A must-have game for the PSP, 100+ hours of a great experience slashing and shooting down giant dragons and creatures!
Graphics
Purely amazing. Also the movie clip in the beggining is just so awsome I end up watching it every time I start this game. The in-game graphics are also extremely awsome, a whole lot of detail, I love the backgrounds, and its almost never pixely, this game's graphics are definitly up high in the chart of the PSP library. You can easily tell the difference between different armor, as well as small details on the monsters, as well as the enviornment. Sound
The soundtrack to the game is OK, nothing to special. But what makes it amazing is the noises of the different creatures and sounds of the envoirnment. You can tell if a monster is close or not by the noises it makes. It actually feels like a real forest when youre running through one in the game. With headphones this games noises are unmatched, this is what I found to be the biggest surprise for me.
Loading Times
Heres the biggest problem with the game. The loading times, to enter the village can take a while to load, not that long but its about 40-60 seconds I think, I dont know Im really estimating here, but it can be a little annoying. Also when you go to a different part of the map it can take 4-10 seconds to load, and is usually short, but can get a little annoying. However the load times are easy to overcome with the great content of the game.
Gameplay
I might as well start from the top. At first you create a character, boy or girl, with a lot of faces and hairstyles, and you can even pick the voice. However, the hairstyle in this game doesent really matter. When you put on armor for youre head your hair changes or sometimes even covered. However you can still see your hair color and eye style so thats all good, but my hair style of my character changing so much was a little dissapointment. There is a crapload of different weapons and armor in the game. The types of weapons are sword, great sword, lance, double sword, gun, and mace. By collecting materials you get from killing monsters or finding in the lvels you can forge new weapons or improve your other ones(which is the #1 thing youll be doing, improving your weapons). You can also forge and buy armor the same way. The variety is great. You move with the analog stick, you can hold are to run but it uses up youre stamina bar. CLick L to make the camera go back to your starting view, what I mean is it looks directly the way youre facing. Some poeple complain about the camera but its rarely ever a problem for me. Click triangle to draw your weapon, with it you usually cant run very fast, and for most weapons the are button becomes the guard move, or with the mace, it becomes your special spin attack. Click circle and triangle or both of them together to attack and you can continually click them with different weapons to stack up combo moves. However you can only just shoot with a gun. Hold L and click circle or square to scroll through your usable items, and then let go of L and click square while your weapons inst drawn to use the item. This feature is made so items can be a lil hard to get to, but its supposed to be that way, and works very great with the difficulty of the game. In order to heal yourself you have to get away from the monsters and make sure you have nough time for you to use the poition or herb, which usually takes about 4 seconds. It makes healing not be cheap like it can be in some games. You cant lock onto creatures and usually have to time your attacks (especially with mace and great sword) and the game feels hard and challenging this way with the battle system. I absolutely love how its been done. Yuu can also click X to roll in a direction but you use up a little bit of stamina. (However when youre stamina isn't in use it replenishes automaticly in several seconds). Most monsters in this game need timing and skill to fight, not just rushing in and mashing buttons. Ofocurse when youre weapons is super upgraded you can kill some weak creatures in one hit, but thats obvious once you get strong. But the way you have to fight most tough enemies is planned out very well. The number of items you can use to help you is extremely high as well. You can aslo combine some items to make other ones, but this isn't random and is pretty limited to what makes what. One more thing, if you use a gun you can make or buy a whole lot of different ammo for it, and thats a great feature. In the village you can buy and sell items and get weapons and armor. You can also have cats cook a meal for you to upgrade your stamina or vitality for the next stage, if you pick the right combo of food. Theres also a Kotoko farm where you can mine materials for crafting or improving weapons and armor, catch bugs, fish, get msuhrooms, plant plants, and a few other features. A must visit in between quests.
Overall
A great game. Something seems to be missing but I cant quite put my finger on it (other than online play). Maybe its that the quests you go on usually have certain creatures, and if there was a free exploring mode with random creatures and unlimited time that would be pretty kool. Non-the-less, this game has very few flaws, laod times are one, and sometimes you get knocked into another part of the level or kill a creature where you cant get items from it. But that doesent happen very often and is quite easy to avoid. A MUST BUY, GO GET IT NOW!