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Game Reviews

Summon Night 6 Review

Welcome to Fillujah

Characters from different Summon Night games find themselves landing on a mystery island where things falling from the sky is a everyday thing. As island dwelling Raj and Amu welcome the new characters, they try to workout what's going on.

Battle system is fairly much standard SRPG where you take turns moving and direction/elevation makes a difference. One feature that does stand out is how the experience system works. Instead of all characters in your party gaining experience, XP is pooled and you can decide who to splurge out on later - so if you wanted to power level a single character, you can! Quite handy for minimising level grinding.

Power levelling with an XP pool.

The same can be said about the skill points system - rather than have a preset list of skills being unlocked as you level up, you decide what skills to focus on instead and you have a full list of what each character has.

As far as level grinding is concerned, you don't have many locations for level grinding... Enemies don't change and spawn in exactly the same spots which can be a good or bad thing. Good because once you have the exact tactic right, you can finish the map quickly which makes battles quick and short. The bad? It can get boring quick.

Once you have characters at the right level, the fights really aren't much of a challenge unless you want to aim for the optional "Brave Orders" which, are extra conditions that increase the difficulty but also give you better rewards. Kind of like Super Robot Wars' SR points if you've ever played any of the games.

Mostly standard SRPG

One annoyance I found in battles is the restricted camera. While most SRPGs let you zoom in and out to have a complete view of the battle field, you can only swerve around a 90 degree angle here - very annoying when you're trying to obtain all the treasures or plan out your tactics.

Other than the limited locations, there also isn't any new gear - you just upgrade the existing one and wear the odd accessory. Obviously this means you won't get any kicks from extremely rare drops or equipping your character with a new all powerful weapon.

Kind of gives you an idea of the budget the development team had for making SN6.

As with prequels, there are night conversations where you can chat with characters and get to know them better. They're fun but not quite close to Persona Social Links or "Trails of" Link kind of fun.

Fortunately there are a few things added in for a bit of variety.

Real time mode.

Side quests are quite odd - if you could even call them that. You select 3 characters to take part and suddenly the game changes from turn based to real time except you don't have any control over the characters. It's kind of like a gambling game, hoping you have the right team of characters as they automatically run their way through the map and kill off enemies. Actually quite a fun change of pace.

And for extra variety, you can even play a mini game of fishing which is your usual wait for a bite then button mash affair.

Backgrounds are nicely modelled.

Background art and 3D models look great. Personally I think they show off some of the lighting effects the PS4 can do. Just right amount of detail and animation. Can't say the same for character designs which still remains unimpressive and exact opposite. Story and dialogue is painfully cliche as characters from different worlds meet - what's worse is you have to juggle between alternate worlds, level new characters from scratch and get re-introduced to the same locations multiple times.

Lots of cliche dialogue and voice acting not the greatest.

Voice acting is very average where they are used lacking emotion and the game doesn't feature full voice. There are no real time animated cutscenes, only short Anime cutscenes and they get cut off quite abruptly rather than a smooth transition back to the in-game dialogue.

Other than the lack-lustre character designs and painfully cliche scripting, Summon Night 6 is quite an average SRPG.

Good

  • Nice backgrounds.
  • Flexible experience and skill point system.

Bad

  • Horribly cliche dialogue.
  • Dull character designs.
  • Not much of a challenge.
  • Very much your average SRPG battle system.
Interested in buying this but can't get it locally?
You can use my import guide to learn how to import goods like this from Japan.

import jrpg ps4 summon night

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