Writings of Mass Deduction

This game almost didn’t become a hidden gem, it got a lot of press at first. A lot of that press was unfortunately negative. So why is it a hidden gem now? Because of two post-release bug fixes that turn “Ogre’s Phantasm Sword Quest” from a promising (but frustrating) experience into something great.

Clocking in at nearly 400MB (compressed), this is the biggest indie game I’m aware of in the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) channel. In fact, until not long ago indie games weren’t *allowed* to be this big. And make no mistake, the game is ambitious. It’s a third-person action adventure that’s inspired by “Shadow of the Colossus”, or so it would seem, with absolutely giant bosses that need to be taken down. There are smaller creatures on offer too, though, and dispatching them reminds me a bit of “Heavenly Sword”. Either way, an experience like this, with graphical fidelity this good, at 240 Microsoft Points (the minimum price allowed for a game of this size), it’s a bargain.

The updates corrected frame rate issues that plagued the game when large enemies were on-screen (which, you know, was kind of the point of the game in the first place) and addressed game difficulty issues. These are the kinds of things developers need to be looking at post-release, so full marks to the developer for that. Given the ambitiousness of the title, the huge size of the game, and the post-release support, “Ogre’s Phantasm Sword Quest” is very deserving of your 240 MSP.

Here’s what the developer (Divider Games) has to say about the game:

“3D Action RPG. Attack large ogres with your sword! Break the helmets! This game contains 9 stages and 5 swords! Ver 1.01 FPS(Frame per second) became better. Stage1’s goblins became weaker. Ver 1.02 no garbage collection(no stop motion)”