The world ends with you

If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written about video games (and even if you haven’t) you know that Japanese RPGs have gotten very stale, with derivative stories and bland design.

You also probably know, if you’ve hit up your local Gamestop any time in the last four years, that the Nintendo DS has about 40 billion RPGs on them (and surprisingly, a lot of them are good). So it’s pretty hard to come across one that actually does some interesting things.

Sands of Destruction doesn’t look like it’d fit the bill for a JRPG that breaks any kind of mold. It has your typical teenage anime-style heroic couple on the cover. It has the big, terrible prerequisite cataclysmic event happening in the background and it has a name like Sands of Destruction.

But there’s more here than meets the eye—particularly if you’ve been a fan of the genre since the halcyon days of the 32-bit era (and even before that) when damn near every RPG that came from Japan was of extremely high quality.

I wasn’t expecting it, but Destruction actually has quite a throwback feel to this golden age. Sure, it’s antique, but if you grew up with games like Grandia and Xenogears, this is something that’s going to resonate with you. Hell, even if you didn’t, you should be able to appreciate the well-written narrative and solid design conventions.

Comparing Destruction to these two games isn’t just a random matchup, either, as its development team ImageEpoch is made up of former developers that worked on the earlier two games. Even on a small-scale platform like the DS, their penchant for the grandiose is immediately apparent—another plus on Destruction‘s scorecard.

In particular, the game immediately struck me as a kindred spirit to Xenogears, though instead of a labyrinthine tale of morality, existentialism and religion set in a sci-fi universe (with giant mechs), it deals with slavery. xenophobia and one’s sense of self (with giant sand critters).

Not that these kinds of themes are entirely uncommon from the canonical history of JRPGs—these guys just spend more time crafting interesting narratives than a lot of other “save-the-kingdom” efforts, and it’s as noticeable now as it was then.

Another interesting element in the game’s narrative comes from the main character, a young kid who just happens to have the power to destroy the world lurking somewhere inside him.

Naturally, there are those that want him to use the power to do just that, but it’s not for the evil reasons you might think. Essentially, mankind has been enslaved by a class of wolf-people so corrupt that pro-human radicals decide that destroying the planet is their only way out. This brings an interesting morality play to the typical good versus evil proceedings.

I could go on about the game’s high production values, or the fact that the brilliant Yasunori Mitsuda (of Chrono Trigger fame) composed Destruction‘s soundtrack, but you get the idea. This game was developed by an all-star team.

It still comes with the caveat that, compared to today’s streamlined design standards, it’s going to feel old. The experience isn’t ruined thanks to some design balancing tricks that run the gamut from good to bad.

Random battles are present (but not throw-your-DS-out-the-window frequent), but remain absent from the world map. The difficulty isn’t that steep, though there are plenty of customizations and depth in the battle system.

And then there are the game’s numerous event scenes, many of which have lots of lines of spoken dialogue. You can’t skip the dialogue despite the presence of accompanying text (though you can turn it down). However if you say, die in the middle of a long-winded set of scenes, you can press start to skip the scene entirely.

It’s not a great tradeoff, since you still have to listen to the dialogue the first time around if you want to absorb the story (this can be especially bad because some of the voice actors are god-awful), but it helps.

On the plus side, the game’s aesthetic choice—an old-school 2-D sprites on 3-D backdrops approach—really works well for Destruction‘s design and historical sensibilities. The combat is more fun than a lot of other JRPGs, with a mixture of real-time commands (paid for with energy points) governed by a turn-based rubric.

But really, just to play something else from Xenogears alums (and Mitsuda, one of the best and most interesting video game composers this side of ex-Silent Hill player Akira Yamaoka) is a good thing. If you disagree, you probably shouldn’t be playing JRPGs anyway.