Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light
PSP owners finally have a console-style RPG to call their own -- a mediocre console-style RPG.
Published: August 7, 2006
Ever since the PSP was first released, one particular subset of gamers has been slavering with anticipation at the promise of the until-now unattainable: a full-on console-style RPG with voice acting, purdy cutscenes, a 3D world, the whole works. Except it hasn't really happened yet. Efforts and inroads toward the eventual culmination of a PlayStation-on-the-go RPG have been made, but there's still nothing that really replicates anything close to a real console experience.
Enter Hit Maker (not to be confused with Hit Maker -- two words -- the division of SEGA responsible for [ps2game=340]Crazy Taxi[/ps2game], [ps2game=557]Virtual-On[/ps2game] and Virtua Tennis games), the Japanese development house that apparently showed enough promise with their concept of Blade Dancer that the Nippon branch of the recently-formed Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios look a liking to them and helped create the first console-level PSP game. Or at least that was the idea in theory.
Things don't start off especially promising. As a teenaged spiky blue-haired adventurer named Lance on a quest to fight 'n fight 'n fight 'n fight (the drink 'n drink 'n drink 'n drink parts were supplied by us), the island of Foo is chock full o' adventure. See, Lance has made an oath to help the first person that asks him for it, and Foo is filled with needy folk. A millennium ago, one of the normally peace-love-dove Zeimos cats that presided over Foo decided they wanted to explore the Dark Side. This gives rise to the nigh-ubiquitous Dark Lord, begins a reign of terror, and so on, until the Blade Dancer arrives, puts the hurt on all the bad guys and then, in a final, climactic battle with the Dark Lord... suddenly disappears. Whoops.
Though the Blade Dancer clearly has massive ADD-level follow-through issues, there's a bright spot to things: centuries later, Lance has arrived, and bears a mark on his forehead eerily similar to Ye Olde Blade Dancer. Cue foreshadowing. Hell, while you're at it, make sure you throw in s'more clichés like a muscle-bound warrior with a deep sense of honor, a spritely, chipper hippy healer chick and the all-important girl with amnesia, just in case there was ever a chance of the game slipping into non-standard territory.
Okay, so things start off fairly formulaic, but by the time you're a good 10 hours into the game... well, the storyline won't really go anywhere. In fact, even after logging twice that time, you'll still be hard-pressed to find much a story here. There are some minor twists, but the fact that you'll be nearly into double-digit territory before things really start moving says something about the pace of the game. It's plodding, it's pedestrian in storyline details, and, to be perfectly honest, it feels so wooden in parts that it's a struggle to keep going. But it's not all bad.
See, Hit Maker and NIS America, who chose to localize and publish the game for US audiences, at least tried to offer something console-level in terms of what you can do with the gameplay. The game does feature a number of ever-foggy areas to run around in, populated by monsters that appear as skulls that trace lazy arcs around the landscape. You can avoid them if you scoot by when their backs are turned, and you can actually target a skull to see what enemies will await you in the encounter should you bump into them, plus the skulls are color-coded to tell you at a glance if they're pushovers (blue), modest difficulty (white) or a little tougher (red).
A fourth category, impossible (grey), isn't quite accurate, but it does happen when two enemies combine (usually after one blue skull runs away from you and joins up with a friend) to form a giant, chattering mega-skull that's one ultra-powerful enemy many times tougher than anything you'd face in normal encounters. When coupled with a sort of evil barfing sound, the idea of multiple enemies pooling to form a very real party-killing threat behind you as your sprint in quasi-slo-mo toward the next area does cause some fun "ohshitohshitohshit" moments.
Enter Hit Maker (not to be confused with Hit Maker -- two words -- the division of SEGA responsible for [ps2game=340]Crazy Taxi[/ps2game], [ps2game=557]Virtual-On[/ps2game] and Virtua Tennis games), the Japanese development house that apparently showed enough promise with their concept of Blade Dancer that the Nippon branch of the recently-formed Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios look a liking to them and helped create the first console-level PSP game. Or at least that was the idea in theory.
Things don't start off especially promising. As a teenaged spiky blue-haired adventurer named Lance on a quest to fight 'n fight 'n fight 'n fight (the drink 'n drink 'n drink 'n drink parts were supplied by us), the island of Foo is chock full o' adventure. See, Lance has made an oath to help the first person that asks him for it, and Foo is filled with needy folk. A millennium ago, one of the normally peace-love-dove Zeimos cats that presided over Foo decided they wanted to explore the Dark Side. This gives rise to the nigh-ubiquitous Dark Lord, begins a reign of terror, and so on, until the Blade Dancer arrives, puts the hurt on all the bad guys and then, in a final, climactic battle with the Dark Lord... suddenly disappears. Whoops.
Though the Blade Dancer clearly has massive ADD-level follow-through issues, there's a bright spot to things: centuries later, Lance has arrived, and bears a mark on his forehead eerily similar to Ye Olde Blade Dancer. Cue foreshadowing. Hell, while you're at it, make sure you throw in s'more clichés like a muscle-bound warrior with a deep sense of honor, a spritely, chipper hippy healer chick and the all-important girl with amnesia, just in case there was ever a chance of the game slipping into non-standard territory.
Okay, so things start off fairly formulaic, but by the time you're a good 10 hours into the game... well, the storyline won't really go anywhere. In fact, even after logging twice that time, you'll still be hard-pressed to find much a story here. There are some minor twists, but the fact that you'll be nearly into double-digit territory before things really start moving says something about the pace of the game. It's plodding, it's pedestrian in storyline details, and, to be perfectly honest, it feels so wooden in parts that it's a struggle to keep going. But it's not all bad.
See, Hit Maker and NIS America, who chose to localize and publish the game for US audiences, at least tried to offer something console-level in terms of what you can do with the gameplay. The game does feature a number of ever-foggy areas to run around in, populated by monsters that appear as skulls that trace lazy arcs around the landscape. You can avoid them if you scoot by when their backs are turned, and you can actually target a skull to see what enemies will await you in the encounter should you bump into them, plus the skulls are color-coded to tell you at a glance if they're pushovers (blue), modest difficulty (white) or a little tougher (red).
A fourth category, impossible (grey), isn't quite accurate, but it does happen when two enemies combine (usually after one blue skull runs away from you and joins up with a friend) to form a giant, chattering mega-skull that's one ultra-powerful enemy many times tougher than anything you'd face in normal encounters. When coupled with a sort of evil barfing sound, the idea of multiple enemies pooling to form a very real party-killing threat behind you as your sprint in quasi-slo-mo toward the next area does cause some fun "ohshitohshitohshit" moments.