Reviewed on: PC
What if Zelda: A Link to the Past were a roguelike?
That’s the new mechanic The Swords of Ditto brings to the table. You are The Sword, the chosen one who is born every 100 years to wield the sword of Ditto and face Mormo, the evil sorceress who enslaves the land if you fail.
And you usually fail several times. The Swords of Ditto offers the variety and the punishment of the roguelike: each generation of The Sword has a different structure for the world map and Dungeons, and your death means losing all the consumables you have. As you play, you unlock new characters to be The Sword, each with particular attributes.
The second story element comes after the first hours of grind (levels carry over between generations, fortunately): a goddess takes pity on your repeated suffering and offers to sell you one more life (in exchange for a special coin of hers). From then on, everything you want to take with you after death costs this new currency (except for the magical artifacts you pick up in the dungeons). Mechanically, the game is quite simple.
It’s in the audiovisuals that The Swords of Ditto draws attention. The whole game looks hand-drawn. The feeling of playing a drawing that moves at your command is inexplicable. The music is pleasant and fits the environments. The game being procedurally generated, as always, can greatly uneven the in-game experience. The dungeons have an average enemy level of 5. Since you obviously start the game at level 1 and find the first dungeon quite early, it takes a certain amount of grind to catch up. There’s always the option of playing below your enemies’ level, and it is indeed possible to play that way. It’s just strange that the first dungeon demands so much of you. Another demerit of the roguelike aspect is that the maps (outside the dungeon) spread out however they want. You go from a level 5 area to a level 3 area, and a level 4 one in sequence.
The game’s narrative brings no innovation of any kind. There is some level of fourth-wall humor, but it’s hard to attribute charisma to characters that change with every death.
Worth the purchase?
Yes! Despite the problems with the roguelike mechanic, The Swords of Ditto is a great experience
Max Xavier
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