Chronicles of the Sword (PS1) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
301A playthrough of Psygnosis's 1996 graphic-adventure game for the Sony Playstation, Chronicles of the Sword.
Chronicles of the Sword is a PC-style point-and-click adventure wherein you take up mantle of a recently knighted Sir Gawain of Camelot, tasked with doing Merlin and Arthur's dirty work of dealing with Morgana, an evil witch.
That's really all there is for plot, though. I suppose when your game is generally one huge fetch quest, you don't really need anymore than that.
The idea is that you chat with some NPCs, comb each of the prerendered backdrops for items that will help you achieve whichever task you've been given, and use the items at places that will allow you to proceed.
Chronicles of the Sword is a game that, way back, I had on PC. I never got very far in it as a teenager and eventually gave up. Now that I've revisited it on the PlayStation, the reasons why I never did have come flooding back.
Let me start with the positives. The background graphics are fairly nice to look at in that strange, sterile, 90s CG type of way. However, even though most of them look alright, they are so dark and grainy that details are hard to make out, and most of the items blend in way too well to notice. When you combine this with painfully small hotspots to click on, you end up with a game that has you wandering in circles for hours before you realize that a tiny four square pixel area that looks like everything else around it is actually an item you need.
Good luck, though, since you'll wander in circles until you can figure out how everything is laid out. The switching camera angles are disorienting, and there isn't any consistency in where the screen exit icons appear, so you'll often get stuck because you didn't see yet another tiny 4 pixel spot that would allow you to leave the screen. Calling it aggravating would be an understatement- I don't ever recall a game being quite as hampered by pixel-hunting as this one was.
The music is alright and is generally easy to ignore, which is ideal when you'll be hearing the same minute long loop for the full game. The voice acting though... oh God. It's hideous, but it's extremely funny. Accents come and go, inappropriately accented syllables, mispronounced names - they all create some laugh out loud moments.
Even more than the voices, the CG movies are a comedy show on their own, and really stand out as a reason to play this. They're all running at a painfully low framerate, and feature some of the most WTF animations you're ever likely to see. I mean, Gawain licking his lips at the camera? What? Or his "Wha... woah!" flailing animation as he climbs the ladder to Merlin's tower? Nightmare fuel right there.
And finally, the way Chronicles of the Sword moves its plot along is, for me, the most memorable thing about it. Segues? What are those? Transitions? Who needs them? At major moments, the game will just throw up a placard informing you of what happened before putting you in a new place. From travelling to new shores to explaining how someone is now dead from random fireballs, this "device" leaves me completely bewildered. These moments appear so abruptly that I often end up laughing out loud. It's completely ridiculous. So is the ending, for that matter.
Chronicles of the Sword is not a good game. Not even a mediocre one. It's a failure on just about every level. Its failures almost end up redeeming it (at least in some respects), but don't jump into this one expecting good game, or a game "so bad that it's good." It's more like a burning bag of dog poo put on CD. It's funny, it's juvenile, and the lingering stench it leaves behind is never worth it in hindsight.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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