The Legend of Heroes II: Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch

"For a handheld, not bad!"

The Legend of Heroes series is not an RPG series that I am familiar with, but seeing as I do enjoy the genre, I decided to pick this up for my PSP as it is the only RPG for the system currently on the market (in Japan). This review is by no means meant to be exhaustive - it is more meant to give an indication to those who may be on the fence about buying this game, like I was.

The story in the Shiroki Majo (White Witch) is pretty cliche as far as RPGs go. 2 children set off on a kind of coming-of-age expedition to see the world and to deliver a sword to a shrine. Along the way they discover more about the White Witch and a great sea beast called Galuga and how their paths are becoming slowly intertwined. Its standard stuff and it is also very linear. I have not completed the game yet (maybe about 8 hours in) but so far the game has pretty much led me by the hand to each location and set piece. I can see this trend continuing - the game wants you to stick to the narrative, not divulge into side-quests etc.

Gameplay:

As I have said already, it is very linear. When walking around a town or other location with NPCs in it, a speech bubble appears over the persons head, indicating that you can talk to them (which seems pointless, as you can talk to everyone). Some speech bubbles will also have a red exclamation mark in them, indicating that you need to talk to this person to move the story along. There are long sections of the game that become little more than trying to track down the red exclamation mark, going from one side of the town to the other - it can get tedious.

Outside of towns (and really only in very short segments, it seems) there are monsters. The monsters are visible on the playing field and when you touch one, the battle commences. I much prefer this way of handling the start of battles, rather than the random "oh FFSSSSS" style of Final Fantasy. It is possible to avoid all the monsters and never fight, but that way you won't level up, obviously.

The battles themselves are rather uninvolved. Rather than a menu system controlling your fighting actions, you are merely required to select "attack" or "wait" at the start of the battle for each of your characters. After that a rather primitive AI takes over and you just watch your characters thwack away at the enemies (real time, not turn-based) until either you or they die. At any point in the battle you can call up a character's subscreen, which allows you to use items, magic or special attacks, but there isn't really a lot of variety in what you can do.

Concerning loading times - the game seems to be average. The only time I really notice loading is when there is a battle - it has to load the battle mechanics every time, I presume, so there is not a smooth transition. Its more like, walk along, bump into an enemy, WOOSH....disc access...wait...now fight. It doesn't sound too bad but if you imagine it happening 10 times whilst you are trying to get to the next town, it gets annoying.

I would rate the gameplay overall as 6/10.

Graphics:

This is one point that really surprised me. This game is very, very pretty - screenshots don't do it justice. All backdrops and buildings etc are rendered in 3D, with the character sprites in 2D. The 3D is set at just a slight angle from being completely overhead, so the illusion of 3D is extremely clear when you run across the screen. There is a lot of detail in the world - you can see individual leaves in the trees (which are also 3D models, not just a 2D texture), footprints in sand, lots of things in people's homes - there are console RPGs that don't look this good. The 2D character sprites work surprisingly well in this 3D world - the 2D allowing for more precise detail and, I presume, a little less strain on the processor and battery. My only complaint would be that the main character seems to have too few frames of animation for his run. In the smoothly flowing 3D world, his running animation seems jerky and slightly out of place - how hard would it have been to throw in an extra few frames? Oh well.

2D is also used for the character avatars - that is, when a character is speaking, a 2D cartoon-style representation of him/her will appear on the screen with the text, to give the text more personality through the different facial expressions of the 2D cartoon. It works well and the quality of the cartoons (still-frame, not animated) is of a high standard, colourful and well-drawn - it compliments the 3D backgrounds quite well.

In contrast to this though, the battle screens look very sparse. The battle screens are just completely flat and 2D - with the odd bit of 3D used for magic effects etc. Imagine yourself walking along a lush 3D forest, with beautiful trees and maybe a river, with stereo bird calls coming from the left and right, then you bump into an enemy and suddenly you are presented with a flat, 2D bland battlefield. Its strange - I don't know why they couldn't have made a smooth transition from a 3D playing field into a 3D battlefield - it would have made the battles slightly more involving.

Occasionally in the game, you get snippets of FMV. This is great for a handheld, although the FMV isn't as well done as other RPG houses like Square. Also, presumably to save space (?) the FMV framerate is quite poor. Still, its nice to have FMV in RPGs on a handheld, finally.

I give the graphics 8/10.

Sound:
The sound is rather brilliant, in so much as I have no other handheld RPG in the same technical league as this to compare it to. Obviously, the UMD format has greatly benefited this game, as all the tracks are all of CD-like quality with rousing, orchestral tunes that are of a very high standard, audio-wise and production-wise. The sound effects are a bit generic, on the other hand. There are no voices in the game.

I give the sound 9/10 for now, seeing as this game really has no direct competitor on a handheld as of yet (and I just really like classical music). If I had to compare it to the sound heard on console RPGs however, it would probably only get a 7 or 8/10, comparatively.

Battery:
The million dollar question. This is what my playtests found - with the screen on lowest brightness setting and the sound turned down to a low level, I could get about 4.5 hours out of this game, which I was fairly impressed with as it constantly needs to access the UMD to load up battle sequences, music etc.

Overall, I'd have to say that this game represents and impressive leap forward for the genre on a new platform. Its by no means perfect but as a very early title it makes the future look extremely promising. I really can't wait to see what SquareEnix come up with for the PSP. I'd say if you can't wait to experience a "real" console-like RPG on a handheld then go ahead and buy this but my honest advice would be to wait a month until Ys comes out in January. As an action RPG, Ys will at least give us a slightly more involved battle system, if nothing else.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/21/04