Publisher: Level-5 Developer: In-house Format: 3DS Release: Out Now
The belated fourth release from Level-5’s Guild01 compendium posits the idea that the real heroes of role-playing games are not those who explore dungeons and slay monsters, but who carefully craft the weapons these adventurers wield. Weapon Shop De Omasse casts you as an enthusiastic blacksmith’s apprentice tasked with forging blades, spears and axes according to both your customers’ requirements and the quests to which their current level and skillset might be best suited.
After the obligatory tutorials, it quickly settles into a strangely hypnotic loop. Characters arrive in your shop with specific requests for weapons, and you have a short time in which to fulfil that order. Head to the forge and you’ll engage in a simplistic rhythm-action game, chiselling away at a heated slab of metal with your stylus to match the percussive cues. Moving and flipping the incomplete weapon as you hammer out its lumps is crucial, as is retaining the optimum temperature by heating and cooling it between well-timed strikes. The process ends with you plunging the completed weapon into cold water, before you’re invited to admire your craftsmanship. It’s a rewarding process, or at least it would be with more thorough feedback: as it stands, the results seem curiously inconsistent, with perfect chains seemingly as likely to result in a mediocre blade as a high quality one.
Once the blade is complete, you can hand it over, or apply a layer of polish by scraping the stylus over both sides until it shines – a short, simple process that increases its stats significantly. The adventurer will then set off on their quest, which can be followed on a text feed called the Grindcast. This fulfils a dual function, working as a pastiche of social networks, while providing a rich source of self-referential humour. Jabs at established genre tropes are nothing new, though the jokes here are warm and well-written. There are occasional moments of gentle pathos, too, and you’ll begin to feel a strange affection for your regular customers –a boastful, manga-obsessed Frenchman; an axe-wielding grandmother searching for her missing husband –as you follow their missives with interest while milling around the store between jobs. Interruptions come frequently, however, courtesy of a series of generic NPCs asking to rent pre-made weapons of a particular kind. They’ll provide your bread-and-butter income, as well as ores that can be incorporated into the crafting process to provide additional buffs.
Yet as long as you deliver a weapon that matches a character’s level and demands, you’ll rarely see them fail a quest – and as such, your role, and the pride you may have come to take in your work, is diminished. What was routine now feels repetitive, and the rudimentary nature of your task is laid bare. As even the Grindcast begins to recycle, the same jokes popping up in your daily feed, the pleasurable mundanity of the early hours soon segues into outright tedium, capturing the prosaic banality of a regular job a little too accurately. For those first few hours, however, this idiosyncratic and characterful curio offers a rare sensation – that of experiencing a role quite unlike anything you’ve previously inhabited. On a console where tried and tested ideas continue to dominate, it would be wrong to entirely dismiss an experiment like this, even if the result is only fleetingly worthwhile.
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