When this was announced earlier this year, it was kinda overshadowed by the announcement of the upcoming ZHP game by NIS, since both games were announced at the same time and the trailer for ZHP was just so much more awesome. But it still looked fairly interesting, with its semi-8-bit/16-bit graphics and 8-bit music.

The game was called Classic Dungeon in japan, which I think is a better name… At least the title tells you it’s an RPG.

So let’s go right away and see if NIS has made another masterpiece!

Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher: NIS America
Date of Release: September 21st 2010
Platforms: PSP

Genre: Action-RPG
Rated E10+ for Everyone over 10 years old

Presentation

The character sprites are pretty much 8-bit-looking. What’s interesting here is that you can actually edit your character sprites, pixel-by-pixel… for their heads at least. It can be pretty fun to play around with that, though I’m not much of an artist so I just went with pre-made faces. The 8-bit-like sprites have a cool cartoony style, but with no black lines surrounding the sprites which gives a unique style. The rest of the graphics are very much 16-bit style. The environments are a bit repetitive, but the enemy sprites look very nice and detailed. There’s a good amount of color swapped enemies though, you quickly realize that there’s not a HUGE amount of enemy types, and their color generally just shows what element they are. The game still looks nice, but a bit more variety would have been nice.

On the music side of things, there’s something for everyone here. If you’re a retro gamer, you can choose to have 8-bit music which sounds very nice, but, if you prefer real instruments, you can have that as well. The real instrument music is sort of lame though, just doesn’t have the energy of the 8-bit version and the composition is slower. The sound effects are classic too. There’s no voice acting but it’s not really needed in a game like this.

There’s not much story-wise. You meet various characters with different personalities, all going to this weird world for their own reasons, may it be treasure, or just to find friends. After going through certain dungeons, you get small cutscenes with some character interaction, but it’s still very barebones story-wise.

Gameplay

Fighting/Dungeon Crawling
The fighting is fairly simple. X does a basic attack. 3 times in a row does combo attacks. Pressing square makes you hold up your shield which increases your defense (depending on what shield you have equipped). Holding R lets you run, which obviously makes you go faster, but also halves your defense (and you can slide if you press square while running, which can be useful at times). Circle lets you jump, and you jump further if you’re running. Triangle does nothing at first, but, as you level up, you learn abilities, which you can use by pressing triangle button, if you have the proper weapon equipped.

Each enemy type has its own attacks and patterns, and strategies to kill them. There’s not that many enemy types so figuring them out isn’t that complicated. If you get hit by certain types of fire or ice attacks, it gives that element to your attacks. Enemies can absorb attacks from their element, or at least be invincible to them. Being hit by fire hurts you over-time until the effect somehow stops or if you touch water. Being hit by ice makes you slide on the floor.

Spread across the floor of each dungeon are traps. Some shoot arrows at you for damage (hitting enemies on the way). Other shoot gas which can put you to sleep or temporarily poison you. Some can instantly explode. Others shoot magic that can heal you (and it’s one of the very few ways to get healing). There’s also one that can make you move faster, which is useful. Other than traps, there’s various things on the floor, like grass, or oil, or ice, which hinders your movement.

The point of every dungeon is just to get to the end. There are certain puzzles in each dungeon, which usually involve opening certain treasure chests or killing certain monsters, which will open the way to the exit. It’s very straightforward, though it might be a bit too repetitive for some people.

There’s a second type of dungeon in the game. Other than the “story” dungeons, which aren’t randomly generated, you can visit randomly generated dungeons, which work a bit differently from the story dungeons. The goal here is still to get to the exit, but here the exits are gates, which bring you to the next level. When you go through a gate, the item drop rate changes, as does the rate of rare items, and the monster levels. Depending of the gate you exit the floor through, the effects are different. Angel gates minimize monster level increase but the item and rare drop rates increase more. Hell and Devil gates increase the monster level a bit more, but decrease drop and rare item rates. Gamble gates are just that, a gamble. And each of those have chances of having completely different effects than expected, like Hell gates giving huge item drop rate increases. Random dungeons are a great way to level grind, or to find good loot.

Leveling
The game might seem a bit actiony, but it’s actually fairly RPG-ish. Rather than having a party system, you have the Magic Circle system. So instead of going around with multiple characters through the dungeon, you control only one, but attacks hit people in the magic circle instead of your character, only hurting your characters when all the characters in the magic circle (called sub-characters) are dead. So how does the magic circle work? Well, you get various versions of the magic circle as you advance through the game, which enable you to “equip” different numbers of characters. Each spot in the magic circle can also has special effects. Some give more XP, some double the amount of mana a character has (will explain mana later), some increase stat gain for different stats, and some of them have different slots for equipping artifacts (each enabling for different kinds of artifacts).

Mana comes in play when you start equipping artifacts. Each artifact has a mana cost when you put it in a slot. Artifacts can raise the sub-characters’ HP, or various of the main characters’ stats, like attack, defense, HP and a few more. While each type of slot is limited to certain types of artifacts, you can equip mana-increasing artifacts to any slot, boosting your stat-increase potential.

As for leveling itself, the “main” character and all the currently “equipped” sub-characters all gain experience points as you kill monsters in the dungeons. When you die or leave a dungeon (dying penalizes you by removing half of the money and experience you gained in the dungeon), you get said experience. Get enough EXP and you level up, which increases some stats. That might seem simple, but there’s some weird things involved here. As your characters level, they get different stats if they’re the main character than if they’re the sub-characters. Main characters mostly get HP and mana, as well as minor boost of other stats, and sub-characters mostly get attack and defense with minor boosts of the other stats. So properly leveling a character is pretty complicated. Actually, the right way to go is to put your PLANNED main character as a sub-character to get his attack and defense up, and putting the characters you want as subs as mains for a while to get enough HP… if you have the time to waste to do that, it can be pretty fun to build the ultimate party.

Other than that, you can buy equipment or find it in the dungeons to boost your power. Equipment comes in multiple varieties. Other than just normal items, each item you find will have a grade. Crap means they’re no good, Normal is that item’s base stats, Wall gives you a minor defense boost, Rise is just overall stronger, and there’s various others. Finding the best equipment is the best thing to do to get strong, in addition to strong artifacts and optimal leveling.

Overall

Cladun is a very fun game. The fighting is simple but fun, especially when you try figuring out the best way to kill each enemy type. The leveling has a huge amount of depth. And there’s some things I haven’t mentioned here, like different character classes and various other stuff.

It’s slightly repetitive, and the story isn’t much to write home about, but it’s very fun. If you’re looking for a fun RPG with unique leveling systems, with a lot of value and gameplay time, Cladun is fairly interesting.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Fun fighting
- Deep leveling
- Fun presentation

Cons
- Hum… not much really…. Let’s say that it can get a bit repetitive

The Save Factor

The game costs 20$ on the PSN, and, for the amount of gameplay you can get from this, I feel like the price is fine. But, since it’s a download-only game, maybe something like 15$ would be a bit more appropriate.

Share/Save

I was interested in the game partly because of the Disgaea crossovers, but also because the gameplay seemed fairly solid. So I had some fairly good expectations for this.

Read on!

Developer: Idea Factory/Gust
Publisher: NIS America
Date of Release: June 29th 2010
Platforms: Playstation 3

Genre: Turn-based RPG/Dungeon Crawler
Rated T for Teen (surprisingly lots of swearing here)

Presentation
The graphics aren’t too great technically. The character models are just a bit above PS2 quality, they really don’t look great. You do get used to their looks, and graphics are never that important in a game anyways, but they’re sort of flat (not just talking about Etna here) and lack detail. Everyone is sort of plastic-y which is weird. They look more like subpar action figures than characters in a video game. This doesn’t exploit the PS3′s power whatsoever. Though the style is nice, the lack of actual quality in the graphics is a bit lame. And the levels are really repetitive. Other than differently placed rooms and corridors, every Pirate Ship will looks the same, every level of the Yoma King Castle looks the same, every library looks the same, etc. This is really like any other dungeon crawler in that aspect. One thing that is good about the graphics is the big sprites used in conversations, those are very nice looking. But there is one funny element about them. They kept advertising the fact that the big sprites move during those dialogue scenes, like their hair moving in the wind a little bit, or them breathing, and moving their mouths while talking… Why were they trying to make this into a selling point of the game? It’s really not very different than the usual non-moving sprites, and they still just fade-out/fade-in from one pose to another instead of fluidly moving from one pose to another (now that would have been pretty cool). It’s a fun little addition, but it doesn’t add anything to the game.

On the sound-side of thing, the voice work is pretty good, in both languages. In english, not all the dialogues are voiced which sorta sucks, and the translation is a bit different from the japanese version (I at least know enough japanese to see that). While most of the sentences keep the same general meaning as in the japanese version, the translations are often modified to add more comedy (sometimes good, sometimes bad) or pop culture/gaming references (as per NIS America tradition), like an “Over 9000″ joke and other stuff (I did find a Star Ocean 3 reference in there, for example). The rest of the sounds are okay. Some of them are recycled from previous Idea Factory/Gust games, but they’re not bad. The music is… incredibly joyful, almost too much so. While the music isn’t that memorable, it will get stuck in your head because of how happy it is… But you have to get used to that kinda lame j-pop song in the opening, because you’ll be hearing it a LOT in the game, as it plays in the galaxy menu, which you spend a lot of time in.

Story
The game has 2 stories to choose from (basically you choose which group of characters you want to use), though they both take place at the same time, and share multiple events. When you chose one group, the other group will be recurring rival characters through the game. But each of the 2 groups have a different story, despite both stories coming together at the end.

Kanata, the Demon God King, escaped from a ritual that would transform him into the Demon God Gem, which would protect all of the NetherUniverse. Since he leaves during the ceremony, this turns him into the Demon Dog King. Now that he’s free from his duties, he decides to go on adventures on objects floating around the NetherUniverse, and prevent the objects from crashing into the town. Protecting the world his own way, instead of sacrificing his life to do it. He befriends multiple people during his adventures, and clashes with the Valkyrie during that time.

Rizelea is the Valkyrie fighting Kanata through his story. Her story involves trying to get Kanata to become the Demon God Gem, but also finding out why objects are drifting around the NetherUniverse. There’ not much more I can say about her story, but it’s quite interesting, and a completely different view of the events than on Kanata’s story.

Of course, this has various different endings, and there’s a true ending which requires doing various things through your playthrough. I have yet to get the true ending, but the fact that there’s multiple endings does add some replay value, and a full playthrough isn’t that long (especially if you skip dialogues). Overall, the game has a pretty interesting story. The writing isn’t incredible at times, but it’s still pretty enjoyable to go through. Though I guess the big draw is that it features Disgaea and Atelier characters in both stories, and some of them play sort of important parts in the story.

Gameplay
Game flow
The game flow is pretty simple. You go through events, which are generally just dialog, though sometimes they have some battles in them. Some events make dungeons come close to you so you can enter them. The dungeons are basically series of corridors and rooms (NOT randomly generated), with items laying around on the floor and in chests. You can press Square to search the area, which shows you colored lines you can follow: Red lines lead to hunting spots, yellow lines lead to hidden treasures, white lines lead to gravity cores (only in optional dungeons though, event dungeons don’t get a white line) and blue lines bring to Managraphic blueprint thingies. At the end of Event dungeons, which make the story progress, you will usually find a boss battle, and some dialogue. Some dungeons have “Lurkers”, which are really strong enemies that have rare drops. When you’re close to fighting them, a black mist appears on the screen, and if you wait too long to exit the dungeon, you get attacked. And those guys are STRONG. One thing I found about them is that, if you die against them, you don’t get a game over.

Other than event dungeons, other (optional) dungeons randomly come close to you that you can visit as well, for different types of items and more Lurkers. Destroying those dungeons’ gravity cores will make them leave the area, drifting them away into space (unless you anchor them using an Anchor item). One element about destroying gravity cores, which is also in some of the event dungeons, is that you have a time limit to leave the dungeon after destroying them, but, during that time, rare items start appearing in the dungeon, so you can try picking some of those up before leaving the dungeon. If you fail to leave a dungeon within the time limit, you’ll be stuck in it, and have to hitch a ride back home. That actually never happened to me, so I’m not too sure of the details for this. All I know is that it’s not free, so drifting away with the dungeon isn’t the greatest idea.

Fighting
The fighting system is relatively simple. Each character has a base AP which can be upgraded with equipment. Unless you get surprised by the enemy, you get a turn first, and then the enemy attacks when all your characters moved. You can skip your characters’ turn with R2, which gives extra AP when you get to your next turn (your AP increases by your base AP every turn, and can go up to 3 times the base amount… or 250, it seems it can’t go higher than that), enabling for major damage if you wait a bit.

When it’s one of your characters’ turn, there are a few things you can do. Pressing X does a mighty blow attack which does one strong hit, Square does a Rush attack which hits 3 times but not as strong, and Triangle does a magic attack that hits all the enemies. Pressing Circle does your first equipped ability, and holding Circle charges up the ability bar, which enables you to reach higher-level abilities if you have some equipped (Escaping battle, by the way, is an ability that has to be equipped… in addition, there’s things like buffs and healing). Each of those action uses AP, and you can continue attacking as long as you have AP. AP also goes down overtime as soon as you press a button. When you have no more AP left, it’s the next character’s turn. Doing certain button combinations in your attack can lead to special attacks, which don’t cost any AP, so they’re crucial to getting high numbers of hits. In addition to those special attacks, you have a special meter that fills up around the AP counter, which fills up in the form of gems. When you have 2 gems (it increases when you do special combination attacks, or kill enemies), you can press R3, which enables you to either heal the character by holding Circle, or to use a powerful super attack if you press Square (deals nearly 100 hits, and a fair amount of damage).

One special feature is the Fury Chain. This is activated by pressing R1 while you’re attacking (works during the last attack animation if you have no AP left, otherwise it works anytime you have AP left). When you press R1, some icons will appear. They will represent the other characters in your party, and stars for the remaining spaces. Each icon is assigned to one of the face buttons. Pressing the face button associated to a star gives random boosts, like Gold dropped by enemies, or drops, or boosts to the metter for super attacks. Pressing the icon represented by a character makes that character get his turn, as well as giving a randomly-selected stat boost. So using Fury Chains can be really useful for some of the tougher battles, and is needed to reach high numbers of hits and damage. Oh, and, if you deal enough hits before initiating the fury chain, there’s gonna be a green area in the fury chain meter, and if you switch character in that green area, you enter a combo attack with multiple characters.

It’s a fun battle system, though it eventually gets quite easy even if you don’t grind much.

Leveling
The leveling system here is really simple. Kill enemies, get experience, level up. That gives various stat boosts, and occasionally some passive skills and extra button sequences for special attacks. Leveling here is really fast. If you’re in a dungeon that’s around your level, using EXP boosts from the Fury Chains, you’ll be able to level once every 2 battles or so. And bosses can give multiple level ups.

In addition to Levels you have a few ways of powering up. Equipment is the simplest way. You have 4 types of equipment: Weapons, Kotodamas, Codes and Spaces. Each upgrades certain types of stats. While you’re limited in what you can buy in the store, this is where the dungeon crawling comes in play. While exploring dungeons, you’ll find items. Those items are used as materials to synthesize stuff i the store. You can make any of the 3 kinds of “armor”, weapons, and usable items. In addition to normal equipment, you get access to Meteorites, which are used to boost your stats further. Each character has his own Meteorite settings. You can place one “planet” which gives the biggest boost, and then you have 3 rings which have multiple slots for meteorites. The further they are from the central planet, the lower their stat boost. Just like synthesizing items, you can make meteorites using materials, as well as extra slots for meteorites on the rings.

There’s also Managraphics… All of them give the same stat boost, from what I’ve seen. You can have up to 2 of them equipped at once, each giving the stat boost. All that really changes is which types of Mana you get when you win a battle. There’s also some enemies that are strong or weak against certain managraphics, but it’s rather rare.

A last type of shop is the coliseum, in which you can use materials to make monsters, which are generally stronger than normal enemies. Fighting them gives you a reqard, which is either a bunch of stat-raising potions, or some materials. This can be useful for leveling, though the enemies quickly become really easy… but the stat boosting potions can really help.

The bad stuff
Well, the worst thing about this game is that it’s very prone to freezing. My game froze 4 times, each time after tough bosses or in the “chapter end” screen. That is… terribly annoying. Each time I lost a little bit of gameplay, even if I made it a habit to save often after the first time it froze. And I know this is a wide-spread problem, it’s not just me that was unlucky on this. Games should be at least tested a little before finally being released, this is unnacceptable.

After finishing the game, you get a new game+ option. That’s fine, I love going back through a game with all my strong items and levels. But here, you get something called the Convert Shop when you start a NG+. This enables you to trade in items for points, and you can use those points to buy any item in the game. Including the best equipment. There might be some items that cannot be bought there (some DLC-exclusive items maybe), but for the most part, you can get anything there. That’s all fine too… or it would be if it wasn’t so damn easy to abuse. Basically, there’s multiple ways to exploit the convert shops, making it easy to get any equipment you want. If you manage to get 6000 points in the convert shop, you can generate infinite amounts of points by buying certain items in the convert shop, selling them in the normal shop, and buying certain items in the normal shop with the gained money, and converting them for even more points in the convert shop (basically, 6000 points become 18000 points in the method I used). That kinda makes the second playthrough really easy (starting at chapter 8 that is, when the required item becomes available in the normal store). The convert shop makes any need to search for items in the dungeons completely useless. Sure, you can hunt for items anyways, but what’s the point when you have such an easy way to get the same things? The convert shop isn’t exactly a “bad” thing, but it kinda cheapens the game. Oh, and you can even get the stat boosting potions, and they’re stupidly cheap. You can essentially get a 4950 stat boost for only 198 points.

Overall
Trinity Universe is a fun game. The dungeon crawling aspect is fairly well done, if not rendered completely useless by the Convert Shop. It might not be too great graphically (even if the style is quite good), but the gameplay is quite fun, and, other than finding certain materials (which isn’t really needed because of the Convert Shop), it’s not as grind-y as you’d expect. Even if the max level is well above 500, you can still level up relatively fast if you fight enemies in the proper places.

Really, the only gripes I have with the game is that it freezes a lot, and that the convert shop makes it way too easy.

Still, the gameplay is fun, if not a little bit repetitive (but, then again, what game isn’t at least a little repetitive, especially in the RPG genre?), the story and characters are entertaining and it’s overall fun to play.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Fun battle system
- Leveling is fast and fun
- Funny dialogue
- Dungeon crawling/looking for materials is interesting before you get the Convert shop

Cons
- On a second playthrough, the convert shop is so easy to exploit that it makes the whole game a cakewalk
- The game freezes up rather frequently
- Graphics are sub-par

The Save Factor
The game has a starting price of 50$. I feel that it deserves a Save Factor of around 35$. It’s entertaining, but the production value is rather low (low-quality graphics, bad testing leading to freezing game) so it might not be worth buying full price for everyone. I still feel I got good value for my money at full price, but other people might not think so.

Share/Save

This is a game that was supposed to come out last year. Just before release, it was suddenly delayed, and at the same time they announced that the game’s genre would change from an Action RPG to a traditional turn-based RPG. I’m not sure of the reason behind this choice, but after that I thought the game would never come. It did end up coming though.

So was it worth the wait, or should it have just been cancelled?

Read on!

Developer: Hit Maker, Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher: NIS America
Date of Release: October 13, 2009
Platforms: DS

Genre: RPG
Players: 1

Looks and sounds
The graphics are anime-inspired. The characters are relatively well designed, though there’s not that many of them. On the map, you only see chibi versions of them, which look just like the non-chibi version which is good. The rest of the time you’ll see portraits of their faces both in combat and in conversations. The levels look really nice, with some parts looking like nice paintings. They all look good and they represent the worlds you are in very well. The enemy design is okay, but there’s nothing really unique about them. And there’s quite a few color swaps as well. Overall the game looks good, no complaint on that end.

Sound-wise, there’s not much to say. There’s cliche attack sounds, and okay sound effects for magic. The music though is pretty nice. Each world has a distinct music style, which represents each area really well and it sounds really nice most of the time. Nothing more to say here.

Story
You play as Lidell, a Witch in training. She hears about a special book that can give immense magical powers. That book is guarded by a powerful vampire. Lidell goes to the castle housing the book, passes by the vampire who is sleeping and takes the book. That releases an evil witch (the Eld Witch) who almost destroyed the world centuries ago, who was stopped by the current Queen, who used powerful sealing magic. Because of that, multiple parts of the worlds are getting attacked by the now released Eld Witch. So It’s Lidell’s job to go and save all the six princesses to get magical stones to be able to seal the Eld Witch once again.

The story is pretty simplistic. Gather a bunch of items and beat the bad guy at the end. It’s standard fair. There’s a bit of humor here added to that. Lidell is wise-cracking, and the rest of the character pretty much all lack any kind of personality.

It’s enjoyable enough, but nothing memorable.

Gameplay
I have one major problem with the whole gameplay: It’s completely touch-screen controlled. Other than the “Ancient” spells, there’s nothing in the game that warrants making the whole thing fully touch-screen controlled. Everything, from navigating menus to walking around to choosing options in fights, it done using the touch screen. None of it should require it, and the touch screen should be an option. Well.. I think I’m done complaining about that. Now let’s move on to the game itself.

The goal is to go through each world in order and saving the princess in each of them. To do so, you must thoroughly explore each world, look for clues and find 3 items. When you find them all, you bring them to old lady Babayaga and she forges a key that opens a gate to the princess’ castle. All of the worlds are essentially big puzzles. Finding everything isn’t exactly easy. NPCs give various hints, or give you quests, which eventually lead to one of the 3 items required for the key. Sometimes the NPCs are a bit weird though, probably bad translation. One in particular said “Bring this flower to my girlfriend”. You assume he gave you the flower, so you go see the girlfriend, and nothing happens. It turns out you have to FIND the flower on the other side of the map and THEN bring it back to her and THEN go back to the guy for your reward. Other than randomly shuffling around the map, there was no way to know that.

In addition to that whole “detective” element, there’s combat. Which is just as simple as an RPG can get. In battle, which is random, you get up to 3 characters. You have to keep Lidell in the team at all times, and you can add 2 dolls to follow you into battle. Dolls are found in the different areas in the game, and each have different stats and magic abilities(on that note, each time you finish a world, you can go back in to find a crystal, which will open up and reveal a doll replica of that world’s princess… they have good stats usually (though they do get overpowered) but they cannot level up). There are only 4 stats: Attack, Magic, Physical defense and Magic defense. They’re all self-explanatory. For each of your characters you can give 1 order each turn: attack, use a spell, use an item, or escape. Lidell has special spells as well. They require 99 MP instead of the usual 8-12, but they deal massive damage to all enemies on screen. Heck, if you level up often enough, you could go through most of the game using only that and none of the enemies would ever give you any trouble. Those attacks are pretty much a one-hit kill against anything other than bosses, mini-bosses, and Death(which appears in certain treasure chests). The only thing here is that you have to draw a symbol on the touch screen to execute the attack. But it lets you retry as much as you want, it’s very lenient on accuracy and gives you TONS of time to do it, so you’ll never miss. When you’re done giving orders, it’s time for the turn to start. First, your characters attack, and then the enemies attack. Each enemy has a certain weakness, and certain resistances, so trying out different spells will enable you to make each battle a lot easier.

If you kill all the enemies, the battle ends, you get item drops and experience, and if you get enough experience Lidell and her dolls might level up. Each doll levels up independently, and all the dolls gain experience with each battle, though less if they’re not in battle. Leveling gives boosts to all stats, as well as HP, and MP when Lidell levels up. Speaking of this, there’s sort of an “MP pool”, so intead of each doll and Lidell having their own MP bar, there’s a collective MP bar, so don’t forget about that. Oh, and full healing when you level up.

One thing I found weird is the big focus on items. Most of the item drops are actually ingredients for items you can get in a store, and there’s a bunch of different items you can get there. But halfway through the game I realized I never even used an item once. They’re pretty useless, and if you need healing, you can either level up or have a doll use curative magic. And using items is weird too. To use an item in battle, you have to take it from your “trunk” and equip it. Then you can use it… It’s weird and confuses me >_>

Overall
It’s a pretty fun game, but it’s incredibly simplistic. I quite like the detective aspect of it, finding clues and solving mysteries before getting to boss fights. Sometimes it’s a bit tough to figure some things out, but that’s the fun of it. I also find that random battles are EITHER too frequent or not frequent enough. Sometimes you’ll play for five minutes without getting one battle, and other times you won’t be able to do a few steps without getting into a battle. It’s a bit weird.

It’s really easy too. If you get stuck trying to find items in a world, you’ll certainly get into a lot of fights and overlevel yourself. You’ll basically be grinding without realizing it. The normal fights are a breeze when you find the enemies’ weaknesses, and can be made even easier by using Ancient spells which will blast you through battles without trouble. That also ends up making the bosses super easy because you’ll be overleveled AND you have those super powerful spells that will take out half their HP.

I also don’t like that it’s fully touch screen controlled when it doesn’t need to be. Developers need to realize that touch screen control should be optional if the game isn’t actually built around it. If it would have let you control normally for all and only used the stylus for Ancient spells, I would have been fine with that.

Pros/Cons
Pros
- Fun and simple
- Okay story
- Looks good

Cons
- Very easy
- Sometimes too cryptic
- Fully touch screen controlled for no reason

The Save Factor
It has a starting price of 30$. The Save Factor on this one would be… 15$. Not bad, but not a must.

Share/Save

Read on and see what it’s all about. And don’t forget to check the Save Factor for the game!

Developer: Ride On
Publisher: NIS America
Date of Release: July 16 2009
Platform: Sony PSP (Playstation Store)

Genre: Arcade-style strategy game? I don’t know.
Players: 1

Looks and Sounds
Well, that image of the cover pretty much shows what the graphics are like. 8-bit style, but still really detailed so that everything still looks good when you’re super zoomed-out. That’s not that many character and monster designs, but the ones that are there have a very nostalgic feel to them. Monster designs are basic. Slimes, bugs, lizards, dragons, fairies, demons, skeletons and souls, and each of those has a bunch of color variations. Overall the game looks nice and detailed, despite using an 8-bit style(which I quite like).

The sound design is a bit basic. There’s some background music, it changes if Badman is captured, and each monster type has different sounds associated to attacking/eating/whatever else they do. There’s not THAT many sounds, but it doesn’t need that much either. It sounds good enough. Too many sounds or background musics might disrupt the games atmosphere. The “voice acting” is pretty much just gibberish(ala Banjo-Kazooie), so I can’t say it sounds bad or anything. The sound, overall, is good, but is nothing to write home about either.

Story
Overlord Badman wants to take over the world. I don’t know how it was going before you intervened, but now he needs your help. You’re the God of Destruction, and you need to help Badman get a nice monster army to take over the world. Simple premise.

It never goes really deep, and there’s really only 1 character: Badman. He talks to you between missions, making pop culture references and awkward jokes. The Humor isn’t too bad but not exactly up to par with other games NISA published (like the Disgaea series).

The story is not really an important aspect here.

Gameplay
Well, here’s the big important part. The gameplay here sounds incredibly simple on paper. You have a big grid. Most spots are walls. Some walls have nutrients, some walls have mana. You have to break walls to make a dungeon. Breaking walls with nutrients/mana creates monsters, and different ones depending on how many nutrients/mana it has. At a different time interval for each level, a hero(or multiple heroes) will come in to capture Badman, and your monster have to kill the hero. To dig, you just have to press Square. But you have a limited amount of “Dig Power”.

It may sound simple, but it’s far from that. First, you have no control on your monsters. Each unit in the game, including heroes, has a pattern. Monsters and heroes automatically move to follow that pattern. Then there’s nutrients. Most walls in the dungeon only have enough nutrients for slimes (AKA weaksauce). Slimes, though, are crucial for building your dungeon. They take nutrients from some walls, and transport said nutrients to other walls. This will enable you to get walls with more nutrients, so the ability to get better monsters(there’s 3 levels of nutrients, so 3 different types of monsters for each type of ressource). Mana works the same way. Making more powerful monsters will enhance your defense against heroes and make it harder for them to reach Badman. When they DO reach Badman, they tie him up and bring him back out of the dungeon.  You still have until they drag him out to beat the heroes, so them reaching Badman doesn’t equal an instant loss.

In addition to that, you have the previously mentionned Dig Power. This is crucial to keep count of, because how much you have at the end of a level partly determines how much you’ll have on the next level. And Dig Power is ALSO used to power up monsters. After each level, you have the opportunity to level up monsters. This won’t affect monsters that are currently in the dungeon, but it will affect any other monster of that type you will summon. Each monster has a number of “points” he needs filled up to get to the next level. Each “point” costs 100 Dig Power.

Each monster typpe has some kind of behavior, which is the basis of the whole game: The food chain. Basically, each monster eats something. Slimes and spirits “eat” nutrients. Omnoms eat slimes, Lilliths eat spirits, Lizardmen eat omnoms, Demons eat spirits and each other and dragons hate everything, kill everything, and eat everything. The way each monster acts with other monsters is crucial to making a proper dungeon, as you have to maintain a dungeon that self-sustains AND that doesn’t self-destruct on the way. Some monsters also reroduce. This is mostly done by letting them eat. They also lose health as time goes by, so letting them eat is very important. This whole element adds a lot of challenge to the game, and makes later levels require a good understanding of everything in the game.

Though this all seems complicated, and don’t get me wrong it IS, the game sports a pretty good tutorial to teach the basics, and a challenge mode to get a bit deeper on different “subjects” in the game, like slime control and hero manipulation. The challenges start out very easy, but after a few they can get quite hard. This adds variety and helps learning every little quirk in the game.

Overall
This game is really hard to play at first, and the difficulty is almost overwhelming. After learning the ins and outs of the system it becomes a lot more fun. This is an arcade-syle game, where, if you die, you have to start all over, and the “main goal” i to beat your past high score. So one playthrough isn’t gonna be very long, less than an hour. But GETTING to the last level is gonna be very long unless you can make a perfect dungeon on your first try.

Overall this is well worth buying if you want something different.

Pros/Cons
Pros
- Nice graphics
- Simple to learn but VERY hard to master gameplay
- Arcade-style “Beat the high score” gameplay
- Challenges add variety
- If it’s somehow too easy for you, there’s a hard mode
- Well made tutorial teaches the basics well enough

Cons
- Not very self-explanatory
- A lot of experimenting and trial and error required (not exactly a bad thing, but it can be annoying)
- Definitely not for everyone

The Save Factor
With a starting price of $20 on the Playstation Store, the Save Factor for Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is:

$15 (fun, but wait for a sale on it)

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