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
Eventually, though, battles will start, either initiated by you or the monsters, and when you do, the game launches into a real-time system that's actually rather good. Everyone, teammate and monster alike, is given a circular clock that slowly fills (though you can't see the enemy's). When it does a full circle, your team can act, allowing you to do the usual attack, magic (dubbed lunabilities, and broken into attack, healing, support and group flavors), item use, run and equip options. Though this seems like standard stuff (and it is to be honest, just with the ever-pressing threat of the enemy attacking while you're making up your mind), there are two factors that keep the game interesting.
The first is the fact that all magic -- sorry, lunabilities -- is pulled from a shared Luna pool that increases as everyone (friend or foe) attacks. This meter starts out fairly skimpy, but is bolstered by the number of party members and by running mini-quests for villagers (more on them in a second), and the twist is that everyone in the fight, both good and bad, pull from this pool. You can smack an enemy while they're charging up their spell and cancel it out, but they can do the same, so there's strategy in using magic. Do you keep attacking with weapons to build up the gauge so you can do a more powerful magic-based attack or support spell, or do you dip into it to keep enemies from doing the same?
This has to be weighted against the game's other major deviation from other RPG habits: item crafting. See, all weapons in the game break. It's inevitable, so just using them means you'll whittle away at the on-screen meter that shows the durability. Both weapons and armor in towns are incredibly expensive later in the game, so equipping your whole party is a financial impossibility, but if you take an item to an appraiser, they'll break the sword or wand or bracelet down into core parts, which you can then buy from shops to build your own.
Because weapons and armor are often bonded with earth, fire, water or wind elements, it's best to let one of your party members craft toward their affinity. The results are a fraction of the price of store-bought goods, and you can make unlimited supplies so long as you have the materials. The recopies aren't terribly tough to understand, and the prices of raw materials are cheap enough that you can start messing with stuff fairly quickly, though this can often yield weapons that are too powerful to use. Still, is a simple system, though your enjoyment of the game will be directly proportional to how much you like crafting.
It's not a perfect science, and you'll often botch a job, but the item lost into the process is almost always a common one. More powerful versions of weapons and armor are dropped by enemies and found in chests out in the world, but there are items which can't be appraised and are thus limited to whatever their natural durability is. Since weapon breaks are inevitable, the battle system forces you to balance out physical attacks (and most of the offensive lunabilities also use weapons), with more passive or supporting spells, and all this must be done while watching the Luna pool to make sure enemies aren't cranking up either.
The battles themselves are fairly brisk, and occur with short load times. If you do manage to work up enough of the Luna pool all the available characters (read: the ones that haven't taken their turn yet or aren't waiting for it to come up again) can combine their assaults with a massive blow that uses everyone's turn at once. If you tap X at the moment the attack circle is widest, you'll do the most damage with the spell. It's actually a nice little timing-based game, albeit a fairly simple one.
When you're not running around forests or deserts or volcanoes or medows, you'll be in town, often times fetching supplies or chatting with villagers. This makes up the bulk of the game's side-quests (though you can talk to some guards and trade in monster drops for some cash), and it actually feels more like an massively multiplayer online RPG than a console effort.
If you have friends around that have copies of the game, you can rock the game Ad-Hoc-style, with all players dropping into their own parts of a dungeon. Teamwork here is key, since anyone who opens a chest will keep the item inside, and they can't be traded, so talking to other players and coordinating who gets what chest is important. If one person encounters a monster, everyone will fight it, however, which is an interesting twist, and once everyone has looted a dungeon, you'll fight a final boss monster. The prizes doled out here can then be taken into the main game, though they're ultra-rare, can't be appraised and are often limited-use. All other experience and items found throughout the dungeon stay in your little Ad Hoc world.