Spectral Souls - Resurrection Of The Ethereal Empires

 File Size: 581.53 MB

File Type: CSO

Strategy RPGs are one of those genres that rely on a delicate sense of timing, plot and gameplay to succeed. Your tactics require precise timing to be successful during a mission. The plot needs to be engaging to keep you playing from one stage to the next. Gameplay has to be captivating and creative enough to give players options they want to use and exploit. If one of these features is hindered, it can potentially turn a good game into a mediocre one. Such is the case with NIS America's latest title for the PSP, Spectral Souls: Resurrection of the Ethereal Empire, which has some plot and gameplay elements, but the timing is so god awful that watching paint dry is more appealing than playing the game.

Spectral Souls is the tale of an alternate world called Neverland. Humans have been forced to submit to their demonic overlords, although they have frequently clashed in violent uprisings and rebellions throughout the course of time. While tenuous peace agreements slow down the full outbreak of war, the discontent is continually simmering under the surface of the civilization. After a number of villages are sacked and burned to the ground by demonic troops, a massive revolution erupts that kicks off what becomes known as the Seven Years War, a battle that threatens to change Neverland forever. Will the humans succeed or will the demons prevail? Not only will the story explore dark themes with a number of twists, but it may even surprise some RPG fans.

Initially, it seems like you're going to be forced to choose between the Imperial Neverland Army (comprised of the demons) and the Reformed Simba Empire (formed from human resistance fighters) to determine the fate of the world. In fact, you'll actually be able to play as both groups and even as a third side that emerges as time goes on, the peace seeking Rozess Liberation Army that wants humans and demons alike to live in harmony. As you play the game, you'll discover that you can switch back and forth between any one of the three sides at any point between combat missions, although after a certain number of battles you'll uncover what's known as a Historical Event. These key moments in the timeline of the Seven Years War force you to choose a side as you attempt to influence history. Depending on the army that you happen to have selected when you complete that event, you may eliminate battles or further options for the other sides.

Players that are accustomed to strategy RPGs will be used to the standard convention of spending time in towns, prepping your characters before they go into battle. The towns typically have three specific places that you can strengthen your characters: Item Shops, Workshops and Guilds. Item Shops let you buy and sell everything from weapons and armor to healing items and accessories. They may not seem to be as important as the other two, but receiving materials at Item Shops are key when you get to Workshops. Workshops let you strengthen the level of skills and items that your characters have to become much stronger and effective in battle. You're limited by how much you can boost these stats: most items and skills start out at Rank 1 and can eventually become Rank 5. You can also take any one of these stronger items and invent newer objects at Workshops, which will impart new stat boosts. The same can be said for skills, where you can literally mix abilities to create new traits. In fact, you can only create some of the more powerful abilities within the game by inventing new talents for your characters.

Finally, the Guilds are key because they allow you to boost your party members with party points that you receive after each battle, which is a free way to augment stats. You'll also be able to use them to change the class of any one of your characters to give them new skills and extra stat points by taking on guild challenges. While the town system is important, some elements aren't particularly impressive -- augmenting skills and items are rather generic, and they don't feel as deep as other strategy games. In particular, many of the low level skills are either ineffectual or too weak for their own good, but because you'll need to power them up before you can create something useful, you'll sometimes be stuck for a while before you get something impressive.

Of course, that brings me to the battle system, which should be familiar to veterans of strategy RPGs. Before each fight, you'll need to select the party members that will accompany you into battle, and you'll discover the various conditions that you need to succeed or fail a mission. You'll also find that there are some special conditions that might arise, such as lasting for a number of rounds or killing certain enemies that you will receive additional bonus points for to augment your party members. Turns are based along an active time gauge at the top of the screen that dictates when allies and enemies can move or attack, and every move is governed by AP points. Oddly, every strike, including basic attacks, are considered as skills. While you can perform these standard strikes or skills on an enemy, landing a certain amount of damage and moving onto the next turn, a majority of the battle system revolves around the Hold skill and Charge skill.

Hold let characters store up and release multiple attacks or skills at one time depending on the amount of AP you have available at that point. Creatively, you can also combine skills for your characters into stronger attacks, making one attack significantly stronger. For instance, holding two attack skills together will result in a multiple strike skill, while combining basic attacks with elemental skills will boost the power of these strikes. You really have to experiment a lot to discover what combinations make effective attacks with Hold. Charge is a variation on hold -- you set the strikes that you'll want to unleash on a target, but your attacks won't actually be triggered until a teammate lands a blow on the same target. This gives you the chance to chain together massive combos, but there is a significant risk of losing your initial attack in various ways, including if the target moves or if your character's turn comes back up again. Initially, Hold will be much more effective in battle than Charge will be to players, until you get used to the system. After a while, you'll find that the only way to land huge damage on powerful enemies is via the Charge chain attacks. This strikes a strange balance where you'll literally come to like and hate these two skills alternatively.

However, apart from the strange love/hate relationship with the skills that you'll have with the skill system, the largest flaw that exists within Spectral Souls is the constant and infuriating load times within the game. For a game that really isn't stretching the technical capabilities of the PSP by any stretch of the imagination, there's really no excuse for the number of times the game accesses the disc and spits out the message, "Disc Access" on the screen. Everything, from simple character movement on the battlefield to basic attacks, requires a 3-5 second load before the action is triggered. It would've even been understandable if these loads were designed for powerful chain attacks only or special instances, but it's literally ANYTHING within the game. Conversations are even worse: the disc loads, then a picture appears, the disc loads once again, and then a sentence or two of dialogue is printed on the screen. Then the same loop repeats when another character makes a response. As a result, simple battles can take up to a half hour and larger, more difficult battles will easily take more than an hour and a half. The game simply shouldn't have been released with these abysmally crippling loads.

In some ways, it's almost impossible to describe the frustration that the load times impart, especially when you look at the basic 2D sprites and basic environs of the game. While some of the attacks are impressive, these aren't visuals that you haven't seen in other strategy RPGs, which again raises the question -- what's up with the constant loads? The same can be said about the soundtrack: decent, but not necessarily ear catching. Surprisingly, there's no voice acting at all, which could've explained the excessive load times as well, but there's nothing there. (Did I mention the retarded load times?) 

 

Review Source: IGN.com

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