First Impressions: Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes

Well, that was unexpected.

In a truly rare moment of absolute surprise, the gaming community greeted Song Summoner two days ago as Square Enix's uh... "flagship" product for the iPod platform. Being a giant fan of any trash with the Square logo emblazoned across it, I of course immediately spent 20 minutes figuring out where exactly the games section of the iTunes store was, downloaded the title, and spent another 10 minutes getting it on the damn thing (not including restoring the iPod to factory settings and installing the latest firmware). After all of this, I gave myself a solid hour to pump out some first impressions of the title.

The story opens as angry robot commandos from space (this is my term, not the game's) corner a boy and his little brother as they flee. The younger of the two, Zero, falls and is taken by the robots while our teenage protagonist, Ziggy doth protest at the robots. Zero is taken away, but Ziggy is saved by the appearance of the "Soul Master" a jazz-man of ultimate power. Soon after this Ziggy falls unconscious, and the Soul Master comments on his pendant. He tells the sleeping boy that he will train him, something I'm sure is illegal on the internet.

Fast forward five years, and Ziggy has completed his training and is a full-fledged Conductor, a warrior who wields the power to defeat robots through song. This is where the game begins and the centrepiece gimmick comes into play: the ability to generate soldiers from music. In a Monster Rancher-esque environment players select songs from their iPod to be converted into the soldiers they will control in battle. The interface for this is quite good, with songs playing quickly and at great quality. There is even an option to have the Soul Master pick a song at random. Ironically, the first song he chose from my iPod was "Those Who Fight Further" as performed by The Black Mages.

Each soldier belongs to one of five types which operate in a rock-paper-scissors fashion, with each being strong against one, weak against another, and nuetral vs itself and the remaining two. The types include Soldier, Monk, Archer, Mage, and Theif. Within each of these exist a myriad of classes, each reflecting a type of music. For example "Electrochemical."

Battle is where the meat of the gameplay comes. Players take Ziggy and up to three allies into battle against the robot hordes in turn based tactical fashion. Units can move, use items, attack and use skills which are classified as weak, medium or strong.

To be honest, the quality will surprise anyone. The game does stutter occasionally, but for the most part it is as smooth as comparable tactics titles on the GBA or DS. The special effects are impressive, and the background music is, of course, of good quality. One thing I noticed was that opening a status menu for a unit resulted in a fairly lengthy load time, but otherwise the game moves briskly.

I'm sure most of you are interested in how Song Summoner controls, and in my first hour I can tell you I was seriously impressed. Players choose between there available units by rotating the click wheel, then cycle through their available actions the same way. All the information you'd expect from a tactical RPG is displayed on the screen. Selecting tiles to move to is also surprisingly easy. The click wheel cycles horizontally through tiles in range, moving to the next row when the end of the current one is reached. Gameplay is smooth and as good as anything else in the genre.

One of the features I wanted to test out was powering up my characters. When you listen to the songs that created them outside of the game, it charges a meter which allegedly enhances the characters and grants certain bonuses. I had made a playlist of songs that my characters came from and left my iPod on it, but unfortunately when I tried to load the game again before writing this post I was told the game was broken and I had to reinstall it. When I did so, my save file was gone.

I expected to be disappointed with Song Summoner, but if anything I was pleasantly surprised. The gameplay appears to be where it needs to be and while the story is ridiculous, it presents itself with comedy and I expect it will be quite funny later on. I will certainly be going back to it, and if it's good I expect I'll soon produce a full review where I can discuss the features I didn't get to try.