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
Talking to most people at the right time (usually after major story events) will give you a simple quest like delivering items from one town to another or tracking people down. The issue here comes in how poorly the game's quest log is set up. Little more than one or two sentences, they rarely tell you what items are needed and what person they're supposed to go to (nevermind where that person might be), which almost makes them pointless. Eventually you come to learn where most people are in town, but that's only because the game employs a simple interaction system that makes you highlight someone with the Square button, thus allowing you to see their name before you talk to them.
This leads to an overwhelming feeling of pointless backtracking and revisited conversations. If the storyline were moving along more briskly, it wouldn't be an issue, but the world isn't that big, yet you'll often spend hours in between story points, and the quests seem less of a diversion and more of a subset of all the stuff you have to do with how complicated they are. There's no system in the game for warping around (at least not that I found), leading to lots of running through the levels with a character's stuck-in-tar gait. There is an upside to picking the party member that leads things (enemies become more or less aggressive, or drop more or less items, or the Luna gauge feels automatically in battles), but it doesn't replace the fact that you'll spend lots of time seeing the same landscape and avoiding skulls.
It wouldn't be such a huge deal if there was something to see, but Blade Dancer for all the talk of being a console RPG, never really feels big. The worlds are sparsely decorated, and though the texturing is decent, the finder details like clumps or grass or people to talk to pop in suddenly. Out in the overworld, rampant fogging keeps the areas from feeling huge, and the areas themselves are often slathered with a simple color tone and minimal charm. There are some rare bits where you'll see a little deviation, but it's so rare, and most of the locales are so bland -- even with variation -- that it never feels like Foo is all that interesting -- nor does it feel like the PSP is really getting worked all that much.
At least the game runs smoothly, though. Both in battles and in the overworld, it would appear that the sacrifices to things like popup and fogging were done to keep the game at a nice, solid framerate, and in my mind, it's better to have things run smoothly than have tons of effects that bog down the framerate; too many games to the other route, and it's nice to see little things like smooth animation and modestly-sized villages offsetting the lack of special effects or textures that wow.
This was apparently a philosophy that mirrored the aural presentation, too. What music is in the game is almost all basic, though things do start off right with a main down theme in Jade, the port where you first arrive, that mixes little hints of Starcraft's Terran theme with the pluckier themes found in something like [ps2game=496]Final Fantasy XI[/ps2game]. On the one hand, nothing really offends, but then it doesn't make for great music either.
Out in the overworld, the only music you'll hear is the battle theme, which only changes up for major boss battles, and never really rises above the point of being tolerable for the game's 20+ hours. Replacing overworld music with simple, ambient wind-rustled trees and such was actually a smart move, as flipping back and forth between battle and main themes would have meant restarting the music multiple times, which can become seriously irritating. The voice acting deserves a mention only because it can come off like a bad anime dub at times, but there is the option to switch things over to the Japanese voices at any time if that's your thing, a very, very nice touch indeed.
I'm a little torn over Blade Dancer. On the one hand, it pulls off simple things like the item crafting and general exploration fairly well. The battle system is original enough that it feels unlike anything else on the PSP, yet feels suited for the system. Sadly, the characters, storyline and world never really hooked me, and so it became increasingly tough to do the level grind, then buy one set of armor and weapons, then appraise them, then spend time buying supplies and crafting things until everyone was all set, only to repeat it all over again in a new area.
The story does start to move a little, but it took me getting past the 15 hour mark before I even realized anything was going on, and unfortunately the storyline is the core of an RPG. There are times when [ps2game=584]the battle system and gameplay are enough to offset a crap storyline or ho-hum world progression[/ps2game], but Blade Dancer can't quite manage that.
What it can do is offer a largely mediocre but certainly tolerable RPG experience for a couple dozen hours. Nothing is so offensive that it will turn most away, but then it doesn't ever draw you in either. It just sort of sits there, accomplishing the task of being an RPG without ever excelling at anything. As a result, it gets the dubious honor of becoming the first genuinely average console-level RPG on the PSP. It's a step in the right direction, but doesn't quite step far enough.
