Yggdra Union
A niche title that doesn’t deserve to be
Tags: Yggdra Union Categories: PSP Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Dec 8th, 2008
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Yggdra Union (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Role-Playing | No | ||
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If you wanted a sure fire hit for the ailing PSP, this isn’t the formula you want to follow: remake an obscure title from the Game Boy Advance, and make sure that title is as niche a genre as possible. While that may sound a bit harsh, but that is exactly what Atlus did releasing Yggdra Union for the PSP. I can tell you that when I use the phrase card based RPG, and combine it with hammy anime story line, I’ve lost three quarters of the people who bothered to read past the game’s title in this review. I’m sure Atlus had about the same effect on the pre-orders.
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I can tell you that there is an audience for this game, I am just hard pressed to describe them. Yggdra Union is technically impressive, the game play is intuitive yet innovative, and the storyline is not terrible. Especially considering the PSP’s rather meager line up, this could be something really engaging, and I imagine across the Pacfic it actually is doing so, even in their more crowded field. However if I could translate this article into Kanji, I would get quite a few hits, and the lost reader ratio would be a little more in the game’s favor.
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Yggdra is a princess who is fighting to regain control of her kingdom after death of her father and the invasion of the Bronquian Empire. While she is plucky she isn’t armed with charm and destiny alone, she carries her family’s heirloom, a holy sword. Along the way she meets up with her former guardians, and a band of wandering thieves, forming her army. While there is a lot of attention paid to the cast of characters that band together as heroes, the enemies still needed to get a few touches, and even though this is a remake, I think they could have added a bit of rewrites to the script and give more depth to the enemies.
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The gameplay is a hybrid between strategy RPGs and the card based combat. Yggdra Union does give a lot of emphasis on team formations, and in fact this is your only way to use all of your unit’s attacks in a turn. A a lot of attention was paid to this, but there is still a lot of simply waiting for the units to decide combat based on stats, and because of a mechanic that allows you to set your units to reserved or aggressive attacks, combat is not able to be skipped, ever.
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This is a passable title that needs a little polish to be perfect. A lot of attention was paid to making this look like a modern game, but some of the oversights that could be improved to make this a more robust title. The gameplay is still unique, and the story keeps your rapt after the novelty wears off.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Good gameplay + Updated look is strikingly good |
8.5 |
| What Doesn't | |
| - Enemy characters needed to be fleshed out | |
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| This is a unique mish mash of genres and is worth a look, there are some nice twists. | |
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Tags: Yggdra Union
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Dec 8th, 2008 and is filed under PSP Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
