Welcome to the next installment of Limit Break. Last month in the premier episode we looked at a few budding MMOs that will be hitting the market in the near future while this issue, I believe we should focus the attention on the RPG world in a much smaller scale. I’m talking about the portable gaming market for RPGs. Then a little later, I want to turn your attention to my latest addiction that came from one of the more unlikely of places, Korea.
PSP – King of RPGs?
Recently, the Sony PlayStation Portable has been gaining significant ground on being a standard staple for RPGs. Specifically, Japanese developers have begun throwing a slew of games at the PSP. XSEED games recently released a fan favorite, Ys Seven to the portable with a pretty good reception. What makes this significant is the company plans on releasing a barrage of Ys world inspired games to the PSP in short order over the next year. Three other titles from the Ys universe will be hitting the streets for RPG fans to latch on to. Ys: The Oath in Felghana is set to release this winter followed shortly by the re-release of Ys I & II Chronicles early next year. This action RPG has gathered a pretty stout following throughout the years but often times has received little attention by mainstream RPG traffic to the US.
Other titles that are already out this year on the PSP such as Lunar: Silver Star Harmony again, by XSEED is a ground up remake of a classic turn-based JRPG. Persona 3 Portable by our good friends over at Atlus was released at the beginning of summer and had fans chomping at the bit for more. Other titles already out that may have flown under the radar are Hexyz Force by Atlus, Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley by Natsume and Mimana Iyar Chronicles by Aksys Games make for a pretty stout lineup. Its also hard to ignore such titles out now as Phantasy Star Portable 2 and Valkyria Chronicles II by Sega as potential RPG canon.
I haven’t even begun to talk about the upcoming games such as Final Fantasy Agito XIII which personally is one I’ve been looking forward to since the announcement back in 2006 because of the return of the job system made famous by Final Fantasy Tactics. Another Square-Enix game is The 3rd Birthday which will be an action RPG in the same vane as the PS1 title Parasite Eve which still ranks as one of my personal favorite games of all time. Yet again, Square-Enix will give us another PSP RPG to salivate over in Lord of Arcana which appears to be similar to the Monster Hunter games that have become so good on the handheld. Rounding out the Square-Enix assault on your RPG senses is Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Any fans of Strategy RPGs know that Tactics Ogre sets a high mark to be compared to in sheer quality of SRPGs. Let’s not forget the recently released Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep which has a review forthcoming on this very site.
Some other titles from smaller developers are even still in the wings for the often forgotten system. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky by XSEED, God Eater Burst, Puzzle Quest 2, Patapon 3, Blazing Souls Accelate, Knights in the Nightmare, and even the quirky Cladun: This is an RPG all make for a robust and full lineup for all RPG fans to choose from. That’s the point I want to discuss today. Is the PSP poised to become the paramount RPG platform? With so many titles being released on it and a lot of them good, can this be what takes the edge off of the Nintendo DS the portable juggernaut? It’s hard to ignore the PSP with such RPG goodness bursting at its seams.
Love it or hate it, the PSP has slowly been becoming one of the best places to get your fix of JRPGs. Fans of the genre have had to fight tooth and nail to get a decent one on the major consoles, but the PSP has expanded its catalog by leaps and bounds. While Nintendo still has a huge collection available to gamers, most of the games are played out, in my opinion, in a simplistic and almost childlike nature that doesn’t appeal to me. A lot more games on the PSP offer adult oriented themes.
Vindictus – More like Addictus!
The next order of business is an MMORPG that I was turned onto by Nexon. This free-to-play Korean MMO is really something fantastic to marvel at. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Free Korean MMOs are all the same and not worth their weight in advertisements, but you owe it to yourself to try Vindictus. Forget everything you ever knew about MMORPGs and throw it out the window. The tried and true method of global cooldowns for spells and skills are gone. No longer do you have to simply mash the #3 key for that Ice Bane spell and wait for the cooldown timer to expire before you rap on #2 for your DOT spell. Vindictus puts you in the heat of battle and puts the action back in action RPGs. The game plays more like an action title than it does any MMO I’ve ever played. Even in the beta, it maps perfectly to an Xbox 360 controller and actually plays better on it. You don’t have to map 300 spells to your keyboard shortcuts because unleashing hell upon your enemies is as simple as chaining combos together on your controller. As you level, you’ll gain more vicious attacks and bigger combos to bring the pain. Leveling up your character increases their combat stats and allow you to dispatch foes quicker and bloodier than previously before. Forget trying to snare a mob in a trap while you fling arrows at them from afar and replace that with getting up in their face, slicing them, then grabbing then and suplexing them into a tree. Then, to put the icing on that cake, watch that tree fall from the destructive force of your attack. This world features destructible environments that can be picked up and used as weapons as well. Notice that barrel sitting over there on the side of the screen? Well, you can pick that up and throw it at your enemies to stun them and setup your onslaught of attacks. Feel like giving the mobs back a little of what they deserve? Pick up one of their corpses and use it as a weapon as well.
Vindictus is a very visceral game that puts action first and foremost. It comes in as a very refreshing game in a somewhat stagnate MMO world. Most developers seem to just regurgitate ideas that have already been put out there but Vindictus clearly breaks the mold in a very satisfying action RPG. There’s something special about grabbing a group of people and setting out on a quest and not having to wait for things to proc, but just let the action unfold in a user skill based setting. Great stuff is bound to come from this title. Check it out.
Just one more level. Honest.
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