The basics go like this: the world of Jewel Summoner is broken down into light and dark elements -- fire, ice, wind, earth, lightning and water breath it down further -- with each sub-element cancelling out the next but being trumped by the previous. This balancing act is key, since all monsters have some kind of innate element, and be countered by their opposing element. Nearly every monster we ran across could be captured providing we did two things: used a prism of their corresponding element (a handy color for each makes it pretty quick to divine what monsters are what) and beat on 'em a little to drop their life bar enough to scoop them into their new crystalline coffin. Once captured, we could either drop them into one of three slots of one party member, or teleport them back to the Order's sort of holding tank -- though there was a catch in that once the tank was full, the capture would be in vain, but we're pretty sure we've got plenty more hours before that happens.

Simple concept, no? Familiar, too, when you factor in the idea that any summoned monsters still around at the end of the battle gain experience (as do the summoners), but that's where the similarity to pocket monsters ends. For starters, all monsters are subject to the additional tweaks of amalgamy, the ability to blend quartz with crystals to change their shape and, in turn, give your monsters new abilities and, if you're good, cause them to evolve.

Monster evolution is a complicated process, and we're not quite sure we're ready to properly explain it all, but we'll try. Fusion is the process by which you can trigger evolution. It actually happens, so you may have to play a couple of hours or nod off for a while until the clock ticks down to the next big addition. If successful -- and this can depend on a number of factors like time of day or even a particular monster's pickiness -- a monster will evolve along a unique path. This gives the game's 100+ monsters a ton of variety, and makes the Wi-Fi trading between players unique.

You can also wirelessly battle a friend/enemy, and the battles here work the same way as they do in the single-player game. A funky little split-screen display shows both your monster and the enemy, and at the bottom of the screen a simple portrait-driven turn order is displayed. Ordinarily, things progress in the order they start, but you can actually shift the turn order by attacking monsters with an opposing elemental attack, called a regression, which in turn offers a chance at intrusion, bumping the enemy back along the timeline and your characters up ahead of them. A caveat, though: do it too often and the monster will get pissed, increasing their attack power and making their turn order unswayable.

The crazy thing is that we're still not sure we've gotten even the full basics of the game down. We do know, however, that Jewel Summoner is anything but a half-assed PSP RPG effort. So far, Sony's wunderportable has been subjected to lazy ports and novel, but ultimately underwhelming role-playing concepts, but 2007 is starting to look a whole lot more interesting, and Jewel Summoner is the start of the high-profile RPG stream.

We'll have a full review in a couple weeks, but to hold you over, we've got a handful of new screens and, though we've never really done this before in a preview, we couldn't help but point out that the official Jewel Summoner site probably does a better job of explaining what we just did... with pictures! So head on over and check it out for a ton more info. See you again in a few weeks!