This won't happen for a while, though, as the captains need to level up by winning battles, and initially that just means pick a formation and watch it all play out as sheer troop numbers steamroll the tutorial enemies. As the captains level up, though, they gain more troops and can issue more commands. They also have the ability to kick off special attacks that have huge area effect damage, though at least in our early build, they completely killed the PSP leading to literal slide shows as the damage was wracked up.

When the two aspects meet, actual combat and the exploration of specific areas of the greater map (you can jump from major section to section all over the world, and drilling down gives you that aforementioned board game-like layout to things), things get most interesting. See, movement on the grids isn't a terribly simple affair. The terraforming aspect mentioned earlier is used fairly often (though it can get expensive) -- even so much as changing certain otherwise unreachable areas into moveable terrain -- but there are parts of the map that can only be crossed in one direction or even just by characters of a certain element.

There are also spots to whip up your own buildings; everything from hospitals to barracks, the latter of which actually allows you to build a custom team that can offset or enhance the particular strengths of a particular captain (some are pure meathead fighters while others do better with magic attacks and long-range special moves). We haven't had enough time to really dig into some of the other buildings, but with a good three dozen hours to the main game, we're sure we'll find a way to explore it all before things are finished.

It should be noted that that 35+ hour stat includes all three storylines, but lest what's truly interesting about the whole thing is that a common thread links the parallel tales, yet none of the worlds feels terribly similar (beyond the battles of, course); the tutorial world is almost steampunk-ish, while the Surface is typical medieval fantasy fare and the Divine World is, as the name would suggest, concerned with angelic and demonic forces. It's actually pretty cool, and thanks to some interesting art design and visuals that feel low-res, but at home on the PSP screen, it was enough to reverse our feelings on the game.

There's plenty that we haven't dug into. The first world is but a taste of what the game has to offer setting-wise, and there are a whopping 40 characters that you'll end up recruiting, all told. In fact, it's entirely possible that the Lower World stuff is the most tame of the bunch; both the Divine and Surface World storylines actually had much better hooks (Hell leading an army against the angels despite Hell's prince having a crush on one of the more fetching parts of Heaven and three childhood friends separated by the invasion of their homeland reunited only to find one of them is now the leader of the invading country, respectively).

If our initial attraction to the game can hold up, we may actually have a game that, while not technically very solid (things are improved over Idea Factory's other admittedly crappy PSP efforts, but they still have a ways to go), may end up being unlike anything else on the system -- and hey, if we're really lucky, it'll end up being genuinely fun, too.