Scared Straight
Brave Story is the first legitimate console-quality RPG on the PSP. It's also a pure paint-by-numbers experience.
Published: July 25, 2007
Also prepare yourself for a bit of aimless wandering and a cookie cutter RPG experience otherwise. Oh, sure, the localization and translation of the game are both very solid indeed (there's even some basic voice work for the movie sections of the game), going so far as to give some characters' text some personality, but though the inhabitants of the world can sometimes be quite entertaining, the world itself (explored from a top-down perspective when not in towns) is fairly bland. It's also clearly a game aimed at a slightly younger crowd, as it rarely presents much of a challenge in even boss fights.
But good lawd, them visuals... Everything in the game has a soft, almost dream-like look while in Vision (which, uh, makes sense, I suppose), but the lighting and the texture work and the animations -- which are absolutely fantastic, incredibly varied (there are a ton of one-time animations) and are often better at conveying little nuances than the dialogue is -- all of it is wrapped up into a presentation that just floored me.
The framerate was solid, the little onomatopoeic expressions that would pop up as an attack connected were awesome and the game churned through endless menus and info screens and transitions with nary a hitch. It is, in a word, gorgeous, and almost worth buying just to prove the PSP can do something like this -- and do it well.
The audio doesn't fare so well. It's not bad by any stretch, but it's certainly forgettable, from music to voice acting to sound effects, which were splashy and clean, perfectly complementing the visuals, but really did little to stand out.
I probably should make this distinction here at the end because I don't know if I've actually said it plainly yet: Brave Story: New Traveler isn't a bad RPG by any stretch. It's just that everything beyond the tech isn't really up to the same level as all that seamless loading and gorgeous visuals. Had the storyline or the characters been on that level, this could have sold systems all on its own. Hell, it still might, but not quite on the same scale as it could have. By all means, check the game out, just don't expect anything more than a pretty face and not much going on upstairs.