The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (PSP)

50 years ago, the Orbal Revolution turned the world into a magitek fantasy full of airships and wondrous devices. Five years ago, renowned Bracer Cassius Bright brought home a mysterious boy named Joshua and adopted him. Now, Estella Bright and her adoptive brother have become full-fledged Bracers in their own right and are learning the ropes of adventuring.

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Overall: I don’t think this was a bad game, but despite ostensibly being something I’d enjoy, it didn’t work for me. The dialogue isn’t bad, the plotting isn’t bad, the worldbuilding is fine, the characters have their moments, the system is too slow but it’s tolerable...this just all added up into a game that I didn’t really like. I’m not going to bother with the sequels.

The Playstation Portable: A Retrospective

I got a PSP in 2012, relatively late in its active lifespan, but I was dependent on my five-game rule before I would get one. (There need to be five games on the system, preferably exclusives, that I want to play before I’ll consider buying the system.) The first game I played on it was Dissidia Final Fantasy. I played 18 games for around 350 hours, though probably 75 hours of that was on emulator versions so I could use cheat codes. Also, 250 hours of that was in the first three years I owned the system.

The biggest time-sink was Final Fantasy IV Complete Collection, clocking in at 55 hours; though all of the Final Fantasy games (Dissidia, Dissidia 012, Crisis Core and War of the Lions) clocked in over 30 hours each. The Ys games (Ark, Oath and Seven) were shorter, but I also really enjoyed each of them. The Nippon Ichi offerings were the most disappointing of games I had been excited about, as they (Disgaea Infinite, Prinny and Z.H.P.) were all attempts at new genres that didn’t really work that well.

I had carved through all of those by the end of 2014, and spent the next two years on one-offs: Me and My Katamari was nice to have portable but was inferior to the PS3 version. Wild ARMS XF had some interesting concepts but also deep flaws. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together improved significantly over the SNES version but didn’t win me the way other tactical rpgs did. Shin Megami Tensai: Persona 3 Portable was good to play for the experience, but I felt no need to seek out other Persona games afterwards. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky dragged when I first tried it in 2015, and then sat on my shelf for five years until I decided to power through it to close out the list for this system.

I generally liked the system itself; the form-factor worked for me, though the spinning UMD occasionally felt odd when I was playing. The Vita solved that problem by getting rid of physical media, but the Vita also had exactly one game I was particularly excited about (Ys Celceta) which eventually came out on Steam. So I never bought one.

Overall: I have yet to buy a portable system and not feel it was worth the money, and while this didn’t measure up to the Nintendo handhelds, I still got a lot of good use out of it and the suite of exclusive games was entirely worthwhile.