Three children have been given a terrible power and no one knows which children have this power. Now, twelve years later, the ninja school is training a new set of ninja’s. Join them on their quest as they take on missions to helps protect their village.
It’s never a good sign when I start thinking of starting a review with the words “Where do I even start?” Well, I guess it isn’t a good sign when I start this way. Destiny Warriors is, in short, Naruto. I’ve never even watched Naruto and it was still obvious to me. You play as J.C and his friends as they become new ninja’s and take on missions.
Putting aside the fact that Destiny Warriors is very obviously RPGMaker – which, let me note, RPGMaker is NOT a bad thing – we have an extremely poor story within. The story jumps all over the place so much. That is, of course, if you can even understand the story through all of the spelling mistakes.
More often than not you will be tasked with hunting down ninja rouges. No, I don’t mean ninja rogues, I mean ninja rouges. Once in your mission you can’t leave for resupplying until you beat the boss. The areas you have to traverse can turn into large mazes with enemies constantly hounding you.
Occasionally, enemies will be visible on the map. You cannot flee from these enemies. If they’re wandering around freely, they’ll use some sort of “AI” to track you down but unless you bump into them yourself they never actually engage you. These aren’t the annoyances though, the enemies that block the paths are. Sure, at first it’s harmless enough, but then you actually start progressing and getting higher level. Then you struggle to even beat enemies.
I’m not sure how it is on Easy, but I was playing Destiny Warriors on Normal. I have no clue what the difficulty actually affects, but anyways… The first thing I noticed was that the enemies were always leveling with me. Now let me think, what other game have I played and thought this wasn’t that great of a system at its core… Oh right, Final Fantasy VIII! Now see, in FFVIII you can do stuff like Card Mod and Junctioning to sky rocket your stats. In Destiny Warriors… you get none of this. You never get the feeling of becoming stronger. In fact, enemies become stronger a lot faster than you do.
Not all hope is lost though. As you get stronger, even though enemies are too (and are based on the average level of the party members you can choose to have at the time), you’ll gain more spells. Oh but wait, what is this? These spells do just as much damage as the ones that came before? Perfect, I’m glad they cost so much more MP! Sorry, I mean Chi. And they aren’t spells, they’re X-Tu. There are a couple spells that can “actually” do damage though, and in general area hitting spells are your saviour.
So hey, one could just force their way through battles right? Well, that would be an option, if enemies didn’t spam you to hell and back with status effects. It’s so much fun going in and just having an enemy (that outspeeds you thanks to how they “level”) just spam you with an ability that gives you stun. Not just stun. There’s also paralysis and freeze which do the exact same things as stun. Why even bother having the different effects? Of course, when you try to put status effects on the enemies they never land and you just get beat down for trying to do so. In fact, it was a particular regular encounter that ended up making me rage quit the game and not actually finish it because it was constantly “oh look, I’m getting stun spammed again”.
Then there’s also the “Beast Mode”. I only actually did one encounter with this “Beast Mode”, but that one encounter was a nightmare. Then I had to complete it twice because the first time a particular character had finished the previous battle dead which resulted in an eventual game over screen. In this “Beast Mode” encounter, the enemy can smash you for something like 1000+ a hit on multiple characters and you can do a measly 1 damage. Oh but of course, I have to Burn and possibly Stun the enemy! Perfect! Let me remind you how awful it is trying to land status effects on enemies again, because it’s awful.
Putting aside the fact that the battle system is incredibly boring and slow thanks to enemies getting stronger so much faster than you, let’s talk about equipment! So defensive equipment is okay, it can actually help give the illusion that you’re taking less damage, especially the Gems. If for some reason you decide to play this, get the XDef gems. They will save you. Weapons on the other hand hardly do anything. That sword you just spent 7,000 Ryo to buy? Yeah, it does as much damage as the one you spent 500 to buy. How useful!
The story does not redeem the game at all. I briefly mentioned before that the game is absolutely riddled with typos (including the infamous ninja rouges). If that wasn’t enough, the game also decides to just randomly drop F bombs for no reason at all. Sure, swearing can be “okay” on an occasion. However, there’s absolutely no warning that the game contains any swearing and it is all completely uncensored. Oh and don’t even get me started on how they started talking about how a character (that you barely even know) is this big furry and one of your guys starts talking about how he “does things” with animals.
Destiny Warriors may also want to take a look into copyright as well. The main character has the full name of James Cameron, there’s mentions of Scooby Doo (I saw a grand total of 0 TVs in the entire game), and the story is a poor rip off of Naruto. Okay, so they actually slightly altered names from Naruto, but it’s Naruto. Also, how do these video game characters know what Texas is? These kinds of “real world” references just make no sense in a game that is set in a completely fictional world that has neither a United States of America nor TVs.
Unless you are desperate for a game that will make you absolutely hate yourself, don’t even think of getting Destiny Warriors. The plot is a mess, the spelling and grammar are a disaster, and I’m still trying to figure out what a “ninja rouge” is. The battle system is a nightmare of “scaling” enemies and poor balance. I consider myself a bit of an RPG Veteran and shouldn’t have to struggle this much on Normal Mode. I don’t even want to think of the nightmare that is Hard Mode. Really though, just don’t buy Destiny Warriors, even if it goes on a massive discount. It’s just not worth the pain. Besides, the game can’t even figure out what name it wants to be called. I saw somewhere around 4 names throughout Steam and the game itself. Pick a name and just stick to it please.
Destiny Warriors Review Score
.5/5
The game just doesn’t have any redeeming facts. And no, I do not see any of this supposed inspiration from Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger. I see Naruto with a hint of a horrendous Final Fantasy VIII system.
