Much the same can be said about the gameplay itself.
Summoner is a good RPG buried in a whole bunch of Bad Things, and in the end, the bad drags down what good the title has. While it's playable, it's not all that enjoyable, which is rather sad -- Volition's other games have been uniformly excellent.
At the beginning of Summoner, you take control of Joseph, a young man who, at the age of nine, destroyed his hometown by summoning a demon he couldn't control. Your new town has been destroyed as well, as the Emperor searches for the child with the Summoner's Mark -- you. After a daring escape, Joseph must make his way to a nearby city and palace, and find his original tutor in the Summoning arts, Yago. That's where the story starts, and as stories go, Summoner has a quite enjoyable one. There's your fair share of cliches (challenging an Emperor? Oh, my!), but there are enough plot twists and little tweaks to the formula to keep you interested the whole way through. That is, if you don't get bogged down in the game itself. With its fair share of inane dialogue, wonky interface, and niggling issues with everything from scripting to environment interaction, Summoner damn near shoots itself in the foot. What could have been a truly solid RPG experience (and you get hints of it, at times) turns into what often amounts to a dull fetch-quest of epic proportions.
First, though, there are things that Summoner got right. The combination of skill and magic into a single type of point, which regenerates over time, is a Very Good Thing. The combat system, which with its Combo Chains reminds me of a simplified Vagrant Story engine, is nice as well. And the large array of items to generally poke around with and whatnot is a pleasant change from the standard console RPG. In fact, Summoner plays a great deal like a computer RPG -- which is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on which camp you're in.
But most of Summoner's problems seem to stem from the fact that the game just isn't quite complete. You can do such nifty things as open doors and chests through walls (no kidding!), the load times are often absolutely horrendous (10-20 seconds), and there are a few dialogue bugs that can have
you gain experience multiple times from quests you've already completed. There are tons of quests in the game, and it's often difficult to keep track of what's going on; an automap that you could mark on a la Ultima Underworld, or one that marks itself, would be very nice. It seems as if Volition was a little too expansive for its first PS2 offering, and the game ends up falling flat on its face rather often. The battle system, which at first seems quite cool, ends up being rather monotonous. It gets interesting again once you get the ability to Summon, but even the novelty of that wears off.