PoPoLoCrois
Ultra-cute 2-for-1.
Published: December 12, 2005
It turns pathways into strategic choke points and creates some interesting physical limitations because the game busts into a turn-based set of moves, allowing you to move along a grid and rotate the characters with the shoulder buttons to make side or back attacks against enemies. This makes for more powerful attacks, though like most of the controls and systems in the game, it’s not really explained, just assumed that you’ve played a strategy game. The characters level up with no real fanfare, and their special attacks do the same. If not for the menu screens that let you track things like experience, it almost feels like they happen at random.
Sadly, the game does do an awful lot of loading. It pre-loads the first time characters announce their attacks aloud, or when the battles themselves start. It loads between seemingly connected bits of open land, it loads going into bigger towns. The loading times are never especially lengthy, but they are painfully frequent, and it tends to make the flow of the game feel somewhat stutter-stepped – particularly with the random encounter rate being so high.
So you have the slightly wonky control system that encourages a lot of slamming into things at high speed, a lot of loading between bits of exploration and fights, and a generally passive attempt at translation and localization. It makes for a game that’s enjoyable, but only just, and quite a bit more could have been done to add some pep to the characters since the world itself is cute, but not terribly inviting.
Part of this might stem from the graphics themselves. The game delights in throwing lots of details into individual homes and buildings like chairs, tables, bookshelves, boxes and so on, and each part of the world does start to feel like it comes into its own, but the second the game decides to zoom in a bit (you can do this manually by holding the R button too), the whole mess becomes a hideous blob of stretched pixels. It’s clear that the assets were juuuust high-res enough to accommodate the PSP screen’s native resolution, but any attempt to move in from there leave the world a blotchy mess that’s similar to running an LCD monitor a few steps down from the default resolution.
When things are pulled out, though, there’s lots of little touches. The sprites are animated well, with plenty of little one- or couple-off animations that add a nice touch to things, and the characters and world themselves are filled with a unique kind of look that’s fantasy-meets-Tellytubbies. It’s cute, but not to the point of being excessively so.
Same with the audio. The music runs in short, repetitive little clips that can drone on after a while, but they’re never really all that grating, just unremarkable. Standard voice acting explains some of the more key plot points, and the characters have some nice variety in the voice clips they do utter during battle, but that’s about the extent of the extra personality that was slipped into the game.
PoPoLoCrois is a nice value for the price. Getting two games for the price of one stretches the experience out into something that feels console-length, but was made portable. Unfortunately, you’ll have to force yourself to warm up to the adventure rather than letting the game get you into it. If you can do that, there’s certainly enough fun in a standard been-there-done-that-20-times sort of way, but it’s not quite on the level of production values or talent that I’m hoping for on the PSP.
