Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

Final Fantasy Tactics introduced a lot of people to the Strategy RPG genre.  While the biggest attraction to gamers might have been the Final Fantasy name, a well executed SRPG game was found underneath.  Since then other titles have been released in the SRPG genre like Tactics Ogre and Disgaea.  While these games have developed a following, they are difficult to find and can fetch large numbers on eBay because they had such a small run.  It would seem that creating a good SRPG is difficult, and when you have created one it is in high demand.

Spectral Souls: Resurrection of the Ethereal Empires tries to bring the SRPG experience to the PSP.  You follow three different factions through a war on the world of Neverland where you take these armies through battles over different landscapes.  Eventually this determines who rules over Neverland.

Whoa!  Did I travel back to the '90's?  This looks like something that I would have seen on the PS1.   The character models on the battlefield all are big heads with small bodies.  They make small movements when moving and attacking.  Still, every character has so few animations that they look incredibly static.

Spectral Souls does feature some nice lighting effects, especially when spells are cast.  The spells burn with a fire spell while a cool chill goes over the ice spells.  A black fog covers the area when a darkness spell is cast.  Most of the spells have swirls and drops in the area that they are cast in.

The character portraits actually look well drawn and have a nice resolution.  They all have an anime look to them, typical of this genre.  They do occasionally change expressions, but those are few and far between.

The music has a medieval feeling to it.  Trumpets blare while the percussion drives the beat forward.  A flute provides the melody and strings add accents.  Each of the three armies has their own theme songs.  One of them is more ominous in tone, while another is more upbeat and playful.  When entering specific areas the music changes to indicate that the battle has come.  Still, the music all starts to sound the same after a while.

There isn’t much voice acting in the game.  Occasionally you do get some voices while executing a special attack.  However, these sound very juvenile and really distract from the game more than enhance it.

The controls in a SRPG don’t have to be complex, but they shouldn’t take long to figure out either.  In battle, moving the cursor is done with the D-Pad, while the nub changes the perspective of the battleground by ninety degrees and zooms in and out.  Selecting is done with the X, while cancelling commands is done with Circle.  The Square button toggles showing Hit Points and Action Points, and the Triangle button toggles showing the detailed turn order of the units.

To complete a Hold Attack or Charge Attack, you hit the R key on the screen with your available attacks, then you select your target.  Once your target is selected, you choose the attacks you want to make in the order to perform them.  Sometimes combining these attacks result in a more powerful attack.  These are essential to get through the game.

The controls work OK, but there are some issues.  Every button press has a delay, so you have to wait for succeeding button presses.  If you hit the button too soon you’ll have to hit it again.  A lot of this is due to disk access, which really should have been handled better.  Because of this, the controls feel a bit clunky.

At its heart, Spectral Souls is a strategy RPG.  It doesn’t do a bad job at that.  However, the issues with the game quickly add up.

There is a tutorial with instruction videos and screen shots that is available at the World Map.  However, you actually have to complete battles at the start of the game that you are thrown into.  While the initial battles do teach you how to get through the battles, it would have been much better to be able to have an option to go through the tutorial at the beginning of the game and then learn the battle system.

On the World Map you travel from location to location.  You are able to travel to certain locations where you can purchase items, synthesize items, augment items, search at guilds to find hidden areas on the map, and change your characters' class.  Other locations on the map indicate points where battles occur which progress the storyline.

If you want to create new, more powerful items you need to synthesize them.  You select two to four items to combine into a new item.  If you use the correct combinations, you get the item, but if you don’t mix the right combination you get a random item.  Synthesis recipes are available from the main menu on the World Map.  These shops also allow you to increase the attack or defensive power by augmenting them.  You can also develop new items by using high ranked weapons and certain pieces of armor.

Characters can change classes at certain shops on the map.  To do this they need to pay a certain amount of gold.  Once this is done, that character must fight a battle and win.  If the character wins the battle the class is changed.  If not, the class stays the same and the gold is lost.

You follow three different armies through the game.  However, the game isn’t set up in three separate campaigns.  Instead you switch through the three armies in-game whenever you want.  However, there are times when you can’t make any further progress in the story with the current army you are with so you have to switch armies at that point.  While this means that you see how the stories of each army overlap, when you switch armies you have to switch gears and figure out which attacks each character has.

Most of the time when you reach a new location you’ll get a little background and then you’ll go into battle.  A formation screen comes up to choose which characters to send into battle as well as changing out weapons and equipment.  Then you are moved to the battle map.  Here you move your characters and attack enemies.

While you can attack a character with different skills, Spectral Souls gives you a way to combine your moves.  One way is the Hold skill.  When you use the Hold skill, you can choose as many attacks as you want on a specific enemy.  When you do this, sometimes special attacks are made.  If you use the Hold skill for two Slash attacks, you will end up with a Triple Slash attack.  There is also a Charge skill, which is similar to the Hold skill, except when you finish the Charge skill your attack isn’t activated.  Once another member of your team attacks the player your Charge skill was aimed at, your Charge skill attacks giving a long chain effect.

This all sounds like the making of an interesting game, but where does Spectral Souls go wrong?  The disc access is where.  It feels like the game is constantly access the UMD.  When it is accessing what the characters are saying, it accesses the disc after almost every phrase of dialogue.  It accesses the disc when you select to move your character and it figures out the number of movement squares you have.  When you are ready to attack and it needs to find out which characters are in range, it accesses the disc.  It does this over and over and over again.  While the load times don’t take very long this gets distracting and lengthens the game time considerably.

The other issue with the game is that it has a lot of dialogue.  The game has a lot of reading and it takes a long time to get to the interesting parts which are the battles.  I felt like I was reading the text in the game twice as much as I was actually playing the game.  There were times that the screen went dark because of the amount of dialogue going on the screen between button presses.  The dialogue isn’t all that entertaining and sometimes you wonder where they got their translator from.  It’s nothing like engrish, but some of it is really bad.  This makes the game a drag.

There’s a lot of game to play in Spectral Souls, but that’s only if you can slog through the dialogue and the disc access.  However, you will need to be committed (not in the padded room sense, but some people will feel that way) to the game.  There are three different storylines that intertwine as you play the game, and each one brings in different characters.  You can upgrade the stats of your characters, their weapons, and their classes.  You can make each game a unique experience, but it might be difficult to get through it again.  In fact, you'll probably put Spectral Souls away in disgust after the first time you pick it up. If you are a hardcore SRPG gamer with the patience of a saint, you might be able to get through Spectral Souls: Resurrection of the Ethereal Empires.  There is a deep game somewhere in there.  If you are new to the SRPG genre, you won’t want to pick this game up as there are much better options out there, especially if you have a PS2.

Gaming Trend Score

55

1. Graphics: 60
2. Audio: 72
3. Controls: 65
4. Gameplay: 40
5. Value/Replay: 50
6. OVERALL:55