I know I should be playing Rondo of Swords, but Yggdra Union is one of my favourite games, sitting in my personal top five GBA games, so I wasn't able to resist to give this improved version a quick test.
Yggdra Union was one of those game that made me lose track of time, often resulting in getting off the train two or three stops after mine, and so this evening I found myself playing for two hours straight with the PSP in a blink of an eye.
Of course the PSP has a considerable edge over the GBA in graphic power and screen area, and the game simply looks gorgeous.
Sting had the brilliant idea to redraw sprites instead of rescaling existing ones like they did with Riviera and, really, if you like 2D graphics you'll find a lot of eye candy in this version of Yggdra Union, even if animations and number of frames used are still the same. Each sprite has a lot of detail and much more colors than on the GBA - it's gooooood.
Maps, cards, character portraits, icons, everything has been redrawn or proper version of the original art have been used to better suit the PSP screen and finally the technical side of the game is keeping up with its game mechanics.
Maps, above all else, don't look anymore as a blob of pixels set as a background, featuring details hard to spot before or even new ones.
All mission introductions are dubbed, like most dialogues. Music sounds like the arranged soundtrack, battle sounds have been upgraded too, so the UMD space is put to good use.
Game-wise, there have been some minor changes, including new secret characters. Some cards have been rebalanced though some are still useless (Refreshment, noon only, 3 mov and low power), but each time a character levels up he/she recovers some of his/her morale, making easier to manage items. During battles the R butt can now speed up the process if you know you're gonna win or lose.
The best thing is that the action spans across an high-resolution 16:9 screen, making things much more readable, there are no longer pixel-wide fonts and the interface is much clearer and more colorful; the style is unchanged however: it might be hard to navigate and there are a lot of things to keep track of, but it's a good step forward.
Unfortunately, the game still features an integral tutorial limiting unions and skills during the first part of the game, even though there's a "tutorial corner" in the game menu.
I'm told that there's an hard difficulty for those beating the game, with no morale recover for level ups (just like the GBA version), but I don't know if it will stick with the tutorials.
Yggdra Union was one of those game that made me lose track of time, often resulting in getting off the train two or three stops after mine, and so this evening I found myself playing for two hours straight with the PSP in a blink of an eye.
Of course the PSP has a considerable edge over the GBA in graphic power and screen area, and the game simply looks gorgeous.
Sting had the brilliant idea to redraw sprites instead of rescaling existing ones like they did with Riviera and, really, if you like 2D graphics you'll find a lot of eye candy in this version of Yggdra Union, even if animations and number of frames used are still the same. Each sprite has a lot of detail and much more colors than on the GBA - it's gooooood.
Maps, cards, character portraits, icons, everything has been redrawn or proper version of the original art have been used to better suit the PSP screen and finally the technical side of the game is keeping up with its game mechanics.
Maps, above all else, don't look anymore as a blob of pixels set as a background, featuring details hard to spot before or even new ones.
All mission introductions are dubbed, like most dialogues. Music sounds like the arranged soundtrack, battle sounds have been upgraded too, so the UMD space is put to good use.
Game-wise, there have been some minor changes, including new secret characters. Some cards have been rebalanced though some are still useless (Refreshment, noon only, 3 mov and low power), but each time a character levels up he/she recovers some of his/her morale, making easier to manage items. During battles the R butt can now speed up the process if you know you're gonna win or lose.
The best thing is that the action spans across an high-resolution 16:9 screen, making things much more readable, there are no longer pixel-wide fonts and the interface is much clearer and more colorful; the style is unchanged however: it might be hard to navigate and there are a lot of things to keep track of, but it's a good step forward.
Unfortunately, the game still features an integral tutorial limiting unions and skills during the first part of the game, even though there's a "tutorial corner" in the game menu.
I'm told that there's an hard difficulty for those beating the game, with no morale recover for level ups (just like the GBA version), but I don't know if it will stick with the tutorials.
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