![]() Not content with that, after a while it gives up and we hear no more about it anyway. There's very little to latch onto about him even his back-story - the loss of his brother, the estrangement of his father - is clichéd and the script is powerless to give it any real significance. Tal, the sword-wielding pseudo-leader of the bunch, is decked out in the bright but forgettable armour of the Illumina Guard, and has a big sword and red hair. Compared to their generic contemporaries, there's nothing memorable about any of them. Brought together in a roundabout way by some ancient prophecy, the four adventurers - Tal, Ailish, Buki and Elco - are an incongruous bunch, and the script never has the strength to justify their union, nor give us cause to empathise with them individually. The most irritating thing - and the flaw that underscores most of the game's problems - is the line-up of characters. And there are all sorts of plot twists and sub-dramas along the way. You do this, surprisingly enough, by visiting towns containing shops, blacksmiths, inns and vast numbers of NPCs circling with a line or two of dialogue battling hordes of randomly spawning enemies in-between (generally whenever you happen into a clearing big enough for the game to fence off at either end without you escaping) and tackling the occasional dungeon area, densely packed with battles, menial puzzles and an eventual boss encounter. Your job is to guide four characters from different backgrounds on a fairly one-way mission to gather some crystals, which the kingdom of Illumina hopes to use to reinforce their position and ward off raids from nasties beyond the rift. The idea, then, is that the world of Sudeki has been torn into light and shadow by some sort of godly unhappiness, and the citizens of both are starting to come to terms with this predicament - all the while an uber-nasty lurks over the ethereal horizon, his agents toiling away in secrecy in an attempt to resurrect him. And for some reason, despite lavish visuals and the core of a half-decent story, too many key elements are just devoid of imagination perhaps either the product of focus groups and committees, or just someone's idea of how a Japanese RPG generally behaves. ![]() Intelligent ideas, like a satisfying real-time combat system that mixes Phantasy Star Online-style timed combo attacks and dazzling Final Fantasy-issue spellcasting, are never more than a few steps removed from insultingly straightforward boss encounters, hackneyed writing and voice acting, and trivial puzzles that are barely fit to lick the ground that Zelda walks upon, let alone plant lips on its boot. It's more that it's just too scattershot in its approach. Sudeki's problem isn't that it's fundamentally a bad game. So what better way to kick off than with a cliché, right? Thoughtless Honestly, we're sorry about that, but in the case of Climax and Microsoft's ambitious RPG, it seems rather fitting not only do our expectations and desires for future RPGs remain unshifted by their work, but within the framework of what's on offer it's difficult to think of anything at all that caught us by surprise. What may come as a surprise though is our rather tiring decision to snipe at the marketing rhetoric by way of an introduction. Given the vastness and pedigree of the competition, perhaps it will come as little surprise that it doesn't. When Microsoft originally announced Sudeki, at a press event in Seville a couple of years ago, we were told it would change what we came to expect from a role-playing game.
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