Valkyria Chronicles II Review

A lot of people screwed up in 2008 and missed Valkyria Chronicles. A delightful little strategy role-playing game, Valkyria Chronicles merged third-person shooters, anime cutscenes, and hardcore strategy gameplay into one watercolor PlayStation 3 package that many loved and a lot skipped. Now, the sequel is upon us and it's a PSP exclusive. Valkyria Chronicles II is a bit more light-hearted than the original and predictable in places, but it's an amazing game nonetheless.

If you missed the first game, Valkyria Chronicles II is self-contained enough so that you can jump right in without an issue and have a blast. If you loved the last title, you're in for more of the stuff you dug and a whole heaping batch of fan service.

Valkyria Chronicles II picks up two years after the first game. The duchess of Gallia has revealed herself to be a Darcsen -- a dark-haired race that's viewed to be less than equal by most -- and this has split the country. Some stand by her, while others have splintered off into a rebel squad that's caused a civil war. With the Gallian army stretched, the cadets at Lanseal Military Academy are charged with picking up the slack in between classes and training.

This is where you'll come in and get the tale from the eyes of Avan Hardins. A 17-year-old slacker, Avan's never really shown that much interest in military service, but when his brother is reportedly killed in a super-secret Lanseal operation, Avan jumps in and joins the fray. Whereas the first Valkyria Chronicles was very serious at times in its telling of war, racism, and so on, the sequel is way more lighthearted. There are definitely tender and serious moments, but when Avan comes aboard, he's dumped in Class G, the rejects and misfits dumping ground of Lanseal. No one believes in the class, they don't get along, and everyone's a mess.

If it sounds a bit hackneyed, it's probably because it is. The underdogs coming together to be the standouts because they work together is a story we've all heard before. On top of that, Avan's a goon for pretty much the whole game -- he's not a good student, he doesn't listen to important conversations and he's a bit hard to root for. Still, I enjoyed the story Valkyria Chronicles II tells -- and it's really up to you to see how much you want to be a part of it. After every mission, you're bumped back to this 3D painting of the school. From here you can buy new missions and orders from the Store or page through your stats in Avan's room, but yellow exclamation points on the map are the optional conversations you can pop into with the other characters in the game. Exploring these strengthens your relationships with the squad and unlocks new "potentials" -- combat techniques and bonuses -- in your teammates.

Occasionally, these meetings play out in anime cutscenes, but more often than not, they'll shakeout in still portraits and text boxes. For the big conversations, each line will be voiced, but for the most part, you get an introductory vocal and then you have to read what the character is saying. I wanted more. The voices are really good in Valkyria Chronicles II -- and the music is well done, too -- but they don't get used all that much. It's a shame. The watercolor art style of the Valkyria Chronicles universe is so striking, but it doesn't do that much as a still image behind lines of dialogue.

Anyway, making the most of the moves and techniques you awaken in characters is key to besting the battlefield in Valkyria Chronicles. If you missed the first game, you're in for a treat because the strategic/third-person system has been carried over and tweaked on the PSP. You'll take missions from the briefing room -- escorting an APC, capturing an enemy base, or eliminating all enemies -- pick your squad, and hop to a 2D map of the battlefield with icons for your troops and your visible opponents on it. You pick one of your troops (these troops include scouts, troopers, engineers, lancers and technicians) and the view warps to that of a third-person shooter. You can run your character around until you drain the movement meter, attack once whenever you want, and crouch behind sandbags for cover. Taking control of a character uses a command point, which you only have a limited amount of per turn.

Sounds easy, right? Not so much, but the idea is, and I was able to wrap my head around it. From there, things get complicated in the most awesome ways over time. While the beginning missions will be as easy as taking out other scouts, by the time you're knocking on the 40-hour mark (and you will if you plan on seeing the whole story), you have to worry about weather conditions, trenches, and taking out shield generators before you can strike the massive dudes that can kill you in three shots. Plus, there are orders to give, tanks to manage and so much more.

Gameplay is king in Valkyria Chronicles II, and that's one of the main reasons I love it -- despite minor flaws like not having an easy way to see how many command points are left after selecting a soldier and having a somewhat touchy "capture" area for flags. There's something so satisfying about molding a squad the way you want it and dispatching it to thwart rebels. After every successful mission, I'd earn experience points, resources and currency that I could then dump into new weapons, my characters, my tanks and even into creating these new coatings that enhance my squad. Once I found my preferred deployment -- shocktroopers and lancers -- I was able to pour resources into them and make them as powerful as possible. Each class has a level limit of 25, and I'd try not to ignore the classes I wasn't using, but it just felt so good to see my shocktroopers getting stronger and stronger on the battlefield.

This is one of the joys of Valkyria Chronicles -- watching your army develop. You and I could both play the game to completion and find that the units we were using to get the same job done were nothing alike (you can change Avan's class to whichever you want it to be). Plus, there's a branching class progression tree, so even if you were using troopers like me, it's possible that my elite trooper was nothing like your elite gunner -- even though they're both from the same "trooper" class.

Whew. Sorry if that's a bit much to wrap your head around in text-form. Basically, the system is really, really deep and opens up a wealth of gameplay possibilities for you.

Still, it's not perfect. There are periods where you'll just cruise through battles and dominate your opponent before slamming into a difficulty spike that has you trying the same mission over and over again. The good news is that while these stalls are no doubt frustrating, they were never impassible for me. In fact, I think the difficulty might have been dialed down a bit from the original. When I'd hit one of these missions that I just couldn't seem to get past, I'd go play a few of the optional missions I had passed up, level up some characters, and come back to the task at hand. Usually, this gave me the time to clear my head and tackle the issue.

If you do stall like me, there's plenty to do besides the mission that's bugging you. The missions are laid out by the months of Avan's school year. You'll need to complete a set number of "key" missions to unlock a "story" one that advances the month and the game's plot. However, each month also has a bunch of "free" missions that are just there for your experience points and personal pleasure. And then there are the missions you pick up from classmates in those conversations I was talking about. And then there are the missions you buy from the store. And then there's the fact that you're getting a letter grade on every mission you take, so there's always that prodding to go back, do better, and get more stuff.

The game's packed with content, but if you need more, Valkyria Chronicles II introduces multiplayer to the mix. Through the wonders of ad-hoc gameplay, you can team up with friends or bash their brains in. The co-op section is the standout in my opinion. Here, you can join up to three additional players and take on missions together. You all move at the same time on the map, so you'll need to communicate strategies and what exactly you're doing as you may not be in the same areas. You don't get as many command points as you're dealing with fewer troops, but working as a unit is an advantage all its own.

Aside from the fact that a 30-hour player can come in and clean house on the enemies a lower level player might be stuck on, you can use the two-player approach to distract a shield carrying enemy on one front so a friend can come in for a killing blow. You each get your own experience points and resources when the battle's over, so there's no reason not to pop in with a pal and grind out missions you may have already completed. It's fun to defend a base with a pal or revive a fallen friend.

On the versus side, things are still fun, but it's a bit more complicated. Again, you're bringing the army you've been using in your story, so mismatches are easy to come by. Yes, you can clip a handicap onto a more experienced squad, but it isn't all that clear and that neuter's the team the person's been playing with and still doesn't really even the playing field. In the end, it's pretty easy for the most experienced player to just decimate the noobs at the table. People who are both Valkyria nuts, however, will find better matches.

Closing Comments

Valkyria Chronicles II is awesome. It’s fun, it’s pretty, it’s rewarding, and it’s beyond deep. The story is a bit "by the numbers" and I could go for a few refinements on the battlefield, but I can’t complain. Valkyria Chronicles II has so much going for it that I’m going to be playing for months to come. 

 

Thanks to IGN For review

Ace Combat: Joint Assault Review Would be more fun with actual joints.

There is a stretch of time during which every adolescent male is obsessed with posters. I have vivid memories of being dropped off at the mall with my friends, where we would scour the two or three stores with the best selections. We argued endlessly about which comic book characters, rock stars and supermodels were worth putting on our bedroom walls, but we all agreed on two things. First, the Lamborghini Countach was f**cking awesome, and anyone who didn't have a poster of it was a total loser. Second, we all wanted to be military pilots. And we came to the conclusion that the easiest way to get started was to buy totally sweet posters of F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18s and stare at them while pretending to do our homework.

Videogames like Ace Combat: Joint Assault exist because that sort of jet craziness never really goes away. If you think airplanes are just big hunks of boring metal, you'll probably never change your mind. But if you think they're cool as hell, you always will. The problem is, it's tough to bring the excitement, complexity and drama of piloting military aircraft to the masses. Games that attempt to simulate the experience risk jettisoning the fun. Those that focus squarely on fun often lose the sense of realism that makes these planes interesting in the first place.

The Ace Combat series has always been more about exciting, accessible and sometimes over-the-top aerial action than strict realism, although the latest installment, Ace Combat: Joint Assault, tries to paint a coat of authenticity over its whimsy by using actual cities such as Tokyo, San Francisco and London as settings. It's a good idea in theory, but it doesn't add much to the typical Ace Combat experience. They serve mainly as backdrops and have no real ties to the individual missions. At one point I was assured London was burning, which, although tragic, sounded like a cool thing to see. Unfortunately, it just looked like a pile of brownish blocks that were not on fire.

"Real world" settings are one of the big selling points for Joint Assault, the follow-up to 2006's Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception. The others are an "enhanced combat" view that zooms in on your plane when you accelerate and a host of co-operative and competitive online multiplayer modes. For me, the latter is the only real reason to pick up Ace Combat: Joint Assault. The campaign missions are repetitive and rather dull, the voice acting is hilariously bad, and the storyline is nonsensical. If you can believe it, the main story revolves around insurance. That's right, insurance. If there's a more boring subject for a game about multi-million-dollar attack aircraft, please let me know in advance so I can bring a pillow.

The multiplayer is where Joint Assault comes to life. Gather a group of friends over via ad-hoc or infrastructure mode and choose to co-operate in the campaign missions (up to four players) or face off in the competitive mode (up to eight players). Joint Assault's campaign missions have multiple branches that can be tackled simultaneously with other players. What's more, in many missions, the outcome of one player's objective will have an effect on another's. Cool, right?

The multiplayer options in Joint Assault are plentiful. You can limit invitees by rank, share career data back and forth, set mission parameters and create teams in Vs. modes. If you get a solid group of friends together with multiple copies of Joint Assault, you're in for some serious stick time.

But if you're going to be playing solo, there's just not that much to get excited about in Ace Combat: Joint Assault. Sure, you can unlock dozens of planes, emblems, weapons and paint jobs as you make your way through the missions. But most of the missions are uninspired and cheap. "Oh, no! The giant flying fortress that's firing Electro Laser Cannons also has 12 anti-aircraft guns on it! Let's take them all out! Awesome, we took them all out! Wait, why did they all come back again? Let's destroy them again and hope they don't come back! S**t, they came back again!" You get the idea.

Aside from a few cool moments like unlocking the F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber, and, oddly, flying a persnickety executive around in an unarmed jumbo jet, there was nothing about this pocket pilot game that got me all that excited about flying. Given the choice between buying Ace Combat: Joint Assault (to play alone) and an equally priced bundle of airplane posters, I'd probably choose the latter.

Closing Comments

Ace Combat: Joint Assault is really two games: a dull, going-through-the-paces solo experience and a clever multiplayer approach to the handheld flying niche. If you’re looking for an engrossing single-player piloting adventure, keep on looking. The campaign is repetitive, the dogfights are dull and the storyline is painful. However, if you have a group of friends with PSPs and a hankering for high-speed aerial maneuvering, then give Joint Assault some serious consideration. In the right hands, I could see it being a multiplayer hit.

 

 

Harvest Moon: The Hero of Leaf Valley Review

In the Harvest Moon series, players have been raising crops and tending to adorable livestock for years. In this iteration of Harvest Moon, you receive a farm located in Leaf Valley from your recently deceased grandfather. Before you can collect his things and return home, you're confronted by three Harvest sprites and the Harvest Goddess who all urge you to stay and help them. It turns out that a capitalist group named FunLand is threatening to level the town and construct an amusement park in its place.

Even though your character has zero farming knowledge and has literally just arrived in the area, you're tasked with raising $50,000 in two years or else the community is doomed. Fortunately, coughing up the cash is only one way to save your newly inherited home; there are 16 possible pathways to put the kibosh on FunLand's park. If you successfully complete related storylines, you can help turn the town into a tourist attraction or a nature reserve.

Regardless of how you rescue the land, you'll need to work odd jobs, plant crops and raise animals in order to make money and maintain a cushy lifestyle. Fishing, mining for ores, chopping down trees for lumber, cooking noms and tending to livestock are the basic ways to make some dough in Leaf Valley.


Now, I'm aware these activities sound extremely mundane, but there's an addictive element to the Harvest Moon series that's hard to pinpoint. All of the mini-games are fairly mindless with the exception of cooking for Martha -- she requires you to figure out recipes through trial and error and then remember them the next time you come around -- but it's satisfying to find a rare metal or giant Tuna or acquire a lot of lumber from a tree.

Working is only half the battle, though. In order to get anywhere in this town, you need to make nice with your neighbors. Give them gifts from your farm and they'll be friendlier toward you. Building positive relationships with people also opens up the aforementioned side storylines to help save the town. My major annoyance with these side quests is that once they're initiated you can't manually progress them. For example, Chester the town priest instructs you to return to the church another day to help him solve a mystery. I returned over and over and over, just waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. Eventually, the second cutscene played, but it's a bit frustrating to have little control over how the story moves along.

Like other Harvest Moon games, you'll be able to marry one of the many townswomen after the FunLand threat has been eliminated. A majority of the girls are easy to woo, but two in particular present more of a challenge than the rest. Alice, the CEO of FunLand and the Harvest Goddess are two brides designed for veterans of the franchise.

Although the game is a lot of fun, it does have its fair share of problems. If you hate loading screens, beware -- this Harvest Moon is plagued by them. Expect to run for a couple of seconds, enter a loading screen, run some more, see another loading screen -- rinse and repeat. It would've been nice to have fewer interruptions to keep you engaged. Additionally, the title suffers from a tempermental selection system -- meaning that if you're trying to brush your horse you sometimes have to circle it for a while until the option pops up. Visually, the game offers a cutesy, vibrant world that any person would enjoy spending time in, but there are noticeable blue seams throughout the game, which can be distracting.

Ultimately, The Hero of Leaf Valley contains very similar elements to its predecessors, so if you've played all the previous games and are starting to grow tired of them, you won't find much new to keep your interest. If you're new to the series or still love Harvest Moon, you'll enjoy exploring Leaf Valley and building relationships with the townsfolk.

Closing Comments

Despite the fact that a loading screen pops up every other minute, the controls can be frustrating at times and the mini-games get stale after a while, I had a hard time putting down Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley. It’s a charming game that begs to be played every day. Once you start it’s hard to end the cycle of, “Oh, I’ll just go through one more day, then I’ll quit.” Yeah, right.

 

 Thanks To psp.ign.com

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable Review

Hopefully, you don't need me to tell you that Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is an exceptional game. I mean, IGN's reviewed the game twice now -- once as a standalone game and again as the director's cut known as FES -- and each time the advice was simple: play this game. Now, the Shin Megami Tensei title is back as Persona 3 Portable, a hybrid that packs the story of Persona 3, the improvements of FES, and a new female character that's the PSP's own.

It's a hodgepodge that keeps what works while dealing with the limitations of the PSP, but it's still a stellar game that people looking for a Japanese RPG or cool story should play.
The thing that's always made me a Persona 3 fan is the story, and that remains largely untouched here. You're a transfer student in modern day Japan and upon arriving at your new home, you discover that this isn't just another boarding school. Every night at midnight, the citizens around you turn into coffins and a tower packed with evil beings known as "Shadows" appears. A select group of people has the ability to stay lucid during this "Dark Hour" and fight the Shadows. This group is the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad (SEES); they're all students, and you're one of them.

Yup, it's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer got into a head-on collision with the JRPG genre.

The rad story spills over into some rad gameplay. At night, you'll head to Tartarus with members of the SEES and battle all sorts of Shadows -- blobs of black, flying monsters, and so on. You'll fight them with swords and arrows, but your main avenue of vengeance are Personas, representations of the SEES members' personalities. These are massive creatures that pack special attacks such as fire moves and lasers and all sorts of crazy crap. They're nifty, and as you play, you'll be able to combine Personas to create super-powerful allies.

As you progress, your character and his or her Personas are leveling up off of the experience points you're earning, you're climbing to higher and higher levels of Tartarus, and the foes you face are getting tougher and tougher.

However, this battling is just going on at night. During the day, Persona 3 plays like a simulation game. You take your character to school, go to classes, join clubs and basically live like a high schooler. You'll need to answer questions in lectures and remember your work schedule while balancing time with your buddies. All of these decisions play into your character's stats -- charm, academics and courage -- and influence the way the world sees you, but the bigger deal is making time for your friends.

As you make acquaintances, you're establishing "social links." You strengthen these social links by hanging out and interacting with the people you've met, and in turn, those relationships make your Personas stronger. To kick ass on the battlefield, you need to pay as much attention to your social life as you do to what type of equipment you've armed yourself with for a night in Tartarus. That's all kinds of awesome -- especially because you're choosing what you're saying and whom your spending time with. Your social network is completely made up of your personal decisions.

All of that is nifty, but you could've gathered that by reading the two previous Persona 3 reviews. What's good and bad about the PSP version of this award winner? Well, most of it's good, so let's get the bad out of the way first. The beautiful anime cutscenes from the original game are gone. Instead, the story is told through static screenshots and voiceovers. Similarly, there's no more third-person free-roaming. You can still choose where you want to go after most classes, but now you just move a circle to interactable objects on the screen. You no longer walk your character through the halls of Gekkoukan.

Both of these losses hurt the experience -- but they don't come near crippling it. Losing the anime cutscenes is a bummer because they looked so good, but the story is easy enough to follow and I found myself connecting with the characters almost as much this way. The same can be said for the new navigation scheme. It works and gets you around, but you lose some of that immersion that came from wandering Japan. This game was already a few years old, and these handicaps make it feel its age.

Should any of that make you bail on Persona 3 Portable? No. I've already mentioned the solid story and cool battles, but Atlus has tossed a bunch of other stuff in here to make Persona 3 Portable feel as fresh as possible. For starters, you can now control all the members of your party -- a welcome addition, let me tell you. Back when you and I were playing Persona on the PS2, we had to rely on the AI to make the right choices in battle -- whom to heal, what Persona to use, etc. Now, you can switch tactics mid-battle and make those choices on your own. This is an awesome addition that makes the Persona 3 Portable battle system all the better.

The other big addition -- looking past the game's option to install data to your memory stick, its two new difficulty settings, and so on -- is that of a brand new character: a female protagonist. If you've played Persona 3 before, this change in the point of view is super-refreshing as the dialogue with other characters is now completely different. That "are they or aren't they" tension between the male protagonist and Yukari is gone, you being short with Junpei has a different connotation to it, and so on.

This is a great counter balance for folks who have already been though the main story, and it's an awesome way to extend your play time if you're picking up Persona 3 for the first time -- there are two stories for you to enjoy.

Closing Comments

Hopefully you don’t need me to tell you that Persona 3 is a well-done story filled with interesting people, cool battles and a ton of stuff to do. Persona 3 PSP keeps all of that and adds in some battle improvements and boosts the replay value. Sadly, Persona 3 PSP loses some of its polish, as the game ditches the anime cutscenes and free roaming. However, the heart of the game is still here and still awesome.

 

 Thanks to psp.ign.com

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker Review

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker Review Review By psp.ign.com

As of this moment -- as I sit typing on my keyboard -- I'm 35 hours into Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and the game only has more to show me. I beat the story at the 17-hour mark or so, but with more than 100 Extra Ops serving as mini-games/challenges, my own Metal Gear to mold and customize, a platoon of 350 soldiers, dozens of hands-off Outer Ops missions to send troops out on and so much more, I don't know when I'll put this game down.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is probably the biggest game in the Metal Gear series, and it's only on Sony's smallest system.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker picks up the story of Naked Snake (AKA Big Boss) after the events of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. It's 1974, and Snake's a bit disenchanted. After killing his "traitorous" mentor the Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake left the United States and founded Militaires Sans Frontieres, or soldiers without borders, a militia of sorts that takes on causes and missions for those who need their help. Soon, a professor and student show up begging for assistance. It seems that the CIA has invaded Costa Rica, and seeing as how the country doesn't have a military, the duo needs MSF to step in and set things right. Snake balks at the offer, but when the professor plays a tape that seemingly proves the Boss is alive, MSF takes the contract.

This conversation, which is pretty much one cutscene, sets up one of the Metal Gear franchise's best stories. One of the most common complaints about Metal Gear games is the convoluted stories. Who are the Patriots? Who's related to whom? What the hell is happening? Peace Walker doesn't go down that path. Snake takes this mission to find out if the Boss is alive. This is a man who is still visibly shaken over the events of Snake Eater. He loved this woman but had to kill her for his country. He's jaded, hurt and angry. He openly cries about what happened and needs to know what drove his mentor to work with the Soviets.

That's your motivation in this game. Sure, Snake wants to stop a Metal Gear from launching a nuke and killing millions, but he really wants to answer the questions that have plagued him since that epic battle in the field of lilies.

This plays out in traditional, third-person Metal Gear gameplay. You'll take Snake though jungles and riverbeds while popping bad guys with tranquilizer darts or bullets. You can crouch so that you can slowly and stealthily make your way through levels, hold up bad guys, choke opponents out, and so on. As always, this is a stealth game, so your goal is to complete the mission objective without being seen or heard. If the guards get wind of you, they'll go on alert, call in backup, and make your life miserable.

Of course, it's not entirely the same old – but awesome – thing here. Snake's still packing his close quarters combat moves, but I found them easier and more useful than ever in Peace Walker. When you can execute a CQC action, you just hold the right shoulder button and latch onto the opponent with a sleeper hold. From here, you can threaten him with a stun rod or use the new throw move to hurl him into walls (an instant knockout) or into other people. If there are others around, you can chain your CQC moves together with a timed button press for rad combination animations where Snake flips dudes and disarms them.

As I've already written about, this game is huge. You're building MSF in this game – creating the infamous stronghold known as Outer Heaven that Solid Snake will have to destroy in the original Metal Gear – so another tweak on gameplay this time around is having to capture enemies to fill out your squadron. In Portable Ops, you did this in a way – knock guys out, drag them to your truck, and they'd be available to play with – but here, it's streamlined. You knock the guy out, hook him up to a Fulton balloon, and a helicopter snatches him out of the sky while you continue on the mission. This is beyond addictive. Even when my squad was teeming with people, I'd go out of my way to capture everyone I could, which includes hidden POWs in every level.

What are you capturing all of these guys for? They're the lifeblood of the game. You'll snatch these men and women and then get to assign them to divisions of your army – combat, research and development, intel, and so on – based on the multitude of stats that each character has. Guys assigned to your combat unit can take Snake's place in missions or be dispatched in Outer Ops; and R&D folks develop new weapons, items and upgrades. Keep recruiting, keep getting better people into these divisions, and you'll keep getting cooler crap.

It's like crack. I can't tell you how many of my hours I've spent with this game just sorting troops by their ability to make food so that I can make sure I have the best mess hall so that my crew is happy. I pick up POWs and pray that they're the "S-rank" troops I've been looking for to really pull my R&D department together and get me the final upgrades I need.

Peace Walker puts an emphasis on shorter gameplay sessions, so each mission is its own task. You'll select the one you want to go out on, get a cutscene if it calls for it, go out on your mission, and get a stat screen grading you on the number of alerts before getting booted back to the menu. This is a nice change of pace for a number of reasons – first and foremost because it gives you control over your loadout for each scenario you're entering. Oddly, you can't save mid-mission, and that might be a drag as some battles go on for a while.

As you unlock and find different suits for Snake, you're going to want to wear them in specific situations. See, the suits are better/worse for certain areas when it comes to camouflage (jungle vs. urban), they allow you to carry different numbers of items and weapons, and some have unique abilities (in the sneaking suit, you can move as fast as you want and be completely silent). Because the missions are self-contained, you can use your weapon-limited sneak suit to get through an entire level, have the level end as you get your first glimpse of a boss, and then start the "new" mission where you fight the boss and have your battle suit armed along with its extra weapon and item slots. It's awesome, and key to dominating missions.

The missions being broken up is great for the PSP because Peace Walker is phenomenal at dangling carrots in front of your face. When these missions end, you return to Mother Base where you're inundated with information – what your research and development team has created in the way of weapons and items, how the troops you dispatched on missions fared, who has come to join your army, and so on.

The game is insanely deep.

Adding to all of this is the focus on co-op. Every mission in Peace Walker – whether it be a story mission or one of the 100-plus Extra Ops – is available for you and a buddy to conquer. Co-op is only available via ad-hoc, but it's still a nice option. If it's a boss battle (a tank, a helicopter or a Metal Gear), four players can set out to best the beast. Whatever you do as a team, you benefit from as a player. If you Fulton out seven players total, you each get those seven players for your squad. If one of you climbs inside an AI core and unlocks a bunch of memory boards to use in your personal Metal Gear, you all get those boards.

Co-op is great. I'm a single-player fan and didn't know if I'd dig playing with others, but marching around levels capturing bad guys and decimating bosses is a blast with friends.

However, co-op leads to one of my main complaints with Peace Walker – and I only have two. This co-op focus means that some of the game is a pain in the ass (if not entirely undoable) by yourself. I've seen a ton of other game critics – folks I know can play – struggle and scream over some of the boss battles in this game. For me, I thought they were crazy until I came to the second battle with the final boss – Peace Walker itself. On my third attempt, I played for 45 minutes before running out of ammo and having the mission called off.

The curse words I screamed would make Dennis Leary blush.

In the end, I couldn't beat Peace Walker without the help of another player who was way past that point. That shouldn't be an aspect of a game like this. It's perfectly fine to make the Extra Ops super-difficult – and trust me, the repeat battles with tanks and the Cocoon are – but a solo player should be able to get through the story by him or herself. Granted, you might be able to replay missions and upgrade your weapons so that certain bosses wouldn't give you much trouble, but I'm no rookie and I don't think that I should've been dealing with the trouble I was dealing with.

The second issue with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker? It's almost too deep for its own good. Don't get me wrong, the depth is one of this game's greatest assets – I won't stop playing until my army has conquered all of the Outer Ops – but there isn't much in the way of guidance. There are really, really general tutorials in the game, but they don't give you an adequate idea of how to make trades with other players, how to make your own Metal Gear songs, or how to make the most of the mechs you've acquired. To learn these tenets of the game, you have to either go through some trial and error or have a "Big Boss" on hand to walk you through the game.

Of course, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker doesn't stop there. On this UMD (or digital download for you cool kids) is a pimped out competitive multiplayer mode where you can go head to head with five other friends in games of deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture and base defense. The modes are fun, but they didn't do much for me – it's just Metal Gear Online, which is no small feat for a portable game. If you can get six Peace Walker fanatics together at one time, have at it, but the game is more about co-op in my eyes.

 

Closing Comments

Here’s the thing – I could write another nine pages on Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. I could do it with ease. From the missions that have you listening to bird calls to the missions that have you taking photos of ghosts to missions that have you holding people up with bananas, this game is insanely deep. It’s crazy and I want to go on and on about every little thing, but there’s no reason for me to sit here and spoil it for you.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is awesome and you need to play it. It’s not perfect, as the co-op is nearly mandatory in some spots and I could’ve done with a better “how to guide,” but this game is a masterpiece. Not only is it in the running for the title of greatest game ever on the PSP, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is one of the greatest games in the entire Metal Gear franchise.

 Thank to PSP.IGN.COM

YS 7 Game review

TORRANCE, CA - XSEED Games, an independent-minded publisher, has announced today the arrival of Ys SEVEN, the first title in the legendary Ys series of Action RPG games to be created exclusively for the PSP (PlayStation Portable) system. Ys SEVEN has started shipping to retailers across North America and will also be available starting today for purchase as a digital download from the PlayStation Store. Developed by one of Japan's most highly-regarded and longest running development studios, Nihon Falcom, Ys SEVEN marks the first installment in the popular and long-running Ys series that XSEED will publish under a multi-title agreement with the prominent Japanese studio.

Eagerly awaited by fans and awarded the prestigious Gold rating from Famitsu magazine in Japan, Ys SEVEN has garnered a number of other accolades, including:

• "Best PSP Game of E3 Nominee" - 1UP.com
  
  
• "Best Overall RPG of E3" - RPGFan
  
  
• "A very fast-paced, well-balanced, and simply fun title." - RPGamer

Ys SEVEN marks the first new Ys game to be released in North America in over four years, and is designed to take full advantage of the PSP hardware. Ys SEVEN features an action-based real-time battle system where players can swap between any of the three-member battle party on the fly and engage enemies in a richly detailed 3D environment with virtually no load times. Ys SEVEN includes nine playable characters, each with their own fighting style, special abilities, and variety of unique weapons. Four difficulty levels allow players of all backgrounds to experience the exciting action in beautifully rendered widescreen 3D environments. The game's more than 30 hours of addictive gameplay span the tale of "Five Great Dragons" who must be awakened by two wandering adventurers, Adol and Dogi, and their newfound allies in order to save a war-torn kingdom from destruction by long-forgotten ancient forces.

Anime