I wanted to like Blade Dancer much more than this. I liked what NIS showed me at E3, and the concepts behind this game seemed sound at the time. But after getting my mitts on this superbly average RPG I come away disappointed and at times infuriated by the things this game does to suck out what fun I had previously anticipated. It follows the old ‘one step forward, two steps back’ axiom and winds up being a lot more frustrating than it should have been. Strictly vanilla is the best way to describe this title, with its generic characters, plodding story, and generally unfriendly interface. It’s hard to find anything to love about this game. What’s worse is that this is still one of the better RPGs in the PSP library, and barely has enough to keep it endearing enough to play through.

Here’s a little time line of events as I went through this game. Within the first hour I had no clue on where to go, I had to deliver sandwiches to three people in town and I was supposed to make my way to the Lunar Tower. I spent the second hour appraising items and then selling stuff to find the components to craft the stuff I had just broken down. By the third hour I’m out and about in the fields running in to mobs of monsters, I’m digging the battle system, but I’m getting really pissed off that my weapons are breaking. I’ve found this guy in the forest who attacked me for little reason and then decided to join my party. I still have no idea on where to go… Okay by the fourth hour I’m wandering through zones with an idea on where to go, just no direction on how to get there.

I made a good amount of progress from there, recruited the rest of my party and started to make my way across the island of Foo in an attempt to stop the Dread Knight. I would like this story more if the game gave me the proper direction in which to go. I find it painful to slog through this deluge of zones without a map indicator to lead me back to my point of origin or to my intended destination. I’ve got a number of the zones memorized but I still find myself getting lost quite a bit. There is no large map to tell me what zones connect to where and it puts a major hurt on this title. Couple this with the fact that you move across the world at a slow pace and you’re going to put this down faster than you picked it up.

As you struggle to wander through the requisite forest and desert landscapes you’re going to run in to a large number of monsters. If Blade Dancer didn’t have such an enjoyable battle system then I would have shelved this game a lot sooner, but it has a very functional system that plays like how I would expect something like Final Fantasy XI or even World of Warcraft to. None of this auto-attack nonsense that I have no control over. Instead you see an enemy out on the field, you can check to see how difficult a fight it will be or how many enemies you’re up against, and then you run in to their avatar. Once battle begins there is a timer for each character, once it completes a rotation then you can make a move. There is a meter at the top of the screen called the Luna Bar, which functions as magic points for the entire party. This bar is also shared with your enemies which provides for a nice amount of strategy in fights. Do you save all of the Luna power to let out one massive attack? Or do you use it as the Luna Bar is filled keeping the amount of available energy low? Early going it’ll be rough, with one party member the weapons break frequently, and it’s easy to get outmatched by some of the mobs.