Neopets: Petpet Adventure - The Wand of Wishing
I wish it were just a little more well thought out.
Published: May 2, 2006
The Neopets license is, at first thought, an awfully odd property to pick up for games. Granted, the Neopets.com web site sold for $160 million dollars recently, and the 15 million users that it's garnered since launch is certainly nothing to scoff at, but can a browser-based, community-driven online pet rearing distraction really work as a video game?
The simple answer, surprisingly, is yes -- so long as some liberties are taken and plenty is borrowed from established bits of gameplay. Translating the process of playing mini-games to earn loot and a watchful eye on your pet to a Untold Legends-style adventure wasn't done with carelessness to the source material, but some of the ideas aren't quite fully formed to the point where the game feels like it can hang with other PSP contemporaries (or, for that matter, the Untold Legends series).
Still, there is a surprising amount of fun to be had here. SCEA San Diego took care in crafting the worlds you'll journey across while discovering what exactly the Wand of Wishing is and why the corruption that's spreading through the land of Petaria, liberally sprinkling in references to the online portal such that even casual players will catch them for the most part.
The basics of a top-down dungeon crawl manage to shine through even a cutesy veneer; you can clumsily swing a weapon in melee attacks, fire off spells (if the petpet is capable of pulling them off, but more on that in a second), interact with the environment (usually this means smashing things and draggin or pushing basic objects around) and launch into fairly lengthy conversations with the equally adorable denizens of this world.
What's perplexing about the game design, however, is how things have been omitted or made unnecessarily complex or tedious. For instance, like more hack and slashers, you'll gain quests from villagers and important characters in the world, and these quests are stored in a journal, but the actual location of the quest giver is mysteriously left, out, leading to a ton of talk-to-everyone-in-town segments if you've left the game for any modest length of time.
There's map included, but it's terribly inadequate and since you'll likely juggle multiple quests, it's bizarre that it wouldn't be pointed out -- even in a very basic sense -- where you're supposed to return to. A mini-map is so zoomed in and featureless that it's near-useless, leading to way too much backtracking and wandering.
Another, and perhaps most aggregious issue, is that of leveling up your petpet. You start by picking from a handful of equally adorable little critters that are either balanced or favor magic or melee combat. This is merely a jumping-off point, since you can level them up as you see fit, but this process doesn't happen by way of killing off adorable badguys. Instead, you're forced to pony up cash to fight in arenas and if you win you'll get a token you can use to built up a single stat like strength, agility, intelligence, defense and health.
The battledome aspect is a nice nod to your ability to pet your petpets against each other online, but the whole process is incredibly monotonous and repetitive -- and worst of all it costs you hard-earned cash. It boggles the mind that this was an active decision.
The interface, too, doesn't seem built for use during combat. Your spells and items are stored in a belt with slots that can be whipped through via the d-pad, but like the combat itself, this is a clunky and unintuitive process that leaves you open to attack as you fumble with the right spell or restorative. I like that there aren't endless potions being dropped left and right, but the gameplay can get hard enough (though this is almost exclusively early on) that you need to either kill an enemy and then hang back and wait for your health to refill or use up all your restoratives -- neither of which lends itself to quick playthroughs.
The simple answer, surprisingly, is yes -- so long as some liberties are taken and plenty is borrowed from established bits of gameplay. Translating the process of playing mini-games to earn loot and a watchful eye on your pet to a Untold Legends-style adventure wasn't done with carelessness to the source material, but some of the ideas aren't quite fully formed to the point where the game feels like it can hang with other PSP contemporaries (or, for that matter, the Untold Legends series).
Still, there is a surprising amount of fun to be had here. SCEA San Diego took care in crafting the worlds you'll journey across while discovering what exactly the Wand of Wishing is and why the corruption that's spreading through the land of Petaria, liberally sprinkling in references to the online portal such that even casual players will catch them for the most part.
The basics of a top-down dungeon crawl manage to shine through even a cutesy veneer; you can clumsily swing a weapon in melee attacks, fire off spells (if the petpet is capable of pulling them off, but more on that in a second), interact with the environment (usually this means smashing things and draggin or pushing basic objects around) and launch into fairly lengthy conversations with the equally adorable denizens of this world.
What's perplexing about the game design, however, is how things have been omitted or made unnecessarily complex or tedious. For instance, like more hack and slashers, you'll gain quests from villagers and important characters in the world, and these quests are stored in a journal, but the actual location of the quest giver is mysteriously left, out, leading to a ton of talk-to-everyone-in-town segments if you've left the game for any modest length of time.
There's map included, but it's terribly inadequate and since you'll likely juggle multiple quests, it's bizarre that it wouldn't be pointed out -- even in a very basic sense -- where you're supposed to return to. A mini-map is so zoomed in and featureless that it's near-useless, leading to way too much backtracking and wandering.
Another, and perhaps most aggregious issue, is that of leveling up your petpet. You start by picking from a handful of equally adorable little critters that are either balanced or favor magic or melee combat. This is merely a jumping-off point, since you can level them up as you see fit, but this process doesn't happen by way of killing off adorable badguys. Instead, you're forced to pony up cash to fight in arenas and if you win you'll get a token you can use to built up a single stat like strength, agility, intelligence, defense and health.
The battledome aspect is a nice nod to your ability to pet your petpets against each other online, but the whole process is incredibly monotonous and repetitive -- and worst of all it costs you hard-earned cash. It boggles the mind that this was an active decision.
The interface, too, doesn't seem built for use during combat. Your spells and items are stored in a belt with slots that can be whipped through via the d-pad, but like the combat itself, this is a clunky and unintuitive process that leaves you open to attack as you fumble with the right spell or restorative. I like that there aren't endless potions being dropped left and right, but the gameplay can get hard enough (though this is almost exclusively early on) that you need to either kill an enemy and then hang back and wait for your health to refill or use up all your restoratives -- neither of which lends itself to quick playthroughs.
