There can be plenty of goals that motivate a main character in a video game. Some do it to save the world from destruction, others do it because they are chosen by divine prophecy and some do it because they are just genuinely good people. One of the most timeless reasons for a hero to set off on their journey is love. Love can make people act in the most unusual, crazy and desperate ways. Such is the case in the story of Sword of the Necromancer.
The Role You Play
You play mainly as Tama, a career thief taking a new job as a bodyguard for a traveling priestess. She is a capable fighter who can fight with a wide array of weapons, including swords, spears, bows and spellbooks. To increase her combat ability, she can also gather potions and equipment that can increase her abilities. She can also fight with the titular sword of the necromancer. It gives Tama the power to resurrect fallen enemies and use them as allies to help fight in battle.
Plot
The story centers around Tama’s mission to escort a priestess named Koko on a pilgrimage. Throughout the pilgrimage, Tama and Koko begin to form a romantic relationship with one another. At one point, Tama and Koko are robbed by Tama’s former gang and Koko is killed in the robbery. Tama, out of love and desperation, seeks out the fabled Sword of the Necromancer so she can use its power to bring Koko back to life.
Gameplay
Sword of the Necromancer is a procedurally-generated action adventure RPG. As you progress through each level of the dungeon, you will encounter different enemies that you can defeat to gain experience or resurrect to use as an ally to fight alongside you. You can also find consumable items, new weapons, equipment, journal entries, and supplies that you can use to upgrade your equipment to make it stronger.
The objective of each level is to locate the floor key. One you have it, you can unlock the boss door and defeat the boss beyond it. Once the boss is defeated, you can progress to the next floor. If you are defeated at any point, you will have to restart the dungeon all over.
Length
The length of Sword of the Necromancer depends heavily on multiple factors. This includes your difficulty settings and how invested you are in the story. You can change the general difficulty, what floor of the dungeon you restart on and whether you restart with the items you collect among other settings. Depending on the settings, it can take longer to get to the end of the game. If you pursue the story fully, you can play through the entire game twice. With all of these factors considered, Sword of the Necromancer can take anywhere from 8 to 20 hours to finish.
Music
The soundtrack in Sword of the Necromancer feels very uninspired. It adds very little to the gameplay experience and is barely impactful at all. The tracks don’t really have any instrumentation that is built around the level. Because of this, it feels like the tracks from all of the different stages are interchangeable with one another. There are some occasionally noticeable tracks throughout the game during the boss battles and cutscenes, but not enough to make up a memorable and impactful soundtrack.
Notable Features
Sword of the Necromancer does a good job of combining multiple genres into one. It does a good job of integrating the action and roguelike elements of the gameplay into the romance elements of its story. The gameplay mechanics of the titular Sword of the Necromancer play an essential part of the story and help build up the relationship with the other characters. This does an excellent job of combining genres that typically are not combined well.
The Talking Parts
The dialogue and cutscenes do a decent job of conveying the story, but there is quite a lot of room for improvement. Most of the cutscenes are just a few images with text and voice-overs. While all of the components of the cutscenes are decent, the scenes themselves are long, drawn out and aren’t paced well. Several cutscenes would have benefitted from having more pictures in them to convey a broader range of expression and body language.
Z…We’ve Reached the End. Anything Else?
Sword of the Necromancer has a lot of options to customize the difficulty. You can adjust the basic difficulty but also make it so that you don’t lose your items or experience when you are defeated in battle. You also have the option to play the game cooperatively with another player. Adjusting the different difficulty settings makes a pretty big impact and adds a lot of replayability to the game.
Final Summary
Sword of the Necromancer is a solid game. It fills multiple niches as a lesbian romance roguelike RPG, which will certainly cement its place in gaming culture. However, it has multiple areas where it could be improved. It doesn’t excel in many fields but in its own narrow genre, it blows what little competition there is out of the water. Definitely worth giving it a try.