Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (PSP)

Grand Theft Auto:  Chinatown Wars was originally of the Nintendo DS.  It was ported to the PlayStation Portable a few months later.  It was the first portable Grand Theft Auto game of the DS, so the graphics and gameplay is slightly tweaked compared to what you are used to.  Due to the limitations of the original hardware, the game has a camera angle from above.  It’s not directly overhead like the original games, but more at an angle.  The PSP version removes the cel shading effect so it looks more akin to the console games.  The change in camera angles still takes a little bit to get used to though.  The controls are familiar.  Your character can run around, get weapons and use them, jack cars and drives them.  Of course, the biggest draw of the series is the open world and the huge amount of optional content.  Chinatown Wars does not disappoint in this area.  As you play the game and more and more things unlock, you’ll come to realize that this game is a true Grand Theft Auto game.  It’s the full experience but on a handheld.  This is very impressive, given that there’s so much to do, from racing, drug dealing, rampages, ambulance missions, and much much more.

However, the age of the game shows in the missions and game design.  It’s still as tedious as ever to gain weapons in a permanent manner from scratch.  Similarly for money making.  If you get busted by the police, then you’ll lose everything on you.  There are no checkpoints during missions.  If you fail at any point of the mission, no matter how far you may have progressed, you will have to restart it completely again, which can be absolutely painful.  The only saving grace is that the game is nice enough to allow you to immediately restart the mission upon reloading, and even so far as to allow you to skip some of the traveling you may have had to do.  While the missions are nowhere near as frustrating and hard as the console counterparts, there are still some annoyances every so often.  The gameplay also feels a lot more gimmicky, thanks to its origins from the DS.  Driving was never great in the Grand Theft Auto games and it is bearable here.  It can be a bit tough given that you do not control the camera angle at all, it follows you.  The best you can do is force it to face the same direction as your character.  Due to the small space / screen estate, controlling the cars can be slippery and annoying.  The overhead camera means that you can’t really see too far ahead of you.  Your activities will attract the police, which is always annoying when they try to hunt you down in the most inopportune of moments.

The story follows Huang Lee, who returns to Liberty City after his father, who was in the triad, had died.  He will end up wanting to seek revenge and in the process, climb his way up the ladder.  To do that, he starts off helping out as a lackey with various triad members (some of which are family).  The game doesn’t break any new ground, it’s still the same structure where various missions are available so you can pick and choose which ones you’d want to do first.  The mission designs are predictable.  The graphics are actually quite good and holds up even today, but the cutscenes retain the cel shaded look.  The story, like most Grand Theft Auto games, can feel disjointed because you only get cutscenes during missions.  This means that the more that you get distracted with the optional content, the longer the period of time between each story piece.  The story is mixed between the cutscenes and the in-game emails that you get.  It basically has Huang on a huge wild goose chase while he does this, then this, and then that, before he finally finds out who killed his father.  He’s basically a lackey throughout the whole game but has so much sass that the insults that he throws around in this game is extremely funny and amusing.

There is a lot of mission variety as it is beyond just driving and shooting.  Although not every piece is good, at least they got the difficulty right.  Shooting isn’t great since the auto aim works most of the time but when it doesn’t, it’s annoying.  Similarly, it’s also awkward to shoot while driving.  The penultimate mission are fun and you can tell that the story was reaching its climax.  Unfortunately, the final mission was a bit of a let-down, both in terms of gameplay as well as the story.  The ending was short and quickly explains what happened with Huang’s father, and while it was expected and passable, at the same time, it highlighted how simplistic the story was.  Of course, even finishing the main story there is still so much of the optional content left.  The story missions take around seven to ten hours to complete if you focused only on them.  Overall, Grand Theft Auto:  Chinatown Wars is an impressive game, especially for the DS (not so much for the PSP given that it already had two Grand Theft Auto games).  Make no mistake, this is a fully fledged Grand Theft Auto game with everything one would want of the series:  a big open world and a ton of things to do.  The story is weak but then again, none of the games in the series had amazing stories.  However, the characters are good and the dialogue filled with all those insults added a nice dose of humor.

-----------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Lemmings (PSP)

Back in the 1990s, Lemmings was a puzzle game that was extremely popular. This PSP version contains all 120 levels of the original, plus 36 new levels. The goal of each level is to allow the lemmings to overcome obstacles to reach the goal. Not all lemmings will make it, but each level will have a minimum amount of lemmings saved in order for you to complete and progress onwards. The lemmings will constantly be walking forward. As the player, you can assign them special abilities. They can dig holes, build bridges, climb up vertical obstacles, float down from high platforms, block other lemmings from passing, dig into the ground or blow up like a bomb. It’s somewhat real time as you determine the best way to solve the puzzle. The lemmings can die from falling from great heights, drowning or by obstacles in the level. Each the simple task of changing the direction of a lemming will require thought. While the game has prerendered 3D graphics, it retains the 2D sidescrolling nature of the original.

There are some player aids such as the ability to pause at any time. This will stop everything, and you can then look around to slowly determine what is needed. The developers also knew that waiting for lemmings to cross the level once you have a perfect solution in place is boring so you can fast forward the level too. The game’s original 120 levels are split into four sets of 30. You can only unlock up to several levels in advance after you have completed enough of the previous levels. Each level has a different completion requirement, which, in addition to the number of lemmings saved, also have a time limit. The game doesn’t have a tutorial at all, so you need to already know the premise first. Once you know what the objective is, figuring out the rest of the controls is easy. It uses a cursor-based system to select the lemmings. The early levels are naturally easier to get you used to the lemmings’ different abilities. The early levels can be finished within minutes but eventually, they will get harder and more complex so that you will need to spend more time on them.

A lot of the difficulty comes from the lemmings appearing at a constant rate. While you have one building, the lemming behind will catch up, overtake, and then go towards their deaths. Unfortunately, too many levels allow you to advance one lemming to create a path while you buy time by blocking all the later lemmings. There are some issues with the game design in that there is no “undo” action if you had accidentally made a mistake. In such a scenario, you will end up repeating the whole level which will get annoying in the later harder levels. The harder levels are annoying in that there is a requirement of saving a high number of lemmings. Just one mistake or slightly misjudged timing will cause you to fail. When it is a level tha you know how to level and it is just the way the game was designed or how the controls worked that had thwarted you, it is immensely frustrating. Wanting lemmings to face the right direction to mine or dig their way through feels like a gamble. Feels like more likely than not, they will face the other direction than the one you wanted them to.

The latter harder levels are too finnicky especially when you must resort to using tricks to have the lemmings go a specific way. Yet it relies so heavily on luck on whether they are facing the right direction or not when they are bunched up together. The worst part of the game is that even if you know the solution you must get it pixel perfect in the exact location to do that exact thing, so that it becomes unfun. For example, you know you must create a set of stairs to the top but… the angle is slightly off so that you can’t make it and it is infuriating when this happens. These levels are unforgiving in that you make a tiny mistake and it’s starting over from the very beginning for you. Furthermore, the analogue stick (or nub of the PSP) does not provide enough finetuning. The 36 new levels are much easier in comparison to the second half of the original 120 levels. A lot of the new levels lean towards being too easy, but some will require more thinking. However, the core gameplay remains the same.

Depending on your skill, the game can take anywhere from eight hours to over ten hours to complete the levels. Then if that is not enough, there is a level designer to create your own levels, as well as share and download others. Overall, Lemmings is a good version of the original game with updated 3D graphics, even though that doesn’t add too much to the experience given all the levels are still played in 2D sidescrolling perspective. The game is quite fun in the beginning, but the second half of the original levels start to introduce more and more flaws to the game. It highlights the restrictions and unforgiving nature which can lead to a lot of aggravating and frustrating moments where you know what you need to do, but the game requires such precising timing that it is painful to get it all correct, forcing you to repeat that level again and again from the beginning. It’s hard to say if the additional 36 levels are worth it if you’ve already played the original, given that while they are fun, they don’t add anything new to the formula.

-----------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Persona 3 Portable (PSP)

Persona 3 Portable is an expanded port of the PS2 game. The main addition to this version is the female protagonist. However, this is far from the “definitive” or “complete” version of the game as it lacks the additional content from FES. There are a few differences in this port. The first is that the game is mostly the same as the PS2 version if you play the male route, but the female protagonist changes a lot of the social links portion of the game. The second difference is the presentation. Gone are the in-game cutscenes, they are replaced with a visual novel style of storytelling. You will have static backgrounds and character portraits whenever there is a scene. It’s most striking when even the animated cutscenes are replaced by screenshots. During the times when you can move across different locations, they are replaced with a pointer system. You move the onscreen pointer to where you want to interact. Not surprisingly, this isn’t great, but it is probably a limitation of the PSP hardware at the time.

The story is predominantly the same whether you play as the male or female protagonist. You are a transfer student at Gekkoukan High School, which is a school situated on the island. On your first night you experience the Midnight Hour, an extra hour after midnight that most people cannot perceive. It seemingly pauses time, turns all people into coffins for its duration, and shadows roam and attack anyone who isn’t a coffin. At the same time, seemingly connected, are people who suddenly lose consciousness, becoming apathetic. Together with a group of other students who can retain their consciousness during the Midnight Hour, you investigate what is happening as it is connected to the giant tower that only appears at this time, Tartarus. The game is a unique mix of story and combat. A huge part of the story and game is on the high school aspect, where you befriend and spend time with other characters, each with their own story arc. These are known as social links, and getting all of these done within one playthrough is tough given that there are very specific requirements and time management is crucial. Social links interact with the combat side of things as they help improve your persona fusing abilities.

The game has a turn-based battle system. characters can perform a physical attack with their weapons. However, each character has something equipped called a persona. Only the protagonist can equip and change to different personas. Each persona has their own stats, weaknesses and resistances. They also bring their own skills, where physical skills use up HP and magic skills uses up SP. Personas have their own levels separate to the protagonist and leveling them up by battling is so slow that it encourages you to create new personas by fusing two or more different ones together, which will usually be of a higher level. The battle system defaults to AI controlling the other party members. While you can change it to manual control during battle, it will default back to AI in the next battle, which is quite annoying. Playing smart is a big part of the game because if you hit an enemy with a weakness or a critical hit, then you get a bonus turn. This is a double-edged sort given the enemy can do the same to you. Knocking down all enemies with their weakness or a critical hit will allow your party to attack all at once with an all-out attack, and this is a nice sight to see.

The game takes place over the course of a game, and you play through each day. It is split between slice of life as you play through high school trying to level up your charm, academics and courage, and dungeon crawling. The main dungeon is Tartarus, a sprawling tower that is procedurally generated. Enemies roam the environment, so you trigger a battle by getting into contact with one. Considering how tight the corridors are, you usually cannot avoid a battle. Unfortunately, the gameplay loop and structure of the game becomes too repetitive. It can end up being a chore to play towards the middle of the game as it has massive pacing issues. Its biggest sin is the boring dungeon of Tartarus. It just isn’t varied enough to keep you going for 250+ floors and the enemy variety quickly turns to just being recolored versions of previous ones. The weakness carries on to the final sections of the game where there are just swathes of in-game days with not much plot going on as you are waiting for a set date to arrive to progress. Doubly so if you have completed most of the social links so you have much else to do. The story ending is as ambiguous and odd as it was in the original.

The game takes a long time to finish, roughly 35 to 40 hours if you follow a guide and rush through the dungeon crawling without worrying about min maxing or creating the best personas. There is a New Game Plus mode that allows you to carry over certain things, and of course, there are two routes to play through. However, it is hard to recommend playing both routes back-to-back since the general story remains the same, and the different social links aren’t enough ot justify playing through everything else, waiting for time to pass, and go through the same story beats. Overall, Persona 3 Portable is an impressive version of the PS2 game. The addition of the female protagonist, which changes up most of the social links so that effectively half of the story content is new, along with the quality-of-life updates, means that this version is still worth playing even if you have played the original. The graphics aren’t much to be amazed about and the usage of static backgrounds to tell the story in a visual novel style doesn’t do parts of the story justice. However, it was a compromise due to the hardware, and this game is still a valiant effort that isn’t too watered down while bringing plenty of other improvements.

-----------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions (PSP)

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lion is an updated version from the PS1. It is a tactical role-playing game in the Final Fantasy series of games. The story itself has no tutorial. If you want a tutorial, then you’ll have to select it from the menu and it is a beefy thing. That’s because there are many facets to the game and it is extremely confusing for a newcomer with little idea of what to do, what stats mean, and what the abilities are. Even the controls for more intricate stuff can be confusing so it is best to click around and get used to it. The game has a high learning curve due to the sheer number of systems and mechanics in play. This means if you have little experience with SRPGs, or you’re a first timer in this game, then you’ll struggle with even the first random encounters. This is doubly so since you have limited options and abilities at this early point of the game but the good news is that once you’ve played a few levels, you will slowly find yourself becoming familiarized with how it works and become comfortable with it.

Battles take place on a grid-based map. You select the party members to use before the battle begins. Once it is your turn, you can move and perform a variety of actions which are dictated by the job of your current character. They can move on the map and the objective of each battle is usually to either defeat all enemies or defeat a certain enemy. The maps have different features on them such as different heights and other types of obstacles. Thus, character and enemy placement is extremely important. Another big element is that if you attack from the side or behind, that character will have a higher chance of successfully damaging the enemy, and the same is true for the enemy attacking your characters. The battles have an isometric view which is not the best given this camera angle makes it difficult to gauge the grid and placements. As it is, you will constantly try to shift the camera, only for the different heights of things on the map to continue blocking your sight.

The game provides you with a huge cast of playable characters, with the potential for infinitely more as you can generate new generic characters to join your team. Each character can freely change jobs, which allows them to learn new abilities that they can take to other jobs. this gives the player a lot of options and sometimes it can feel like there are too many options so that you are not sure what job and ability you should spend the time for. By performing actions during battle, you gain experience points and job points, the latter of which are used to unlock the job abilities. This is somewhat annoying in that a specific character must do something in order to get those points, so you are forced to use them in battle and do something with them. This isn’t too great when their current job is more of a defensive role rather than an offensive one. There are some quirks to the game, one of which is the uneven difficulty. Some story battles are extremely easy, while others are annoying, especially the ones where enemies can heal and revive. Then there is the fact that enemies can easily cause status effects on your characters, steal your equipment, or destroy your equipment. Yet on the flipside when you try out those skills, there is an abysmal success rate so it can feel unfair. There is no quick way to restart a battle, you will have to reset the game and sit through the unskippable cutscenes first. There is also no way to run from a battle, so you must waste time fighting the random encounters. Considering that battles do not take a short amount of time, this is not great. Given the ease of getting yourself into a bad situation, you end up saving after every single battle, which is tedious and a hallmark of bad game design.

Another quirk is that the enemies always target your weakest character. This makes sense as that is what you would do but unfortunately when all of them move halfway across the map to target that one character, they are bound to die. It can be a vicious cycle given that the character needs to do something before they can gain the experience points to get stronger but aren’t given that opportunity as they’re quickly killed. Then there’s the fact that every single character that’s not the protagonist can be perma-killed (hence the ability to generate more generic characters). Certain enemies do excessive amounts of damage where one hit can take down over half a character’s health. Yes, you can manipulate the game’s AI but for most players who just want a decently good and fun time, this is not great. The enemy will constantly outnumber you and will attempt to surround you, and the RNG element is incredibly painful. All that said and it takes around the first chapter for the player to really get the hang of the gameplay. Once it has clicked for you and you’ve started to fiddle around with the characters, it gets addictive. You’ll fall into the temptation of wanting to grind for those extra job points to unlock a new ability that would pair extremely well with another job. You can’t help but look at it after every single battle, and the same goes for the equipment upgrades which come thick and fast. The game constantly introduces new characters who will join your team, and these ones are often much stronger than the starting generics. However, by the time they arrive, you would have already spent a long time on developing your beginning characters, so you have to decide whether to start afresh on a stronger one, or just keep your existing team. It’s usually worth it to swap characters but it does feel like you have wasted a lot of your time in doing so.

The game is mainly told via in-game cutscenes where the characters speak in dialogue boxes on the battle map. There are occasionally animated cutscenes that are fully voiced, which looks great due to the art style. The story is often touted as one of the best in the Final Fantasy series, but it depends on your tastes. It is more serious, and it has a bit of politics with a grander scale throughout the whole game. Yet there are times where you might just not care, and the second half is weaker given that the characters end up being forced to go along a specific path due to a smaller scaled reason. The story battles towards the end of the game can also feel more like filler rather than something that was required for the story. The game takes 30 to 40 hours to complete, and the final boss can be cheap because it likes to rapidly cast every single status ailment onto multiple characters at once. This is slightly softened by the fact that the final boss is otherwise easy. The game has several sidequests and they can be missable. Once you finish the game though, you cannot go back, and you may have locked yourself into the final series of battle without being able to exit. This is another annoying quirk of the game, you are easily able to accidentally save yourself into an unwinnable or unescapable position.

Overall, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is a fun but also incredibly annoying game. It has some frustratingly stupid game designs such as the enemy easily destroying your characters equipment, or easily infecting your characters with a debilitating status effect. Other than those annoying quirks, the game itself has a lot of depth. The job system can be overwhelming at first, especially when you are trying to decide on how to build your characters. The game is winnable with many combinations but it’s just finding the one that suits your playstyle. The story is okay, it can become dry towards the end but all in all, this is a fantastic game that has aged well considering when it was released.

------------------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon (PSP)

The title of Innocent Life:  A Futuristic Harvest Moon gives it away, this is part of the Harvest Moon series, just with a different setting.  You play as a robot, given the task of growing and building your farm on Heartflame Island.  The beginning of the game has you focusing on your farm, so all the staples are there.  You need to till the soil, plant seeds and then water them every day.  You keep your farm clean by weeding and once your crops are fully grown, you can harvest them to sell for money.  You can buy new seeds for different types of crops.  All of this takes time and it can feel repetitive and boring if you’re not into these kinds of games.

There is a small town for you to explore.  This is where the residents live, as well as the supermarket where you get to spend your money on.  The game progresses day by day, in real time.  One second in real life equals to one minute in-game, so the days can pass by quickly.  Unlike Harvest Moon, there are no marriages or relationships, and there is also no need to worry about missable events that only occur on certain days with certain prerequisites.  Unfortunately, there is no fast travel.  You’ll need to travel on foot, but later on you’ll get something to help you to get to places a bit faster.  This is mostly a pain when you need to go into town as there’s a long stretch of pointless nothingness that you have to run through each way, each time.

The game has some light RPG elements, such as stats for your character.  In addition to the farming, the other main objective is to explore the island and eventually find a way to quell the Fire Spirit from erupting the volcano and destroying the town.  The game can be quite chilled as you can mostly progress through the story at your own pace, although you’re given two in-game years to complete it.  The most boring part is the first season as there isn’t much to do except to grow food.  Once the next season comes around and you unlock a few more activities, it’s more interesting.  Each new area you unlock are fairly big, with their own treasures and new items to collect, as well as paths to other areas.

As you’ll end up spending a lot of your time in exploration, you get a sweet robot helper that will automatically do a few of the things you need to do in your farm, like watering crops.  This, along with the thing you get for quicker movement, are great quality-of-life improvements compared to the Harvest Moon games.  In addition, the more you use your tools, the more they’ll level up, which will allow you to use the better tools that completes those actions easier and faster.  While tedious, it is in your interest to suck it up and bear through the earlier repetitive parts.  There are some RNG elements that are incredibly annoying, in particular, the storms.  They appear at random and will wipe out most of your plants so that you need to plant them from seeds again.  While this is realistic, it’s a terrible mechanic especially when you get a string of bad luck and have them appear every week, or in back to back days.

Unfortunately, the pacing of the new stuff being unlocked is way too slow.  You’ll easily explore all available areas before the next ones open up.  This means you won’t have much to do apart from harvesting again and again.  The number of areas you can explore is small and there’s usually little reason to go visit them again once you have done enough to progress the story.  The second half of the game is worse in that money means nothing.  It becomes so easy to make money and there is a severe lack of things to buy.  You’ll easily buy the equipment and tools that you need, which are the most expensive items in the game.  All that’s left to buy are seeds, which are relatively cheap.  You get several huge plots of land but it’s tedious to do more than the bare minimum, and you’ll end up relying on your robotic helper for several things anyway.  This means you’ll be spending weeks of in-game time doing nothing but harvesting and then going to sleep for the next day.

If you know what you need to do, the game can be finished in under 20 hours, and a lot of that time is just waiting or farming.  The actual real content of the story is minimal, and so the ending is quite disappointing.  The exploration aspect could have been done a lot better, but given the lack of fast traveling, the areas couldn’t be too big or confusing as it still needed to allow you enough time to go home.  There are some odd story developments towards the end, and the whole saga felt like it was over too easily and too quickly.  There was one sad moment but that was it.  Once you’ve finished the game, you can keep playing for as long as you like, but there’s really only the farming aspect left.  There are no new exploration areas, nor are there relationships that you can pursue.  The biggest piece of content is a farming challenge, where you are required to harvest 1000 crops within two years and lose all the quality-of-life improvements that cut down on the tediousness.  It’s the old-fashioned way.

Overall, Innocent Life:  A Futuristic Harvest Moon is an average game.  It has some good ideas, like removing the missable time-based events that only current on certain days, and quality-of-life elements having a helper automatically do several of the more tediousness aspects of farming for you.  The exploration focus is great, except for the fact that there’s not else to do besides running around in a new area and perhaps grabbing new fruit or mushrooms to sell.  In this aspect, it felt too barebones and minimal in its content, which is exactly how the story feels.

------------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Breath of Fire III (PSP)

Breath of Fire III is a JRPG. This PSP version is a port of the original that was released for the first PlayStation. The game is a classic JRPG through and through, from the story to the battle system to the game structure. It follows the character Ryu, who wakes up with no memory and is befriend by the local thieves Rei and Teepo. After causing mischief, the trio is forced to do some good in helping to eliminate the monster that had lately been destroying crops. The game is presented in an isometric view, which makes the controls annoyingly confusing. You use the d-pad to move but it feels very imprecise, especially when going down a ladder or wanting to get an exact spot. The analogue stick doesn’t help either. The camera angle can be moved slightly but will snap back into place. This is probably the worst part of the game and will take some time to get used to. The game is split between dungeons and the world map. The battle system on the other hand will be familiar to anyone. It had random encounters but it doesn’t transition to a separate battle screen. Instead, it will take a few seconds to load the enemies in. It’s a turn-based system and each character can attack, use an item, use magic or defend. Its menu based and can be clunky at times. The most unique aspect of the battle system is how you can change the form your party takes. There are three preset forms, attack to boost attack power at the cost of defence, defence to boost defensive power and normal for a neutral form.

The game does not hold your hand in terms of telling you where you need to go next. You just need to explore yourself to see where you go, and where you can’t. The game is linear though. Dungeons can be annoying as there is no in-game map, and as always with random encounters, they can be an impediment and a disincentive to explore. There are gimmicks and puzzles in dungeons that you need to solve and overcome to progress. In what is possibly one of the worst design decisions of the game, to progress the story in several places, you will need a specific character’s ability. Each character has a different one, and this means you will need to change out your party. There are obscure ways to move forward, like needing a specific character to talk to the NPC or interact with an object deep within a dungeon. The game in no way tells you any of this so you could just be scratching your head clueless on what you need to do to move onto the next section.

Unfortunately, the game is slow, from battles to story to just about everything. During battles, you’ll be waiting for the animations to slowly finish. For the story, it felt like the characters were repeating the same thing again and again, requiring backtracking in a few places. There is a severe need for quality-of-life improvements. The game tends to keep removing your characters, artificially lengthening the game as you take longer to defeat enemies. It loves to reshuffle your characters with no warning, screwing up your party and formation, requiring you to go into the menu and change it every single time. The amount of grinding required is ridiculous given how little experience enemies give. It feels unfair when you are severely underleveled compared to a boss who will wipe all progress of the dungeon that you’ve just gone through. It is such a poor design with no excuse for the developers to do this except to just make it artificially harder.

There are so many little things with the game that annoys you. it’s cheap and stingy with healing, whether that’s HP or status effects. Yes, you can heal with spells but there is no easy way to recover MP and dungeons usually do not allow you to save at all. There are no spells that you can easily get to cure most status effects, forcing you to rely on expensive items. While the graphics are surprisingly good for a PS1 / PSP game and is actually rendered in 3D, it constantly hides stuff with its isometric camera angle, which all too often includes story progression objects. There are mandatory minigames that are terrible and underbaked. The controls will constantly work against you, being unorthodox and extremely annoying. The whole game ends up being a giant fetch quest one after another. The characters constantly get distracted on doing these pointless filler quests, grinding the whole game to a halt. The encounter rate is absurdly high at times and there’s no way to reduce that down.

The game takes around 30 to 40 hours to complete, and it’s really only the last ten hours or so where there’s a lot more story. Given the short time, it’s quite condensed and doesn’t justify the amount of boring filler before it. After suffering through the high evasion monsters, monsters that spam status effects, and everything else that tests your patience, it is definitely underwhelming. Overall, Breath of Fire III did not age well. It has all the flaws of the JRPGs from the PS1 era and exemplifies them. The story is slow and keeps it glacial pacing all the way to the end. All potential it had will be lost when you do yet another pointless fetch quest that adds little to the story. The random encounter rate would be fine if not for the pitiful experience points, so you’ll lag behind in levels. The abundance of annoying enemy traits makes grinding a massive chore. The lack of direction and guidance on what you need to progress, including some obscure ways to progress, means it’s a frustrating and annoying game. It’s just terribly designed in a lot of places and if it wasn’t for nostalgia, then it would have been received even less well.

-------------------------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (PSP)

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona is a spin-off from the Shin Megami Tensei games and is the first in the Persona series. However, this isn’t anything like Persona 3, 4 or 5, but more typical of the Shin Megami Tensei JRPG series in gameplay and structure. Originally for the PlayStation, it was ported to the PSP with some new cutscenes and a reworked English localisation. The game was originally a PS1 game, and it shows. It takes on an isometric view that makes the control a bit more awkward, whether you’re using the d-pad or the analogue stick. The city map is annoying as you’re moving a cursor along the streets, and it feels slippery and inaccurate. A menu based system would have worked much better here given that the traversal does not feel good at all. The dungeon crawling also takes place in first person but looks so aged and with an extremely high random encounter rate, it can grate on your nerves too.

The game lacks a tutorial or any kind, nor does it mention any of the game’s mechanics. You’ll need to rely on the instruction manual or online guides if you want to make sense of the various complex systems. The combat system is confusing and filled with too much stuff. Characters can attack but they can use either a melee attack or a gun for a ranged attack. They can use skills, which is basically magic and the skills that they have access to are dictated by their currently equipped persona. Lastly, characters can guard if you need to skip a turn. Given that battles are on a grid-based system and your attacks can only hit certain squares, you may need to do that, and this adds to the annoyance factor as it depends on the enemy’s placements on whether you can hit them or not.

Then there is the negotiation aspect where you contact the demons before using trial and error to see if you can spell card from them. Why? Because these cards are what you require to create new personas. New personas can be more powerful than the one you have already equipped, learning new and different types of skills, with different weaknesses and strengths. It’s in your interest to fuse new and more powerful personas. Unfortunately, complicating matters are that characters have two different levels. The character’s level determines their stats, and then a persona level which dictates the highest level persona that they are able to equip. The persona level is independent of the equipped persona’s strength. Each persona has a rank, and the more you use the persona in battle, the higher it will rise in rank and power. This means it can be annoying to grind (and you will need to grind).

Characters also level up at different rates as the experience points are distributed based on the character’s actions during battle. This means you will have uneven leveling and is quite a pain to manage given that certain characters will fall behind, rapidly. And then the more a character falls behind, the less likely they will do enough in battle to get a bigger chunk of the experience points, and so they become further behind, it’s a vicious cycle. While there is a high encounter rate, even if you fight every single encounter you come across, plus more, you’ll still need to excessively grind in order to keep up with the levels. Battles themselves don’t lend well to grinding as there are plenty of enemy combinations where they will spam party wide status effects. This means that more likely than not, you’ll have several characters with some sort of status effect, giving you a severe disadvantage. This can feel unfair and cheap. The same goes for the enemies that sacrifice themselves to drop all your characters’ HP to 1, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The game really likes to beat you down. Just when you may get a bit more comfortable and confident, you are smashed with unfair enemy groupings that will continue to spam those annoying party wide status effects with party wide devastating damaging moves. You’ll end up losing control of your party, watching them helplessly be pummelled into a game over that feels completely unfair and down to sheer luck. It’s not difficulty, it’s straight up cheap and trash. Losing progress is the worst part thanks to the save point system. And of course, the escape option fails often (a horrendous trend in JRPGs, you only try to escape if you can’t beat the enemy, so losing turns when you attempt to do so is horribly frustrating). What makes even even more annoying and difficult, and this is a staple of the Shin Megami Tensei series, are the absurd resistances and immunity that enemies have. Some might have completely immunity against physical or magical attacks, others might repel it. And when different groupings come that each require a very different strategy, that’s when you’re in trouble and it becomes a massive pain to go through in every single dungeon.

Suffering through the demon contact menu trial and error to get enough cards to fuse new personas, equipping them, and then ranking them up, is tedious and repetitive. It’s annoying that when you get a persona to a certain rank, unlocking their abilities, you then must start again with the next stronger one. It feels like you lose a lot of your progress as you cannot use abilities during battle apart from the currently equipped persona. This makes changing the style of your party and tailoring their strengths and weaknesses against bosses waste a lot of time. The cheapness continues all the way to the end where an endgame dungeon gives you the same powerful enemies, while outnumbering you and walloping you with their strong party wide attacks… but only two party members to use. The designers went out of their way to make it frustratingly annoying, hoping to wipe your progress or waste as much of the player’s time as possible, which is just horrendous gameplay design. If you want to grind for some levels (because you will need to to beat the game), it’s a long tedious affair and just all around not fun at all.

Rounding it all out is the story, which had some potential, but it is boring and not told in an engaging way. While the protagonist is visiting a friend in the hospital, they are attacked by demons, which has also infiltrated the town. They didn’t intend to at first, but they end up setting out to find out the cause of this, gaining access to the power of persona. There are some interesting concepts like the different worlds, and the actual cause of the phenomenon but because the story elements are after the poor, tedious and long dungeon crawling, the game is disjointed and poorly paced. It takes around 30 to 40 hours to complete the main story quest, depending on how much you grind and how lost you get. The ending is fine, nothing great or special, just like the rest of the story. Perhaps most impressively is that the game contains two separate storylines, with the second one more geared towards experienced players. The second one more heavily leans towards the dungeon crawling aspect, and is filled with even more tough encounters, tough bosses, and other types of restrictions, so it can be incredibly hard if you don’t know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, there is no New Game Plus, nor can you carry over anything, so if you want to play the other story, you will need to start from scratch.

Overall, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona can be fun, but it can be incredibly cheap, unfair and frustrating. It’s not even rewarding to get past the tougher sections because it can be so reliant on luck during random encounters. Grinding for levels is tedious and you are forced to go out of your way to do it because even fighting every opponent with the high encounter rate is not enough. It relies quite heavily on trial-and-error gameplay, even against normal enemies, each encounter having the potential to destroy you. The dungeon crawling is not a great experience since every dungeon basically looks and feels the same. The game has not aged well in this aspect, losing potentially up to an hour of progress, if not more, due to a cheap shot is not fun and makes you want to put down the game with the time it wastes you.

------------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Valkyria Chronicles II (PSP)

Valkyria Chronicles II is a PSP only sequel to the turn-based action strategy hybrid game from the PS3. It retains the unique blend of turn-based strategy tactical combat, where each turn begins with a 2D overhead map that lays out the terrain, visible enemy placements, and your own troops’ placements. You have a certain number of actions in the turn where you can select a character, at which point the view then shifts to a third person perspective. You move the character around and can target enemies this way to shoot them (which is based off a variety of factors such as aim, stance and accuracy). You can keep using an action on the same character, though they’ll slowly lose movement range each time. The lack of the PSP’s right stick is painful for the camera as left / right movement is mapped to the shoulder buttons, while up / down is mapped to the triangle and X buttons. This means that even if you have a Vita, you can’t map all four directions onto the right stick. You’ll have to settle for either horizontal or vertical movement only for the right stick, and horizontal is the better choice.

There are five classes. Scouts are flexible with a large movement radius, average attack and high accuracy, however they have low defences. Shocktroopers are the opposite, with more limited movement and low accuracy but high attack and defence. Engineers help refill ammo and heal others. Lancers are heavy units that can do big damage to tanks. And lastly, Armored Techs have shields so they boast massive defence but only has a melee weapon. You can easily swap characters in and out during a level, and thus different classes, at will so you’re not locked into something that you’ve picked at the beginning. This provides a lot of flexibility in the strategy that you use, as well as changing it on the fly. You get experience and money after every battle but the amount is affected by the ranking you receive based on your performance. Higher rankings can be achieved via completing the battle in a low number of turns, or you’ve defeated tougher enemies, or a lot of them.

The area maps are smaller than the first game, something necessitated by the lower end hardware of the system. As a compromise, there are separate areas instead that you swap between. It’s more annoying since it’s not one big seamless map and breaks the immersion quite a bit. There is a limit on how many units you can have overall and in a specific map at any one time. This is artificially limiting and restrictive. Changing areas is also a pain as it feels like you’re forced to manage something you really shouldn’t need to, especially since the first game didn’t have this. There are field effects like night reducing visibility of opponents, or sandstorms reducing accuracy. This ties into vehicles, which you can use to attack and carry troops, as well as attach parts to cancel out certain field effects. While they’re supposed to spice things up and add variety, all the effects are negative, so they are annoying every time you encounter one, only serving to drag the mission out.

The RNG is annoying for the bulk of the game. Accuracy is a killer, limited movement is a killer, enemy evasion is a killer. All this combines to make it harder to get to where you need to, especially at the beginning of the game. Reloading isn’t fast as you cannot save during a mission anymore, you have to back all the way out, and then go through all the loading screens in order to retry the mission. A simple restart option would have been nice. Completing a mission will grant you experience points. They are used to level up whole classes at a time, so even if you don’t use a character, theoretically they shouldn’t fall behind as their stats and effectiveness are determined by their class’s level. Unfortunately, each character can specialise in their classes. In order to do this, you are required to use that character in missions to obtain the items used in this process. It means you have to consciously use specific characters to specialise them. This is a terrible system as it awards these items randomly to characters, and specific missions give a specific type. It’s designed for grinding, as it is entirely reliant on luck on whether the characters you like and use the most will get the items required to specialise.

With the story, it keeps the same storybook art style of the original. However, since it’s on the PSP with its lower resolution screen, it’s nowhere near a striking. It still has a lot of its charms though. The story is told with visual novel style cutscenes, with full English voice acting. The story is set two years after the end of the first game with the war over. However, Gallia now faces a civil war, as a group aims to get rid of all the Darcsens in the country. The game follows Avan, whose brother was killed in combat although Avan doesn’t believe that to be true. He enters the same military academy that his brother went to and meets fellow students Cosette and Zeri. The three are in Class G and thus begins their academy life. There is more text in the story than expected, so you do spend quite a bit of time reading. There are key missions that push the story forward, with plenty of optional missions. There are nice animated cutscenes but it’s too bad about the slow pace of the story and school setting as it loses the unique blend of a grittier darker story paired with bright colorful anime aesthetic that made the original so good. The focus on academy life can be cliched if you’ve watched many anime set in schools, while the second half has a higher focus on the civil war which is definitely the more interesting aspect as it has higher stakes.

The game slowly loses its appeal and charm though. Later missions are yes, supposed to be hard. However, they’re made harder with tough armored units with tons of health, while most likely, your own units are still squishy as the game has not been kind in giving you the required items to specialise and class up. Forcing you to go blind in missions is realistic, but it means that it requires trial and error, which is a pain as it blocks your strategizing. It requires you to at least play it once and then once more to get a better rank. Enemy turns will end up taking forever, especially with artillery bombardments as well. It takes a bit over twenty hours to complete the campaign if you’re mostly efficient in each mission. Afterwards, there is a lot of postgame content that is unlocked, as well as all the other optional missions that you may have not yet played. Although these are harder, they reuse everything that you’ve already seen, in a game that already reuses its assets way too much.

Overall, Valkyria Chronicles II makes the successful transition from console to handheld with a few compromises. The controls for one, although they can be gotten used to. The reduction in map size is the bigger compromise and can make you feel cramped at first, especially with the segregate areas which isn’t good as you will quickly hit the maximum number of units allowed to be deployed at the same time. Each mission just feels that bit more restrictive than it should. There are a few common strategies that can get you across most of the missions so by the second half of the game, the variety isn’t great and it can start to feel repetitive. It’s still a fun game, but the forgettable story means it’s not an essential game to play.

------------------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection (PSP)

Final Fantasy IV: Complete Collection contains Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy IV: Interlude, and Final Fantasy IV: The After Years in one package. This version features updated graphics compared to the original release of the game (although ironically, despite being the more powerful system, it doesn’t get the 3D remake version that the DS release had).

Final Fantasy IV

Final Fantasy IV is the fourth game in the Final Fantasy series, and like the rest, it’s story is standalone. The original was released for the SNES, while the updated graphics allows this game to be presented in widescreen, and it looks really good, even on the Vita when you have bilinear filtering on. The widescreen presentation allows you to see more of your surroundings, although it does make the distance between your characters and opponents during battle quite wide, leaving quite a bit of empty space. Otherwise, this is a standard JRPG for its time with a turn based battle system. It uses the Active Time Battle system where it is still turn based, but there is a bar that fills showing off the speed of your characters and when they can attack next. The unique aspect (for its time) is that even when it’s your turn and going through the menu to determine your action, enemies can still attack you. There is a basic position battle where you can determine the characters in the front and back rows. The front can deal full powered attacks and accuracy with the trade-off being that they get hit harder from enemies.

Unlike Final Fantasy III, there is no job system here. The characters in your party have predetermined jobs, so you’ll get a paladin, or a white mage, a black mage, or a summoner etc. So while you lose the versatility of using your favorite characters, it gives those characters a sense of identity and uniqueness instead. During your turn, you’re able to attack with the weapon the character has, use items or run away. Every character, depending on their job, has additional abilities like magic or special unique abilities that only they have. Your party is constantly changing, which can be annoying when you like a particular character and am forced to swap to a new one to slowly build them up, time and time again. The game is 2D with a faux 3D viewpoint at times. It has random encounters, which can be annoying. The random encounter rate goes up and down, and it is actually had to predict. Sometimes in the dungeon you’ll get an encounter every few steps, but then you can traverse a whole level without encountering one. While you can dash, at least anecdotally, it feels like the random encounter rate is higher negating the faster walking speed. The other annoying aspect is that there is a high chance of having encounters where you’re at a disadvantage, with the enemy being able to attack first.

The story is of course one of the stronger elements of the game, along with the awesome soundtrack. The plot follows Cecil, a dark knight of Baron who follows orders and is at a crossroads with his conscience. On the one hand, he is loyal, but on the other, the atrocities he is forced to commit weighs heavily on his mind. Once he decides to break free, he uncovers a bigger plot. He’ll travel across the world, meet a lot of new people who’ll join his party and save the world. It’s a straightforward story where Cecil will go to each of the crystals, always one step behind the villains until the end. There are several cool locales you get to visit as well optional hidden areas. The unique part about this game is that the story is more complex and deep compared to the previous games, which were basic (but had started to improve). We get characters that are fully fleshed out and while there is still room for improvement, we do get attached to those characters. It also feels slightly darker for the fact that it’s not as idealistic, and characters come and go from the party for reasons more than just wanting to sightsee. As a result, the story does have several genuinely unexpected moments that might cause you to do a double take.

That said, the beginning can tough in terms of the available party members you get. While Cecil is great as a physical fighter and allrounder, he’s primarily the only physical damage dealer you get. A lot of the other early party members focuses on magic, so that they have weak attack and defence stats, that can make battles longer than they need to be. Dungeons can also be confusing, and while some sections will gentle nudge and railroad you to the next area, others can be a confusing mess of paths. The game’s difficulty is not too bad on the whole, but there are certain sections, specifically towards the end, where it spikes up. You’ll encounter enemies who will counter whenever you attack, or groups of enemies who have high speed so you’re being bombarded by several attacks whittling down your party’s HP before you can even make a move. Some characters have low HP due to their class and are easily damaged down to critical levels due to how hard enemies can hit.

The difficulty ends up becoming very uneven towards the end. The final dungeon itself has several difficulty spikes requiring you to grind for a few levels to comfortably beat the game. Thankfully, the game has an Auto mode to blast through some encounters but you’ll need to be careful as it is limited and risky for higher levelled enemies. Yet despite all this, the game is strangely addicting even though the story isn’t too complex. It’s good enough to keep you moving forward. Leveling up, exploring and obtaining treasures from chests is a satisfying formula. You’re given a lot of freedom once you are able to fully explore the world map, but the game’s not great with telling you where you need to go next to progress with the story. If you know exactly where to go, the game takes around 20 to 30 hours to complete. Afterwards, it unlocks a bonus dungeon that’s harder and filled with great items for your characters. Overall, Final Fantasy IV is still an enjoyable game decades later. The graphics have aged well, as did the battle system. Sure it might be simple by current standards but the variety of your party helps keep each part of the game fresh and different. The characters are likeable and the story is engrossing enough to keep you going towards the end.

Final Fantasy IV: Interlude

Final Fantasy IV: Interlude a brand new game for this collection. It takes place one year after the end of Final Fantasy IV, and it set before The After Years. The title is very fitting since this is a short interlude, that kind of sets up the next game, but doesn’t show off a whole lot. We control Cecil again, and see all the party members after the events of the previous game. It reuses the same battle system and annoyingly, everyone is now between level 30 to 40, so you don’t have access to all the abilities you had. That doesn’t matter too much since it takes less than two hours to finish but you end up retreading through various dungeons, fighting a few bosses. Everything is reused with just new story events on top. It’s okay but it isn’t something to jump at buying the game for.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is a direct sequel to Final Fantasy IV. It was originally released only in Japan for mobile phones, in episodic format no less. Due to its episodic nature, it’s structure that each main playable character from Final Fantasy IV has their own tale, where you start from a low level with no items and little money. The story itself takes place years after the ending of Final Fantasy IV and the Interlude chapter. It is separated into multiple scenarios called “tales”. Each tale follows a different character, so those that like to have a consistent growing party will be disappointed. There is a slight change to the battle system in this game. It’s still turn-based but the major new feature is the moon where it waxes and wanes. Each phase will affect the power of magic and physical attacks. For example, at full moon, physical attacks does half damage while black magic is doubled. This affects enemies as well as your own party members. The phase changes over time while on the field or manually changes when your party sleeps and recovers. Another addition are combination attacks between the characters, which are quite flashy.

The first thing you’ll realize when you start the game is how it reuses basically everything from the original. You’ll be going through the same dungeons and towns, some of them multiple times. It’s nostalgic if you played Final Fantasy IV on its release years ago, not so much when you’ve just completed it like you likely would have when playing this collection. The random encounter rate is also as high and random as it was in the original. You can traverse a whole floor of a dungeon without an encounter while at other times, you’ll have an encounter after one step. Each tales takes under two hours to complete, depending on how much you grind and how quickly you rush through the dungeons. Unfortunately, playing with a new party in each tale is a flaw as you need to re-level each time as well as stocking up on healing items. Your parties are unbalanced and you’re trapped within a really small area of the world. This is always a problem with games that takes this split viewpoint approach (like Dragon Quest IV). The first tale follows Ceodore, the son of Cecil and Rosa. He is a far cry from his parents who is insecure. This tale sets up the story of the game which focuses on the strange happenings on the moon that coincides with monsters invading Baron.

The second tale follows Rydia and supporting characters from the original become playable characters here. The story starts to become more intriguing, particular since Rydia is a stronger character overall. Although her character is nerfed so it makes battles more annoying. Yang’s tale follows a similar structure and at this point, it starts to become a chore. The enjoyment from new dungeons in addition to trekking through old ones is mitigated through the amount of backtracking required. Once you’ve reached the end of a dungeon and beaten the boss, what does the game need you to do next? Walk all the way back and this is just pure filler. Palom’s tale truly shows how annoying Palom can be. In the original game, he doesn’t get much screentime before he exits your party so his antics aren’t as grating. Here, they’re in full force and it can get to the point where you can’t stand the guy. He becomes better towards the end but it is yet another tale with similar plot points, dealing with the loss of a crystal.

Edge’s tale takes what was already one of the worst elements of this game and makes it even worse. His tale is further splits into five sections, each with a different main playable character. While this split into different viewpoints may be interesting at first, they all result in the same thing and structured in a similar way which eliminates the intrigue. Porom’s tale is as obnoxious as Palom’s… because Palom is in it and this game plays up his angsty attitude way too much. To make matters worse, you’re stuck with an all-mages party for most of the tale so that you’re too heavily reliant on magic, which makes grinding up levels suck. The only saving grace to this tale is how it is a different perspective to the events that happened in other tales so you can see other characters doing their thing.

Edward’s tale isn’t that much better and wow, this one takes the cake for backtracking. In addition to trekking through the same dungeons for the third time in this game alone, the tale includes scenario where you trek through multiple long dungeons, make it through to the end, only to be told to go back, grab an item and then come back again. Throughout all this are seemingly super high encounter rates, and it makes this a really unpleasant experience given that the story in this tale was so shallow and so similar to the others. Kain’s tale is probably the most interesting story-wise compared to the others, but the big reveal on appears at the end. Before that, you’re going to traverse the same dungeons, and swap viewpoints, so more of the same really, and that is such a shame that the pacing is so out of wack in this game. At least this if you’ve been playing the tales in the order that the game presents them in, this is the last one before the final tale where everyone joins up together.

The Lunarian’s tale is long, and if you thought up until this point the game was bloated with filler, you haven’t seen anything yet. The pacing was already bad but it makes it worse here with the constant backtracking of the same extremely long dungeons for only a piece or two of the story. It’s so bad that you can’t wait for the end but despair as there so much of the game that is left. The final tale is split into various sections where you spend the first part collecting the various playable characters together. Then you’re able to finally choose your own party from the many available. Unfortunately, even if you import the save data from the other tales, you will end up with uneven levels within your party. This results in a terrible difficulty coupled with a high encounter rate making the overall experience even worse than it already is. Then there’s the actual difficulty spike in the final dungeon where every enemy hits like they’re a boss, on average twice as fast as your characters, and gives pitiful experience. It is frankly just terrible design that’s disgusting and outdated even when the game was released. It’s as if your time wasn’t wasted enough already with all the filler, recycling and grinding already, you’ll have to do even more if you hope to traverse through the final dungeon.

The final tale is also horrendous in that you’re going through almost every single dungeon in the game yet again, as if the first, second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth time wasn’t enough. Seriously, at this point, you suspect the game’s sole aim is to see how far it can push a player to play through the same area again. The final dungeon itself is too long as well, making it seem that the game never seems to end. All this combines into an artificially padded out game that’s about eight times longer than it should be, where it outstayed its welcome 20 hours ago. Overall, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is a bad game, it is one of the worst Final Fantasy games available. It’s got a bad story, a bad structure and a bad difficulty. Even being originally for mobile phones isn’t enough to explain some of the baffling design choices. Having you traverse the same dungeon six times? Making the final dungeon over forty floors long with the same design we’ve already seen? Making the difficulty insanely spike up and jacking up the encounter rate? These were all completely unnecessary but no, and for that, it is completely disrespectful to the player for wasting their time. This game sours the memory of the original Final Fantasy IV and should not have existed.

Overall

Overall, Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection is great value, having packaged both the original and the sequel. It’s just a shame that The After Years is a terrible sequel and a horrendous game. Buy the game to play Final Fantasy IV, and ignore Interlude and The After Years as both are trash that’s not even worth booting up.

----------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page and this page.

Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley (PSP)

Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley is a farm simulation game for the PSP. It follows the same protagonist as Save the Homeland and has several returning characters as well, essentially an expanded remake of that game. You can name the protagonist to whatever you want, and he travels to Leaf Valley to take over his grandfather’s farm. It is there that you learn that you have two years to save up enough money to buy the deed to the whole village. If you fail, the village will be demolished and a theme park will be built in its place. The game doesn’t have a great tutorial. It kind of just throws you in and leaves you there with limited guidance. You’ll spend the first day exploring the village, which is of a reasonable size. Annoyingly, the village is split into various smaller areas, each of which requires a short loading screen. That said, the graphics are decent for a PSP game, thanks to the bright and colorful aesthetic, it still looks great to this day. Then you’ll explore the part time jobs to get extra money such that you can buy some seeds to grow, and eventually buy some animals to raise. The crops that you grow can be sold for money and they are your main source of income at the beginning of the game. Shops will have specific requests that pays more than selling it piecemeal but of course, are tougher to gather up.

The core of the game is to spend each day growing crops, taking care of your animals, and then going through the village to build up affection points with each of the characters. You can affection points by talking to the characters every day as well as giving them gifts. Characters will move around throughout the day, so it takes a few days before you start to remember where they are at a particular time. The somewhat constantly moving nature makes the village feel a bit more alive and inhabited. The game has calming and relaxing music. However, each day runs in real time. The clock is constantly ticking in the upper right corner. One second of real time equals to one in-game minute and it can be stressful at first when you’re worrying about wasting time and wasting the day if you just aimlessly run around. As you go through the week, you’ll realize that shops are closed on certain days, as well as only being open at certain times of the day. You’ll need to pay attention if you want to buy or deliver something.

It takes a few in-game days before you get a feel for the gameplay loop and start to set up a routine. Soon you’ll get sucked into the trap of playing one more day and figure out ways to maximize what you can achieve each day. However, the pacing is very slow, given that you’re playing the game one day at a time. Waiting for new events which last a few seconds can make the game extremely repetitive. Once you get past the first month and the story events start to become more frequent (provided you fulfill the criteria), it’s a lot more interesting. Towards the second half of the game, you’ll start to cut stuff from your routine. Given that it is really easy to get enough money for the normal ending as well as being able to buy everything before the end of the first year, you can tell that the game focuses on the various events and associated character affection building instead of the farming component. There are multiple “endings”, or ways to save the village. Unfortunately these endings are tied to specific events which are tied to specific days. Miss the requirement to trigger an event and you can kiss that ending goodbye. These “missable” endings are a pain if you wanted to see as much as you can in a playthrough, especially if you don’t want to follow a guide.

Despite the chilled atmosphere, the game can be harsh in several ways. If you accidentally miss a day in feeding your animals, they will get sick the next day which will drop their affection as well. If your character gets sick from over exerting himself, then you will lose a day, potentially causing you to permanently miss events. When it rains, it restricts a lot on what you can do since all the characters stay inside and you cannot do a lot of the minigames. The limited amount of items you can carry early on is annoying as you’ll constantly run out of space. Thankfully, you can upgrade this along with your tools which benefit you since you’ll use less of your stamina bar. The controls can feel archaic at times. Having the same button mapped to selecting an item, gifting an item, and throwing the item, with the only difference being that it depends on how far away from a character you are, means you’ll be accidentally throwing away stuff all too often. The same goes for when you’re confirming a textbox only to throw a valuable item away or you want to speed up the text only for a selection box to pop up and the default answer is now the one to move the route forward. Therefore, saving in multiple slots is a must in case you need to reload a previous save and redo the day.

After the two years are up and the credit rolls, provided you had enough money, you can continue playing the game for as long as you’d want. However, there aren’t too many new things left to do. You can expand your house a bit more, buy some more tools and get married. These are definitely nowhere near enough for you to keep playing for that much longer unless you really love the routine of farming, watering, harvesting and taking care of your animals. It already takes a fair amount of time to get to the ending, anywhere from twenty hours to fifty hours. If instead after you finish the game the first time you wish to start up a new one, there is a new game plus option. This mode allows you to carry over items such as money, house extensions and keeps a track of the endings you have already achieved. However, you will have to redo any routes you want, which includes building up all the affection points again, which is very time consuming and boring. Overall, Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley is a solid game. It’s not quite the addictive cycle that one would expect of a farming simulation game. The game focuses a lot on achieving the story events in order to get the various endings. Unfortunately, its fixation on the strict timing of all those story events means you’re likely to miss out on a lot which can be disappointing and frustrating, particularly since it takes so long to go through a full playthrough.

-------------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page.

Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy (PSP)

Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy is a fighting JRPG crossover spin-off game for the PSP.  It is the second game in the Dissidia series but the story is a prequel, and it also contains the first game’s story as a post-game bonus. Dissidia is designed as a fighting game, which serves as the combat system.  Battles are one-on-one fights taking place in a large open area.  It is fast paced and looks great in action.  Winning is slightly different though because there are two types of attacks.  Bravery attacks will not deal damage to your opponent’s HP, but will build up Bravery Points.  HP attacks will damage your opponent’s HP to the value of your Bravery Points.  Thus you must build up enough points and then land a HP attack in order to get somewhere. Furthermore, your character can jump, block and dodge.  Blocking and dodging depends on your timing, which isn’t helped by the fact that it is a combination of two buttons pressed at the same time in order to execute.  Complicating things further, you can call for Assist Attacks where a friendly character will come in to deal damage, and an Ex Mode that gives your character stat boosts, unique attacks and other passive abilities.

All the while you can jump around the place, dash towards or away from an enemy, and climb walls and other obstacles.  This leads to verticality in the area designs.  The game highly discourages button mashing since all attacks aren’t instant.  They have a short starting animation that can be interrupted, which can be annoying and frustrating if you are not used to it.  Dissidia is a difficult game with a high learning curve, even on the Normal difficulty. Despite being a fighting game, it has a meaty story mode complete with all RPG elements.  Each character can gain experience to level up, unlocking new attacks and abilities to equip in the process.  There is a wide variety of attacks and abilities that can drastically change a character’s play style.  The story takes place in chapters and focuses on six characters:  Lightning, Vaan, Laguna, Yuna, Kain and Tifa.

The game’s cycle is that your character is placed on a world map where you run around to go to Gates.  You battle through these Gates, defeat a boss and then move on.  There are frequent cutscenes, which are all fully voiced.  The story mode can be difficult for newcomers due to the complexity of the combat system, and how you need to look out for the enemy’s moment in order you time your actions.  Furthermore, you seem to be perpetually underleveled compared to the bosses and you do not have enough resources to consistently source the best equipment. Bosses can feel cheap when they are able to constantly dodge your attacks.  You’ll fight against the camera since when you are locked onto an opponent, the camera likes to shift around and have a pillar or wall blocking your sight.  This is a limitation of the PSP hardware since a right stick to control the camera would have alleviated this frustration.

The crossover aspect is very cool.  As part of the eternal conflict between the gods Cosmos and Chaos, Cosmos summons the heroes from various worlds to fight for her.  During the journey, our heroes will fight against Manikins which are effectively clones of the villains.  It uses the same music from the various Final Fantasy games and when used as battle themes, it is awesome.  The battle between Cosmos and Chaos are in cycles, and as the title suggests, this is the 12th cycle. The story ends up being quite simple and not that well told.  It seems very drab with a lot of dialogue.  It takes around ten to fifteen hours to complete so it isn’t a long story by JRPG standards.  However, the final chapter requires a bit of grinding since it forces you to use a party of all the playable characters, but they will all be underleveled by the time they reach the final boss, even if you had never skipped a battle before this point.

Once you get the hang of the battle system, the game is very fun.  The graphics are impressive for a PSP game.  The gameplay loop within the story can be a bit repetitive, especially with the amount of battles that you have to do.  It only feels like this because of the constant loading screens.  It does try to stave off the repetitiveness by forcing you to control a different character each chapter, and each character plays differently, you have to change and adapt your tactics. Summon effects during the battle that usually puts the opponent at an advantage or you at a disadvantage and it feels really unfair when that happens.  It happens way too frequently.  Due to the seeming “lag” between pressing a button and the attack actually happening due to the attack animation, it feels as if the opponent dodges your attack way more often than you’ll like.  This is probably due to the game encouraging you to dodge and then counterattack but it is still frustrating at times, especially when it drags out the end of a battle.  These two combined makes it a terrible design choice and makes the game really unfun.

Once you’re finished with the prequel story, you can play through the first game’s story and the difficulty rise is ridiculous.  All your characters start at level one and the enemy far outpaces your level.  You are supposed to make up for it with equipment but it is still unfair when certain opponents spam moves and continues to make the game more and more unfun.  This highlights the flaws of the control scheme where the AI has inhuman dodging reflexes while you’re stuck trying to press two buttons at the same time to dodge, and the movement being so clunky.  Upgrading your equipment is not as easy as it sounds as you don’t gain much money from battles; it makes the game a stupid grindfest. The first game’s story is longer, and feels even more of a grind.  It tries to shake things up a little bit by introducing stage effects but the story is of a lower quality and somehow manages to make an epic crossover quite bland.  It takes around 15 to 20 hours to complete and after that comes the post-game content which is the first cycle of battle.  In this, the enemies are very high leveled.

Sure, there is a lot of content but it is all very repetitive, and the world map ends up not adding anything to the game.  That fact that you’re fighting in the same arenas against the same enemies multiple times (since they’re used as mooks), it’s not great and feels like it is dragging the game way too much.  The story is nowhere near good enough to keep the grind going.  The original’s story has the same concept, which is just the various characters fighting against each other, there’s a lot of dialogue but very little is meaningful. Overall, Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy is fun for the first ten hours or so but then it eats away at you with its repetitive nature.  It is grind heavy, the AI difficulty is broken, being either too easy if you exploit it properly, or too hard as it spam moves and throws massive level differences.  The world map is cool but once you get to the second cycle, it’s like, what’s the point since it is unnecessary fluff.

----------------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (PSP)

The Legend of Heroes:  Trails in the Sky is a JRPG in a long-standing series, most of which was Japan-only.  Trails in the Sky was translated into English and released for the PSP in 2011, which is surprising but nevertheless welcomed.  It is the first chapter in a trilogy.  The game is presented with a camera that sits approximately at a 45 degree angle overview.  It is 2D-ish but the environments are rendered in 3D.  You can rotate the camera using the shoulder buttons but if you have a Vita, mapping it to the right stick makes it so much more natural and easier.  The game uses the 2D view to hide things so it is a good idea to do a thorough sweep in each area before moving on.  The battle system is interesting as it mixes some tactical elements such as the grid movement system.  However, since characters can move quite far, there are only some instances where you end up "missing" a turn due to monsters being out of range.  Trails in the Sky has a turn-based menu system system where characters can attack, use Crafts which are special attacks using Craft Points earned, Arts which is basically magic using EP, and the ability to use items.

Battles are easy to pick up and with the grid movement, it adds in another layer of strategy in terms of being able to distance yourself from enemies.  However, it is confusing in the beginning with the difference between Crafts and Arts.  There is a column on the left side of the screen during battles to show the attack order and turn bonuses.  Every so often, a particular turn will have a bonus such as a guaranteed critical hit or HP healing and the player can manipulate their characters' turns to a degree such that they receive the bonus and not the enemy.  Annoyingly though, using Arts will take two turns.  One turn to start casting and then one turn to deal the damage.  During the time in between, monsters can take the chance to interrupt you.  This makes the timing of healing Arts much more crucial.  The story is told in four chapters plus a prologue.  Each chapter taking place over one region of the world which is quite big.  The plot takes place in the Kingdom of Liberl and follows Estelle and Joshua who are adopted siblings . They follow in their father's footsteps to become a Bracer.  A Bracer is a professional as a part of the Bracer Guild who completes quests to help out people.

Estelle and Joshua's father goes missing and the two go around the world searching for him.  Naturally, during their journey they discover a more sinister plot.  Each chapter has a subplot which adds to the larger overarching arc of the game until it wraps together in the final chapter which is where the story really starts to grip you.  With that said, the prologue was a tad bit slow in terms of story and gameplay but afterwards it builds up the momentum and will soon become addictive.  The story is not huge in scale but the journey of the two and how they grow becomes entangled with the player's heart.  The long prologue also acts as the tutorial, teaching you the basics of the game which is complex and meaty so it will take a while to get accustomed to what each features mean.  During the game, various other characters will join as party members but they will all eventually leave.  The only true permanent team members are Estelle and Joshua.  Only in the last dungeon can you pick and choose which of the playable characters form your four-character party.

The story is told via text and dialogue.  There is effectively no voice acting except for some shout outs during battle when characters use their special moves.  This means there is a truckload of reading and coupled with the optional books and NPC dialogue, that's a lot of text.  You travel through the five major cities which are connected by numerous interconnected maps.  There is loading time between each smaller map but they are not too long.  The annoying part is that if you want to do all the quests or even just go through the story, you will constantly be walking back and forth along these long paths which is time consuming and a bit mundane.  There is no fast travel.  As you progress through the story, you also cannot go back to the region of the previous city, leading to a lot of missable items and events.  Enemies roam the battlefield and a battle initiates only when the party comes into contact.  This is harder when you have a full party of four as the characters trail behind you like a snake, making it all the easier to accidentally come into contact with an enemy that you wanted to avoid.

The sidequests come in the form of Bracer Quests which is also the main way to get money.  These are usually fetch quests, escort missions or beating certain monsters.  Money is hard to come by in the beginning of the game, be sure to sell equipment as otherwise there is no way to upgrade all your equipment.  Some of the quests can be obscure and it requires a lot of reading in order to find out how to begin the quest and what you need to do.  The game is a good difficulty provided you do most of the quests and don't run away from all monsters.  There is a tough final boss battle which requires good strategy and a bit of grinding.  However, it is a manageable challenge although it dragged on for a while due to the high HP.  The ending is strong but it is also a cliffhanger and some backstories of the characters are not revealed.  These are left to be addressed by the sequel instead.  Coupled with the music, these last ending scenes genuinely make you sad that you've finished the game.  Overall, The Legend of Heroes:  Trails in the Sky is a strong solid JRPG.  While some of the game mechanics and story doesn't wow you too much, it combined into a powerful and emotional ending that gets you hyped up with the sequel.

---------------------------------------

For other game reviews, have a look at this page.