Required Firmware: 2.60.
Introduction
A young girl moves to a mining town to live with her grandfather and discovers friendly monsters. Yeah, ok. But it's not as bad as it sounds. Essentially this is an Action RPG, and a pretty good one at that.
She's got a massive drill!
Gameplay
So, this girl. Parin, her default name is. She controls rather well with either the D-pad or analogue nub. The controls are simple: X to whack stuff with your legendary drill, Circle to jump and Square to do some odd spinning guard thing. I haven't found an option to change these though, so if you don't like it you're stuck.There's not too much platform jumping to speak of, which is usually a relief, but the controls are easily responsive enough to cope with what there is.
Combat is a little flat at first, with just the basic thwack and homing jump attack, but combos can be bought from very early on, so you'll have some nice pretty lights to watch. The enemies are rarely difficult to deal with, especially with the correct items equipped, but the Bosses can drag on a little- your attacks often do little damage so it's a case of chipping away until one of you dies.
As is the standard, there's some basic puzzles to overcome every so often. These aren't taxing, but give a nice change of pace. There's five or six difficulty levels to unlock incase it's too easy for you. Each unlocks something that you can access from any save game. It's a good fifteen hours from start to finish too, so it's not small. Loading times are pretty good, reduced to near zero if you dump it to your Memory Stick.
Sights and Sounds
Visually, this game is rather attractive. The themed worlds are colourful and well decorated. Characters are well animated, although the side characters and enemy design is a bit bland. It reminds me of Blinx on the Xbox in that respect.
The background music fits each setting well. There's not much more I can say about it, it's your standard Japanese Game Music faire. Sound effects are inoffensive.
A nice surprise is that all the cuts scenes are voiced quite well, by an "all star" cast. I've never heard of any of them, but apparently Parin is voiced by someone who was in Psychnauts, so she gets bonus points for that I guess. Gurumin is quite funny in places too, though not up to Psychonauts' level.
Stuff that sucks
- The camera. It's OK most of the time, but sometimes it just has nowhere to go. I feel that a First-Person Look button might have solved this, but there isn't one.
- Character and Object draw distance is quite poor. You often can't see objects at the other end of a room. However, I guess this is a trade-off for a solid framerate.
Conclusion
So, what we have here is fairly run-of-the-mill Action Platforming RPG. Howvever, it's fun, speedy and not unchallenging. The game itself stays pretty much the same throughout, although new combos are unlockable at fairly even stages. There's lots of hidden stuff to find, too.
A worthwhile purchase.
A demo can be found in the Downloads section!
Score :
it for the missus or not, as there has been a big gap in her PSP gaming since Daxter, LocoRoco, Ratchet & Clank.