Sadame Review

Publisher Rising Star is renowned for its dedication for localising Japanese games, and their latest release is Sadame, known as Ishi-Sengoku-Den Sadame in Japan (now roughly translating to the simple title “Fate”). Sadame has you choose from 4 classes - Samurai, Ninja, Monk, and Rogue - and battle across a fantasy Sengoku-period Japan. Developer Studio Mebius aren’t sticking too close to the facts though as this Nobunaga commands an army of demons and the undead, which I’m pretty sure isn’t how it actually went down 500 years ago.

Sadame is a 2D hack-n-slash with loot drops and character levelling played from a Pokémon-style view, giving you a plane to fight on rather than a platform. Melee attacks are mapped to A and B, with each character starting with a basic combo string that extends with levelling, and X delivering an AOE attack. You can dash to avoid enemy attacks with Y, with each character having different speeds and distances covered. L and R are then dedicated to selecting your karma and spell options respectively; karmas are earned by defeating bosses and spells are linked to the armour and weapons you have equipped.

All the right tools are here, but the combat feels somewhat unsatisfying. Without a lock-on, some attacks will have you swinging wide regularly, and working on a grid basis, lunging attacks and the like require you to be in the right place which isn’t often easy with the loose movement control. Also, you can only select a single difficulty on starting the game for the first time, and for the first half dozen missions, every enemy - including bosses - will fall to the just a couple of hits. Then, at the end of Act 2, the difficulty suddenly starts to curve upwards, going from lifelessly easy to punishing every mistake between a loading screen.

There being only one difficulty available is actually part of a feature that makes Sadame reminiscent of a roguelike - completing one playthrough unlocks the next difficulty for that character. You’re encouraged to repeatedly go through the game with the same characters, so completing it once only takes about two or three hours. There’s not much of a story either; Nobunaga needs to be slain, and you have to fight your way across Japan, through waves of zombie archers and ninjas, to reach him. The dialogue translation seems to have tried to be as close to the Japanese as possible, meaning that conversations are often very literal, and lacking in any nuance.

Each campaign won’t necessarily be the same, as at certain points you will choose which path to take, leading to different levels. While this does primarily serve to appease the monotony of seeing the same environments and enemies again and again, it does also offer new bosses. As I stated before, defeating a boss grants you their karma - a unique skill to use in battle: healing, elemental damage, buffs and debuffs - so exploring is rewarding.

Sadame doesn’t just want you to play through with the same character each time, it also wants you to be using multiple characters. Collected loot and money is shared, and from the deployment screen before a mission you can assign one of your other characters (or a friend’s via StreetPass) to act as a partner. Having an AI to assist and distract becomes key at higher difficulties, so making sure that you are levelling everyone up to near enough the same level invites you to keep replaying.

If you need yet more reason to keep starting over, there are also achievements to unlock in-game that offer monetary rewards; the objectives are simple things like clearing the game once with a class, saving a merchant, and destroying a large number of pots, but there are also a few high value ones linked to difficulties.

As a budget release on the 3DS eShop, and if approached as something to play in short bursts, I think Sadame is worth a purchase after you’ve already exhausted the best this handheld has to offer. By no means a bad game, Sadame is ultimately carried by its cross-character interaction, with the often dull combat holding it back from anything more than mediocrity.