QCF - Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God

he rogue-like is kind of making a bit of a resurgence in the current gaming landscape. Games like Towerfall, The Guided Fate Paradox and more are really kind of creating a sort of Rogue-renaissance with their unique combination brand of roleplaying and crippling hardships upon player's very imminent deaths. Unlike most games out there today (Dark Souls notwithstanding), these games offer a challenge seldom seen in the video games of today. But what if you're not hard core enough to slog your way through the modern rogue-like battlefield? Well, that's where Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God comes in.

In Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God, you take on the role of Pupuru, a magic student outcast by her school for failing her exams. With seemingly nothing left to do in life, she stumbles across a curry shop that is trying to create the ultimate curry with a bunch of legendary ingredients. With the help of your newly discovered pet, Kuu, a small, rotund, rodent-like being that can eat anything and everything, Pupuru sets off to find these omnipotent foodstuffs to impress a guy. More or less. All in all, despite some really off-kilter and admittedly interesting casting choices, the story is kinda dumb.

Meanwhile, Sorcery Saga has all the trappings of a modern roguelike. Random Dungeons? Check. Limited inventory? Check. Step-by-step action/reaction exploration and battle system? Money and item banks in case you bite it? Yup, those are there too. On the whole, Sorcery Saga is everything you want in a rogue-like, with the added benefit, if you're less than fantastic at them, of an easier difficulty curve. The enemies you'll face off against are rather tame, and it's fairly easy to gain levels from your starting point of Level 1 with each dungeon you explore. There’s a wealth of items that can increase your overall health too, which can be helpful in higher numbered floors.

Pupuru also has a nifty little room that she can change her costumes in, upgrade weapons, store money and items and so forth in. Pretty standard stuff, but it's also much better laid out than, say, The Guided Fate Paradox. Pupuru can also go around town to interact with various friends and locales to get items, hints and generally take part in general banter. 

Kuu is also an integral part of the game. He'll follow you around, attacking enemies and offering support in various ways, but also needs to be alive and present to progress to the next floor of the dungeon. This being the case, keeping him full is essential. Throwing unwanted items into his gaping maw usually does the trick, but can also sometimes hurt him, depending on what he's eating. He can also gain additional abilities based on what he eats, which grants him powers like item upgrading, elemental augmentation to his attacks, poison removal and more. Feeding Kuu is never an issue though, since there are items up the freaking wazoo in any given dungeon, to the point that you'll be constantly throwing them into Kuu's bottomless gastric chasm.

Combat is fairly simple here as well with a general back-and-forth between you and your foes. Sorcery Saga places a lot of emphasis on spell scrolls though, so making your opponents a smoking crater, perhaps, or like, making yourself an invincible juggernaut are totally something you can do frequently, which only helps in making decent progress in the dungeons versus bosses, for example. Just be careful not to get cursed or the items you have will be unusable/unchuckable if they are. Holy Water helps, though it tends to be fairly uncommon. Other status ailments can seriously impede or outright murder you, like poison, paralysis and sleep. And of course, finding and obtaining potions always helps. Just be careful what you end up consuming. Botions, for example. Eee.

Despite all of this, you will end up dying from time to time, because Sorcery Saga likes to remind you every now and again that it mostly means business. While, like in any other rogue-like, you'll lose all of your items, money, experience and levels when you get unceremoniously ejected from your current quest in X-dungeon, one thing that stands out is that your equipped items are left intact. This means that upgrading your sweet sealed Katana to +6 and that totally boss heart-shaped shield won't have been a complete waste of time, effort or luck.

The game play is decent, all told. I rather enjoy the randomness to the dungeons, the challenge of starting from scratch with each new area and finding new weapons and stuff to appraise and upgrade. I just wish the presentation was up to par. While the visuals are fairly good in-dungeon and the character design is pretty clean and more or less good, the sound is kind of a mess. The voice samples and many of the sound effects sound really down-sampled and a bit washed out, which is a tad confusing, since 3DS games like Bravely Default have crystal-clear audio. The music is hit-and-miss too. Some of the pieces are great with cool vocal emphasis and some truly hilarious arrangements. Others are boring and poorly composed—more or less of the status-quo for Compile Heart.

Overall, do I recommend it? Sure. Sorcery Saga is a fun little game to poke around in on your vita between great titles like Bravely Default and Dark Souls II. It's just not something that I'd stick with for too long at a time. I'm all for quirky niche stuff, but even I have limits.