Spectral Souls

Who's Who?
Switch to a different army and it's a whole different war.

Switch to a different army and it's a whole different war.

Each battle is linked together by a very cool non-linear scenario. The overarching story follows three warring armies, and all three are available to control most of the time. If you're tired of fighting with one group of characters, you can swap them out and build up another army's warriors. In the process, this might also reveal new map locations to explore along another army's thread of the story.

The flip side of the clever scenario design is a brain-bendingly complicated plot, and while it's great fun to customize the skills of all those characters, good luck keeping track of who plays what role in the story. It doesn't help that this is the sequel to a Japan-only release, and it really doesn't help when the loading makes the cutscenes flow in a jumpy staccato rhythm.

If the bewildering twists and turns of the story don't try your patience, the constant fits and starts of the data loading surely will. It manages to muck up the oddest parts of the game -- even the skill synthesis mode bogs down with repeated pauses between menu selections, as the drive strains to seek and load even simple item images.

Not Created Equal
Go ahead and take the high ground, but spells can still get through.

Go ahead and take the high ground, but spells can still get through.

Incredibly patient players might still manage to have some fun here. Cut out the load times and you would otherwise have a distinctive, well-made strategy-RPG. The only technical problem that doesn't tie in to the loading is a slightly overtaxed 3D engine (drops in the frame rate occasionally slow down battles, or make town exploration drag a little bit).

A saintly level of tolerance for technical ineptitude is not something developers ought to require of their audience, though, especially not on a portable. Portable games have to be fun in small doses. This game demands marathon sit-downs to make real progress (half of which consists of staring at "Disc Access" messages).

On another level, Spectral Souls points up the maddening gaps of logic in Sony's third-party approval scheme. Many PSP games have stayed in Japan for no reason other than they happened to be PlayStation ports. Technically, they may have been more or less together, but Sony deems too much recycled retro content an embarrassment to the image of its handheld.

Meanwhile, the same quality filters let this game through, a game which -- while nominally a PSP exclusive -- is a landmark in programming incompetence. Exclusive or not, it's a bigger embarrassment than any retro port could have been.

Spells work well alone, but you can also combine them with physical attacks.

Spells work well alone, but you can also combine them with physical attacks.

Comments [0]

post a comment

Post a Comment