Sword of Rapier, a very obscure doujin game by Ikumo vDog from the begone era of Xbox LIVE Indie Games, is a 2010 action RPG with a unique "Sky High" combat system that I was surprised to see not only making its way onto PC in 2018, but was updated and re-released on mobile phones and the PlayStation Vita years prior. Its story begins with Katharine, an amnesiac woman who wakes up in the middle of a forest with no recollection of her past or her identity, but discovers a bloodstained rapier in her hands as soldiers from the Heristal Empire try to apprehend her for crimes she has clue whether or not she has committed. She tries to fend off the soldiers as well as monsters as she tries to escape through the forest only to run into their commander, a knight named Sara who knows something about Katharine yet harbors a grudge against her as she tries to kill Katharine on the spot. Miraculously Katharine survives her run-in with Sara thanks to a girl named Denise and her brother Ares whom nursed her back to health and looked after her when she washed up from the valley. With their help, Katharine explores the vast world of the Heristal Empire in search of her lost memories.
While not an amazing story and is a bit on the cliché side, it did have a few surprises that held my interest for its relatively short runtime. One of the most glaring problems with the game's story I have however is the incredibly shoddy English translation. Although I'm not great with English either, but the game is rife with poor grammar, hokey dialogue, and some very bad sentence structure. Not to mention misused terminology (e.g. MP is being labeled as "SP" when there's already another kind of SP used for learning magic, slamming enemies with a downwards slashing motion being called a "Thrust"), making the game's tutorials and in-game manual harder to understand, confusion whether or not this game takes place within a kingdom or an empire, and very Engrishy names to characters, spells, and the like, especially when the main villain's name making no sense in comprehension and pronunciation to an English speaker. While you can sort of get an idea of what's going on despite the awful translation, but it really makes the game come off as amateur even more.
The game's visuals similarly have an amateur look to it but in a weirdly charming kind of way. Character models definitely resemble something out of the N64 era with blocky low-poly models that stands out with the somewhat higher fidelity assets. The PC version made some considerable improvements compared to the previous releases featuring higher resolution textures, more environmental details in some places, redone lighting with dynamic shadows, and improved visual effects, lending itself to an early 3D doujin game presentation. It is however more demanding than it appears despite the simplistic graphics; on Normal or High presets at 1080p, the game looks and runs fine on my out-of-date PC, but if I try running it at a higher resolution than that with the same graphical settings, it begins to tank the framerate greatly, especially at 4K since it stresses the GPU so much. It's possible to reduce the load on the GPU with the Low preset, but the game will look rather sterile without the advanced lighting effects, so you might to stick to 1080p if you have a decent mid-range PC. Resolution options are limited to only to 16:9, but you can force different resolutions like 1600x1200 with Unity's command-line parameters, although some of the UI elements aren't repositioned accordingly for non-16:9 aspect-ratios. Speaking of UI/UX, something I would like to see in the PC port is the game's HUD/UI elements reworked to be similar to the Xbox 360 version. Audio-wise it's generally passable with some decent sound effects that does the job for the gameplay and nice albeit not too memorable music, but not too bad overall.
Gameplay-wise, it is a pretty simple action RPG game with an interesting gimmick. The game's combat centers around launching foes into the air and using a combination of your fencing attacks and magic spells to juggle foes as long as possible before finishing them off with a blade slam that not only can potentially deal massive damage, but also rewards extra EXP and Gold in the process. Some of spells you can learn throughout Katharine's journey each have their unique properties to mix things up, such fireballs that homes-in on distant enemies, summoning a tornado to whisk enemies high into the sky, a barrage of icicles, summoning lightning and more, and these spells can also be powered up along the way. Despite having magical spells to mix things up, the combat does tend to get pretty repetitive after a while. Using spells that can hit multiple enemies together oddly also doesn't count hits for multiple enemy being attacked at once, instead only the one that is "targeted" counts towards your aerial combos chains. There's also no way to speed up your movement or quickly descent to ground after taking a foe down from very high heights, adding a lot of dead air in between battles. It's also a very linear game with not much to do other than advancing the plot along like in other action RPGs.
There are also some issues with balance in the game; while you can wail on enemies and bosses in the sky for potentially absurd lengths of time even after they're already defeated, they can sometimes easily stunlock you to death thanks to how knockback works in the game, which is especially bad if an enemy manages to hit you while airborne and you're forced to wait for Katharine to get back to the ground to regain control of her which is not only frustrating but adds more dead air to the game. Conversely, how HP orbs dropped from slain enemies work can make the purpose of healing items almost meaningless outside of boss battles since they can drop a generous amount of orbs at once, but each orb also heals 10% of your maximum HP. The levels are decently varied and a few instances manages to use the game's soaring combat hooks in interesting albeit clunky ways for exploration, but towards the end of the game, the last few levels (especially the final one) does overstay their welcome with lots barren ground to cover and confusing level layouts that is not helped by the lack of a map system. I also ran into a few bugs like odd collision issues in a few areas, tutorial cards using the wrong ones when prompted, and one very rare instance of the game freezing while trying to quit to the title screen. The save system is weird too; you can save your progress at almost any time, but strangely the game for some bizarre reason lets you save even in the middle of a fight with regular enemies but not for bosses. Beyond the initial playthrough, there's not much else to this game other than an unlockable difficulty level that changes somethings up in addition to making battles more challenging and a Boss Rush mode, which is thankfully included in the PC version similarly to the PlayStation Vita port. Another possible upside is that the game isn't terribly long, it's about 8-10 hours long, so if you're looking for a JRPG that doesn't require a huge commitment and can look past a lot its jank, then Sword of Rapier might be an okay little diversion.
In all honesty though, I was surprised to see this game not only survive the XBLIG purge, but has been touched up visually over the years across its different ports. While it's certainly not on the same level as Cave Story or Dust: An Elysian Tail as one-man indie projects goes, it's not the "kusoge" that some people on YouTube frame it as in my opinion and it's commendable that vDog was able to keep a niche doujin game like this from fading to complete obscurity. For some, this may have been the closest thing to a falcom styled JRPG game one could get on the Xbox 360. If vDog can give a concept like this another shot at it and refine what this game tried to do, I'm sure it could evolve into something memorable.
