Blades of Fire
Oototoo, Vhooonha, Padoo, come get y’all repairs.
Blades of Fire is an action RPG from MercurySteam, the developers of the Castlevania reboot Lords of Shadow series and the most recent 2D Metroid games, Samus Returns and Dread. Though most people now will recognize them primarily for Metroid Dread, Blades of Fire is much more in line with what they were up to in 2010 – the chunky character models, the cartoonish gore, the world design and dialogue and even the general art style, all very reminiscent of that era of third person games.
The game takes place in a fallen world, with the Queen embracing the heretical doctrine of the Thaumaturgists and using their foul magic to turn all Steel into stone, a perversion of the works of the Forgers who made the world. You play as Aran de Lira, [not Samus Aran] a grizzled woodsman who is suspiciously built like a brick shithouse, who hears commotion in the forest and arrives just late to save his old friend Abbot Dorin from getting gutted by the Queen’s soldiers. He does, however, save the Abbot’s charge, a young man in an absurdly bizarre outfit named Adso, who hands over a magic hammer that gives Aran the Forgers’ power to turn Steel into blades. And maces and shit.
Almost the entire game revolves around the crafting and maintenance of your weapons, and it ends up being a lot more rewarding and a lot less irritating than it probably sounds on paper. Enemies drop small amounts of various ‘materials’ on death, every weapon has a limited durability, and you learn new weapon designs and discover new alternate parts for them as you kill new enemy types and explore. Then, once you’ve ‘used up’ a weapon, or just want to make a new type or a stronger variant, you warp to the Forge, spend some time speccing it out, hammer it into shape, name it [or use the game’s randomizer to generate a hilariously unwieldy tongue-twister name] and roll out. If any one part of this was miserable or just not that fun, it could spoil the entire game loop and make the game a little too authentically retro. Thankfully, almost every aspect of it is thoughtful, creative, and genuinely engaging.
First up, the combat: Blades of Fire uses all four of the face buttons to attack, each in a different direction, and a pretty sticky auto-targeting that pulls your character into position relative to the nearest appropriate enemy. You might expect this system to play into a directional-blocking mechanic sort of like Mount and Blade, but blocking is actually omni-directional. Instead, the reason for the directional attacks is two-fold – most enemies have different armor values on their arms, torso, and head, and attack directions determine animation length, width of your attack hitbox, distance you can attack from, and, in tight spaces, whether you can actually make the swing uninterrupted at all. Additionally, each attack button can either be tapped for rapid combos or held for charged heavy attacks, and each of those changes a lot of those properties too. The animation speed of your weapon attacks and dodges are determined by how much stamina you have remaining – lighter weapons give you more stamina to work with, and each swing drains less, while strong attacks with a giant axe will make your followups noticeably sluggish and easily interrupted. Finally, most weapons have multiple ‘stances,’ for example, a standard sword can either be swung to deal slashing damage with its edge or stabbed forward to do longer-reach thrusts, each with their own penetration values.
Targeting an enemy highlights them in a colored border, with the color indicating how effective your current weapon and stance is against each part of their body – green means you’ll do full damage, yellow means reduced damage, and red means that your attack will just bounce off, damaging your weapon and leaving you exposed. Whether or not a weapon is effective against an enemy or armor type comes down to the type of damage it’s doing and its current ‘penetration.’ The damage type is pretty straightforward – blunt hits from mauls and maces ignore rigid armor, but are dampened by padding, which is most easily penetrated with piercing attacks, and so on. Piercing and slashing attacks then CAN punch through higher quality armor if they have enough ‘penetration,’ which is determined by the quality of the steel the weapon is made with and how ‘sharp’ the cutting edge currently is. Using a weapon gradually dulls its edge, making its penetration value less, and so eventually a sword that could previously cut through chainmail like butter will start doing reduced damage to such foes, then potentially become unable to even break the skin… and the cutting edge sharpness is tracked separate from the piercing tip, so there’s even more incentive to change things up and stay aware of what you’re using your weapon on.
Weapons can be sharpened back to their max penetration at any time, at the cost of some chunk of their overall durability score getting lost. When that total durability goes to zero, the weapon is broken and unusable. Broken weapons can be repaired, with a percentage of their crafted materials reinvested, so long as they still have a forge Star to sacrifice. See, when you make a new weapon type for the first time, you’re forced to do a little minigame where you hammer the billet into the form of the blade, adjusting the angle and strength of each blow, a little like the Fun-Sized Forge minigame in Dragon Quest XI. Depending on how well you do on that minigame, the final weapon will get a certain number of Stars, and that’s what determines how many times you can repair it before it becomes totally scrap. Thankfully, once you do the minigame once for a weapon type, you can skip it and just get the highest Star score you’ve earned for that type already, or reattempt at any time to try for more.
But the forging is a lot more than just a minigame. All the materials that drop from enemies and destructible chests can be used to create a variety of different Steel types, and when you’re designing a weapon, every single portion of it can have its own Steel type, which then augments its properties in every logical way. Say you want to make a spear with the best possible tip for stabbing, but you don’t care all that much about doing sweeping attacks with it – use the strongest, sharpest steel for the tip, obviously, but that damage will also be affected by what you use in the core, and even the weight of the steel used for the sides.
Each weapon affects a huge number of properties, and each component shifts those numbers in some way. A heavier blade will stagger enemies more and do more damage, but also gives you a lower max stamina and increases the amount of stamina used to dodge. A harder edge might perform better initially, but a different steel will let you sharpen it more frequently between repairs, allow you to block more hits before being staggered, and even extend your parry window, making it easier to deflect incoming attacks. Blades can be shaped in different ways, adjusting their curvature for a keener edge, or adding a fuller to lighten the weapon at the cost of its durability. Even adding or enlarging a pommel can help, balancing your weapon’s weight closer to your grip, letting you swing it faster and with less effort.
Statues dot the world that can be presented with a weapon of the correct type to unlock a new part for the next time you forge one – a longer blade, a different type of edge, a bigger head for a mace. Whole new weapon types tend to come from killing enemies wielding that weapon, and each one falls into a particular ‘class’ that have generally similar movesets and build types. This being a very 2010s style brawler, you also find gems that permanently upgrade either your max health or max stamina, as well as items that unlock extra forge Stars for your favorite weapon classes, or improve your… well, it’s an Estus flask. Yes, Blades of Fire is also technically a Souls-like, because you heal with a flask that recovers its charges when you rest at an Anvil and respawn all common enemies. Thankfully, if you die, all you lose is your current weapon, which turns to stone and remains at the location of your death until you make your way back to retrieve it.
Finally, when you’re done with a weapon, you have two options – you can recycle it, getting back some percentage of the materials used to make it based on how many times its been repaired, or you can donate it to an NPC. The NPC lets you pick a material type, and give you a big stockpile of it that scales based on the weapon’s ‘reputation,’ essentially its experience level, earned by killing enemies. This is how you’re meant to earn most of the highest quality smithing materials, by getting weapons to the highest level and then cashing them in so you can make even stronger weapons. Materials can also be exchanged for others, at a loss, both up and down in quality, meaning that if you’re just short of something to make the Steel you want, you can just go over and shuffle a few things around and don’t have to make a special trip to try to find it.
All that complexity with the smithing and damage types and weapon degrading could have been really annoying, a tedious treadmill of recycling, grinding, menuing. In my experience, though, it was awesome – perfectly balanced to keep me swapping, sharpening, shifting stances, always excited to craft and try a new weapon type, always invested in micromanaging the steel types, comparing stat spreads, considering what I wanted each new sword or axe or pair of daggers to excel at, what I could afford to go cheap on, what tradeoff I was willing to make. I never once found myself compelled to grind for materials, never found myself without an appropriate weapon somewhere in my inventory, never got frustrated that I was ‘wasting’ hits, but by the same token never feeling like I could totally ignore any of those concerns either. I was able to make most weapon types shortly after unlocking them, with the best quality steel on their most important edge, and only totally burned through every Star on a handful.
The final big feature with the weapon system are the Arcana, added with the 2.0 update that brought the game to Steam. Arcana are unlocked by completing timed boss refights, with each ranking earned letting you pick one Arcana of the corresponding tier to make available for your weapons. Each one is a major, permanent perk that gets applied, at the cost of one forging Star, and requires the weapon to have already been at a certain reputation level depending on the perk. Some of the perks are very obviously a little broken – one of them just straight up removes the ‘sharpness’ mechanic, letting the weapon retain its max penetration forever. Others are a little too vague or conditional to really feel worth using – one gives you the infinite stamina you get from a parry when you sharpen your weapon, another gives you extra damage on charged attacks… how much extra damage? That’s your problem, buddy. I just work here. You can change Arcana at any time, as long as you can afford to give up another Star, so you can, for example, use the one that boosts Reputation gain to bring a new sword up to the point where you can put something better on it faster.
The game takes place across several large maps, each one explored mostly linearly, but with plenty of side branches to hunt for extra upgrades, to return to later with new abilities, or to unlock shortcuts that make navigation easier. The exploration is pretty standard 2010s fare, livened up by a decent map and the ability to place mostly helpful compass pins on points of interest. Some of the areas are pretty complex and highly vertical, making it easy to get turned around or find yourself looking around the wrong floor without realizing you’re above or below where you need to go. There’s a decent variety of enemies, though some are reskinned or reused later on.
The story and writing are surprisingly good, and a lot of it hinges on the dynamic between Aran and Adso. The whole surrogate father thing is a little played out now, and having a companion that follows you around and yells out comments or gets involved in cutscenes is nothing special, but I found myself liking the main characters more and more as the game went on. Aran and Adso do a little verbal sparring, but there’s no eyerollingly pointless drama, no drawn-out angst, and what I read as wooden performances in the demo soften as they become more familiar and comfortable with each other.
The in-game bestiary and lore compendium is contextualized as Adso’s notes, complete with genuinely helpful tips and sketches that become more refined as you slay more examples of each enemy type, and many of the optional conversations later in the game have Aran mention his appreciation for Adso’s contributions. I think I’ve just been conditioned to expect a lot of pettiness and hollow angst driving plots like this, so I was relieved to have a story focused on characters who aren’t utterly unreasonable and totally insufferable. And if you really don’t like having Adso around, you can always send him back to camp and summon him at will.
Some of the jokes don’t land, or go on too long, some of the side characters are a little grating, and the twists are the sorts of things you should probably see coming hours in advance, but by and large I really liked it all. At no point did something start to happen that made me go ‘fuck this’ and try to skip ahead, and I genuinely enjoyed the character development and worldbuilding, especially the art design. There’s a lot of very chunky models, gangly monstrosities, and the same weird sort of magitech-punk mechanisms that featured in the Lords of Shadow games. You can return to camp and flip through Adso’s sketchbook which is just a big repository of concept art for things you’ve seen so far. Villains ham it up spectacularly, often cackling for almost a full minute in rapturous delight at the thought of their own evil, while the main and supporting cast are just as expressive in their own 2010 ways. The game’s pacing builds to multiple separate climaxes, capping off each area with its own major confrontation before moving on.
There are a few problems with the game’s structure – first and foremost, there’s a false ending… or actually, multiple false endings, and each one kind of demands you do a bit of busywork before moving on. The most involved has you going all around the maps, tracking down what might be dozens of collectables that, until that point at the very endgame, aren’t useful at all and most of which you can’t even collect until very near the end. It reminded me of Metroid Prime’s artifact hunt, but a little less tedious thanks to anvil warping. But the game also locks a lot of sections off until right around that point, without really making it clear that you’ll eventually be able to reach them in a different way, so if you try to be thorough with your collection at any point, you’re going to get stymied and not be able to tell why you can’t reach those spots.
The weapon variety is really fun and interesting for most of the game, but past a certain point, some of the balance considerations break down. Blunt weapons don’t really get any ability to scale their damage past a certain point, while blades with the best few tiers of Steel can easily cleave right through even the hardest stone or armor, plus do significantly more damage anyway, so there’s no real reason to bother making blunt or piercing style weapons. The boss refights for Arcanas had the potential to be really cool – they’re all in new, dedicated arenas you warp to, they have new mechanics like extra enemy spawns and new attacks, and get more health so you can’t trivially destroy them right away. Unfortunately, the fact that all the rewards are purely time-based means that your only real hope of unlocking anything is to equip a max-damage weapon and hope you can tank quite a few hits while spamming charged attacks, because no other play style will let you win the DPS race. I think these could have been a lot more enjoyable just as pure completion challenges, or with some other condition like avoiding flask use or dedicated weapon types, anything but a straight up DPS race.
Weapon crafting also starts to get funneled in endgame into only the three ‘dream’ quality Steels, which all outperform every other variety even in other stat domains, which, yeah, it makes sense and it makes the whole triangle work, but I felt like it would’ve been cooler for them to be more of a tradeoff for more payoff deal, rather than just flatly better at everything plus extremely strong at their focus. Or at least let you do… something else at that point, I don’t know… maybe temper or alloy the Dream Steel with another type of Steel to strengthen it, give you some reason to use those materials instead of just converting them all into Dream mats. In a similar vein, I found it really annoying that guards and pommels require the same massive steel material quantities as, say, the head of a maul or the whole blade of a sword – their effect for different steel types is incredibly small compared to any other part of a weapon, and it makes choosing anything but a base steel for them entirely wasteful. They should’ve cost like, a quarter of a normal part, max.
As much as I love how impactful the combat is, and especially how killing blows physically lop off limbs and even send soldiers’ heads flying if you aim for a decapitation, the game unfortunately goes a little too far and incentives killing enemies with charged attacks ONLY, since you get a 50% bonus to weapon prestige versus finishing them off with a quick attack. It’s usually not a problem, because you’re either running up and splattering a guy’s melon in one hit like Gallagher or can easily throw in one or two quick attacks to get them down into one-shot range, but for some enemies I found myself having to stall and backpedal and bait out particular attacks, just so I could get a window for a big swing and wouldn’t feel like I’d wasted some weapon XP. Some of that is just my personality taking over, but it’s something that seems a little unnecessary and could have just been flattened.
Another thing I thought they could have designed better were the runes. At some point in the story, you get the ability to run up to a blue ghost who spawns in somewhat arbitrary locations and have her enchant your current weapon with a magic rune – each chapter you unlock a new type, and the runes mostly allow you to activate dedicated triggers around the maps. It’s the main way you unlock more content earlier in the game, and the first one also allows the enchanted weapon to harm spectral type enemies, who are pretty common in the area right after you unlock it. The problem is that neither of the other runes have got anything interesting going on with them, and it feels like a mostly wasted mechanic – finding the ghost is needless busywork, assigning them to weapons is mostly pointless, and all three could have just been powers you got directly.
I mostly liked the banter and little character stuff, but one thing that started to really get on my nerves was that Adso would make a passive-aggressive quip or rude comment about Aran’s weight or age… every single fucking time I would start to climb a ladder or up a rope. You have to do it so much that you’ll hear the same catty comment like… no shit, dozens of times, and it’s not particularly in-character either. Oh, another thing that really bugged me is that the protagonist’s name is Aran, and one of the main antagonist’s name is Erin, and nobody really makes much effort to enunciate them differently. It’s not like it’s ever particularly confusing but it is kind of weird and pointless and nobody even makes a joke about it, which is probably the part that bothered me the most.
There’s also a whole area that has a ghost following you around, and he makes a comment every single time enemies show up or you finish killing enemies, which is a little less annoying because it’s just in that one area, but it is still annoying. Even worse, though, there are multiple parts in that zone where the only way forward involves clearing an area and then standing around while he shuffles back and forth, mumbling about trying to remember where the hidden switch or whatever is, for, like, WAY TOO FUCKING LONG before finally making his way to the right spot and pointing it out, and only then are you actually allowed to use it to open the way out. The first time it happened I was like ‘okay, this is a kind of annoying joke but whatever’ and then it happened like four more times just in that play session and by the end I wasn’t even mad, just in awe of the audacity to do that so many times back to back.
Some enemy types are a real pain to deal with, many of them entirely because they just have too much health, and a few minibosses will straight up one-shot you. Through your guard. At max health. I wasn’t even playing on the highest difficulty and some shit just tanks way too much, or blasts over half your health away in an instant, and it felt like the game had a few weird balance problems. Another issue with enemies is that some of them just take so many kills to unlock their weapon, and it crops up kind of early in the game, too, where you’re thinking, I only have a couple weapon types, and I can either move on and just hope I get a new thing to play with, or sit here and kill THIRTY of this one enemy type, respawning them with an anvil rest, until I can finally make their weapon. It’s the one thing I felt like the game pushed you to grind, and I don’t think it adds anything to the game. You know, there’s a visual feature in this where enemy weapons turn to stone as they die, maybe you could do an Ender Lilies style thing where there are miniboss variants of each enemy type that drop their weapon blueprint directly instead of grinding.
I also noticed there were some parts where there would be a weird warp or a path that makes the camera zoom out and then your character goes ‘this is the way to [some other part of the game]’ before slowly turning and walking back down. It made me think they initially wanted to make this a real deal open-world goliath of a game and wisely scaled it back, but I accidentally went up those paths a few too many times and started to get really pissed off that they weren’t taken out.
All in all, I absolutely loved Blades of Fire. I was kind of joking all the times I said how 2010s it feels, but it genuinely does feel like they took all the best of that era and tuned it up really well, on top of having a unique and enjoyable central gimmick of its own. It’s also just a solid action game in general, regardless of any nostalgia. It’s silly, it’s brutal, it’s charming, it’s confident in its weird decisions, and it won me over. It’s a shame its release [and rerelease] has mostly gone unnoticed or gotten lukewarm reception, because a sequel with some of my little nitpicks fixed would probably be one of my most anticipated games in a while, and I have some doubt it’ll happen now, in spite of a very obvious sequel hook. Highly recommend Blades of Fire for anyone who can get down with some messy executions.
Blades of Fire can be purchased on Steam, Epic, Xbox, and Playstation 5.
I remember watching a favorable review of this game when it originally came out, but never really thought about actually getting it. It reminds me a bit of Kingdoms of Amalur, another 2010s-core game that I kind of want to play but end up just pushing back in favor of other things.
That said, I do think the whole weapon forge system going on here to be something interesting enough for me to pick it up once it goes on sale.
I've been super curious about this game as a huge fan of the first Lords of Shadow. Really appreciate this in-depth review and moving it up on my to-plau list.