Volume 10: Unchained Blades
Skybox’s first column has reached the double digits! We’ve been operating for nearly a year, good gravy. It remains challenging to maintain the juice to run a column every month, especially when it comes to picking something to focus on when there isn’t necessarily something jumping out at you. But sometimes the angle finds you anyway. This time, while we have a single game as a subject, we’re using the game as a sort of springboard into a broader topic. That said, let’s talk a little about Unchained Blades.
Unchained Blades was an early effort from FuRyu, a developer responsible largely for B and C-tier RPGs that have struggled to find fanfare. But some of my favorites come from this studio, like Crystar and The Alliance Alive. Unchained Blades is an odd one due to its creative bonafides, which includes director Toshio Akashi (Lunar), Takashi Hino (Grandia), and Nobuo Uematsu (you should know this one). The main character designs are also the result of a collaboration from various manga and anime creators, giving the game an odd, incongruous sense of style. I think it’s neat!
Structurally, it’s also an odd duck. It’s foundationally a Wizardry-style DRPG, but it also has a weird monster-collecting element that feeds into a battle minigame that’s almost like a music game, but with the arrow/timing commands and without the musical cues. It’s also terminally grindy, with EXP and money rates that are so low it’s extremely difficult to find your footing in the first real dungeon. Unchained Blades has a cool energy about it, with a story about a dragon seeking revenge on a wish-granting god whose ego he bruised, and a ragtag group of misfits he sort of bullies into forming a team. All the ill-fitting, manga-like character designs feed into that energy, giving Unchained Blades a strong, but confused-feeling aura.
But! I’m more interested in talking about how I played Unchained Blades, rather than the game itself. See, I started out playing on the PSP. This time. Way back, years ago, I reviewed this game early in my games media career, and I reviewed it on 3DS. I figured booting up on the Vita would be more convenient for various reasons (battery life, for one), but I couldn’t help but feel like Unchained Blades was much uglier than I remembered. I understand playing a PSP game on Vita has some resolution stuff going on, but there was still something else I couldn’t put my finger on, between the character graphics, UI elements, and other parts. So I unearthed my 3DS and booted it up there to compare.
Huge difference. Turns out the key was Nintendo’s old and arguably failed 3D gimmick. All of Unchained Blade’s pieces were made, seemingly, with stereoscopic 3D in mind. The text bubbles, character portraits, UI elements, and dungeon environments are all layered in different ways, to make an otherwise normal-looking DRPG make sense in 3D. It actually looks cool, and each element looks clean while sitting on its own plane of sorts on the screen. But when you turn the 3D off and everything has to be flattened down together, it looks almost as ugly as the PSP version, albeit with a smaller, pixel-hiding resolution. You can kind of tell some of the way things were oriented, designed, and colored, which don’t look good together normally, suddenly make sense in stereoscopic action.
Also, the map. The map! On the PSP, the map has to be overlaid on the screen on top of the action, taking up an already limited screen real estate. It’s crunchy and hard to see details without locking in and even squinting sometimes. But on the 3DS, the map lives down on the touch screen more or less on its own. Because of that the map is more clear and easy to read. A perfect resource for a game like this, that relies on your ability to glance back and forth between the map and the rest of the game.
This stuff had me thinking back on the 3DS in general. I wasn’t as into DRPGs back then, but I still played several and really dug them! Unchained Blades of course was one of them, but there was also Etrian Odyssey, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey and Persona Q from Atlus, Eliminage Original, and other games that maybe weren’t DRPGs but still used that extra screen for a nicer map than you’d get elsewhere. The Wii U had a similarly strong double display gimmick, and it’s one of the things I miss the most when I look at the Switch now, even if the Switch is rad in its own ways.
Unchained Blades is neat, weird, and interesting. But I really miss the 3DS, folks. What a great handheld. What a great platform for dungeon-crawlers and RPGs in general. If we still had clamshell handhelds today we’d be a better off society, probably.
Until next time, dungeon delvers.
