Sword of Vermillion Review

One thing I’ve found that the Sega Genesis tends to lack is a wide library of RPGs. The SNES tends to excel in this area, but there are still a number for the Genesis, and a few are actually pretty dang good. Enter Sword of Vermillion. Sword of Vermillion is one of the oldest RPG-style games on the Genesis, being in fact one of the first two. I say style because it’s not totally an RPG, but it does carry enough of the storyline format, magic, and ‘find this and that item’ scheme to it that an RPG is pretty much what it is. Anyway, I was quite happy to find it in spite of the blah cover art, and overall it was a cool experience. A few areas were not to my liking, but it’s one I recommend. Let me explain.

Graphically, Sword of Vermillion makes pretty good usage of the Genesis’ capabilities. The color scheme is fine, the graphics are pretty clear, and the detail is generally fine. Some of the bosses in particular are nice and big with lots of intricate little details. However, this one falls prey to the pallette swapping trick in a bad way. Some of the creatures just look silly to begin with and the color changes make it look even worse. Also, the animations tend to be pretty wooden. Your character has this puppet-like walk to him and some of the enemies move around in these ridiculous slides that don’t really make sense. The bosses, in spite of the detail on some of them, are rather slow. Not much of a problem, but these sorts of things do stand out. The scrolling 3D view of the terrain can get a bit confusing too. For example, instead of just having a continuous line of trees while you’re walking through a forest, they have a continuous row of sprites coming at you, and sometimes when you’re looking for key areas like a cavern entrance it will look like it’s to the one side when it’s in a totally different direction. Making the graphics continuous instead of repeating sprites would have been a better idea. Smooth scrolling, however. One more problem with Sword of Vermillion is there isn’t much variety in the terrain. Trees, rocks, cavern entrances, and that’s about it. The only thing that sets it all apart are the occasional towns or areas of interest, otherwise it pretty much looks the same all over. Different realms would have been a good idea.

In Sword of Vermillion the music has this technological, but epic sound to it that fits the atmosphere. The action sequences, especially the boss rounds, are pretty interesting. In general, most of the music fits, but I can’t say any of it really stood out as being truly stellar. No problems with it though, other than the odd track you get right before a battle. Not sure what that strange thing is about. It almost sounds like music of anticipation you’d hear at a puppet show, I don’t have a better way of explaining it. The sound effects are decent, but a lot of them sound rather stupid. When you get struck you get this strange little ‘hip’ sound coming out of your character and the sound of enemies dying is horrible. I didn’t know slimes, scorpions, and medusas all went ‘roooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’ when they perished. The effects are really a pretty weak area for this game. Thankfully the music is loud enough and covers over most of it, with the exception of that stupid rooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa sound for every single enemy. Talk about annoying.

So, Sword of Vermillion is essentially an RPG. You have to gather experience to raise levels, collect gold and items, find various things, uncover secrets to reveal the truth behind the plot, encounter wandering monsters, and so forth. Where it differs is that the battle system is primarily action-based. So instead of the usual confrontation screen, you move your character around swinging your sword or casting spells in a battle scene that takes a 2D view of sorts. Those are the only areas that make it almost Zelda-like, the rest of Sword of Vermillion is traditional RPG format. It’s pretty large, too. You have a lot of areas to go through, progressively harder enemies, various tricks, magic, people to find and talk to, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from an RPG, though you should keep in mind it’s an old one, right when the Genesis was first released. Check it out here before I give you the hate:

Sword of Vermillion has some faults in the graphics and sound department, but overall the gameplay is pretty cool. It does, however, have a number of notable issues that makes it less than it could have been. Frist off, the constant sprite scrolling doesn’t really work right for a 3D screen. Luckily, they threw in another, overhead screen similar to what Sega did for Miracle Warriors on the Master System, so this helps to clear things up. The 3D screen can get kind of annoying and confusing at times, but you should be able to get the hang of it. Second, the battle system in this game is absolutely senseless and horrible. Worst battle system ever right here my friends. Don’t get me wrong, I think mixing the RPG-style of Sword of Vermillion with Zelda-style fighting is cool, but they didn’t pull it off. When you start the battles, your character starts at a random position, as do the enemies. Too bad they’re sometimes right on you when you appear, causing you to lose some life and possibly get poisoned. To make it worse, you only have a measily few milimeters of contact space for your weapon as you swing it in this ridiculously useless arc from down to up. Who swings like that? You have to get really close to hit, and trust me, for the first few times you’ll be running into everything.

To add further pain, the angles during battle make it more awkward and confusing when you have a horde of creatures on the move. The spells are generally useless in actual battle, which is lame, since you can do most of your damage through striking. Would have been cool, but you kind of need to save your spell points for traveling back to town, eliminating poison, or healing yourself. The damage spells usually take up way too much energy so it’s not even worth it. Plus, some of the creatures are just annoying to even bother fighting, like these ‘fungus’ things that have these swinging tentacle arms. Not only do you not really get any experience from killing them, but it takes forever to get it done. Luckily, you can run away from any battle except the bosses by just moving your character to the edge of the screen. The boss segments, in contrast, are pretty cool overall, but again your character has this really wooden movement. You can’t jump, only duck, move and swing, so aside from the fact that they look cool, the actual play during the boss sections is lackluster at best and damn easy too.

Sword of Vermillion was an early 16-Bit era RPG, but it really didn’t do anything new. This sort of format had been tried previously in the 8-Bit era with games like Ys and such, so it’s not really ground-breaking in any way. They included a little more text-heavy play, but in general it’s a typical RPG with action segments mixed in. Nothing here that really breaks the mold. Pretty much everything you’d expect with some suck thrown in.

I have to say though that Sword of Vermillion definitely delivers in the replay. In spite of its flaws I had fun playing it and I came back to it several times over the course of about two years before I finally completed it. It’s got just enough to tax your abilities, but not so much that it gets on your nerves. Being able to run from any small battle is actually a huge time saver and helps out in the end. In general, I’d say you’re looking at roughly a few weeks of steady play before you complete it, so it has that typical RPG feature of sucking all of reality out of your life until you complete it, and it’s really not that bad in the long run.

Overall, Sword of Vermillion is an enjoyable RPG with some noticeable flaws. Of course, these flaws are kind of severe in a way, but in spite of them it has enough to offer that most RPG fans will feel right at home with it. Most people will easily get the hang of it, but you won’t necessarily be a fan of some of the mechanics. I don’t recommend it to the general gamer, and if you’re more into an RPG like Warriors of the Eternal Sun you’ll probably be annoyed by Sword of Vermillion, specifically the ridiculous battle segments. But in spite of this, it’s definitely an RPG to check out for the Genesis, though with reservation.