As promised here are a few words about how much I enjoyed playing Summon Night 4 and how much it scratched my strategy RPG itch so that I won’t be playing another one for a while. Unless I feel like it.

Unfortunately with the benefit of hindsight, I’m starting to realize I didn’t enjoy SN4 all that much. I mean, it was nice and all, but the further I get from it, the more I start to wonder what I saw in it. Apart from the fact that it’s an SRPG and that it’s Summon Night, of course.

It was a good game, no question about that. Apart from the story, which I will elaborate on below. I don’t remember much of the story in the first two games and SN3’s story was quite abysmal so maybe SN4 is just following in that proud tradition. They even have the customary “fight 15 battles against the same enemies who later join your party” thing going on as usual but I’d already grown to expect as much so I wasn’t the least surprised.

Summon Night 4 is significantly easier than its predecessors and would be a good introduction to the series if there weren’t so, so many references to earlier games in it. For a series fan like me it wasn’t that much of a problem, but in another series I would be quite annoyed.

Anyway, about how much easier it is – hm, well it’s only easy if you make it easy, just that it’s much easier to make it easy this time round. In previous games the only way you could grind between story battles was with Free battles. These took ages to complete and gave paltry sums of money and EXP. You’d fight and fight and only earn enough to level one or two characters up and buy a single sword. Free Battles are still present in SN4, but they’ve taken a backseat to Repeat Battles, where you redo Story battles for 50% EXP and money, and the Endless Corridor, a 20-stage (i.e. not so endless) bonus dungeon that gives so-so EXP but also provides fun challenging battles and great item rewards. You don’t have to take advantage of any of these, but the fact that they’re present alone makes the game much easier to play and finish, if only by grinding your way to glory.

Unlike SN3 the karma system in SN4 doesn’t affect the kind of ending you get either. Higher (or is it lower?) karma affects your ability to see certain scenes and recruit certain characters (I think?) but doesn’t influence the story in any way and can be safely ignored. Summon Night 4 also has the easiest mini-games in the series, though I freely admit to using a FAQ to solve the garden puzzles. Even winning at Xiaomei’s darts and scratch cards was much easier.

And that’s not all. There are even more things that make SN4 the easiest of the lot so far:

– As a Summon Night veteran I already know that making your main character a summoner never ends well, so I was able to focus on physical stats from the start.
– Brave Clear conditions have been simplified to Brave Orders. I’m too lazy to explain how this works, but basically you can easily get lots of bonuses to boost your party’s fortunes without restraint. Especially since the Rematch battles let you complete Brave Orders you missed last time.
– You can grind for Skill Points to boost your stats. Quite easily too, just by lowering a character’s level (lose EXP but keep all Skill Points to date) and raising them up again through the aforementioned Free Battles, Rematches and Endless Corridor. I never did it, but it should be quite easy to raise summoners with good DEF and ATK and melee fighters with decent MATK if you only have the patience. Broken? But of course.
– Enemies, especially summoners and archers are much weaker this time round. Enemy summoners were objects of sheer terror in earlier games, where they could decimate your entire team while dodging almost all distance attacks and tanking your party’s summons. This time there are very few summoners and archers and they’re pretty weak
– You can get by with spending all your skill points on strength/magic because your party’s stat growths are excellent. Gone are the days when you had to buff your fighters’ MDF constantly or risk having them hopelessly wiped out by the weakest enemy mage. On the other hand this means you can use late-game joiners just as well because your personally-distributed stat points don’t make as much of a difference.

Basically SN4 = fun, but easy, but fun.

But enough about that. It’s all standard SRPG game fare anyway. You play one, you’ve played them all. On to the story! The initial story, i.e. the one RPGs like to waste the first 20 hours of the game on before inevitably getting down to the real thing, is that our protagonist Fea has adopted a baby dragon but the bad guys are after the dragon to fulfill their bad guy ambitions. So the first half of the game is 20 battles of “Gi’us the dragon” “Nu-uh” against the same enemies ad nauseam.

Finally the real story kicks in. I’m simplifying a bit here, but these are the main points. In the world Fea lives in, Summon beasts are summoned from their own worlds without warning, held against their will and forced to slave for their summon masters until they die with no way of ever returning home. Not only that but they have no rights at all either: they can’t even enter most establishments let alone get service, if anything happens to them their masters just summon a new one instead of helping, all good citizens are required to turn in runaway summons or risk punishment, etc. The summons who get off with the best treatment are those lucky enough to pass for human, like Shingen and Akane. The more human-like you are, the better off you are. The similarities to slavery, particularly in 18th and 19th century America are endless.

Happily enough, it turns out the dragon can return some of the slaves summons to their own worlds by means of a magical ship which is also a castle. The last dragon didn’t want to do that because she was all like either I save everyone or I save no one, which is kinda stupid. Anyway she died so the bad guys were hoping to try their luck with Milreaf, the new one. And they would probably have succeeded too, if they had just approached Fea and Milreaf in a nice, friendly way instead of sending wave after wave of incompetent mooks to seize them by force in a typical bad guy kind of way.

Then again maybe not, because Fea and the rest of the humans’ stance on the matter from start to finish is “Well it sucks what’s happening to your people, but how else were we supposed to develop our countries? And who’s going to do all the work if we let you go?” It’s like Moses vs. Pharaoh all over again only this time Moses is the bad guy.

With our modern sensibilities we might expect the heroes to eventually see the light and realize that forcing non-people who have the same capacities to think, live and reason as human beings into bondage is not a good thing. To their credit, they do get that far. But no further, which means they collectively shrug their shoulders with another chirrup of “But who’s going to do all the work?” and life goes on as usual.

Thus the final compromise (after the bad guy has been killed because the bad guy must always be killed in this kind of story even when he has a very valid point) is to have Milreaf take those summons who really want to go home back to their own worlds. Happily ever after, right? Nope. Since we haven’t done a thing about the world system of summon slavery, the returnees and their families are still at risk of being kidnapped and enslaved again and again. Absolutely nothing stops summon masters from just re-summoning them. “Hi guys, I’m home!… PSYCHE!”

Along the way they trot out a couple of unnecessary sub/sobstories, like the fact that Fea is half-summon too in an attempt to… lend her views legitimacy, maybe? Like she gets to call the shots on the whole deal because she straddles both worlds only not really because she thinks of herself as human for 99% of the game and has never had to endure a single moment of persecution or discrimination in her life. I wish they hadn’t added that element because it didn’t add a thing to the plot. It just let Fea go “See, I’m like you guys but I’m totally doing fine, see? You lot are just whiners,” which does nothing for my ability to sympathize with her.

That said I did like most of the characters, good and bad, and I suppose my characters’ views would have been remarkably progressive around, say, 1800 or so. Gotta give credit where credit is due. The game is also careful to show as little as possible of the abuse summons go through while playing up the happy-happy relationship Fea and her human friends have with their summon buddies, so it’s only natural that she and her friends can’t take summon beast problems all that seriously. And I mean, who is going to do all the work if the slaves leave? See, you can’t argue with that. -_-

Anyway, so those are my random thoughts on Summon Night 4. Fun but easy game gameplay-wise, I liked the characters, bright happy colors, it’s an SRPG, the whole shebang. The story left a bad taste in my mouth but maybe they’ll solve it in the sequel or in the alternate “befriend the bad guy” end, I dunno. The game didn’t rock my world or anything but it gave me at least 30 hours of solid fun. For that at least I am grateful.

Related posts:

Summon Night X ~Tears Crown~ Summon Night DS Summon Night 2 DS review Summon Night 3 – Fine game, but a little too long