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"A solid strategy-RPG with many unique features"

There's tendency to think that nowadays, all the good games released in Japan are also released in the US. But Summon Night is a striking counterexample; while a relatively popular series in Japan, most players in the US don't even know it exists.

Summon Night 3 is a strategy RPG (like its predecessors), so the battles are the core of the game. Those who have played Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics will feel right at home; SN3 has the same isometric 3D map as those games. You move your characters around the map, attacking the enemies, casting spells, and using items. There are no "generics"; every character has a backstory and personality, and they all have slightly different movement and attack types. Some characters can shoot guns or bows, others can attack in 8 directions (including diagonal), some have 2-panel reach attacks, others can only attack in the standard 4 directions. The game allows many more characters on screen than most games of this type -- it's not uncommon to be facing 15 enemies with more than 10 characters on your side.

Rather than using an agility score or the like to determine turn order, your entire party takes their turns (in whatever order you like), then the enemies do the same. While some people do not like this system, I think that it emphasizes the "team" element of the game, and it forces you to think ahead to the enemy turn -- the AI of the enemies is very good; they will gang up on people if you leave them unprotected.

The "Summon" in the title comes from the spellcasting system, which is all based around summoning beings to do things for you. Generally the summons fall into two types -- some of the monsters will actually appear on the battlefield and fight as characters (you raise their levels and abilities by feeding them outside of battle). Other "summons" are really just normal magic spells. The summons are divided into five elemental types, and each character has their own specialty and proficiency with particular types. You discover the summons in battle by combining a "sumonite stone" (of one of the 5 elemental types) with an accessory. Depending on the combination you may get an item, a summon, or a "miss" (which does slight damage to your character). The game keeps a dictionary to tell you what combinations you have discovered. "Discovering" a summon results in you receiving an equippable stone -- characters have several slots for equipping the stones depending on their character type (i.e. a fighter-type character will have 1, whereas a magic-oriented character might have 3). If you want more than one of a stone you can just mix the "recipe" again in battle and you'll receive another one. The stones offer different spells based on the proficiency level of the caster in that particular type of magic. Each spell has a unique, sometimes lengthy animation (although they can be skipped by pressing the X button).

The enemy levels are fixed, so you could in theory just level up a lot in "free battles" (i.e. non-story battles) and overpower them. But the game rewards players who use strategy rather than levelling with something called the "Brave Clear". In most story battles, if you manage to win the battle without overlevelling, without anyone dying, and without making excessive use of healing items, you will receive a "Brave Clear" which grants you points that you can use to set Party Abilities. The Party Abilities (many of which are gained through Brave Clears) range from the mediocre (getting a 50 hp-restoring lunchbox at the beginning of battle) to the powerful (increasing everyone's maximum HP by 10%). Your main character also has a very powerful transformation ability, but this prevents you from getting Brave Clear, and it also increases your "karma" (if your karma gets too high you will not get the game's good ending).

Speaking of gaining levels, the levelling system is one of my favorite aspects of this game. Most strategy RPGs operate on a system that rewards individual characters for what they do in battle. This leads to well-known "strategies" of attacking your own guys, casting worthless spells, weakening enemies with one character and killing them with another, and other unrealistic actions. Summon Night grants you a certain amount of XP after each battle which you are then free to assign to your characters however you want, regardless of what they did in the battle. This allows you to focus on the actual strategy of the battle rather than also having to think about how you are going to gain XP for your healers and weaker characters.

This is only a small portion of what the gameplay has to offer; there are additional interesting features like being able to choose (on the fly) how to react to an attack (either by reducing the damage, or counterattacking), obstacles on the field that can be blown up to do damage to the opponents, status effects (poison, sleep, etc.) that are actually useful and dangerous, being able to move a character and then attack later in the turn (or vice versa), and more.

But why are you fighting these battles? The second thing most people look for in a strategy RPG is a good storyline. SN3's storyline is unusual among strategy RPGs in that it is not a dark political plot. The story is very light-hearted in tone, and focuses more on character development than plot. You really feel like you are getting to know all the people on your team. There are many small character development scenes that prevent the "once they join your team, they never talk again" aspect seen in many games of this type.

The main character is either Aty (female) or Rex (male), a former soldier who quit the army to become a private tutor. You can choose one of four apprentices at the beginning of the game. While on a ship journey, you are shipwrecked on an island inhabited by rogue summon monsters, who are worried that if people discover their island, they will be hunted and killed. The plot is not epic in feel; it works more as a series of small stories (which do reach a climax at the end). You have some control over the direction of the story by the choices you make in conversations, but this is limited (often the choices only vary by a line or two of dialogue).

The music is pretty good, although nothing standout. You likely won't find yourself humming the tunes, but they work well enough within the game. The voices, on the other hand, are high quality. They got an all-star cast (at least within the anime world) to work on the game, and many of the voice actors will be recognizable to those familiar with anime. Some examples -- Gundam SEED fans will recognize the voices of Cagalli and Yzak, Sailor Moon or Ah! My Goddess fans (among others) will recognize Hisakawa Aya, and fans of Slayers will recognize the voices of Gourry and Gaav. My main complaint about the vocal work is that the main character has no voice, thus any scenes with him/her in it come off as rather odd because only one side of the conversation is voiced.

The graphics are very clear and well-done. It's done in an unusual style for a strategy RPG -- a rather comic style with slightly cartoonish-looking monsters and backgrounds. This does seem to fit in well with the nature of the story and world, though. One thing I didn't like was the opening sequence -- when you turn on the game, you are treated to a (skippable) animated opening which looks like the opening to an anime. It's neat to see all the characters from the game in the anime style, but I wish that they had used the space on the DVD and the time to put animated sequences in the actual game rather than putting it all here in the relatively meaningless opening. Another limitation is the character portraits during the story sequences. While they look very nice and display some range of emotion, action cannot be represented well -- if one character hits another, you will simply hear a sound effect and the character will say "ouch". Another limitation is that only two portraits can be on the screen at once so in a conversation between more than two characters, the portraits switch in and out in a rather distracting fashion.

There is a rather high amount of replayability in the game. In addition to the different choices you can make in the dialogues, there are multiple endings, a number of optional characters and sidequests, a new game+ feature (sort of), an unlockable side-story, and a "gallery collection" (pictures) with a number of unlockable images. You can also try personal challenges (as in most S-RPGs) -- beating the game with Brave Clear in all battles, using fewer characters than allowed, not fighting any free battles, etc.

Overall this is a very solid game that should satisfy anyone who enjoys strategy RPGs. Unfortunately, the game is probably extremely difficult to play without some Japanese knowledge, but perhaps at some point, someone will make a basic walkthrough that will help even those with no Japanese enjoy the game.