This is the two hundred thirty-third entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. This particular entry is also part of the Keeping Score series about games and their soundtracks. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
Our two hundred thirty-third random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is wielding an absurdly huge sword. It’s Bold Blade, by Ultra Runaway Games (who are perhaps better known as the developers of Paper Sorcerer), and its tagline in the bundle reads:
the bitesize pixel art action RPG where your sword keeps getting bigger!
One of the most iconic figures in games is Cloud Strife, main protagonist of Final Fantasy VII, hefting his ridiculously large Buster Sword. It’s a giant slab of metal, nearly as tall as Cloud himself, sharpened on one side, with a tiny thoothpick of a hilt. Somehow, Cloud effortlessly hefts this thing with his little spindly arms. It defies the laws of physics; even cosplayers, who make replicas of the Buster Sword from lightweight foam, struggle to lift them due to how top-heavy they are. And yet! The impossible, oversized sword is a classic, imitated often across a variety of games. Bold Blade is bold enough to ask: just how big can a sword get?
Players control an unnamed hero who has come to a cursed island seeking a magic sword. To find it, he’ll need to upgrade his own, normal-sized sword into one that’s much, much bigger. Visiting the blacksmith lets players pay to increase the sword’s length or width, over and over again, so they can wade into battle with a weightier blade than before. Battles themselves play out a bit like a classic beat ’em up: the hero can move in and out of the screen as well as left and right, as enemies appear from all sides. But instead of lining up attacks and special moves like a typical beat ’em up, players simply swing the hero’s sword, either clockwise or counterclockwise (actually, the default controls are a contextual “left” and “right” but I found clockwise-counterclockwise a more intuitive setting). A stamina meter, borrowed from Dark Souls and its ilk, means constant swinging deals little damage. Players must wait for the right moment and line up some good slashes that cut through whole groups of enemies. Naturally, this is a lot easier if the sword extends across half the screen.
Defeated monsters drop coins, and players keep this cash even if they fall in battle, so it’s always possible to buy some upgrades and come back stronger. There’s more than just the blacksmith, too. As the hero conquers each area on the island, new merchants appear, offering stat boosts, better armor, and magic spells that the hero can add to his repertoire. Many of these are pretty expensive, however, while the incremental sword upgrades remain affordable. So I found myself mostly growing my epic blade, with the occasional spell or magic trinket thrown in for good measure.
Battles themselves feel good. Try to slash with a depleted stamina bar and the sword will fail to slice through foes, bouncing off instead. With careful positioning, however, I could get a bunch of enemies clumped up and then cut through them, sometimes back and forth a few times. Unless more enemies jumped me from the other side. It’s easy to get swarmed, which is when things get frantic. These brawls were often hilarious, because the hero always rotates at the same sedate pace, cycling through multiple character sprites as he does so. I imagined him stoically sticking to his combat training, even as monsters hacked at him from all sides.
Later foes bring more variety. Some fire projectiles that can be swatted away with the giant sword, forcing more defensive play. My favorites are the ones who wield (slightly less) giant swords themselves. If their blades intercepted my own they would parry the attack, so I had to wait carefully until I had a clear opening to strike. Fighting these armored guys was so much fun that I found myself wishing the rest of the enemies were more exciting. Often, they were simply swarms that tested whether my sword was big enough to fight them off.
But it’s hard to complain too much about that, because Bold Blade is such silly fun. It’s quick, too, easily finished in a single play session, although there’s an option to return to the island and keep going if players desire. Bold Blade also looks and sounds great, with colorful and detailed pixel art that evokes the arcade games of the late 1980s, or perhaps a game from the Sega Genesis home console. One detail I noticed is that, unlike Cloud’s Buster Sword, the hero’s sword in Bold Blade is double-edged with a flat tip. I’m sure this was partly to make it easy to be re-sized in so many increments during play, but it brought to mind the legendary executioner’s blade Terminus Est from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I’m not sure if it was an intentional homage, but I like to think so.
If the idea of swinging around an ever-more-absurdly-huge sword sounds fun to you, I can recommend Bold Blade. If you missed it in the bundle, it’s sold for a minimum price of $7.99, including both the game and its soundtrack. Which brings me to…
The Score:
The music for Bold Blade is not credited to any particular composer, so I assume that Ultra Runaway Games made it themselves. There are eight tracks included, and all together they don’t quite reach six minutes of runtime. Bite-sized, indeed! Many tracks are very short jingles, like the ten-second “March On” that accompanies victory over one of the game’s battlefields, or the three-second “Unfortunate End” that plays when the hero falls in battle. The meat of the soundtrack lies in the tracks that play during combat, like “Bold Battle” or “Upward Climb”, both of which break the one-minute mark for runtime. They’re also designed to be looped during play, so the versions here just end abruptly. One more battle theme, plus “Beat Echo” which plays on the world map, round out the soundtrack. There’s also the 34-second “Bug Boshers” which accompanies the optional Bug Boshers arcade-style minigame that I totally forgot to mention above.
The music itself sounds like an homage to the days of FM synthesis in the late 1980s, the kind of music you might hear on an arcade cabinet of the time, or on the Sega Genesis (the only home console to use an FM sound chip). The opening track, “Title Chorus”, in particular recalls this distinct sound with its reedy synth lines whose softer attack makes them sound much gentler than the previous generation of programmable sound generator music. Other tracks bring in the simple sampled percussion one might hear in games of the era, but they also move a bit beyond what FM synthesis could actually achieve. “Beat Echo”, for example, has a believable FM synth leads on a synth string bed, but the fat bass synth throbs that anchor the rhythm are too advanced. They sound great, though; “Beat Echo” might be my favorite track.
The soundtrack overall is a bit too high fidelity to be genuine FM synthesis, but I’m not complaining. It still has a great retro sound with some fun melodies. I’m unlikely to listen to it as a whole very often given its brevity, but I’ll be happy when one of its tracks pops up when I’m shuffling my music library, reminding me of the good time I had with this silly game.
That’s 233 down, and only 1508 to go!
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