Developer: Games Express Publisher: GNN Release: 07/13/92 Genre: RPG
Back in the day unlicensed video games were rarely seen or heard. Usually hailing from China or Korea they were most often terrible in every respect and the subject of much derision. Cheap knockoffs of popular titles were common but occasionally you would find a porn game (or eroge) that tried to hide its shallowness behind titillation. At first glance Lady Sword looks promising. It is hard to screw up a simple dungeon crawler. Yet somehow they do so in spectacular fashion. Lady Sword is so indescribably bad it is unbelievable.
In Lady Sword you are an unnamed swordsman traveling through the land when you meet the former king of a great land. The king tells him the story of how monsters destroyed his kingdom and kidnapped his granddaughter, settling in the ruins of his old castle. Over the years the monsters would kidnap many other women and bring them to the castle, ushering in an age of darkness. But rumors say swordsman once defeated the demons using a weapon called the Lady Sword. The man gives the swordsman a map to the location of the Lady Sword in hopes that he will save his granddaughter.
Lady Sword is a dungeon crawler that sees you climb the ten floors of Faunus Tower to find the titular weapon. Along the way you will also rescue many maidens that are, uh, the reason why the game is unlicensed. I will get to that later. The game is very basic. There are no weapons, armor, or items to use in combat or equip. Damage numbers do not exist; you get a description of how hard you hit which is dumb. There is no magic system either. Instead you heal by resting outside of combat or defending during battle which if successful will restore some health. Your options in combat are to attack, defend, or taking a chance at a multi-strike. There is a rock, paper, scissors element to battle but there is no telling which action will be successful. It makes no sense like the rest of the game.
It gets even better! You do not gain experience; your stats increase the more you fight as well as after defeating bosses or finding key items. There is one exception; there is an enemy named Aura that always boosts your stats when killed but it is random. There is no rhyme or reason as to when the boost will occur normally. Without experience points you will grind aimlessly in hopes of a stat bump. The encounter rate and how it throws grossly overpowered enemies at you randomly discourages grinding. Your hit points increase the most frequently but the most critical, defense is rare. And with how fucking brutal this game is the inane stat system makes an already miserable experience that much worse.
Almost immediately you will experience the game’s balance problem. Every floor has a pool of monsters, some stronger than others. In most games they pace them out so you encounter the stronger monsters later. Not so here. At any time you can and will run into a monster that will one shot you. It starts in the opening moments of the game and never lets up. Literally any moment can be your last meaning saving every few steps to avoid losing progress. It is stupid and not fun. Even after grinding for a while there was still at least one demon on every floor that would kill me instantly. You can’t even rest in peace; there is a chance an extremely powerful dream demon will interrupt your sleep and possibly kill you! If you soldier on in spite of these issues there is an even worse problem.
Basic navigation is a nightmare which for a dungeon crawler is the kiss of death. Lady Sword has an auto map you can check at any time which is good. The problem is changing direction rotates the map with you. There is no compass so there is no way of knowing which direction you are facing. This is an absurdly stupid decision that all but ruins the game. After the first floor every level spirals in to a mass of one way doors, hidden walls, pit traps, and teleporters. The fact that you have no way of getting your bearings like normal sucks. I wasted so much time spinning in a circle hoping to travel in the desired direction because of this stupidity. A dungeon crawler lives and dies by its maps. With the ridiculous encounter rate, insane difficulty, and repetition Lady Sword fails on every level.
Aside from its lacking quality the primary reason Lady Sword is unlicensed is its adult content. On every floor is a maiden you will save. These are accompanied by a brief of flash of nudity that is wildly out of place and is there for no reason other than to titillate teenagers. I suppose it is less strange than the disembodied heads of the women you did not save that are still wandering each floor. They get progressively more rotten and hate the fact you did not make it to the tower to save them earlier. It is one more strange element in a strange game.
In Closing
Lady Sword is a truly awful game and one of the worst gaming experiences I have had in years. The game is broken on nearly every level and lacks fundamental elements that even the most basic dungeon crawlers manage. Beware; the game looks enticing and weird in screenshots but does not respect you as a player in any shape or fashion. I am baffled as to why I bothered to soldier through this game but I had to do my due diligence to see how bad it is. Do not be an idiot like me and stay away.
