Review by: Cole Jones

Late last year, Chrono Trigger DS came along and reminded players how great 2D RPGs used to be. Unfortunately, it also had another unintended effect: making Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled look like a unimaginative carbon copy. Even though it's a delightfully detailed and colorful RPG, Black Sigil lifts the entirety of its graphical style, character movements, and overall aestetic directly from Crono's adventure. While imitation is the highest form of flattery, this modern day retro revival is reserved for hardcore enthusiasts only.

By and large, Black Sigil's story is its strongest suit. Based on the glory RPGs of yesteryear, Black Sigil tells the tale of Kairu and Aurora; two childhood friends with family ties to the Duke of Bel Lenora. While Aurora's an apt mage and the apple of her father's eye, Kairu is an orphan taken in by her father, the generous Duke Averay, after the magicless evil heathen Val is banished from Bel Lenora. As Kairu ages, a troublesome truth comes to light: he appears to lack magic as well. Fearing what might happen if Kairu turns out to be another devil incarnate, Averay hastily banishes him to another dimension with Aurora accidentally in tow. As the two adventurers awake in a verdant maze on another planet, the story truly begins.

Black Sigil's battle system tries to emulate the fast-paced battle systems of yesteryear, but it oftentimes ends up being far more frustrating than fun. For starters, the game uses a mildly tactical area-based attack system that forces you to be within arm’s length of enemies before using weapons. While this pinch of realism sounds good on paper, it practically guarantees one of your characters will be out of range and forced to use precious magic during battle. To add insult to injury, Kairu's inexplicably cursed with random status ailments for almost half the game, and many of the enemies you encounter add another infliction to the mix with an alarmingly high success rate.

That said—I really can't express how much it pains me to see such a delightfully retro game bogged down by a single fixable problem. The developers of Black Sigil really like their battles. A lot. As such, you're forced to trudge through a random encounter practically every 3-5 steps, which wouldn't be so bad if each battle didn't take upwards of two minutes to position your characters carefully and wait for your attacks. Sure, you could hold B and pray for your release, but the game's experience and gold output is so meager I was actually forced to grind multiple times. It just gets tedious.

While I couldn't recommend this game to anyone not looking for a slow-paced grindfest, Black Sigil has a few redeeming aspects if you're able to stomach its encounter rate. It does a great job of pulling you into its humorous and touching story, and there's so many hidden items, paths to discover, and alternate endings you'll probably want to play through it multiple times. Unfortunately, I doubt the vast majority of us possess that sort of trance-like patience to make it through Black Sigil once, so only hardcore retro fetishists need apply.

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