Bounty Sword Double Edge (バウンティソード・ダブルエッジ), released 7/30/1998, developed by Headquarters, published by Pioneer LDC

This is the sequel to Bounty Sword, a real-time Super Famicom game I covered earlier. It was re-released on the Playstation in 1997 as “Bounty Sword First,” with some changes that made it significantly harder (permadeath being the most notable addition). It also was now labeled as part of the “Bounty Sword Trilogy.” The second game, Double Edge, came out in 1998, but there was never a third game — I’m not sure if this was because of poor sales of the second game or some other reason. I did not finish the game, mostly because I just don’t like these kind of real time strategy games — it still has all the flaws of the first Bounty Sword but somehow I found it even more annoying to play.

The game is called “double edge” because you can choose between two main characters. Both of them have the same goal — to find the 12 rings hidden on this island that has become a battleground for different nations seeking treasures. The male character is Kain, a young (though already burnt out) knight, who is the son of a Dark Knight that uses sword techniques that many feel are obsolete. The woman is Sara, although I don’t know much about her because I didn’t play her route (the instruction manual says she is the widow of a Holy Knight continuing her husband’s work).

The big difference between them is that if you choose Sara, you get a game over if you go over the time limit in a mission, whereas for Kain, you just don’t get any bonus money (as in the first game).

The game is relatively open; you travel around the island with each movement taking one day. The character you do not choose becomes a rival, who moves around themselves, and can find the rings and some recruitable characters before you do. You can get back the rings if you encounter them and fight. Although I am not certain, I do not believe that you can lose the entire game by taking too many days. From what I can gather, a significant plot event happens that divides the game into two halves; I believe the plot event happens at the same day regardless, but that might not be the case.

Some of the circles have battles, some nothing, and some plot events. On many of the dots you can choose “search” to fight a free battle, that doesn’t take a day — I think that if you are going for a “find all rings and companions before your rival” path (which requires knowing your rival’s movements from a walkthrough or previous experience), you would need to do a lot of levelling to make that happen.

Once you start getting the rings, you can use the rings to warp to various places on the island which reduces the number of days you need to spend travelling.

The battle system is fundamentally the same as in the first game. You set vague AI options for the characters and then watch them go fight. As I said in the introduction, I’m not a fan of these systems because you just sit and watch a lot of the time, and I always feel like success is based more on fighting against the system and overcoming its problems than it is on actual strategy. Also, the pathfinding is just as bad as it was in the first game, meaning that you have to constantly enter specific paths just to make sure that your characters can make it across a bridge or get around obstacles.

Each character has special moves; one change in this game is that you start each battle with 0 SP and it slowly goes up as the battle proceeds.

Another addition from the first game are the “void” units, the little robots you see in the earlier screenshot. You assign a void to each character, and although you can give them their own commands they tend to stay around the “master”. You can customize them in the shops or build new ones, and the parts you can assign will weight them more towards distance attacks, close attacks, magic, etc.

In the end, as I said earlier, I just don’t find these games particularly fun. I was able to beat Bounty Sword despite my dislike of the system, but I wasn’t enjoying this one very much. If the battle system doesn’t bother you there are probably things to like about it — the story seems potentially interesting and the “rival” system isn’t bad. But given the number of games I still have to play I’d rather move on to something else.