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chuckro50 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.
This was the last game I actually purchased for PSP, and it’s been sitting on my shelf for years since I last started a play-through.
The story is generally quest-based; you pick up main and sub-quests at the Bracer Guild and go up ranks as you accomplish them. But watch out, because many quests are missable: Once you leave an area at the end of a chapter you can’t go back, and many of the quests will “time out” even sooner than that. You need to do things as soon as you spot them, basically. Oh, and some quests aren’t on the guild board, they’re actually secrets you need to go find by wandering into the right area or talking to the right person. (I don’t think there’s a prize for a perfect guild score, but you get items for going up guild ranks, and missing any quest slows that down.)
The system is a semi-tactical layout, kind of similar to Grandia, in that you need to move close to enemies to hit them with melee attacks and your magic has set areas it can hit. Upgrading characters follows several axis, as you gain traditional levels; but you also have your Orbment which functions like Materia, affecting your stats and providing Arts; and you can use Crafts with CP accumulated by attacking in battle. You need to collect the eight colors of Septim to both craft Quartz (Materia) and to upgrade your Orbment to equip more of it.
Each chapter (there are five) takes place in a different area, and could almost be a separate game in an ongoing series: You can never go back, you get a different set of support characters, and through there are plot threads that run between chapters, each chapter is a story with a beginning, middle and end. I give them credit in that pretty much every mystery they establish does get resolved in the end; even the things that are clearly leading into the sequel still tell you what was going on. If you finish the game, despite the fact that the story continues in the sequels, you get a full story that resolves everything it sets up. I heartily approve of that.
The anime-style “everyone picks on the girl for being a tomboy and a lousy cook” thing grates on me, right from the get-go. Honestly, this hits a lot of anime tropes particularly hard (from the “like brother and sister” turning into romance to the hot springs episode to fantasy metaphors for nuclear bombs) and it doesn’t win me.
It’s a very “talky” game, but not necessarily in a good way. Some of the conversations advance character growth or establish information...but a lot of them are just endless repetition and filler. “Oh, hey, where’s your mother?” “Oh, she’s right here,” (Mother walks in.) “Oh, hi everyone!” That adds absolutely nothing and serves only to waste time; and they do it constantly. In the last chapter, you participate in a fighting tournament (because of course you do) and they make you watch several of the other battles! In theory this is letting you see what kind of moves the opponents use, but in practice, you’re watching the CPU boringly attack itself for several minutes. The fact that the tactical nature of the random battles makes them take a long time (even for really easy ones) and you have to spend a lot of time just walking back and forth across the map for sidequests makes the “filler” problem even worse.
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.
This was the last game I actually purchased for PSP, and it’s been sitting on my shelf for years since I last started a play-through.
The story is generally quest-based; you pick up main and sub-quests at the Bracer Guild and go up ranks as you accomplish them. But watch out, because many quests are missable: Once you leave an area at the end of a chapter you can’t go back, and many of the quests will “time out” even sooner than that. You need to do things as soon as you spot them, basically. Oh, and some quests aren’t on the guild board, they’re actually secrets you need to go find by wandering into the right area or talking to the right person. (I don’t think there’s a prize for a perfect guild score, but you get items for going up guild ranks, and missing any quest slows that down.)
The system is a semi-tactical layout, kind of similar to Grandia, in that you need to move close to enemies to hit them with melee attacks and your magic has set areas it can hit. Upgrading characters follows several axis, as you gain traditional levels; but you also have your Orbment which functions like Materia, affecting your stats and providing Arts; and you can use Crafts with CP accumulated by attacking in battle. You need to collect the eight colors of Septim to both craft Quartz (Materia) and to upgrade your Orbment to equip more of it.
Each chapter (there are five) takes place in a different area, and could almost be a separate game in an ongoing series: You can never go back, you get a different set of support characters, and through there are plot threads that run between chapters, each chapter is a story with a beginning, middle and end. I give them credit in that pretty much every mystery they establish does get resolved in the end; even the things that are clearly leading into the sequel still tell you what was going on. If you finish the game, despite the fact that the story continues in the sequels, you get a full story that resolves everything it sets up. I heartily approve of that.
The anime-style “everyone picks on the girl for being a tomboy and a lousy cook” thing grates on me, right from the get-go. Honestly, this hits a lot of anime tropes particularly hard (from the “like brother and sister” turning into romance to the hot springs episode to fantasy metaphors for nuclear bombs) and it doesn’t win me.
It’s a very “talky” game, but not necessarily in a good way. Some of the conversations advance character growth or establish information...but a lot of them are just endless repetition and filler. “Oh, hey, where’s your mother?” “Oh, she’s right here,” (Mother walks in.) “Oh, hi everyone!” That adds absolutely nothing and serves only to waste time; and they do it constantly. In the last chapter, you participate in a fighting tournament (because of course you do) and they make you watch several of the other battles! In theory this is letting you see what kind of moves the opponents use, but in practice, you’re watching the CPU boringly attack itself for several minutes. The fact that the tactical nature of the random battles makes them take a long time (even for really easy ones) and you have to spend a lot of time just walking back and forth across the map for sidequests makes the “filler” problem even worse.
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.
