Summoner was one of the PS2s most eagerly awaited launch titles. Early in the systems birth, it gave RPG fans a game to play... but how good is it? It's certainly not without some flaws, but it's pretty good for a launch title.

Summoner follows the story of Joseph, a young farm boy who has the ability to summon. In his early days his village was attacked by marauders, and in an attempt to protect it, he summoned a creature that completely devastated the village. Ashamed, Joseph throws his ring of summoning into a well and vows never to summon again. Time passes and Joseph's new hometown is attacked by soldiers. Word is being spread that the Emperor is searching for the man with the mark of the summoner, so Joseph again abandons his hometown and travels in search of his former mentor in an attempt to find out what's going on. Joseph's adventure begins...

The overall storyline of Summoner is fairly good. It starts out a little slow as you run off in search of your mentor, but it really doesn't take long to pick up. The plot stays pretty stable throughout the rest of the game and there is never really another slow point. Things can get tricky as you play as the thief and have to sneek through entire dungeons, or can be exciting as you run through streets surrounded and almost hopelessly outnumbered. There are a lot of interesting plot twists in the game, and just when it seems like the game should be ending you find out that its actually just begun! The characters in summoner are all very likable with interesting backstories that add a lot to the storyline. They continue to evolve throughout the game to become even more important to the story.

The characters are also well done in their class distinction. When a character levels up in Summoner you receive points which you are able to spend in any way you choose. You can spend the points to increase your healing magic, your unlocking skills or even your ability to carry heavy weapons. Each character has their separate abilities that they can learn and their own advantages and disadvantages. They also have distinctive weapons, armor and other equipment that they can use.

Graphically Summoner is ok, but not great. The cutscenes aren't very good and the characters featured in them tend to look like they've been smoking something. A PS2 game should have done a lot more with these scenes, but there are other cutscenes where images are drawn out of parchment. These are actually more enjoyable and really get you into the medieval fantasy environment. During gameplay the graphics are significantly improved. The effects when a spell is cast are a nice touch to the game and the battles often end up a splendor for the eyes. The entrances of your summon creatures are just as nice if not better as you see creatures emerge from flames or clouds of mist to help your party prevail. The character movements are convincing and most of the game's backgrounds are beautifully done. Some of the game's various temples come to mind as being particularly well done. There are several caves where the lighting effects are fairly poor, which makes it hard to appreciate the background, and even difficult to navigate. Of course, what do you expect... it's a cave. At times the fog can be pretty bad and entire buildings can seem to pop out of nowhere, but this detracts little from the game. The environments in Summoner are a bit small and many roads and towns are annoyingly cut off by fallen trees or a small boulder that your party should easily be able to clear.

Larger cities and town would have been nice addition to the game so that the dozens of sidequests could be more spread out throughout the game. You enter a city and there seems to be a dozen people sitting around and all of them have a missing sword they'll pay you to find. The sidequests are amusing though, and add some extra fun to the game when you don't feel like continuing on into the game. But, spreading them out more would have added more reason to explore. The world map is small enough that you end up going back and forth between the same few cities so many times that you'll probably end up memorizing the name of everyone in the town and will probably end up bringing their missing swords back to them without even trying. You end up having to go back and forth to several of the same cities and dungeons, and after a while this gets horribly boring.

The battle system is simple and effective, but can also be dull. You really don't have to do anything as your party will automatically attack and even automatically dodge and parry depending on how high their dodging skills are. Counting your summoned creatures you can have up to five people in your party, but you only directly control them one at a time. The character that you are controlling has the ability to chain their hits, which is a concept borrowed from Vagrant Story. When your character hits an enemy with their weapon you have a split second to press a button that will result in a continued attack. If you get good enough at it you can pretty much continue attacking and kill your opponent before they can react. The chaining was much better in Vagrant Story because of the fact that everything froze while you were doing it. In Summoner there is so much going on that it's easy to mis-time your chaining. Nonetheless, the chaining gives you something to do while battles are going on and will keep you involved in the game. It also make it a lot easier so you have the advantage over your enemies. You can do a chain to your enemy which will poison him and throw in an occasional few points of damage throughout the battle, you can chain and just throw and extra blow in and do some major damage, or you can chain and knock your opponent back if you decide you need some time to escape. There are multiple different chains per character and they can be very useful at different times.

One thing about the battle that can be annoying is the fact that its hard to keep everyone attacking the intended target. You may want your whole party to go after a more powerful and threatening target, but after a while they may begin to attack others. Overall though, the intelligence of your party isn't bad and the specific characters do a pretty good job of sticking to what their class of character is best at. The intelligence of the villains ranges from time to time. Enemies will sometimes sit around and wait for you to come get them. Foes will even be dumb enough to allow you to cast spells on them and still sit there while you do it. Yet, at other times your enemy will run after your party from all across the map and chase you all around. The bosses may even surprise you with their intelligence at times.

Summoner's random battles are great compared to most RPGS. These battles only take place on the world map, where you sometimes run into encounters. These encounters will take you to a separate screen and can be anything from groups of enemies walking around to some merchants who want to sell you some weapons. The random battles give you the chance to run around and gain some major experience killing a dozen or so enemies throughout the encounter area , and also make it easy for you to escape as there are many exits.

Summoner is overall a good game, but it's got a fair share of problems. As a PS2 launch title, it's solid, and it's also available on the PC for PC gamers. It's a worthy title to pick up while you wait for some of the greats to come out, but otherwise it's a game you won't be coming back to in a few years.