Released: March 10, 2009
Developer: Matrix Software
Verdict: Forget it
Pros: Beautiful graphics, fantastic soundtrack
Cons: Repetitive, dialogue is nonsense
There is, at once, an overwhelming sense of deja vu when one snaps the cartridge of a Japanese RPG into a Nintendo-made gaming device. A young hero, drafted into the service of good, shouldering the fate of the world. Have we been here before, and how many times? This time will be different, they say, words spoken from the slick tongue of a goddamn liar.
At this point we must be scraping the clay out the bottom of a bone-dry well. We can skim the synopsis of any genre staple and find the plot of Avalon Code verbatim. It’s not even worth mentioning.
The hook that bobs enticingly before us is the “Book of Prophecy.” The world is ending, you see, and we have been chosen by the gods to write the story of the one to follow. As with any hook, once you bite, you instantly realize your mistake. By the time we’re in the boat, we’re thirty dollars and twenty hours poorer. 
The Book of Prophecy inhabits the touchscreen and houses everything the player needs over the course of Avalon Code. Every map, character, item, weapon, and what-have-you gets its own page after the player smacks said what-have-you with the book itself. Each entry is accompanied by a unique “code” that can be altered by the player; there are codes for elements, animals, and abstract traits like “freedom.” For example, the player can weaken a boss by swapping out his “stone” codes for “ill” ones. Almost anything in the world can be altered this way. The possibilities seem dizzying, at first.
Disappointment quickly sets in however, when individual experimentation has little-to-no impact on anything at all. Mixing codes on characters only makes a difference during story-driven events where the player is told what codes to use. Different pieces of weapons and armor are effectively identical no matter what codes are used, unless they match certain recipes that the player finds. What’s worse, neither of these are even the real problem with what is supposed to be the major innovation of Avalon Code.
The Book of Prophecy effectively amounts to inventory management. Take your worst nightmare from Resident Evil, then multiply that by the number of characters and items in a typical RPG. Divide the result by your sanity and you have Avalon Code. There are dozens of entries in the book, each with their own Diablo-style space that can be filled with codes, which can themselves be various shapes and sizes. The player can only hold four codes outside of these entries, so swapping the codes you need around these countless pages is like a never-ending riddle. You know the one where you have to get wolves and sheep across a river using a single raft? It’s like that, but for twenty hours. Once you make a key and weapon with every element – to get through any door and hit any switch, respectively – there’s no incentive to ever touch any of it again.
Traveling the world of Avalon Code consists of walking through bland, samey rectangles populated by two or three monsters each, which brings us to the combat. Fairly early in the game, the player will gain the ability to juggle enemies ever higher until they die. That will take care of any normal enemy, and most bosses are handled with a simple hack-and-slash approach. Each room in every dungeon is a shallow and repetitive mini game that revolves around some combination of killing enemies and hitting switches. It’s impressive in a weird way that someone found a way to make real-time combat less exciting than turn-based strategy.
The dialogue is a joke as well, but anyone who plays Japanese RPGs on a regular basis will probably have a tolerance to that sort of thing.
It’s unfortunate that all of this is wrapped up in a rather attractive aesthetic package. Avalon Code looks gorgeous for a DS game in most areas, and the soundtrack is enthralling. Beyond that, there’s just so much wrong that it is difficult to recommend on any level. For a game about the apocalypse, it feels like a catastrophe in its own right.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel bored.
Popularity: unranked [?]
