Spectral Souls

By: CAPTAIN GORDON EDWARD
Review Date: Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Furthering the debate about what system is better, the PSP or the Nintendo DS, it seems that the Nintendo DS continues to pull away from PSP. There are many reasons for this, and one of the main reasons involves the load times. I believe the Nintendo President once said that the PSP would not hold up to the NDS, because when playing the system on the go, the PSP will only be ready to play after you have reached your destination. While the claim did seem to be over zealous, after playing Spectral Souls I can 100% agree with him.

I will start off by saying that most of the games that are published by NIS America are great, and they have usually done a great job. The only other game that I did not like of there's was Generation of Chaos. If I were to compare Spectral Souls to Generation of Chaos though, Generation of Chaos would be the game of the year. What holds back Spectral Souls is not content, in fact the battle system is quite nice, and even fresh. What holds back Spectral Souls are the lengthy load times, and they are plentiful at that.

In fact in between most of the text messages that narrate the game, their game switches into a load mode. You will constantly see this in the bottom right of your screen, burning your pixels away with the glowing words "Disc Access". Furthermore in between each battle, you can expect a thirty-second load time, and this kills any momentum that the game builds. This coupled with the many load times in between characters talking (which is only text again), or players moving their characters, will make you wish that you never picked this game up. In short the game will run at a snails pace. The load screen is not even interesting, as the in between battle screen, or loading a city is blank screen with only those words.

The storyline is decent enough, and involves a war with demons. Originally the demons are the rulers of the world, and they control humans while terrorizing them. A revolt occurs, which causes the humans to turn on their demon overlords. This act creates a great war, shaking the fabric of all life. When it seems that the war is favouring the demons, a hero is brought forth from Earth, and with his martial arts skills turns the tide of battle. This storyline is decent by my standards, even if it is a little derivative of a few other games. What is different though is how the story will proceed, but we will get into that more a little bit later. There is a slight problem with this bringing the character martial arts master from Earth. What does not make sense though is that the character starts off at level one, with no experience, so they could hardly fit the bill of someone whom has gone through many battles to become a master.


Moving along to the storyline mechanics, you have the ability to switch around to different teams for battles. This means that you may switch to any of the three teams, and successful battles with them will limit the actions of a different party. Completing the next mission from a different standpoint will affect how the end of the game ends, which is a very neat idea. This encourages people to try out the different characters, which helps them out with their strategies. I like this feature in the end, because it changes up the entire game.

Moving onto the battle system, each character has an action bar. This will control how characters attack and move. You share this bar between all of character's actions per turn, so moving and attacking once can use up all of your points. Likewise if you do not move your character, you can find yourself attacking several times in a row, which puts a serious hurt on your opponent. This means that mages are no longer be limited by magical power, as the bar recharges to max at their next turn.

Another feature of battle allows you to set up a charge attack against a target enemy within their area, and this pools the energy of the attack. When authorized it ends the current player's turn, and moves to the next person. Once the next character on your team has the ability to attack the same character, and it releases the pooled attack. This causes extra damage, while providing additional experience for your team. This is a great thing to have as it can also allow for a super-powered elemental attack. The only draw back to it is that if the charging character is damaged or healed, then the charge attack is cancelled.

Another part of the game that I enjoyed was the levelling system. You can gain a level in the middle of battle, where you are then be able to increase their stats manually. After each level up, a character gains a certain amount of stat points, and you choose which areas to level up. The catch here is that there is a segmented bar, and each stat will take a certain amount of points to fill up. The amount required for an increase ramps up as you continue to level up the stat.

Moving beyond this, of course the standard requirement of any NIS America game is included, where you will have the ability to synthesize new items out of old ones. This time you can combine two to four different times into one, which generally ends up more powerful. The weapons produced are also better than the ones that you can buy, because they have additional features, like more attack power. Other than that it is your normal crafting system, which expands the game, but again this feature runs into the lagging load time issue.

In the end, the game is interesting if you have extreme patience. The main interest comes from its tactical battle system, which builds on the standard system used in most games. The real question is... Why the game is as laggy as it is? The game should be running smoothly since there are no exquisite features that are holding the game back. The graphics are average, or even a bit on the low end. The music is decent, and nothing to be wowed over. The game does not even feature voices, and instead of them the game sticks to bland text. In a few words, there is nothing that I can see, that should be causing all of the lengthy load screens. If this game were sped up, perhaps two to three times what it currently is, and then it would be a solid game. Since it is slow though, it loses considerable marks, because it kills the gameplay. All and all, Captain Gordon gives Spectral Souls a C-.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? CaptainGordonEdward@Gmail.com