Every once in a while we encounter a game so mediocre it almost defies scoring. Should we utterly slate a game for its lack of originality, or laud the fact that it emulates every other game of its genre rather well?

Within an hour of playing Blade Dancer: Lineage Of Light, it became apparent that the developer had no intention of taking the player beyond the comfortable realms of a stock RPG. We’re regaled with the trite tale of a young lad (Lance) seeking adventure in the legend of the Blade Dancer: Gerard. He starts as a loner, but picks up a couple of other losers who want to star in this lame game – this includes Tess, the obligatory love interest. Lance sports an esoteric Blade Dancer tattoo on his forehead but has no idea how it came to be there. Perhaps, *gasp*, his destiny is linked to the Blade Dancer legend? Or perhaps Tess dared him to prove his manhood by being tattooed somewhere really stupid and painful after he got ratted on rice wine.

Gameplay isn’t quite as insipid as the plot, but it hardly made us leap in ecstasy either. The village of Foo (one letter short) is inhabited by a useless population, proving themselves particularly witless through their inane conversation. Adventuring outside of town is more entertaining and, fortunately, the anticipated random Final Fantasy-style encounters have been replaced by hovering skulls, representing groups of marauding baddies that move to intercept should you venture too close.

Blade Dancer has no real tutorial, apart from instructing you in the basics of crafting, an innovative skill that allows you to analyze the components of an item in order to replicate it. Instead, it’s audacious enough to embrace its generic fantasy conventions and expects you to do so too, by providing no further instruction aside from telling you how to target using Circle.

But it’s probably through being so mundane that we gleaned a modicum of pleasure from Blade Dancer. For despite disliking it for not being anything more than distracting, going through the same soporific gameplay motions we’ve made in every other RPG evoked a nostalgic appeal that compelled us to play on for a while. It’s hardly enough for us to elevate it to the RPG podium but at least this saves it from the gaming gutter.

Ben Biggs