Love traditional JRPGs? You'll love this. Tired of traditional JRPGs? Skip it. Sands is well done but can be tedious.

User Rating: 7 | World Destruction: Michibikareshi Ishi DS
By Swoosie | Review Date:
Sands is a very well done, but pretty much standard in gameplay, Japanese-style RPG. There's plenty to love here if you like very traditional JRPGs. But if you're looking for something fresh or unique, you won't find it here.

The facts:

* 3d environments with 2d sprite characters
* In-game-world cut scenes with fully voiced character interaction during those scenes
* Random encounters in dungeons
* Turn based combat that mixes magic, melee, and party based tactics

The opinion - negatives:
* Very easy difficulty can make frequent random encounters tedious, which can kill your interest in pushing through larger dungeons
* Again, because of the frequency of random encounters, you'll see the same monsters over and over and over...
* Voice-over work is inconsistent and sometimes bad
* 2d character sprites are not animated or detailed very well. We've seen much better in recent DS games.

The opinion - positives:
* Very good, unique story -- the hero's motivations and personal inner conflict is unusually compelling.
* Good musical queues and scoring throughout
* Not too much backtracking or wandering required
* Good combat system with some unique leveling of magic skills and melee combat skills.

Again, overall it's very well done and has a lot of attention to trying to make the old formula interesting. For fans of this RPG style, you'll likely be very happy. But for folks that don't love traditional JRPG turn-based gaming with abundant combat ("grinding"), you may get bored quickly.

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