It’s 2000, the Millennium Bug didn’t bring down Western Civilization, and Sony just released what would become the best-selling console of all time, Playstation 2. Having made the end-of-friendship leap from the N64 to PS1 in the previous generation, you’ve all been on the console hype train from Sony (even if my young teenage mind can’t fathom what David Lynch PS2 ads mean), and I was ready to round up whatever mid-range launch titles would be available for it.
Another thing I couldn’t wrap my still-forming teenage mind about is why “RPGs” on consoles are different than they were on PC. I’ve been fascinated by the great D&D-inspired adventures on PC of Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Daggerfall, and I’ve never really understood why consoles can’t seem to deliver similarly vast adventures, or why RPG means on Sony Final Fantasy consoles And Vagrant Story, Chrono Cross, and other games that seemed pretty strange to how I understood the genre. It was the only stop playing at this age.
But that all changed with the launch of the PS2 in 2000, and the release of a previously unheard of launch title for the console called Summoner.
Developed by Volition, Summoner was unlike anything that had ever made it to consoles. It was an RPG in the Western lore, set in a vast medieval fantasy continent you explored across a map of the outside world, just like the classic Bioware and Black Isle RPG (and just like in those games, you could be ambushed in random encounters). like crossed the continent). The game also had an enchanting soundtrack – it conjured an audio landscape of the fantasy world through a mix of classic instruments such as decidedly electronic sounds like synths and intertwined choral elements.
Just listen to the tone of the Outer World Map (uploaded with the rest of the soundtrack by original composer. Subtle harpsichord, dreamy jingles – all invite you to adventure in such a somewhat compressed way that only a soundtrack from this era can.
The Summoner’s Story was very much a classic poverty-to-riches tale, following peasant Joseph as he flees his village after he accidentally summons a demon to try to save it from invading armies. Linking up with three other companions – each with his own elaborate backstory, grudges and side quest – he heads out into the world to learn to understand his powers, harnessing them to save his own country, Medeva, from invasion by the neighboring kingdom of Urinia.
Joseph – whose high cheekbones and curtain hair looks like a special regional twist of a boy gang member in the late ’90s – is a summoner, and throughout the game he gets episodes that allow him to summon various demonic creatures to help him. During the battle, you can freely switch between controlling different party members (including your own demon), while others continue to auto-combat. Chain-based combat, where you had to time each blow perfectly as an icon popped over your head, was a neat and easy console alternative to more complex cRPG combat. In fact, the first Witcher game in 2007 used a similar combat system.
It was the Summoner Scale that felt unprecedented on consoles. The world spanned two neighboring kingdoms and two vast cities – the capital Linnell was a bustling center of side quests and merchants, while Iona was a tropical island with an ancient monastery looming over the sea. Each new main area will be presented with a cinematic scene as the narrator introduces the history of the area while beautiful hand-drawn sketches appear on the screen.
Even random encounters, which took place primarily in small arenas, were great at evoking a sense of scale; In the forests, you can see the landscape rippling in the distance before mixing with the skybox trees in the foreground which and then Mixed with another layer of skybox trees in the background. Sure, Summoner’s scale often hit the PS2’s limited technical resources, and graphically there wasn’t much to look at, but Volition’s various clever tricks meant that it really did look like a world with a vast and complex history they were writing only a small part of.
Oddly enough, the game itself may not be as popular as ‘Summoner Geeks’, an early viral video created by Volition (using voice from a comedy group skit called Dead Alewives) that used several studio characters, including Joseph, in a D session & D silly. Released in 2000, it was probably one of the first viral video game videos ever created (don’t quote that).
Summoner wasn’t the perfect RPG by any means, but it hit a lot of notes that consoles were lacking up until that point. Perhaps it was too good to be the first to bring some of the cRPG-style magic to the console series that had been defined up to that point by its strong cultural ties to Japan, the JRPGs.
It was a bold move by Volition and publisher THQ to try and conquer these new frontiers, and they clearly did quite well, because a sequel appeared on PS2 and GameCube two years later (which I never found to play myself). Morrowind in 2002 for Xbox was probably the first true PC RPG to come to consoles, proving that the genre had a big place on the gamepad and the big screen, but it was the peasant farmer and his temperamental group of followers. who led the way.
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