Sudeki

Sudeki is an action role-playing game where players take control of up to four characters, exploring a variety of locations including towns, rural areas and roads, wilderness, and underground temples and mines from a third-person camera perspective. The world is split between the main world Haskilia, the mirror world Akloria, and the Realm of Shadows. During exploration, the party can interact with non-playable characters (NPCs), break containers to find items, interact with local merchants and blacksmith characters, and discover treasure chests. Each character has a dedicated health bar and skill point bar which powers magic and special moves.

While in towns, the party can visit shops to purchase materials and items for healing and status buffs, sell materials and merchants, stay at inns to rest and recover character stats, and use the local blacksmith to upgrade weapons. During exploration, each protagonist has unique abilities; Tal can push and pull heavy objects, Ailish can reveal hidden objects including chests and pathways, Buki can climb some surfaces, and Elco can use his jetpack to cross otherwise-impassable gaps between areas. In addition to the main story-driven quest, talking to certain NPCs leads into side quests which can be completed for different rewards. Save points are found throughout the game.

Sudeki is set across three locations; the light world Haskilia, the dark world Akloria, and an intermediary plain dubbed the Realm of Shadows. In the game's backstory, the deity Tetsu governed the world of Sudeki, and in his loneliness created a twin from his own being. This split also divided Sudeki into two worlds, and Tetsu's twin took the name Haigou and overthrew his brother. Tetsu chose four heroes—Kariston, Olivitess, Mo, and Lebius—who banished Haigou from reality.

One thousand years later in the game's present, the Aklorians are attacking Haskilia, which is united under the Bright Empire ruled by Queen Lusica; Lusica's past was marred by the debilitating illness of her mother. Among the game's locations are the capital Illumina, the Anthropomorph settlement Shadani Mo, and the technology-based city of Transentia.

The first concepts of Sudeki were proposed by a small team within Climax Solent, a branch of Climax Studios. At this time, it was titled Symphony of Light and was being planned for the Dreamcast. By April 2000, it had changed platform to the PlayStation 2. At some point after this, it changed platform again to become a high-end title for Microsoft Windows.

After its first year of production, the title attracted the attention of Microsoft, which was preparing to enter the console market with the Xbox. Describing the company's choice, Microsoft manager Peter Connelly said that Japanese developers were failing to deliver RPGs for the Xbox, so Climax Studio's project gave them an entry in an under-represented genre. The current form of Sudeki began development in September 2000, at the time as a console exclusive overseen and published by Microsoft Game Studios. Under Microsoft, the title was changed due to potential confusion with a similarly-titled series.

In a September 2004 sales report from the NPD Group, Sudeki was the tenth best-selling Xbox title of August in North America with sales of over 16,500 units. In the UK during its first month of release, the game only reached #25 in general sales charts. In Japan, the game sold over 6,200 units over its lifetime, making it the 78th best-selling Xbox game of all time in the country.

Computer and Video Games described the title as a reasonable RPG experience for children and genre newcomers, but lacking anything to hold genre veterans. Edge Magazine generally enjoyed the combat and exploration, but felt that it had an identity crisis going on between its complex elements and intended audience of RPG newcomers. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer summed up that "despite building most of the game upon fondly remembered Japanese RPGs, Sudeki doesn't really leave us with any that justify the time we invested in it." Matt Helgeson of Game Informer said that the main draw for him had been its character customisation systems, with other elements feeling unfinished or unpolished; a second opinion from Lisa Mason praised the genre balance and art direction but found multiple frustrating points.