Picture the year 2000: the Y2K hang-over still throbs, Gladiator quotes are taped to dorm doors, and every publisher wants its own 3-D RPG epic, no one quite knows which ingredients made BioWare’s soup taste so good, but everyone is ready to copy the recipe. Into this scrum vaults Summoner, Volition’s maiden voyage beyond space shooters: a game that straps timed-combo swordplay onto a sprawling Euro-overworld, sprinkles Diablo-lite loot mathematics inside mouse-driven menus, and then cheerfully announces, “Oh, by the way, the hero can channel a kaiju whenever he feels cranky, please don’t melt your Pentium.” Is it underrated, overrated, or merely rated-R for polygonal limb dismemberment? Fans swear it’s a raw gem in THQ’s early catalogue; critics recall elbows sharp enough to slice toast. Essential? Only in the way a weird cousin is essential to the family tree, he makes Thanksgiving unpredictable. Negligible? Tell that to anyone who can still quote the tavern bard’s immortal “Have you ever been to the Cloud City of the Vharian Mountains…?”, a throwaway improv line that snowballed into one of the internet’s first machinima memes. If Morrowind is the thoughtful Tolkien professor, Summoner is the theatre-kid cousin waving a magic ring, asking whether it matches his chain mail.
Historical Context
Volition, hot off FreeSpace 2 accolades, yearned to prove it could world-build on foot. THQ, meanwhile, needed an RPG for its fledgling PlayStation 2 pipeline. The console edition of Summoner landed 26 October 2000 as a U.S. launch title, just in time for holiday hype. The PC port arrived roughly five months later, on 19 March 2001, swapping the right-stick camera for a mouse, offering truly hi-res display modes up to 1280 × 960, and bundling an anisotropic-filter slider that owners of GeForce 2 boards flaunted like MTV Cribs status symbols.
Genre stakes were sky-high. PC role-players were still unpacking Baldur’s Gate II and Diablo II; console fans equated “RPG” with Final Fantasy. Summoner tried to fuse both camps: real-time movement, a “pause-for-orders” overlay for micro-managers, Diablo-style loot colours, and cut-scenes stuffed with Shakespearean gravitas delivered by Champaign, Illinois, VO recruits.
My first brush came at XP Arcade: a Pentium III rig between two LANned Quake machines and a lonely Dreamcast. The clerk slung me a Code Red and shrugged, “New one where you turn into a demon and slap peasants, try it?” Minutes later a tutorial siege had me summoning a Stone Golem, screen shaking, textures buckling, and I realised Volition wasn’t here to drop subtle stakes. Here, prophecy enters with flaming catapults and leaves with therapy bills.
The mood fit the millennium: DreamWorks had spent $60 million marketing The Road to El Dorado; Square readied Spirits Within. Summoner felt like their scrappy Midwestern cousin, no FMV, modest budgets, but massive intent. PC magazines flagged the juxtaposition: destructible door splinters (handled by simple event scripts, not Volition’s later Geo-Mod tech), yet UI icons looked like Geocities clip-art. It was the era’s aesthetic: AAA dreams, dial-up pipelines, patch files arriving by magazine CD.
Mechanics
Rings, Summons, and the Combative Metronome
Central gimmick: Joseph of Ciran wields five magical rings, each housing mythic beasts. Activate one, your party blinks out, and the creature incarnates, sharing Joseph’s HP bar. Early summons include a Stone Golem that swings like a forklift and a Fire Nova elemental spewing AOE napalm. Late game unlocks heavy hitters: the Phoenix, the storm wyrm Apep, and the screen-dominating Nhuvasarim. Kill the summon and Joseph dies, so every boss fight becomes Pokémon roulette with permadeath stakes.
Swordplay revolves around an early rhythm-action prototype. Land a strike, wait half a second, tap again: chain 2. Repeat for chain 3 and Joseph launches a “peasant blender” flourish critics alternately loved and lacerated. Miss a beat and damage drops by half. That window narrows as weapon speed rises, turning late-game rapier duels into metronomic mania. My private absurd motif, the Chain-Combo Alarm Clock, went off louder than Windows’ critical-battery chime every time I mistimed a link, which was often.
Party Dynamics and Real-Time Panic
Your entourage bulges to five: Flece the cut-purse; Jekhar, ex-militia bruiser; Rosalind, spearmaiden of the Church; and Yago, Joseph’s Gandalf-with-tax-fraud mentor. Unlike the PS2 version’s d-pad cycling, PC players reorder party members via F-keys for dialogue context, but combat AI stances switch through tiny sword-and-shield icons, Aggressive, Defensive, Passive, no function-key shortcut here. Pausing with Space opens radial command menus, yet micro-managing at 640 × 480 is eye-strain torture: imagine prying Band-Aids off ants. Still, there’s joy in switching Rosalind to Aggressive, watching her chain-lance goblins, then flipping to Passive so she pockets mana for emergency heals.
Skills progress by usage, swing hammers to raise Bludgeon, fry spiders to boost Fire. Talent points buy passives: back-stab crits for Flece, mana-discount hymns for Rosalind. Min-maxers discovered a farm exploit under Lenele: set party AI to Aggressive, spawn skeletal rats with a bugged lever, leave PC idling during dinner, return to maxed Polearms. Volition patched spawn rates in v1.1 but not before speed-grinders etched “Ratcellar” into GameFAQs legendarium.
Loot Economy and the Great Smithy Incident
Gear drops via Diablo palette: white-common through red-legendary. Socketable runestones add elemental mods, Emberstone scissors carve +Fire into blades; Frostbite crystals chill. Mix opposing runes and the weapon shatters, teaching hard lessons about experimentation. Gold flows from crate-busting and bandit swords. Vendors track supply/demand: oversell iron sabres, price tanks. Pre-patch v1.0 lacked merchant gold caps, letting players liquidate entire bandit camps and bankrupt blacksmiths, shops sat empty until a world-zone reset. Patch 1.1 added static 20-percent minimum prices and a 50 000-gold purse ceiling, ending the so-called Great Smithy Incident that soft-locked more than one unlucky save.
World and Quest Cadence
Medeva strings classical beats onto a cohesive spine: pastoral Ciran, plague-haunted Lenele, desert Durgan-Kul oozing Egyptian iconography, icy Ikaemos pounding blizzards, and Gaude Citadel’s chandelier-hall finalé. Side-quests oscillate between fetch comedy and tragedy. Fetch: harvest boar tusks so a ferryman cuts a discount. Tragedy: stage a palace coup only for the usurper’s daughter to immolate, prophecy fine-print strikes again. Optional bosses elevate stakes: Four-Armed Golem lurks beneath Wolong Monastery; the Rampaging Kirin stalks Durgan-Kul dunes. Each can one-shot under-levelled parties, forcing players to grasp that chain-combo timing or abuse summons defensively.
Legacy and Influence
Critical aftershocks. PC Gamer scored the Windows version 78, praising scale but lamenting “VO that slips between Broadway and bowling league.” GameSpot lauded timed attacks yet flagged path-finding bugs. Sales? THQ reported 200 000 PS2 discs by March 2001; no public PC numbers, though first-print jewel-case runs routinely appear in bargain bins, evidence of modest but real uptake.
Design ripples. Timed attack strings resurfaced in Kingdom Hearts and Sudeki. Risk-reward summons echo through Final Fantasy XV’s Astral system and Dragon’s Dogma’s pawn sacrifices. The economy experiment foreshadowed Skyrim’s slowly depleting merchant purses. Most memorably, a Volition lip-sync test, Joseph and Flece riffing “Have you ever been to the Cloud City… glittering prizes and endless fun”, escaped debug builds, became a Shockwave animation, then an early YouTube meme titled “Summoner Geeks.” The clip predated Red vs Blue and taught THQ that dev bloopers could out-viral marketing trailers; they pressed the audio onto E3 2002 sampler discs.
Volition’s own arc. After Summoner 2 (2002), the studio pivoted to Red Faction Geo-Mod spectacle then Saints Row open-world anarchy. Summoner remains a résumé footnote, yet dev interviews still cite it as their “design playground”, a testbed where internal tools matured, including early scripting that would morph into Saints Row’s NPC routines.
Why didn’t it break the platinum ceiling? Timing: PC community was soaking in Baldur’s Gate II expansions; console audiences eyed Final Fantasy X. Graphically, Medeva’s muddy textures aged overnight when Morrowind flaunted per-pixel lighting. And quality-of-life deficits, tiny loot icons, erratic AI, made critics hedge. Still, for every two dismissals came one evangelist singing about chain-combos that felt tactile six years before Mass Effect tried similar rhythms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47iSWUvQhRM
Closing Paragraph + Score
Reloading Summoner in 2025 feels like cracking a dusty high-school ring-binder: doodled prophecies, algebra scrawls of DPS math, but also flashes of brilliance teachers overlooked. Its clacky chain-combo beat still thrills; its summon-or-die tension anticipates Soulsborne spirit-ash stress; its vendor-economy shenanigans predicted modern sandbox economies; and its dev-room blooper birthed one of gaming’s earliest viral sketches. At the same time, voice acting somersaults between Royal Shakespeare and DMV queue, UI buttons mis-align above 1440 p, and path-finding occasionally routes Rosalind off parapets when Joseph pivots too fast.
Net result? 7.6 / 10, a weathered bronze ring: tarnished at the edges yet gleaming with ambition, prophetic about where action-RPGs would roam. If you’ve never chained a seven-hit rapier flourish into the screen-darkening Phoenix then watched supply-and-demand crash an entire blacksmith, you owe your inner millennial at least one pilgrimage to Medeva, just remember the unofficial widescreen patch, the rat-cellar grinding trick, and a macro for that absolutely bonkers cheat line.