears and Chrono Trigger. You know what is and even bigger slap in the face? There is a Sands of Destruction anime that was based off the game, and believe it or not it is actually pretty watchable. It refines the plot, features competent Japanese voice actors and doesn’t have you fucking around with a ludicrously high encounter rate and faulty battle system. If you are at all interested in Sands of Destruction, watch the anime and be done with it. Otherwise, just skip it completely.

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