Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows is a traditional hack and slash role playing game that was released on PS2 and Xbox in late 2005.

Developer: Midway San Diego
Publisher: Midway
Release Date: December 12, 2005
Platforms: PS2, Xbox
JustRPG Score: 75%
Pros:
+Easy to learn combat system.
+Combos are satisfying.
+Fun multiplayer.
Cons:
-Poor story line.
-No character customizations allowed.
-No shops to purchase items.

Overview

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Overview

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows is an action adventure role playing game that was the sequel to Gauntlet: Legends. In this version of the game there are no hidden characters to unlock, no central town where players can upgrade or purchase items, and no character customizations at all. Other than those complaints this is your standard hack and slash role playing game much like the previous Gauntlet games in the franchise. The multiplayer mode can be pretty fun, but once you and your friends beat it once its pretty much over and you probably wont play it again.

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Screenshots

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Featured Video

Full Review

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Review

By, Jason Ferguson

Backdrop
.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.
The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).
Gameplay
Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.
The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.
Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.
Combat
Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.
Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.
Fresh Features
Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.
To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)
Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.
Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.
Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.
Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.
Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.
In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.
Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.
Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.
Time for Completion
Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.
Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.
Shortcomings
While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.
From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.
The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.
The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.
Final Word
We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!
Final Grade: B
The classic Gauntlet series has been reborn in the form of Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows! This entry in the series features a lot of improvements over the rest of the series, such as deeper gameplay, much more impressive graphics, and online play. But do the changes result in a better game? Read on to find out!

 

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The Uricointi Empire was once a mighty kingdom, whose Emperor was aided by four powerful, immortal heroes. These heroes, known best by simple words that befit them, were the Elf, the Warrior, the Wizard, and the Valkyrie. These great heroes were loyal to their Emperor, but little did they know that he was being corrupted by six power-hungry advisors. These advisors craved not only the Emperor’s position, but the immortality of the heroes. The Emperor was tricked into betraying his trusted heroes, and bound them to the Great Tree Rit’i, which grew its very roots into the nexus of magical energy at the bottom of the world. Afterwards, the six advisors betrayed the Emperor as well, killing him and taking the throne for themselves. Now as a ghost cursed to roam the world alone, the former Emperor realizes his mistake. He must free the heroes from the Great Tree and undo his first sorrow. Once free, they will be able to destroy the evil advisors, and put closure to the Emperor’s remaining six sorrows, freeing the world from the clutches of evil and allowing the Emperor to rest in peace.

 

At first glance the story seems fairly deep and interesting, however it’s not relayed through the game well at all. Most of the info I just gave you can be found in the game manual, or will be explained before the game begins in a brief intro scene. Once the game begins, there really isn’t much to the story. No plot twists, character interaction, or even much explanation as to what’s going on. There is a little bit of story given in snippets between each level, which ties together each level, explaining where you are and who you’re about to fight. The story isn’t particularly deep and not very interesting, but it ties the game together enough to give you a reason to keep fighting the evil hordes.

 

If you’ve ever played a Gauntlet game, the gameplay will be familiar to you. You start out by choosing one of the four heroes to play as. The game can be played by anywhere from 1-4 players, and you can even take the action online, which is new to the series. The game is fully playable single-player, however, to get the most out of it, the game should really be played with friends. When played alone, the gameplay can quickly get repetitive and dull.

 

Throughout the game you’ll hack ‘n’ slash your way through hordes of enemies, gaining experience with each kill and taking out the generators to stop the swarm. When you gain enough experience you’ll level up, which will award you with a stat point that you can use to increase either your health, attack, or mana regeneration. Along the way, you’ll also gather gold, which you can use to purchase new abilities.

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Seven Sorrows adds quite a bit more depth to the series with a variety of attacks and abilities. You can perform a hack, which is a powerful shield-breaking attack; a slash, which is a sweeping attack that can hit multiple foes; a projectile, which is a ranged attack; and a launch, which shoots enemies into the air. You can also block, dodge, and perform a powerful mana blast, which uses up your MP to deal great damage to nearby foes as well as defeats Death, who will occasionally pop out of treasure chests to kill you. Aside from these basic moves, each character can perform a variety of unique combos using different button combinations. Each character also has four unique special moves, such as the Warrior’s Vortex ability, which is an axe maneuver that pulls in and stuns nearby enemies. These moves are powerful and can have a variety of effects, but they are used at the expense of MP. This all adds a lot more depth to Seven Sorrows than what was seen in previous games in the series, and helps to break up some of the hack ‘n’ slash monotony. It’s still not horribly deep, but it should be enough to please most RPG fans while keeping the gameplay simple enough to appeal to the casual gamer. If you’re a fan of the genre who yearns for a break from the complexity of most RPGs, then Gauntlet might have just the right level of depth for you.

 

Throughout the game you’ll also pick up armor and weapons upgrades that will not only increase the strength of your weapons and armor, but will also change their appearance. This isn’t nearly as interesting as in Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, where you changed character class in addition to changing appearance, and you gained a familiar, which also changed in appearance. But, I guess it’s better than nothing!

 

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The game features multiple difficulty settings, ranging from Beginning to Impossible. In Beginning mode, you and your teammates have infinite lives. In the Impossible mode, though, you only have two lives, making it extremely challenging. If you’re brave enough to try your hand at the Impossible mode, you’re probably best off to play through some of the easier modes first in order to power your character up. Unfortunately, the game length is extremely short and can easily be conquered in a weekend or a lengthy day-long sitting. It does feature a little bit of replay value if you decide to try and tackle some of the higher modes of difficulty, play as a different character, or level your character up to the fullest. Still, I managed to gain access to all the abilities in a single play through, so you’ll probably get everything there really is to get out of the game by beating it once. It’s a major step forward as far as graphics and gameplay depth overDark Legacy, but it doesn’t feature a fraction of the replay value or nearly as much game length.

 

The game’s music is actually pretty good, however it’s subtle enough that you aren’t going to notice it a lot among all the chaos. Still, the music suits the game nicely, and if you take the time to listen to it, you’ll be pleased. The voice acting is all of pretty good quality, although the narrator can get annoying pretty quickly because you’ll have to listen to him freak out every time someone starts to get low on health.

 

Graphically, the game is a major improvement over previous games in the series. The environments are beautiful and feature a large amount of variety, allowing you to notice the high amount of detail. The spell effects look great, from blasts of fire to the summoning of Death as he appears to drain your life. The characters are also well detailed and designed, although perhaps a bit cliché, and they even move with a fair amount of realism. Unfortunately, the camera can cause quite a few problems if you choose to play multiplayer. Players will often get stuck on objects, and you’ll have to backtrack to free them. Most annoying of all is when a character gets pinned in the corner of the screen by enemies and is unable to move. There will also be plenty of times where you can’t see the oncoming swarms of enemies due to the focus of the camera and they’ll seem to come out of nowhere.

 

Overall, Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows is an action-packed, enjoyable adventure that makes some major improvements on the classic Gauntlet gameplay. It’s not particularly long, though, the camera is as annoying as ever, and hardcore RPG fans may find it far too light on the RPG elements for their taste. Still, with all things considered, this is great multiplayer fun for those who aren’t looking for something horribly deep.

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Final Grade: 75%

 

Screenshots

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Screenshots

Videos

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Videos

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Trailer

Guides / Links

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Guides / Links

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows Wikipedia Entry

FAQ/Walkthrough