The Witch and the Hundred Knight is a rather surprising, richly detailed work of art. Many of the backgrounds in the levels are decorated with lush plant life, detailed tile patterns, and lots of shadow and light accents. One drawback of all this is they seem to have forgotten playability. It’s inconvenient to move the camera, and sometimes you just can’t get a good angle. All those lovely trees get in the way when they aren’t made invisible while your character runs under them.

The main character, the witch Metallia, says a lot of four letter words. A lot. It’s funny, sometimes they forget to bleep her. For example, "sh**" is usually bleeped, but at one point, she says "bullsh**" with no filter at all. Then sometime later, the editors seem to just say f- it themselves, and stop censoring at all.

I gotta admit, it cracks me up. She’s just so vulgar. It seems a little awkward at times though. It’s as if they really tried to push the envelope and make her use as much foul language as possible, but it still feels like her dialogue is still being pushed into a very formulaic box. It’s as if they’re trying to pour all of that crassness back into the neat little JRPG mold. They could have gone farther to make her feel like a natural, no rules kind of gal. It would have made her feel just that much more real. To put it another way, Metallia sounds less like a verbally agile Quentin Tarantino character and more like some kid on Xbox Live was playing mad libs with a JRPG script. I still find her pretty entertaining. She’s just so angry, so awful, and so hilarious. And heck, this is a pretty entertaining ESRB description to read if anything.

With Metallia’s wild personality dominating much of the game, the music feels out of place. Much of it is bouncy, sugary stuff. In fact, Metallia’s home map has a repeating "La, la, la, la" chorus that chimes in periodically. Might not be a problem if you’re into the irony of it, but I just couldn’t take it. Then again, the other main character, the Hundred Knight, is actually a cute, squeaky little thing, so perhaps it fits his personality better. Still, the music is so smothering and sweet, I often just turned it down while I played.

The story of The Witch and the Hundred Knight is intriguing, and keeps you hooked on a few mysteries as you progress. You start off in Metallia’s swamp. She’s a swamp witch, and as you’ll find out, she’s definitely not the only witch in the world. She is a chaotic, angry soul, but for the most part she just wants to spread the swamp until it covers the world. She has grudges with just about every witch out there, and not much of a heart at all. When she helps people, it’s usually an accident, or at least her second choice. Or is it? Many of the people Metallia talks to seem to hint that there is something she is missing - something even the great witch Metallia doesn’t understand. The story unfolds slowly, so you’ll need to get hooked on these little clues early if you really want to get into it.

To aid her in her general quest for chaos, she enlists the help of the Hundred Knight, which starts out as a little black blob with orange eyes. You play as the Hundred Knight, while Metallia constantly pushes, berates, and blackmails you into doing what she wants. After getting bound in a contract with a witch, you generally don’t have much of a choice anyway.

To accomplish its task, Hundred Knight uses several weapon types like the spear, sword, and staff. The weapons each have a die number attached to them. Putting your weapons in order of die allows you to create combo attacks up to 5. Each weapon has an attack type as well like Slash or Blunt, which are effective against certain creatures. As you can imagine, you can spend a lot of time arranging your weapons for each particular battle. You’ve also got magic abilities called Tochka which allow Hundred Knight to deploy magical bombs, traps, and other special abilities. If you develop your skills, there’s a lot you can do with limited resources, but The Witch and the Hundred Knight also puts a time limit on your adventuring in the form of Gigacals. Hundred Knight constantly burns through Gigacals, so you can’t just spend all day dodging, kiting, running, and comboing. At some point you have to go back to your home base and replenish those Gcals. You will get a Tochka later that helps with this, and many other points in the game that seem needlessly difficult do turn out to have a balancing component to be found later.

There is also a bit of replayability in the story. You can affect some changes in the way other characters respond at certain junctures. You’re given the option to Refuse, Accept, Question, or Ignore some questions that are posed to the Hundred Knight. You can be the perfect little agreeable minion, or you can be a disagreeable little snot. It’s up to you. These questions don’t happen terribly often, but there are enough of them that replaying the game using different responses can be interesting.

I believe part of a game’s difficulty comes from the game showing you what’s supposed to be difficult. I believe if you spend too long explaining easy things, and not enough time focusing on difficult things, you herd the player into an awkward state where they take way too long focusing on the wrong things. In this game, it feels like an inordinate amount of time is spent showing the player very basic things, when those basics don’t really build a foundation for getting further in the game. For example, if a game spends a lot of time focusing on, let’s say, switches, you might think it’s trying to explain a very important part of the game. But if it spends no time at all explaining that you can essentially do "trick shots" with certain magic weapons, you might end up being stuck for a very long time on a certain map where this is required.

Some players may not have an issue with this, but new players might find this a very frustrating experience. Luckily, help is usually just a search away on the internet, but it feels like help should be a bit more self-contained in games nowadays. The "manual" for The Witch and the Hundred Knight is actually only accessible through random tips in the loading screen. Since there are 50 of these tips, it can take quite a while to get a chance to read this entire manual.

All the difficulty brought on by confusion aside, you can also set the difficulty level down to Casual at any time (without penalty, so the game says) if you feel like the grind of combat is just getting a bit too cumbersome or boring. You can’t play the game while you’re asleep on Casual by far, but it does bring the difficulty level down to the level where you don’t need to concentrate quite so hard on fighting perfect battles.

The Witch and the Hundred Knight suffers from the same problems as many Nippon Ichi games. I just. want. to. play. You often encounter mind-numbing walls of text. There’s little to no variety of pace in the spoken speech, as well, lengthening many dialogue scenes. On top of that, a lot of dialogue that could have been pared down to the essentials, and often characters are repeating the same points when you start a new chapter.

Unskippable, slow cutscenes often pan in on objects as if your eyeballs need hand-holding. It feels like the game is always halting you 2 seconds too long when it tries to show you something. It may not seem like a big deal, but in my opinion, it’s a holdover from gaming days long gone by. When you enter a store, select a different menu option, or switch to a cutscene, there’s no need for 2 halting seconds of fading into or out of black. It’s unnecessary and aggravating in a modern game. And then despite all the text walls, you’re sometimes cast out without a safety net and trying to figure out how to do basic things such as use items, which should be some of the easier things to do. But by God, will they spend about 2 unskippable hours explaining how to use a switch.

Among this list of things in RPGs that "Ain’t nobody got time for" anymore: freezing your character while he flips a switch or talks to people, opening him up to free hits from enemies when he’s unfrozen out of it. I might seem impatient, but these are things that you just don’t need to make people suffer through in order to have a challenging game worth the time required to figure it out.

Despite these setbacks, The Witch and the Hundred Knight is still a fun little RPG. The action elements of the combat, as well as the huge customization options for weapons make it an interesting place to play. The story is also a draw simply for the fact that Metallia is hard to pin down. Is she purely evil? Is she just bored? And is she running from something even she doesn’t understand? With all that in mind, Hundred Knight can be an enjoyable RPG. It has one foot stuck in the past, but if you can overcome those difficulties, you can have a good time with this game.