Feels like the PSP hasn’t been seeing enough use lately, so I decided to go ahead and finish up Mega Man Powered Up. I’ve really enjoyed the ‘new style’ campaign, but I got stuck on the dang obligatory uber cheap boss rush area toward the end.
After many long tries, I’ve finally finished the freaking thing. I’m tempted to try and complete all 100 stages of the challenge mode, or the old style mode, but frankly Mega Man is just too frustrating to be worth it.
LocoRoco has been on my play list for quite some time, but I had just never got around to it. The cute colors and simplistic gameplay drew me in as soon as I first heard of the title. Having recently found myself with a lot of down time, I finally gave it a shot. It’s certainly a heck of a lot of fun, if perhaps completely without any challenge.
Gameplay is little more than using the L and R keys to tilt the world left and right, causing the LocoRoco to roll across the level. There are a few enemies here and there to dodge or jump into, but by and large you’ll just be sliding around making your way to the exit. There are no real cliffs to fall off of and very few dangers large enough to actually cause a game over, nor are any of the puzzles difficult. The low difficulty actually makes the game quite relaxing to play.
Picture something like a web game you might seen done in Flash or Java and you’ll have a good idea of LocoRoco’s graphics. They’re not bad by any means, but they’re that sort of simplistic vector type commonly seen in small online games. Here it’s likely just a style choice. The audio had me laughing right from the title screen. Between the hilarious but cute fictional language all the songs are sung in. and the way the little LocoRocos all shout when you push O to reform, I was hooked.
Surprisingly, unlike so many PSP RPG titles, Brave Story doesn’t suck. The story is amusingly brief, the pacing is nice and at least there is a story to begin with. Basically, You’re a kid at a park with your girlfriend and dog. You’re playing the PSP, the girl is going on about being outside and not listening to her. You keep playing PSP. Eventually she takes the dog for a walk, but the dog comes back barking.
You follow the dog to find the girl out cold. Fast forward to a hospital, girl is in coma, no known cause can be found. Boy goes to rooftop, hears mysterious voice that tells him if he completes a journey as “the traveler”, he can have one wish granted. Big doors appear and through he goes to a place called “Vision”. You get the gist told to you by a guide of sorts, answer some questions to pick stats, and soon rescue this hyper cat-girl thing called a “kitkin” (har har) named Yuno who joins on the quest.
There’s a nifty battle system technique where the more you fight together, the more “union” dual-techniques you learn. Overall, Brave Story seems pretty good so far. Battles are fast, nothing too heady, and the story is passable. You can even use the original Japanese battle voices, but the cutscenes are still in English. Perhaps the best aspect though are the graphics. For being a PSP game, Brave Story looks beautiful.
I must admit the game’s rather drab dungeons tend to get a little repetitive after awhile, but the story and the characters are keeping me playing. Along the way we’ve met even more travelers, each with their own goals and methods. Amusing dialog helps keep things going too, like the option to select “I forgot I had one…” to the question “What is your wish?” Another good example is the option to say “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” to a dying man’s last words.
I’m a bit mixed on the BP mana/skill point system though. While it’s great that attacking restores BP, doing special attacks that consume BP also restores BP at the same time. With many basic BP attacks this simply means you can use it every time without worry. While some unity attacks have high BP cost, it still seems like more strategy could have been had if many BP attacks didn’t basically recharge themselves. It would have forced players to use normal attacks more often, at least.
