Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree Review
I can always appreciate when a big, established publisher uses their resources to support smaller studios and endeavors. Especially as more and more companies lean further into 'leveraging their IP' to advance their business, it's nice to see when they decide to take a swing at something more experimental. Bandai Namco is known for many franchises and anime licenses, but here they are with Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree, a roguelike action RPG developed by Brownies.
Being a roguelike RPG, this means that Towa is a run-based game. You'll take control of one of the game's eight playable Guardians (or Towa herself) and work through a series of semi-randomized rooms until you reach a boss challenge at the end. Along the way, you'll collect power-ups called 'Graces', also randomized, which can improve your damage output or provide a multitude of various modifiers to your combat capabilities. If you've played other action roguelikes, this should all sound somewhat familiar to you.
The diegetic setup to establish the run-based nature of Towa is a little bit strange, but it essentially boils down to this: the timeline around Shinju Village has become all jumbled up as Towa and her guardians work to take down the evil god Magatsu. In order to piece things properly back together — and to reunite the guardians from a broken timeline — the offspring of Magatsu must be taken out one at a time. Each offspring defeated allows the timeline to be incrementally fixed, allowing time to pass before moving on to the next run.
This means that as you complete runs to progress through the game's story, time in Shinju Village will jump forward decades at a time. While Towa and her guardians all stay the same age, the villagers of Shinju live their lives as they can, with Towa as their beloved guardian spirit. In between runs, you'll return to Shinju Village, connecting with the townsfolk and rebuilding the village itself as you power up your characters for the next run.
Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree's presentation is top-notch, for the most part. While it may not boast the highest fidelity character models or environments, Towa has absolutely excellent character artwork, colorful & vibrant scenery, all topped off with a traditionally-styled Hitoshi Sakimoto soundtrack. I love almost everything about how Towa looks and sounds for the type of game that it is. My only real complaint here is that some of the battle arenas sometimes feel like a palette swap.
Combat in Towa looks largely like what you might expect from an isometric action game, but there are a few small wrinkles that try to give it something of a unique flair. The first is that each character has two primary attacks, and which attack is used is determined by which of the character's two swords is currently equipped. Only one sword can be equipped at a time, and a sword's durability will momentarily decrease as you use it in battle. So, ostensibly, you'll have to regularly swap between swords to keep each weapon's durability up, while also toggling between the two different attacks available.
The most outwardly unique component of Towa's combat systems is the game's dual-character system. As you make your runs to take out Magatsu and his offspring, you'll actually be playing as two characters at once - sort of. The main character you control is known as the Tsurugi (or 'sword'). This character is supported by a backup character known as the Kagura (you can think of this as 'staff'). Any of the game's playable characters can be either a Tsurugi or a Kagura, and you can switch this up at will between runs.
Honestly, though, these components of Towa's combat structure never quite came together for me. As you make your runs, the Kagura spends most of their time automatically trailing behind you, usually getting hit by enemy attacks far more often than the player-controlled Tsurugi. In this sort of game, precision in combat control & movement becomes quite important, both in dodging enemy attacks (all highlighted by AoE markers) while getting in hits when you can, safely. You'll be deftly weaving between enemies and AoE while hoping the Kagura stays close enough to not get hit themselves. While there are some methods to directly control the Kagura momentarily, it interrupts the control of the Tsurugi and the flow of combat. It never felt worth it. The Kagura's spells also never felt nearly as useful as the Tsurugi's sword combat abilities. Rather than feeling like a synergistic Tsurugi-Kagura pair, it felt more like Tsurugi + attached liability.
The weapon swapping mechanic also feels a little underbaked. Swapping out swords immediately brings the durability of the removed sword back to full. So instead of some sort of compelling rhythmic A-B alternating cadence, I found myself sticking to my preferred sword attack, and then swapping swords *twice* in quick succession to be back to full durability of my preferred sword nearly instantaneously. I found a character whose ability I liked, and mashed it as often as I possibly could. No matter the enemy, boss, or run, just spam the same ability as much as possible. This all led to combat becoming a bit dull and predictable, but effective.
An unfortunate circumstance of Towa having 8 guardians to choose from (plus Towa herself), all of whom play differently from each other, is that you'll likely find a character whose combat style you like and stick to playing them as much as you can. For me, that was Shigen, something of a catboy shinobi with a powerful AoE-type attack. The game is challenging enough (on the standard difficulty) that I didn't want to change characters and get used to a new combat style when I didn't need to.
It's also worth noting that most of the character conversations between the eight guardians solely take place during combat runs, not back at Shinju Village. I got to learn a lot about Shigen and Akazu — my preferred Tsurugi/Kagura pair — because I used them frequently. However, this meant that I barely got the chance to learn anything about the other characters. Partially my fault for not using them, but when I'm trying to give myself the best odds to be successful in my next run, I'm not going to play as other characters that I feel I wasn't as good at controlling.
When you are not felling Magatsu spawn during a run, you'll be spending time at Shinju Village.
One of the more significant activities you'll do in the village is forge new swords as you gain better upgrade materials. Swordsmithing is essentially a series of QTE-like minigames, including timing hammer strikes and furnace quenches. The better you perform during these mini-games, the better your sword stats will be, and the more likely they are to be imbued with stronger status effects. Improving your swords is a form of permanent stat progression, making it easier to succeed at your runs.
There are several other permanent progression treadmills you'll find yourself on in making your characters stronger over time. You can turn in currency to the village Dojo to raise character stats permanently for things like attack power, attack speed, and hit points. You can equip gems on your Kagura to add percentage boosters to stats that affect both members of the Tsurugi-Kagura pair. Constructing new buildings in town will also raise your stats globally and permanently. Even if you don't succeed in making it to the finish line of a run, various collectables and currencies can be used throughout town in these ways, so it never feels like time was wasted.
There's actually quite a bit you can do to customize the appearance of your sword, including hilt and scabbard patterns. However, this felt strange to me, because you'd never notice any personalizations with the zoomed-out isometric camera in the fray of hectic combat. I quickly decided not to bother with this.
What I enjoyed most about Towa (the game) was seeing how Shinju Village changes over the decades that pass as Towa (the character) works to fix the timeline. The dojo master raises an apprentice who will one day surpass him. There's the village cafe, where a family of chefs works to perfect a family recipe over generations. A youngster who loves to play pranks on her teacher in the village school grows up to become an admired teacher herself. Childhood friends at the blacksmith grow up through the years together to raise an aspiring swordsmith. Towa herself is present throughout all of this as a guardian spirit, beloved and never-changing, while the town changes around her.
There are very explicit themes surrounding the passage of time and leaving a legacy for future generations. There's also a very personal scope to village affairs, which I appreciate. Towa is often not especially concerned with the world at large. Nearly everything in the game is centered on Shinju Village, the families who live there, and characters' immediate relationships with those around them. While the game's combat components are merely serviceable, I was always eager to check in on the residents of the village and see each mini-story progress over time. As I said, this was my favorite part of the game.
However, Towa's larger narrative is a bit more plain and uninteresting, and the villainous demon Magatsu is disappointing. It is largely treated as a faceless, malevolent force that needs to be quelled because it is evil. There's no villainous charisma, conflict of ideals, or curious antagonistic motive here. Magatsu is simply an evil force that needs to be stopped. I can't discuss it directly without spoilers, of course, but the ending of Towa also left something to be desired.
When I hit the credits of Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree, I felt a little bit bummed out. I don't regret my 25 hours spent playing the game, but it never elevated beyond just being an acceptable action roguelike. Many of the game's unique components in the combat & structure feel either inconsequential or insignificant. The overall presentation is stellar, and the Shinju Village NPC stories are endearing. However, stale combat, underbaked sub-systems, and a mediocre overall narrative bring down a game that I wish left more of an impression on me