Quite posssibly the worst ending for any RPG in the history of gaming. No lie.

User Rating: 3 | Blade Dancer: Sennen no Yakusoku PSP
After devoting about 25 hours to searching every nook and cranny for every quest and treasure chest, I can honestly say this is a horrible game. Well, let me clarify: The gameplay at the beginning is a bit sluggish, and very little backstory is provided until late in the game (not that you'd want it. If you're playing this game for the story, find another game). However, the gameplay definitely does pick up after you get your first party member. The game stays interesting, enough to make the game enjoyable for a reasonable number of hours. However, by the time the gameplay slows down, and the game itself starts to get boring, you're too far into the game to quit, simply because you want to finish it. (if you're anything like me, that is)

If you do all of the quests, you fight WAY too many high-level monsters to not be ridiculously powerleveled (towards the end of the game, the bosses stay at approximately the same difficulty level, but start offering insane amounts of XP). I ended up walking around with level five equipment on my level 50 characters just to make things even remotely interesting. The last two dungeons start to pick things up, however by the end of them i was ready to chuck the PSP if i saw another pair of enemies combining to make the SAME DAMN MONSTER.

What irritated me most about this game was the ending. I won't ruin things for you if you plan on playing the game, or you currently are, but suffice it to say that it was abrupt, predictable, and ridiculously stupid. I arrived at the end of the last dungeon expecting a real boss battle, but I defeated both the sub-boss and the final boss in under five minutes COMBINED. And that was with me waiting forever for the lunar gauge to fill up so I could watch the new lunability I'd just learnt for Lance.

If you're considering buying the game, let me do you a favour: DON'T.

The story is less than mediocre (it was tolerable during the game, but the ending just killed it); cheesy and substandard, it was predictable with every turn and attempted twist (oh, no! so the evil henchman really IS the once-good-but-now-turned-evil-hero-from-a-thousand-years-ago! tell me something i didn't figure out 10 hours of playing time ago!) At the end of the game, the boss fled with Lance's inherently-good-but-struggling-with-her-evil-past love interest, setting up for the sequel. Let me sum up the entire game with this sentence: I would rather have my scrotum nailed to the ground and eaten by plague-infected rats while it's still attached to my body than play that sequel. No lie.