Spectral Souls
Hooray, we now officially have a worst game on the PSP. By a mile.
Published: September 26, 2006
This is all after you'd fumbled around with the perplexingly difficult control scheme, of course. Instead of adopting something close to what most SRPGs manage, things are mapped to apparently just cause confusion. The shoulder buttons don't rotate the map (instead that's left to the analog nub, along with zoom), the d-pad's control of the cursor is based on the direction of the camera, but still feels off, as if the diagonals should be used instead, leading to moving right when you want to move down.
The visuals don't help things -- not only because they're simplistic as all hell, but because this is the very same grid-based movement system with claustrophobic alleyways and chunks of forest that we've seen rendered in 3D with plenty of detail in perfect smoothness since the original PlayStation. There's also a disturbing lack of ability to get the camera to cooperate so you can see enemies. Trees and buildings often completely blot out enemies, and if it weren't for the fact that they take a turn and move, you may not even know they're there at all. Just throwing in some translucency would have helped a ton. The texture work and sprites aren't horrid (truth be told, at times the textures can actually look really nice -- marble floors and stone streets are replicated nicely), but there's quite a bit of re-use.
If nothing else, the character portraits do a good job of letting you know who's speaking if there's a crowd, since things don't appear in text bubbles. It's just all the stupid pausing that takes place to load up something as simple as "..." that drove me up a wall. I don't want to know what's happening if I have to experience it as if the conversations are being beamed in real time from the developer up to a satellite and then downloaded by my PSP at the speed of a 9600 baud modem.
Without any voice acting, the game is left to fall on the sound effects, which are little more than slashes and grunts or screams with attacks and hits, and the soundtrack. The soundtrack is actually fairly decent, with a hard-rockin' intro track that would fit in with most any action movie these days, and the rest more of a mix of more traditional brassy, splashy, booming quasi-orchestral tracks (though it's obviously pretty synth-heavy).
I don't know who I'm more disappointed in; SCEA for allowing this game to be released here in the US or NIS America for publishing it. This is an abomination burned onto a UMD, an utterly pointless exercise in testing the limits of someone's patience, and I've no doubt that in some deep circle of hell, this game is used to torture people who played video games instead of attending their siblings' birthday parties or something.
I'm sure Spectral Souls is better on the PS2, as nothing could possibly be worse than this game, but there is the question of whether or not it was any good in the first place. Though I could stomach the cookie cutter characters and the attempts at human/demon relations, it's nothing you couldn't experience in a better presentation. Seriously, do not touch this game unless you have some sort of fetish for miserable gaming experiences.
