Brandish: The Dark Revenant

released on Mar 19, 2009

A remake of Brandish

From acclaimed Japanese studio Nihon Falcom, the classically-styled dungeon crawler Brandish: The Dark Revenant puts players in the role of swordsman Ares Toraernos as he climbs his way through over 40 sprawling floors of monsters, traps and puzzles in an attempt to escape a long-forgotten underground labyrinth. Along the way he repeatedly encounters his arch-rival, the voluptuous sorceress Dela Delon, who’s just as interested in claiming the bounty on his head as she is in escaping the maze herself. With each floor boasting unrelenting enemies fought in real time, elaborate booby traps, ancient treasures, tricky puzzles and thousand-year-old mysteries to solve, Brandish promises to keep players fighting for survival till the bitter end.


Released on

Genres

RPG


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More

The best version of the game and hardly anyone got to play it. Alas.

Boring and largely uninteresting but gives the same satisfaction as popping bubble wrap. The minute it asked me to do anything more than be on autopilot I was out.

I enjoyed the atmosphere and the unique ideas this game brings to the table. The game definitely feels a bit awkward in a lot of places. In particular the game seems extremely generous with potions and retry bread, the latter of which I rarely used. This feels like band-aid solution to deal with the somewhat tedious level design.
Getting 100% map completion is also a pain as it requires use of the warp magic in a lot of places. Sometimes I had to intentionally jump into pits to map out bits of the ground. The game seems to have a fetish for pitfall traps, especially in a certain area of the game where you cant see the floor.
The postgame Dela Mode might be my favorite part of the game since it feels more carefully designed than the base game while also being challenging in ways the base game isn't.

Fantastic dungeon crawler, not too difficult, but not too easy either. Maps are handcrafted, loot placed manually, exploration is great. Dela mode is more difficult than the main game, but also much shorter. Focus shifted to puzzles and exploration of more sophisticated maps.

What I liked
- Hand crafted maps, loot placement
- Exploration
- Infinite use weapons
- Teleport spell
- Limited set of actions at your disposal, which encourages creativity
- Dela mode
- NPC's portraits
- Ares/Dela encounters gags
- Music

What I didn't like
- Dela mode puzzles with spinners, timers and opening pitfalls can be annoying
- Dela mode maps are pretty convoluted near the end of the game
- Shops sell weapons/armor/spells that you can also find in chests