Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors for Wii Reviews by Gamers

This game showed a lot of promise when I had initially started it up. Lots of fanfare and epic music, beautiful graphics, the usual Toriyama character designs. When I start playing it, it's a different thing entirely. For starters, my biggest peeve about this game: When you're walking around in the game's ONE town, you have to use the Wii Remote's D-Pad, you can't use the nunchuk. The D-Pad is absolutely atrocious for this purpose, and to run, you must press one of the "number" buttons (I forget which) along with the D-Pad, which strains your fingers quite a bit. It doesn't help that the town itself is composed of really blocky and simplistic buildings, though through playing the game you know the engine and the developers are capable of much, much more. The voice acting is superb, but even that can't save the horrible lines/story the characters are given to work with. Most of the talking you do is with your father, or with whoever the random second party member is, and it's all idle chatter except the occasional objective. On to the gameplay. Basically, it's like this. Go to the one town the game has, buy some stuff, talk to your dad and various others, get a mission, get your NPC party member (useless), and go talk to the town guard, which lets you go to one of the game's "levels". When you finally make it out to these areas, you notice they look WAY better than the town does. Anyway, the way you go through these areas is basically thus. Walk forward (no other direction possible), then proceed to fight the enemies on the way. This is accomplished by pointing the wii remote at the focal point, clicking it, and then swinging it in the proper direction. This is very clunky. You're also able to guard with a shield, so little spots light up on the screen that you must move your shield to to guard attacks. Your shield breaks slowly from attacks. There are forks in the road, too. If you take the wrong one, you must start the area over again. That's all there is here.

This game is terrible, basically you will play through about ten hours a randomly swinging the wiimote hoping you hit something. While you can aim, the shield makes it nearly useless. Another problem is the game doesn’t read slashes very well, and rarely will you be lucky enough to do a trust attack. The game play is repetitive, slash then block, over and over again. My last complaint is how liner the game is, there's practically no exploration to be had here. The saving graces for this game is it won't take long to finish, only about ten hours, and the graphics look great.