I did not finish this game. For reasons that will become obvious as you progress through this review I could not bear to carry on playing The Witch and the Hundred Knight. Disclosure is important, but even if you feel that not finishing a game invalidates one's opinion; I implore you to stick around. My reasons go beyond just subjective preferences.
The Witch and the Hundred Knight is about Metallia, a self-proclaimed great witch that lives in a swamp that she cannot leave. You see, Metallia is the Swamp Witch, and the world is covered with magical pillars that prevent the swamp from spreading. Thus, she summons you, the legendary warrior Hundred Knight, to go out into the world beyond the swamp and break the pillars. Except, you are nothing like the legends said you'd be... in fact, you are kind of puny and dumb.
Just like NIS' more popular Disgaea series the story of The Witch and the Hundred Knight is cut up into chapters. Each of these chapters introduces a new story development—oftentimes a rival witch that Metallia wants you to defeat—and sends you to a new area that you must then clear. Some of these chapters have an interesting premise, but what they all have in common is that the storytelling is awkward.
The various cutscenes are done in the style of visual novels with pictures of the characters accompanying their dialogue, which is sometimes voiced. While sufficient, these scenes are often drawn out and the pacing is all-around off. A moment that stands out for me is an early encounter with an ancient tree that is brought up out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly. The whole five minutes long exchange was baffling in its own right and I had no clue what kind of tone it tried to convey. If it was meant to be funny, then the joke definitely fell flat.
Despite leaning towards the comedic tone common in most NIS games, the other big selling point of The Witch and the Hundred Knight is its sadism. Metallia is an evil character and you are her underling. In any other game you might expect some sort of redemption to occur, but for as long as I played it was torture, and rape, and murder, and cruelty all throughout. Many reviewers evidently couldn't deal with this, but frankly I can; the issue is just that it grows boring after a while. Metallia is a one-note character for far too long and after a while her rude dialogue just blends together into a flurry of insults and complaining. The game has some interesting lore to it, so sometimes I found myself wishing Metallia would shut up just so I can read what the actually interesting characters have to say.
As for gameplay, we have an isometric action-RPG that has you explore large areas filled with monsters. Hundred Knight can hold five weapons at once. The order of these in the equipment menu dictates how your combo plays out as you hammer the attack-button. Enemies can be weak or immune to certain types of damage, so for the best results you'll find yourself moving your arsenal around quite frequently. It does make some bosses absolute cake, as you can quickly figure out what they are weak too and steamroll the fight from there.
Running around and stabbing monsters with your supply of giant weapons is fun for a while, but when you get past the first few laughs it doesn't take long to realize that this is all there is to it. There is hours upon hours of running around and killing monsters to do and the combat is nowhere near deep enough to make this interesting. There is more to The Witch and the Hundred Knight, but none of it creates any lasting variety. The various summons you get, for example, only serve to destroy specific obstacles and have limited use in combat. Likewise anima, a resource that has a rare chance to drop when defeating an enemy, is supposedly useful in Metallia's store. Except I found nothing in there that I wanted to buy.
Another factor to keep in mind is that Hundred Knight runs on a timer. Each time you leave the HUB area you'll have 100 calories to burn through. Everything you do makes this tick down. At the pillars you destroy you can exchange some of your score for temporary upgrades and restoring these calories is one of the options. Likewise, you can eat severely-weakened enemies to restore this as well, but it'll fill your inventory with trash that you can't throw away while in a stage. This mechanic was fun, I admit. It works well, it has a nice explanation in-universe, and offers a risk versus reward system where spending longer in a stage nets you extra bonuses.
By far the most useless mechanic, which is saying something considering how many there are, was the raiding. Any house you find that has a visible door can be attacked, sending Hundred Knight into a rampage. Without any influence from the player it will decide whether Hundred Knight or the resident wins. If you win, the house is taken over by Metallia and you get a prize. If you lose, you are kicked out and lose health, time, and some calories. So many things are wrong here, so let's just list them:
- The prizes are useless. They are often items you find everywhere or which are in no way remarkable.
- If you have too many of the item already, you'll lose the prize entirely.
- It's rarely just one house. You'll find entire villages and Metallia encourages you to conquer all of them.
- Raiding gives you bad karma and if you have too much of that, then the immortal villagers will randomly attack you.
- You get no experience from any of this and there is no consequence for not doing it. The sooner you stop with it, the better.
The environments look good in comparison, but suffer from a different issue entirely: repetition. Indeed, just like how it gets boring to run around and smack enemies for hours, the various areas the game sends you to are long, empty, and lead to a lot of frustrating backtracking. And when it's not oversized plains that takes an hour to map out, it'll be a series of maze-like corridors. My biggest gripe here is that the map is incredibly inefficient. Only a small area around the Hundred Knight is considered "explored", even though you can see much further.
And the nail in the coffin? The game has a crashing issue! Many times I had been exploring for half an hour when the screen turned black and the system rebooted. First it actively encourages you to stay out in the field for a long time—where you can't save, might I add—and then it just decides to crash back to the Playstation menu. So no, a bit of good voice acting and Tenpei Sato can't save that, this is not okay.
There is some heart to the Witch and the Hundred Knight, but it's starved for depth, terribly written, and has technical issues up the wazoo. There is an edgy appeal to Metallia's unapologetic villainy, I won't deny that. Yet even those patient enough to deal with the esoteric design of NIS games will find the monotonous gameplay and system crashes trying their patience.
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