God of War: Ghost of Sparta Review

Ghost of Sparta offers stunning environments and brutal combat, but a few issues get in Kratos' way.

The Good

• Incredible visuals, both technically and artistically  
• Violent combat with responsive controls  
• Puzzles are a great change of pace  
• Thoughtful story with a couple of touching moments.

The Bad

• Does little to differentiate itself from other God of War games  
• Design issues affect both the visuals and combat.

The word "epic" gets thrown around an awful lot, but it's rare that a portable game is worthy of such a lofty distinction. God of War: Ghost of Sparta doesn't let the diminutive hardware it resides on get in the way of delivering the breathtaking sense of scale for which the series is known. Incredible visuals ensure the mythical locations you venture to continually amaze with their strong sense of place and varied artistic design. And sharp controls push Kratos' unrelenting rage to the forefront so you can focus on tearing the minions who dare oppose you limb from bloody limb. Ghost of Sparta is an impressive technical achievement that is almost indistinguishable from its PlayStation 2 brothers, but that authenticity comes with a few drawbacks. The chaotic action makes it easy to lose Kratos on the PSP's small screen, and some of the controls are uncomfortable enough to cause aggravation. But aside from a few awkward moments, Ghost of Sparta is another great entry in the respected series that does justice to Kratos' deadly exploits.

Kratos' bond to his family has been the underlying theme that connects every game in the God of War series together. In Ghost of Sparta, Kratos' ultimate goal is to discover the fate of his brother who was forcibly separated from him when they were both still children. The adventure takes place between the first two games in the series, and it does a fine job of fleshing out his painful backstory while furthering the notion that Kratos must exact revenge on the gods. There are a few clever sequences in which the story and gameplay are intertwined, and these prove to be the most powerful moments in the game. Kratos is more complex than his angry facade would lead you to believe, and being able to see how he relates to his blood relatives goes a long way toward making this god slayer feel like a normal man with a few larger-than-life problems.
The slowly developing story does a good job of pushing you through this thrilling adventure, but it's the outstanding visuals that provide the wow factor. This is a stunning-looking game. Clever camera work smoothly transitions between tight close-ups and sweeping panoramas, and exacting details ensure that every view comes with its own visual delights. The technical range is particularly impressive because the game floods the screen with enemies and special effects without skipping a beat, and the artistic flourishes give every creature a unique personality and each location a different feel. Unfortunately, because the screen is so small, it can be difficult to locate the pint-sized Kratos during certain sequences where you must battle a horde of enemies while the camera is pulled way back. It's a small price to pay for such an amazing-looking game, but it does lessen the impact when you can't see what you're doing.
The brutal combat continues the trend of shrinking the console experience down to the portable world. Belting out combos that stretch well into the dozens is a snap, thanks to razor-sharp controls that make it a savage joy to rip your enemies to shreds. The assortment of magical attacks and weapons that you unlock during the course of your journey may not veer far from previous games in the series, but they do provide enough variety to ensure you're engaged the entire time. Rolling out of the way of an impending attack is fast and responsive, but parrying deadly blows is slightly tougher. The combination of a zoomed-out camera and a small screen makes it tricky to time your block against certain enemies, and though the game is easy enough on the default difficulty to avoid frustration, it's still annoying. More aggravating is the reliance on rapidly tapping the shoulder buttons to escape certain attacks. This is clunky at best and downright painful at worst, and it could have been avoided if tapping the face buttons were the option instead. Despite a few stumbles, the controls are generally smooth and responsive, making it a visceral delight to battle the minions in your path.
In between your binges of unrepentant bloodshed are cerebral puzzles that let you rest your muscles for a second and get your cognitive skills firing. These thoughtful breaks are expertly interwoven with the brutal combat, giving you a chance to catch your breath for a few minutes before you're back to slicing off heads once more. The puzzles often rely on tasks from the previous games, so you once again have to make clever use of dead bodies as in God of War: Chains of Olympus and punt dogs into specific objects as Kratos did in God of War III, but that doesn't hinder the fun of figuring out what needs to be done to proceed. The puzzles find a good middle ground between painfully obvious and maddeningly obtuse, so you still feel empowered when you solve a tricky conundrum and don't have to worry about being stranded in the same spot because it's way too challenging. The one flaw pertains, once again, to the zoomed-out camera and small screen. You often have to interact with a specific object to move on, and it can be tough to see what needs to be done when it's just a few pixels high. But, for the most part, the puzzles are a great respite from the hectic action.

After suffering through so much eye poking, you would think Cyclops would start wearing goggles.

Boss fights are the one area where Ghost of Sparta falters. You square off against a number of murderous monsters, and finishing them off in style is certainly exciting. But the fights are ultimately forgettable for a number of reasons. First, they are exceptionally easy. A seasoned God of War player should be able to breeze through every one of these encounters without any problems, and it's not exactly thrilling to topple a giant pushover. Second, they borrow so heavily from previous games in the series that they don't have an identity of their own. This is true for the vast majority of the game, whether it's the boss fights, puzzles, visual design, or combat, and it's not until the end that Sparta becomes its own beast. The entire last level, and especially the boss, is when Sparta finally separates itself from the games that came before it.
The biggest problem with Ghost of Sparta is that it tries so hard to mirror previous entries in the series that it doesn't have its own identity. This hinders the gameplay occasionally because a feeling of deja vu permeates all of your actions, and the PSP just can't match its console peers. But when Sparta's biggest problem is that it's too close to the excellent games that came before it, that's not a huge setback. This is not only an amazing-looking game, but it's incredibly fun as well. Slicing mischievous minions in a variety of stunning locales is an exhilarating experience, and because the adventure stretches on for more than 10 hours, you can lose yourself in this fantastical land for quite a while. Ghost of Sparta is a gorgeous and satisfying adventure that will keep you glued to the screen until the very end.

Lord of Arcana Review

Tedious quests and dull, infuriating combat make this one fantasy adventure whose monsters you won't want to hunt.

The Good

• Becoming more powerful and earning better gear is satisfying  
• A few nifty stylistic flourishes in battle.

The Bad

• Combat is tedious and repetitive  
• Bosses employ some infuriating tricks and take far too long to defeat  
• Frequent loading times and other minor annoyances  
• Bland visuals.

Taking on quests, killing monsters, and slowly advancing from a relative weakling into the greatest warrior the realm has ever seen. It's the stuff of legends passed down from generation to generation, and when it's done right, it's the stuff of thrilling video games, too. But alas, though a journey from zero to hero is at the heart of Lord of Arcana, the thrills are absent. Instead, the road to becoming a well-equipped, powerful fighting machine in Lord of Arcana is paved with frustration and tedium.

After you create your character by selecting from a modest assortment of faces, hairstyles, and the like, Lord of Arcana begins by giving you a small taste of life as a powerful warrior. Fighting your way through a dungeon, you cut through goblins with relative ease and summon the devastating magic of the massive beast Bahamut to aid you. This trek culminates in a battle against a "Dragon of Murderous Rampage." But no sooner do you earn victory over this monster than you find yourself in a temple, stripped down to level one, without any of the powerful gear or magic you were just wielding. You have sacrificed all your strength and your memories to be transported here, to the seaside village of Porto Carillo, to test your fate and prove yourself to be the worthy successor to the ancient king of the land of Horodyn. A few early cutscenes set the stage for the tale, but for the most part, story takes a distant backseat to the business of embarking on quests, strengthening your character, and acquiring better gear.
To embark on a quest, you speak to the woman at the counter for the Slayers Guild in the village. Once you select a quest from the available options, you're transported to the area where the quest takes place, be it Neumellow Woods, Ahbor Desert, Kamma Wind Cave, or some other region. Then, it's up to you to complete the quest objective within a set time limit. Quests can involve killing a certain number of a specific type of enemy, gathering a certain item, or defeating a boss monster. No matter what the objective of your quest is, however, you can bet that completing it won't be much fun.
Combat with the ordinary monsters who roam each area is dull for a number of reasons. For one, monsters behave according to obvious, repetitive patterns, making each encounter with a given type of monster feel the same as every other. The various types of goblins you encounter frequently on your adventures, for instance, always do a happy little dance that lasts a few seconds before they attack, giving you ample time to guard or dash out of the way. Skeletons have a habit of guarding constantly, so fights against them become a continuous attempt to get behind them and attack where they are vulnerable. The little plantlike creatures called mandrakes have the irritating ability to summon monsters to aid them that may be more powerful than you can handle, but no matter. You can just escape from battle and then attack the mandrake again, hoping that this time you kill it before it calls for help. There are a few stylistic flourishes that liven combat up a bit, like the brutal finishing moves (called coups de grace) that you perform with the push of a button and that result in your foes exploding in a bloody mess. But such moments of gory visual glee can't stave off the boredom that quickly sets in. Lord of Arcana invites obvious comparisons to the Monster Hunter series, but fails to imbue the hunts with any sense of thrill whatsoever.

Welcome to Porto Carillo, land of fierce monsters and fiercer backhanded compliments.

This remains true when tackling boss monsters. Agni, a flaming rock giant, rolls up into a ball, speeds around the arena for a while, and then stands up, woozy and disoriented, giving you an obvious chance to strike. This repeats again and again and again, for far, far too long, until at last he falls to your blows. The storm god Takemikazuchi has the ability to shrink you down to a minuscule size, which makes your attacks ineffectual and tremendously slows the rate at which you can cover ground. As a result of your slow movement, trying to track down the floating keystone you need to strike to return to normal size becomes an exercise in frustration. This trick is doubly frustrating when you encounter it again as you fight the regal horselike creature Kirin, whose speedy charging attacks are just about impossible to avoid when you're tiny. Boss battles culminate in flashy quick-time events called melee duels, but like the coups de grace, these can't redeem the tedium that precedes them. And when a boss finally falls to your attacks, you don't feel victorious so much as just relieved that it's over.

There are five types of weapons to choose from, and at least they feel significantly different from each other. One-handed swords allow for relatively quick attacks and let you wield a shield in battle. Maces are slower and heavier but let you unleash powerful charged strikes. The ludicrously huge two-handed swords take time to swing but do heavy damage. Polearms let you respond to enemy attacks with counterattacks. And firelances are pikes that fire projectiles, which makes fighting some enemies a joke, because you can stand in one place and chip away at their health from a safe distance, and they are seemingly powerless to do anything about it. Regardless of your choice of weapon, none of them can make the combat enjoyable. 


Teaming up with a friend or three via local multiplayer on your quests can make the combat less painful, but only because suffering with friends is better than suffering alone. Enemies don't become any more interesting to fight, and boss battles don't become any less tedious and frustrating. The lack of online multiplayer severely limits the amount of use you are likely to get out of this option, and the fact that only the host saves any actual mission completion data and quest progress makes tagging along with others a much less attractive proposition.
A number of other minor issues contribute to the general unpleasantness of questing. For one, each area is divided up into a number of very small sections, and you're treated to a loading time almost every time you exit one section and enter the next. (These can be offset somewhat by installing the game.) For another, locking on to enemies requires that you keep the L button held down, which is an unnecessary design decision, since a toggle would have worked just as well. And as you gather the torn leather, clean water, starch spuds, bog moss, and other items scattered around each area, you must press the button and wait a moment for your character to bend down and pick up each individual unit. There may be three cypress staffs in one spot, but you can't save time and grab all three of them at once. Individually, issues like this aren't terribly significant. But combined, they make the whole experience of playing Lord of Arcana even less enjoyable.

Pushing the button over and over to pick up each cypress staff does not result in a more immersive experience.

There's more to Lord of Arcana than combat. As you quest, your character becomes stronger, learns new weapon strikes, very slowly gains magic attacks, and gathers all kinds of items that let the blacksmith in town forge better equipment for him or her. And seeing your character develop as you sink time into killing monsters, earning experience, and completing quests carries with it a sense of satisfaction like that which you'd expect to find in just about any role-playing game. The problem with Lord of Arcana is that the things you need to do to make that progress are extremely tedious, repetitive, and occasionally infuriating. The whole point of getting stronger and acquiring better gear is to make you more effective on your next quest; rewards along the way can't make up for an unpleasant journey. On top of that, the game's not much to look at. Your attacks look powerful, but your enemies are so lacking in detail that you'd probably never know the skeletons were skeletons if you weren't told, and the arenas in which you do battle are about as bland as bland can be. With all the frustrations and all the boredom this game dishes out and with so many similar, better games available for the PSP, there's no reason to embark on this quest. Becoming the next lord of Arcana just isn't worth it.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Preview

Xseed's partnership with developer Nihon Falcom is certainly benefitting old-school Japanese role-playing game fans in North America. The publisher recently released the Ys games for the PlayStation Portable and is now working on localizing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy that was originally released in Japan in 2004. Anyone comfortable with turn-based battles will feel right at home, but Trails in the Sky makes its own touches to the combat system and customization to make it unique.

Combat is grid-based, but you can't really tell.

The story is set in Liberl Kingdom and revolves around a feisty young girl named Estelle Bright, the daughter of a legendary fighter. Her adopted brother Joshua is always by her side looking out for her as they take on guild quests together. You'll join the Bracer guild early on (an organization dedicated to help the people), which serves as a tutorial for introducing you to the combat mechanics, arts, and craft. As you continue completing jobs from the guild, the story will advance and you'll learn more about the world's politics, as well as the people close to you.
At a glance, the gameplay resembles a fast-paced strategy role-playing game. Enemies appear onscreen, and once you've entered the battlefield, you have the option to maneuver around a 17-by-17 grid area for strategic placement. It's turn based and quick; you don't have to deal with which direction you're facing (or move first and then attack; you just automatically attack if you're within range), but you do have to keep in mind how you want your characters positioned. On top of your standard attacks, you have magical abilities that come in the form of orbal arts. In Trails in the Sky, characters have individual orbments, which are a technology that lets you harness orbal energy points and customize your skills. Slots in your orbment can be filled with different types of quartz, which grants you the ability to cast spells or even boost your stats.
Other than your health and energy points, you need to keep track of another meter in the form of your craft points. These build during battle, and once you reach 100, you can execute an S-craft technique that is similar to a limit break or overdrive attack where you deal extra damage but use up all of your charged craft points. Your party members will learn unique crafts as they level that will require craft points.
There's a lot to take in at first, which is why the game provides you with a Bracer notebook that documents your current missions and can be used as an in-game manual. Estelle may be talented with a staff in battle, but her skills don't exactly extend to the kitchen, given the amount of flack she receives from her father and brother. Throughout your travels, you'll gather recipes that are automatically recorded in a recipe book. From there, you can use items that you've picked up along the way to conjure up some meals to help your party.

Orbments is the way to go.

We didn't get far enough to find out more about the overarching story, but there was enough intrigue and mystery surrounding the main characters to keep our attention. Estelle can be a bit too bubbly at times, but Joshua's levelheadedness strikes a good balance. Visually, Trails in the Sky doesn't stand out much compared to other Japanese RPG remakes that have been put out on the PSP, but its visuals are pleasing nonetheless and the soundtrack is fitting. For those interested in the soundtrack, you can receive it by preordering the limited-edition version of the game at participating retailers. It also comes bundled with other goodies, such as a poster and a Bracer guild replica badge. Look for The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky when it is released on March 29.