I'm about 15 hours in and the game isn't throwing enough new content to keep me interested in terms of gameplay side of things so here's my thoughts so far... the UI is clunky when combining skills that you find throughout the game, it's practically mandatory to do so in order to get the optimal build for the next mission unless you want to risk failing and losing all your progress in the mission and to keep using the few abilities that you are able to get from drops. There's no way to simply select the menu recipes you've unlocked to just consume the items for the recipe. It would've been much more straightforward if the enemies dropped the items you needed to progress directly instead of this poorly designed UI that you're expected to dredge through between missions (i.e. 1/3 of the game). I kinda feel like the armband ability is pretty unbalanced as it allows characters with this ability to just sweep the battlefield of enemies and accumulate tons of EXP so i end up trying to avoid using it to not leave the 5 or so other characters in the dust since they are needed to carry your armband wielding characters and to leave openings for chain kills. It's like the game wants to punish you indirectly for relying on these character's abilities too much. There's a variety of different character classes to mix and match in your party but you'll find that the characters you are able to use don't really change your strategy much since you'll end up using most of the ones you have available to you anyways since the number of characters you are able to use per mission increases, maybe later on there'll be more available characters so that this doesn't remain the case. There also isn't much incentive to take risks besides the turn limit which hasn't really become an issue as of yet, there has been one time so far where i was at risk of failing due to the turn limit but that could've been just because i wanted to clear the level of enemies first. If the game becomes more difficult later on i'd bump my score to a 6. As long as you keep your characters in formation there is little risk of one dying, the enemies will only focus down one of your characters if they are separated from the formation. Is the game fun? ehhh it's alright. It's engaging at the very least. the game must've been good for 2007 but i don't think it holds up in 2019. Is the story good? There were some interesting parallels between the first recurring antagonist and the protagonist but i am unsure if this is intentional and would be explored in more detail later, the main big bad guy seems to be the evil dark lord archetype that does evil for the sake of accumulating power except it's under the guise of a possessed child *evil yawn*. Other than that nothing exciting has happened so far, it's just been a power fantasy where the protagonist goes around slaughtering English soldiers and demons with minimal effort. her development as a character is yet to be seen as she hasn't seemed to learn anything beyond "English = bad guys" though there could be the potential for more interesting interactions as the protagonist is so driven to killing without mercy that she may end up slipping towards being a sort of "war lord" and end up killing the wrong people. The music is heavily recycled so that part of the experience is not worth mentioning. the graphics and character portraits are not bad especially for the psp.
Generally there are many nuisances to playing this game here are a few: -every time you pick up an inventory item the game pauses and displays a popup description that you can't skip until a second and a half whether or not you've picked up that same item before. -every time you choose to feed animals a cutscene is loaded that is unique to the animal type you are feeding, this is even a longer break in gameplay and requires you to wait around 5 seconds before you can get out of it. -The combat becomes super limiting in what you are able to do and certain enemies and bosses require you to perform very specific actions in order to deal damage to them and once you figure out their gimmick they become a breeze. The major nuisances: The dialogue would be better if it didn't exist at all and was more of an artistic representation where the environment indicates where to go and what to do rather than some red text that plainly states it. There are certain points in the story where what you're supposed to do is completely incoherent and the developers knew it or else they wouldn't add a "fortune teller" so you can pay for the red text that tells you what to do. One point in the game requires you to fire a rotating cannon at a wall to crate a hole but there aren't any distinctive marks for what wall this cannon should be fired at. the cannon doesn't appear to fire any sort of projectile out of it to indicate that it will affect the surface it is being targeted at so I assumed that some sort of cannon ball needed to be located but no, it's just bad game design. Then there's also another point in the game with the Orca and finding a "whirlpool" that leads to the dragon temple, the Orca tells you that "the whirlpool is somewhere in the ocean" so I ride around exploring the islands in the ocean and when I decide to actually look for this whirlpool instead I waste 20 minutes looking for it because the Orca couldn't be any more specific about how this "whirlpool" was to be accessed. What I was supposed to do was go back to shore and talk to someone on a cliff that triggers an event where you draw stars in the sky to create a spiral constellation and spin it to create the whirlpool in the ocean. The entire game and everything you do in it is linear and scripted but the game gives away the answers to puzzles straight from the beginning, the balance of how much information the player should be given to complete a task is very rarely intuitive and rewarding to follow through with, either the dialogue overextends information of what the player is to do or it tells you to do "step 4" but completely overlooks steps 1-3 which are seemingly unrelated to step 4. The redeemable qualities of this game are it's art style, the story, cutscenes ,and characters are well executed though don't explore out of the realm of cliche, the fishing minigame that requires me to inject steroids into my left thumb, and some of the objectives/side quests are genuinely intuitive and fun to complete but there's still a lot of missed opportunities to give the player an "Aha" moment. This game feels like it was meant for a younger audience at times when everything you need to do is plainly stated (sometimes even several times over) but that would be in contrast with some of the convolution that not even an adult could figure out where or how to progress without glancing over a walkthough which isn't desirable for any game.
