Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade
Posted by 7th on September 20, 2005

The first time I ever powered up my PSP, it was to play Ridge Racer. I was in a state of bliss. Never had I played a handheld game that looked, sounded, and played so well. The graphics were nothing short of phenomenal. The control was everything I'd come to expect from the series. Short of vehicle customization (which has never been a selling point for the series to begin with) it was perfect.

I couldn't believe it, considering it was a launch title. The game was PS2 quality, if not better. I yanked it out, and threw in another PSP game I'd gotten with my system purchase (thanks to an EB promotion, I went home with five PSP titles that day.)

I popped Untold Legends into my PSP, looking forward to some real hack n' slash action, and turned it on.

I could just cry.

UL is a PSP exclusive title made by the same design team who did the first Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norath. In basic execution, it shows, as the concept is pretty much the same.

In every other aspect, it fails to live up to its big brothers. In almost every sense, the game seems rushed to make the PSP's March 2005 debut. Playing it, the first RPG for the PSP, was like a person's average first time having sex: over way too quickly, and not near as great as was hoped for.

The story is what you've come to expect from these American RPG's... straight out of D&D/Everquest/LOTR wannabe crap. Choose your warrior, wizard, or elf, and then get to slashing. Of course, the previous two games weren't extremely heavy on story either, so this didn't bother me that much. What bothered me was the lack of diversity to it all. And I mean everything.

Rather than being split into several stages, each with a central locale, UL has one central city around which all the levels surround. Over and over again you'll return to this same drab town, and do all your weapons/armor/potions dealing with the same damn shopkeeper. No more going to a new town and finding new weapons. You just warp back to town, and go back to the same guy, and HOPE that he has something better than what you dug up on your own. Usually though, what you've found is much more powerful than anything he has for sale, so after a while, you stop looking at his weapons and armor and all and simply use him for potion replacement.

The gameplay is essentially the same as Norath, only it just doesn't have the same feel to it. I don't mean the lack of vibration either. When you start hacking into a zombie, the control just doesn't feel the same. It's slower, and less responsive, especially with melee weapons. It doesn't matter whether you're swinging a sword or a huge warhammer, your character can only perform slow, wide arching swings. So no more of the Norath style charging into the room and quickly slaying anything that moves. You have to time your swings, keep your distance, and stay on the move to avoid being surrounded. Everywhere you go, you feel like you should be moving faster. It's as if your character is constantly moving through ankle deep molasses.

The sound effects are great, on par with anything from the previous titles, but don't expect much from the music, because it sucks. We're talking barely above Casio keyboard quality. And each level has, at most, 20 seconds of music that just repeats over and over again. Believe me, after an hour or so of leveling up to kill the next big beastie, you'll have the volume turned off, especially if you spend a large amount of time in town, and have to listen to those same 28 notes over and over and over and....

As I said, the control sucks. This isn't helped by the fact that there's no second analog stick ala the PS2 controller, hence there's no way to rotate the camera. In fact, the only time the view DOES change is to cover up the biggest lie in the game.

Supposedly to make each play of the game a new experience (but in reality was done to make programming quicker) all the levels are said to be randomly generated with each play.

Allow me to now call BULLSHIT!

The levels stay the same each time. The system just rotates the camera a quarter turn in any given direction so it looks like everything has been moved. It only took me a couple plays to pick up on it, and then from there, sure as the world, everything was where I remembered it being, every time. It never changed.

With the lack of new worlds to explore, and randomly (hah hah) generated dungeons, you'd expect the graphics to at least be sharp and in 60 fps. WRONG. You'll face multi-colored versions of the same enemies (with the exception of the last couple of dungeons) over and over again. The joy of selling discovered weapons is crippled by the aforementioned lack of good weapons for sale, so you're less inclined to sell what you find for fear of it being the best thing you're going to happen across.

In some levels, the ground seemed to be covered in shimmering plastic wrap, as if the system couldn't handle rendering the ground textures and motion at the same time. I haven't seen this glitch in any other PSP game, so I have to assume it was just shortcutting and shoddy programming on the team's part, as it's certainly not due to a lack of system power.

Your character, and the enemy characters, are reasonably well modeled, and move smoothly, for the most part. As with the previous games, your character's appearance changes depending on what you have him/her dressed in.

The bane of console gaming, slow down, does make an appearance here, I'm sad to say, usually when there are more than 4 enemies on screen at any time, a blasphemy for games of these types. A Diablo-style title should be able to handle at least ten enemies on screen at any time with no slow down, period. This is simply unforgivable.

Finally, there are NO cinemas. NONE. All story elements are told via NPC, or still shot "paintings" that look like they were scanned from Magic: The Gathering cards. There's no FMV, no CGI, nothing. Just those damn still-shots, that are also used as the game's load screens.

Suffice it to say, this was not my favorite PSP launch title. But if an RPG fix is what you're jonesing for, this is as good as it's going to get until October, when Legend of Heroes, the first of a flood of "true" RPGs for the PSP hits the shelves.

Unless of course you shell out money for Rengoku: Tower of Purgatory, the key word being Purgatory in regards to the game playing experience, in which case you're on your own.

*** (3 out of 5 stars)