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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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