Review: Dragoneers Aria (PSP)

It starts off fine. Typical of most PSP games these days everything graphically looks nice with some good looking cityscapes and character models and then the main hero turns up. We first thought we were playing as a girl before this rather feminine looking ‘thing’ opened his mouth. A posh British accent came out of this pony tailed lady boy, instantly making us think of all those awful American movies that make all Brits sound like a tea and scone scoffing women. It’s then a trek through a rather barren and empty looking city before triggering the big story cut scene which looks like it was animated by a five year old. The posh Brit you’ll be playing as is called Valen, after recently becoming a Dragoneer he enters a graduation ceremony before it is cut short by an evil Black dragon. Never fear though because there are good dragons too, only they’ve decided not to show up and help, so it’s a quest to find out what’s going on in a plot that goes absolutely nowhere and is of little interest to anyone.

Following this it’s time to try out the battle system. You have the usual attack, defend and item options and on top of this is the Mana system. A bar runs across the top of the screen and with each normal attack it slightly fills. Problem is the bar is used by all your party members rather than having separate ones for each character. It does make the fights more tactical but is nevertheless not the most interesting fight mechanic we’ve seen in an RPG. The Mana bar is used for the usual spells and attacks that have been stolen from almost every RPG made previously, with nothing original at all. The fight sequences take a criminally long time, as each move can take ages before it actually strikes the enemy.

A common RPG trait which we have come to despise is the grinding. Some RPG’s do this really well by balancing your character effectively as the story unfolds, Dragoneer’s Aria is the complete opposite. Even beginning the first dungeon you’ll be forced to grind relentlessly before actually managing to get onto the next section. It’s tedium personified. At least on the main map you can actually see the enemies (represented by a weird floating eye thing) so you don’t have to run around in circles hoping to trigger a random battle. Each dungeon also seems incredibly imbalanced. Often we’d be flying through defeating enemy after enemy then we’d hit a roadblock because some of the creatures we face are incredibly overpowered compared to what came before, and this is all in the space of five minutes of gameplay.

This all makes us wonder why you would even consider spending money on this excruciatingly bad RPG. There are far better examples on the PSP all of which don’t have you suffer through terrible dialogue, monotonous battling and mind numbingly slow gameplay.

Rating: 3 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver