Game Reviews

Sting is an interesting developer. This is a studio that numbers their flagship series, Dept. Heaven, in order of originality in game design, rather than their sequential places in the story. Given that the first and least innovative of these is Riviera: The Promised Land—an RPG/dating/minigame/adventure—it's easy to see that the crew at Sting really like pushing boundaries. This pedigree makes the total lack of innovation in Hexyz Force a bitter pill to swallow.The game isn't technically part of the the Dept. Heaven series, so perhaps I'm judging it a bit too harshly, but even taken on its own Hexyz Force does little to set itself apart from dozens of RPGs that came before.

The battle system is a strictly turn-based affair. The only wrinkle is that each attack has a cooldown, with stronger attacks typically delaying a characters next turn longer than weak ones. Not exactly revolutionary stuff. Sting makes some small efforts to bring some spice to a mostly done-to-death system, but they're transparent disguises over things RPGs have been doing for years.

Ragnafacts—holy weapons that only the protagonists can use—and RP have taken the place of spells and MP. The other weapons, Spirifacts, work similarly to Ragnafacts, only they consume no RP and have limited uses before permanently breaking. The final methods of combat are Force Burst attacks, which are basically penalty-free super attacks that can be used once the Force Burst gauge fills. Fancy names aside, none of these are things that haven't been seen many, many times before.

The single, kinda-new feature that Hexyz Force brings to the table, the Hexyz Charge, falls completely flat due to thoughtless implementation. Every technique has one of three elemental affinities, and chaining together a series of attacks in the right way will increase the damage of the next attack. The problem is that enemies also benefit from the Hexyz Charge, meaning that if the party is stronger, so are the enemies. I ended up ignoring the Charge for most of the game because of this catch-22. Not utilizing the Hexyz Charge presented zero problems, largely because Hexyz Force has close to zero challenge. Embarrassingly, I forgot to upgrade any of my Ragnafacts for two entire chapters, and the only difficulty I encountered the entire time was staying awake.