Last week I wrote about one of my favorite lost gems, Legend of Legaia, and that got me to peruse my game shelf to see if there were any other relics worth exhuming for a closer look. In my PS1 section I happened upon one of the most unfairly forgotten games that I have played: Threads of Fate (aka Dewprism in Japan). Threads of Fate was produced by Squaresoft, and its gameplay is similar to Brave Fencer Musashi, another PS1 cult classic. The game was a third-person action game at its core; however, some of its story and gameplay elements still stand out to this day, and it is worth checking out if you haven’t had the chance.
Threads of Fate begins by offering the player a deceptively simple question: would you like to play as an enigmatic boy named Rue or a spunky girl named Mint? The game presents this choice like a typical choice between two different characters, like perhaps choosing Luigi in Super Mario Bros 2 instead of Toad or Peach. However, the choice you make at the game’s outset locks you in to one of two parallel storylines for around 10 hours of gameplay. Rue and Mint’s stories overlap at key moments, but their motivations, character interactions, and even antagonists vary wildly. Mint is an obnoxious, deposed princess on a quest for a sacred relic, the Dewprism, which will allow her to overthrow her usurping sister Maya and conquer the world. Rue, on the other hand, is searching for the Dewprism in order to resurrect his friend Claire, a woman who sacrificed herself to protect Rue from his main antagonist, the Doll Master. As you can see, these two protagonists could not be on more different quests for the same object.
As a result of the dual-narrative structure of Threads of Fate, each half of the game has a very different tone. Mint’s journey starts as a purely selfish act of self-aggrandizement with ridiculously over-the-top dialog and character moments. Over the course of her quest, Mint begins to grow into a likeable human being with interests that don’t include herself. On the other end of the spectrum, Rue begins as a fairly soft-spoken character who does not know much about himself. Throughout his story, Rue learns about his past and about his predestined place in the world. Regardless of whose story you choose, each character eventually comes to meet the other, and depending on whose perspective you are playing, their interactions can be quite different. I remember Mint being a lot more obnoxious when playing Rue’s story, while Rue seemed a lot more clueless when playing as Mint. Over the course of each of the halves, the Mint and Rue’s narratives fuse into one united mission at the game’s end, the conclusion of which is not revealed until both stories are completed. Threads of Fate’s dual-narrative structure was truly novel when it came out, and to a certain extent it still is. I haven’t seen any other game that features two largely separate sub-scripts complete with separate cutscenes.
On top of the narrative duality that the game exhibited, there was also the little matter of the actual gameplay. Like the narrative, each half of the game played quite differently. The basic gameplay was a 3D adventure game with some platforming and melee attacks. However, Mint and Rue each possessed a unique power with which to augment their fighting and puzzle-solving abilities.
Mint was a spell caster with access to elemental magic that was limited by her MP gauge. This allowed her to be a fairly straightforward character to use, since she always had access to all of her spells and she always had the same amount of MP to work with. Her skillset was additive, constantly gaining new tools to use.
Rue’s gameplay was a bit more unique, as he was a shape-shifter. Rue could transform into almost any regular enemy in the game after killing it in combat. However, he could only access the last 4 enemies he killed for his transformations. This meant that Rue’s puzzles often began with a monster hunt to actually acquire the form required to solve the puzzle. Each of Rue’s forms had different skills, body sizes, and movement abilities, meaning that Rue’s basic skills were constantly changing, leading to constant adjustment on the part of the player. The one constant that Rue brought to the table was high physical attack damage while in his human form. In a way, he was more straightforward to play than Mint since his physical attacks were so useful. Rue’s monster forms were quite unreliable in boss fights, as some just did not have great damage output and others lacked mobility. Ultimately, the monster forms were more trouble than they were worth in boss fights. Essentially, Mint brought a Swiss-army knife to every fight while Rue brought a pocketknife; she had more tools, but his single tool was more powerful and reliable than hers.
Threads of Fate told two heartfelt, colorful stories of young adventurers learning their way through the world, and the skill the game exhibited in blending two complete narratives into one compelling whole is still remarkable. Threads of Fate is more than just two games crammed together or one game stretched out. It is an actual, honest-to-goodness combination of equal constituent parts. I suppose that is why Squaresoft decided to name the game Threads of Fate in the US rather than Dewprism - it all weaves together nicely.
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