PSP

Hexyz Force

June 23, 2010

PSP / Reviews / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Hexyz Force does a lot of things right, but most of all it is designed with portability in mind. There are no overlong cutscenes, not multi-hour tutorial, and a quick, efficient battle system that keeps you in the action but still manages to feel strategic.

A single playthrough of Hexyz Force will run you between 20 and 25 hours. That feels right to me for a portable RPG. Once you’re through with your first playthrough though you’ll want to start a second because Hexyz Force is two games in one. With two main characters and two quests you’ll have something to do after you complete Rafael’s story that is more entertaining than replaying the first narrative, and easier to get into than starting a whole new game.

Story-wise Hexyz Force is nothing special. A great evil looms in the distance, and it’s up to you to stop it. In order to do so you must climb the Tower of Judgment slaying monsters along the way. Where Hexyz Force differs from the run-of-the-mill RPG is its streamlining. There are very few random NPCs begging you to find their lost cats or liberate their cities that are ancillary to the main quest, and there are no shops where you need to try on every tunic in the place to maximize your dexterity skill to make it past the next encounter. Everything you need can be crafted on the fly, and the pace of the game is better for it.

RPGs live and die by their battle systems, and Hexyz Force has a very good one. Each hero can equip one ragnafact (primary weapon) that requires RP to use. Each ragnafact has an elemental attribute, and exploiting an enemy’s weakness is key to victory. In this regard, Hexyz Force feels a lot like Skies of Arcadia. Using RP allows you to use your ragnafact, but ragnafact usage must be rationed as RP can only be replenished by leveling up or visiting a force site (like a mana fountain in Torchlight). Since RP is a finite resource you’ll need to create secondary weapons from random enemy drops using the game’s crafting system. There’s no need to seek out a workbench or run back to town – simply open the menu and get cracking. Created weapons have a limited number of uses, but drops are plentiful enough that as soon as one weapon deteriorates you’ll have the necessary parts to create a new one.

The graphics are serviceable, but you’ll never forget that you’re playing a 3D game on a system less powerful than a PS2. Most models are serviceable, but you’ll occasionally run across some very low poly-count models. Enemies are color-swapped quite a bit so get used to seeing that wolf because you’ll be seeing his green comrade in the next dungeon and his blue one in the dungeon after that. There’s a surprising amount of music in Hexyz Force, and the boss tune is catchy and warns you of a big encounter coming up where it’s okay to spend every last RP you’ve got. 

Hexyz Force doesn’t feature an epic narrative, but it hits all the right notes in terms of mechanics. Battles are fast-paced and strategic, crafting is fun, and since enemy drops mean new and better weapons grinding is its own reward. If you’re looking for a JRPG to play on the go and don’t mind a forgettable story then look into Hexyz Force.

Plays Like: SNES-era Final Fantasy, Riviera: The Promised Land

Pros: Great crafting system, fun battles

Cons: Throw-away story, color-swapped enemies

 

Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake

June 23, 2010

PSP / Reviews / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake is exactly what you’d think it is – a scaled down version of the PSN release with the same pick-up-and-play mentality, hats that define your role on the battlefield, and flags that get bigger when you force-feed them cake. 

Fistful of Cake feels just like its console big brother, and that’s a good thing. The PSN original is great fun, and it translates well to the PSP. Every game mode is a variant of capture the flag, but that’s what you get when you change the flag into a princess and then name your game after it. Since your flag gets bigger when you feed it there are more ways to work as a team than in your run-of-the-mill capture the flag game. Offense doesn’t just involve killing the opposing team’s offense but getting rid of their cake-carriers, and defense has the addition of finding cake and feeding it to your princess. In some game modes you’ll also need to fatten up your own princess once she’s on the throne to keep the enemy from kidnapping her and taking her back to their jail.

So as an owner of the PSN version of Fat Princess, why should you buy Fistful of Cake? First, you can play it on the go which is always nice. If you’re without Internet then you can play a skirmish with CPU allies and enemies, and if you do have Internet access then finding a game is as simple as selecting “quick match” from the menu. There are also new maps, a new Grim Reaper game mode, and a much-expanded single-player story mode. This makes a lot of sense. It’s understood that if you’re buying DD games from PSN that you’ve got access to the Internet, but Fistful of Cake is available via UMD and PSP users aren’t always sitting near anopen wifi hotspot. In the single-player story you might find yourself cursing your AI teammates. At first this feels like a slight against the AI programming, but once you’ve played online it becomes clear that teamwork is always hard to orchestrate properly. That’s not to say that the AI couldn’t be better, but it prepares you for online play quite well.

What is Fistful of Cake missing? A couple of big things. There is no voice chat, and there’s no way to invite friends into your game. And puzzlingly, matches are still 8v8 but only 4 players can be human-controlled so even when playing online you’ll be dealing with the AI. For a game designed around multiplayer these are strange things to leave out.

Fistful of Cake is a faithful reproduction of the PSN original on the PSP. If you already own the PSN version then you know what you’re getting and why it’s a good time. For those of you with PSPs but no PS3s then Fistful of Cake is great fun. It’s violent, medieval TF2 for a scant $20 that you can play anywhere. There are online limitations, but they don’t detract from the fun of finding the Grim Reaper hat and wreaking havoc for a while.

Pros: Great multiplayer experience on the PSP, easy to find online games

Cons: Limit of 4 human players, no voice chat, can’t invite friends to a game

 

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3

May 23, 2010

PSP / Reviews / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Naruto has been turned into numerous video games, and the series is no stranger to being given the fighting game treatment. Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 is an exclusive to the PSP, and I don’t really understand why. The point of the fighting game isn’t to sit on the bus and play by yourself – it’s to have friends over and battle all night or go online and see how you fare against others with the game. The PSP does a lot of things very well, but multiplayer isn’t one of them. You either need to know another person with a PSP and a copy of your game of choice or a wireless access point and the good fortune to find an opponent online. Sadly, I don’t know anybody else with Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3, and I couldn’t find anybody to fight with online.

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 has you covered though. The single-player story is lengthy, and that’s great if you aren’t familiar with the Shippuden stories. If you are there isn’t any new content here. This bothers me for one reason, Naruto games are aimed squarely and Naruto fans, and if anybody is going to be familiar with the stories presented in the manga and anime it’s fans of the series.

Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 feels a lot like its predecessors. The fighting system is still criminally simple, and the graphics still convey the feeling of a living anime well. Hit circle to attack, and specials are executed by pressing triangle and then circle. There’s a balance to be struck when it comes to pulling off moves in a fighting game. You don’t need every move to be as difficult as the fatalities from Mortal Kombat nor do you want every move to be as simple to pull off as the standard light punch from Street Fighter 2. Unfortunately, Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3’s fighting system is that simple, and it hurts the game. There’s much less emphasis on deciding what you’d like to do and pulling it off well and more emphasis placed on mashing on the circle button until you win a la 1980s brawler arcade games. One new addition for Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 is four-player battles. More fighting games need four-player battles. The more friends I can get in a room who can participate in a game the better.

For the Naruto fans there are a ton of unlockables and characters to choose from. In order to get the unlockables you’ll need to collect Ninja Points by completing missions (single player fights). The things available for purchase include character art and movies – if you like Naruto then you’ll dig unlocking the various goodies. 

Unless you’re a die-hard Naruto fan and need your fix on the road then pass on Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 and pick up a copy of BlazBlue, Super Street Fighter IV, or Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom for one of the consoles. That way you’ll be playing a fighting game with a better combat system on a bigger screen against friends in your home or opponents online.

Plays Like: Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 2: The Phantom Fortress

Pros: Lots of extras for fans to unlock

Cons: Shallow fighting system, familiar story to fans of the anime

 

Armored Core: Last Raven Portable

May 23, 2010

PSP / Reviews / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

There is nothing wrong with difficult games. There is, however, something wrong with games whose difficulty is created by a poor control scheme, and that is exactly what Last Raven Portable is – difficult because you have to fight the anemic control scheme in addition to the enemy mechs.

Last Raven started its life as a PS2 game, and when it released it was released only for existing fans of the Armored Core series. Just as Nintendo cultivated a generation of platform gamers to be able to pull off ridiculous wall-kicks and long-jumps in Super Mario 64, From Software had cultivated a group of mech action players that demanded a difficult but fair campaign in Last Raven. And that’s what they got – Last Raven, when it released on the PS2, was punishing difficult, but every time you died you knew it was your fault for wasting ammo or taking a risk that you shouldn’t have. This encouraged players to refine their strategies and get better acquainted with the controls.

Unfortunately, Last Raven Portable is a photocopy-perfect port of the PS2 original. None of the enemies have been rebalanced, and none of the mechanics have been changed. Ordinarily this would be a good thing. Nobody wants to play a version of Duke Nukem 3D where all of the secrets have big neon arrows pointing them out, after all. In the course of a day, you’ll fight a war against the very corporations that you used to serve. And if you can keep your wits about you you’ll be the last Raven left alive when it’s all over. As with the mechanics, the story is a photocopy of the original game’s so if you enjoyed it the first time you’ll enjoy it again here.

Here, however, the perfect translation serves to frustrate the player as the PSP just doesn’t have enough input to competently play the game. Last Raven was designed with the DualShock 2 in mind, and it shows. There are airborne enemies to track, but you’re short an analog stick. And in Last Raven you can’t afford to be fumbling with buttons to rotate the view because the enemy has already spotted you and now you’re dead. Same outcome as before, but now you can completely blame the control scheme for your failure. If you’d had a second nub panning your view would be easy, and it would be in line with how the game was originally designed.

The Last Raven that you remember fondly is present on your PSP, but playing it is akin to strumming a guitar one-handed or driving a manual transmission car without a clutch. It’ll get you where you’re going, but nobody will be happy by the time you get there. Sometimes, games need to be changed when ported from one platform to another, and this is one of those times. 

Plays Like: Armored Core: Last Raven with a broken controller

Pros: Competent port of the PS2 original to portable hardware

Cons: Exceptionally difficult to control, hard for all the wrong reasons

 

What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord!? 2

May 9, 2010

PSP / Reviews / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord?! 2 (the sequel to last year’s Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman, What Did I Do to Deserve This?!) Just like the first time around you’ll be playing as the Lord of Destruction laboring to protect Badman from the swarms of heroes laying siege to his underground lairs because he’s a bad guy and they’re good guys, and it was decided long, long ago that good guys have to fight bad guys. This is where you come in – it turns out that Badman is a fairly inefficient villain and just about anybody can kill him. To keep him safe you’ll need to dig out a complex maze, raise a few monsters, feed those monsters to other monsters to create better monsters, and hope that you have a good enough monster economy going to defeat the aforementioned heroes.

My Lord 2 doesn’t look or sound like much, but don’t let the 8-bit veneer fool you. Under the rust, the 8-track player, and the antenna that local neighborhood kids snapped off lays a big, powerful V8 engine of deceptively complex gameplay mechanics and randomly generated playfields. Every experience in My Lord 2 is a unique one, and it never ceases to be entertaining to mine for nutrients and get an economy going well enough to finally beat those blasted do-gooders. In order to get you used to the mechanics My Lord 2 features a 12-part tutorial.

Aside from adding a few new monsters to the mix and changing the title of the game My Lord 2 feels an awful lot like Badman. This is fine in games without a random element, but Badman has random dungeon layouts just like My Lord 2 does so I’m not entirely certain why somebody who played and enjoyed the first installment would need the sequel, and I’m not certain why somebody interested in the series wouldn’t start with part 1, save some money, and just keep playing that. Unless Badman eventually proved to be too easy for you, you don’t really need to upgrade. For the three people out there that cleared out Badman and can play with their eyes closed, My Lord 2 is more difficult thanks to new monster types, new hero types, more levels, and an even steeper learning curve due to small additions like creature mutation and varied hero pathing. 

A warning for any who decide to pick up My Lord 2: be prepared to die. My Lord 2 is unforgiving and insists on teaching via failure. The first title did, too so this isn’t a surprise, but there’s very little hand-holding, and if you make a mistake you’ll be punished for it with a game over screen. NIS missed an opportunity here to make My Lord 2 the definitive Badman title by making it accessible without sacrificing the challenge. Instead, what we have a game that is less informative than its predecessor and more difficult. Pass unless you loved part 1 and desperately need more.

Pros: Challenging, highly replayable

Cons: Unforgiving, fairly inaccessible to new players

Plays Like: Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman, What Did I Do to Deserve This?!

 

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