The Swords of Ditto is a charming rougelite game that’s packed with a surprising amount of depth. But even that depth left my enthusiasm feeling a little thin.
The Swords of Ditto
Developer: onebitbeyond
Price: $19.99
Platforms: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), PC
MonsterVine was provided a PS4 code for review.
Swords of Ditto is a not a story about a single hero fighting against evil. It’s a saga covering multiple generations of heroes trapped in a loop of rougelike game mechanics. Where one warrior fails, the next will succeed, or fail miserably. As the person at the helm of the controller, I felt like I made progress from my experience no matter the end result of each run. But sometimes a rougelike can get bogged down with repetition, an issue I faced in Swords of Ditto.
Swords of Ditto tasks players with taking on the evil witch, Mormo, whom has plagued the Isle of Ditto. Every 100 years, a new hero is chosen to take on Mormo and her minions by wielding the gleaming Sword of Ditto, which is really the star of the game. The hero will only have a few days to accomplish their goal, and those days are typically spent preparing for battle with Mormo. If you want, you don’t have to wait and can jump right into the main battle, but it will be really tough. Whether the hero fails or succeeds, the sword will inevitably move on and wait for the next hero to wield it.
The nature of the gameplay, where you only have one life and must start over each time, helps sell the loop of the story. All progress you make in the game is represented by time passed on the Isle of Ditto, which meant getting to see the world affected by the exploits of the hero and Mormo. If you fail, you’re forced to see a decaying world that sends the population into misery. It would be like having to watch effects on Hyrule and its people if Link fell to Gannon (yes, I’m aware of the timeline Nintendo created where Link fails).
Speaking of The Legend of Zelda, Swords of Ditto is not much different in terms of gameplay. The game is played from a top-down perspective as you traverse an overworld and plunge into various dungeons. Players can find/purchase several items known as Toys, which range from a bow and arrow to a magical golf club. The latter is used on one of the game’s larger dungeons for puzzle solving, similar to what you find in Zelda. Each Toy, and the Sword itself, can be upgraded by finding items in the environment. Just about every enemy in the game requires a unique approach to dispatching them, so the more time you spend fighting, the more you’ll be prepared on future runs.
There are also stickers that you collect and equip that work as a perk system in Swords of Ditto. The perks can buff your character and items, which really helps because some of the enemies are tough.
No matter what item you equip or sticker you have buffing your hero, being alert and cautious is the only way you can succeed. Swords of Ditto will throw a lot of enemies at you, and unfortunately there is no way to block any of their attacks. I felt unmatched quite a few times. There is a roll that helped with evading enemies, but I wanted a simple block or counter attack to help manage the onslaught of enemies.
The game does allow you to level up your character, which persists across all the heroes you’ll control, but I didn’t notice any clear use of the system. Enemies scaled to my character, which meant there seemed to be no time where I felt vastly more powerful than Mormo’s minions. The levels are tied to which dungeons you can unlock, but all of that was thrown into the loop of the game which made it feel unnecessary.
The constant loop will require you to prepare for the final battle with Mormo. But after a few runs, you’ll start to unravel a deeper meta game. Some of the heroes will not succeed in defeating Mormo, but these warriors can be useful in exploring the Isle of Ditto for secret systems. One of those systems will actually allow you save gear for a future hero, making it vastly easier for that character at the start of their run. I spent a decent amount of time having to essentially start over fresh with a new character until I discovered that system.
Even when I failed, I made it a mission to use that character to learn more about the overworld. Each hero felt useful in that way, even if their existence was treated as a “throw-away.” It’s a morbid way of playing, a perfect juxtaposition to Swords of Ditto’s whimsical art design.
The game’s art-style is reminiscent of something like Adventure Time with its vivid color palette and cartoonish character designs. Its music also feels appropriate for this style, and helps strengthen the game’s whimsical tone. Even when a character fails, there’s something welcoming about the look and sound of the game that kept me relaxed.
Despite all the exploration I did in the world and gameplay systems, the game’s fun wore thin on me. Swords of Ditto is very repetitive and after a while, it sucked away some of my enthusiasm. It didn’t help that at the start of each run, you go through the same introductions over and over again. Even though the world and character names are procedurally generated, a lot of the dialogue is repeated. There are plenty of jokes in the game but after reading them over and over again, I was ready to move on with the humor.
Swords of Ditto’s repetitive structure is sort of a double-edged sword. On one end, it’s incredibly effective in allowing players to study the world and discover systems that actually change your end goal. On the other end, it meant having to repeat the same actions with little deviation.
Swords of Ditto offers local co-op, which makes the game easier in a lot of aspects. For one, you can mix and match items and stickers to help compliment each player. On top of that, it makes crowd control a lot easier. I didn’t spend too much time playing with a partner, but the little I did try was fun. Co-op seems like a good way extend the life of Swords of Ditto.
The Final Word
Swords of Ditto is a whimsical game with a surprising amount of depth in its world and gameplay. Of the rougelike games I’ve played, I really felt like this was effective at allowing me to learn from every successful and failed run. I can’t deny, however, that some of the repetition in the game’s structure left my enthusiasm feeling zapped. It’s a problem I face with a lot of the games in the rougelike genre. But Swords of Ditto stood out among those other games as a title that I can at least appreciate even if my attention waned.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
