Phantasy Star Portable for PSP and other things!

After about 2 months without our PC's we should finally be getting them back in a couple of days! Wohoo!! Cant wait to get back into creating art!!

Quite a few things to catch up with once we get them back.

1) Cleanup my Female Face tutorial.
2) Prototype some male and female faces & then bodies for a top secret project!!
3) Finish off my Fran Bust.
4) Finish off my Civil War Vampire Chick.

I also decided to start writing a few things down about the games I finish from a developers point of view, I'm not sure if that will really be interesting for anyone but hey.

I recently finished off Phantasy Star Portable and it wasn't as bad as what I thought:

I'm a huge fan of the original series Phantasy star I, II, and III, I actually owe Phantasy Star for being probably one of the first rpg's I ever played, so I do have a soft spot for the series and its mythology.

In a sentence: The game started off like absolute crack, but then tapered off and dragged on a bit towards the end.

A bit of a longer description:

The intro cut scene is pretty cool, I thought the production value looked pretty damned good, much better than what I thought it was going to be!

Character creation was much much more in depth that I was expecting from a psp game, you can pick your race and gender from a handful of races - and get right into customising all kinds of things even the size and shape of your body, making fat and unheroic looking 'heroes' is definitely possible, which was kind of refreshing to be honest. You could also customise your face quite a lot and color pretty much everything, finally choosing some clothes before jumping into the game.

Your eased into pretty much how the entire game will play, within about the first 30 minutes, story is delivered via 3d rendered portraits and speech bubbles, with probably 90% or more of these done in voice which isn't too bad of a quality. Navigating around the world and to your missions and from planet to planet is as simple as choosing a destination from a menu and your there. Talking to npc's is a simple as hovering your cursor over the npc symbol and up pop the portraits ( some of these are awesome others are just okay ) and some speech bubbles with various responses.

It soon becomes clear that the game takes place in 2 distinct areas. The safe haven of your base town, and the mission dungeons. In the towns you can visit stores, talk to people etc though none of this is 3d, its all flat rendered image based, with glowing icons to click on, or menus to navigate from place to place.

Navigating to your mission place is where you finally get to see your character, this is where the bulk of your gameplay will take place. Its fully 3d, and you basically move around through set levels clearing them of monsters, finding key cards to get through locked doors in order to move deeper through the levels and usually end up with a boss fight of some sort before moving completing the missions and advancing the story.

You will encounter Story NPC's who will give you their 'partner cards' which can be used to call upon them to join your party before you head off on your story or free missions which is wear you can grind for better weapons, or level up your characters. You can have a maximum of 3 other characters who are AI controlled in your party aside from yourself. Of worthy note here is that when I filled up my party, and had 5 or 6 enemies on screen my framerate would often fall to 3 - 4 fps and be almost unplayable, so i generally played with 3. The AI used to control the other players in your team is generally okay but often i would go through a level without realising id left one of my players behind who got stuck behind some wall etc. I also thought that the designated healers healing was mediocre at best, often busting out the healing when there was absolutely no need for it, and not spamming it when the whole team was bleeding out.

The story was pretty simple to be honest, I wont spoil it too much but if your looking for some deep twisted plot you wont find it here - though there is definitely some mystery built up in the final cut scene of the game. As mentioned above most of the story is delivered via portraits and speech bubbles but there are a couple of ingame rendered machinima style cutscenes that take place through the game's story missions.

Combat and collecting / powering up weapons and armor is really where the addictive crack is. I think they really could expand on this, but not by adding more items, but by streamlining what is there already, as its a little overwhelming - particularly in all the stats and the naming.

You have a combat quick switch of 6 or 7 slots that you can fill up with different combinations of left and right hand weapons, of which there are single and double handed variants. For example you could be fighting with 2 1 handed swords and switch out to a 2 handed axe, or dash away and pull out a sniper rifle and inflict massive damage from a distance very quickly.

There are swords, daggers, axes, guns, bows, polearms and the token crazy things like super cannons, giant hammers that all feel quite different to use in combat. There is also little helper bots which can be setup to spam either offensive and defensive magic or both.

Actual input for combat is fairly simple, its essentially a button mash for a 3 - 4 hit combo with one very simple method overlayed on top that will make each hit in your combos do MUCH more damage.

While you can just mash x for a standard combo, if you want to inflict more damage, each weapon has a different 'timing' and it will take some playing around to get that timing right but when you do, a flash effect will appear before every swing and you'll do much more damage. essentially making for quicker kills. There is also special techniques for each weapon which you can equip and unleash when ever you want in your combo, these techniques also level up and get more powerful the more you use them, another addictive little element.

The actual controls for camera placement could be much better, its annoying to keep the camera at an angle that works well for combat, and you notice it especially when flying bosses are whizzing about overhead.

Enemy AI is fairly easy, with some brutal opponents showing up much later on. Most of the cannon fodder makes for grindy missions just to fight some of the bosses which are generally much cooler to fight. Giant Dragons, Demons and other beasts make for some brutal boss encounters, especially for the unprepared - if you've come to the fight with only swords and the creature has a tough hide, you've easily made the encounter last 5 - 10 times longer so its best to set yourself up with a library of weapons and different attack styles at your disposal.

The final boss fight is a huge jump up in difficulty compared with the rest of the game, so be prepared for it - I was wiped out in one hit the first time I jumped in unprepared and needed to level up a little before going back in and tackling the final boss again. I did think though that this was the best combat in the whole game - the final bosses attack sequences definitely kept my fingers rampaging, switching out my weapons from guns to melee, from offensive magic to defensive to protect myself and heal / buff my party and so on.

The ingame artwork is not that bad, but not that great either - there are some really cool character designs and some nice environments, but nothing that I thought was amazing. Particle effects are also pretty simple.

Overall I didn't mind the game, It didn't blow my mind though. The weapon and armor collecting and the levelling up of your super moves where definitely the saving grace and kept me playing through to the end where I was intrigued just a little by the story. If your an rpg freak like I am, you'll probably by the end be compelled to check out the sequel which carries on where this one ends.
It's a good bedtime game not too stressful just a casual dungeon grinder - an hour or 2 before bed will see you finish the game in a couple of weeks. I think i finished it in about 35 or so hours.

Overall I give the game a 6 out of 10 :)

I picked up the collectors edition of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together and am playing that at the moment, so will make a writeup about that once I get finished.