Finally!! A game for the psp that is worthy of staying in your collection permanently. This one is a keeper!!!
While the gameplay is similar to other games I really enjoyed the simplicity of it. The loading times are minimal as well. There is a good assortment of characters you can choose to take into battle and I never really found myself not using a specific character at all. In each battle I found myself mixing up the teams and getting creative with my approach. In short you will use all the characters at some point.
The skill stone system in my opinion was a good idea. Better than spending loads of time contemplating where to put talent pts for each character. With the skill stones nothing is permanent. When you a assign one to a character it can always be removed to use on a different character for a different battle. Half of the fun was setting up your party and switching things around for a given battle. Even characters your not using at the time will get xp to stay on par with the others so you can switch them in when needed.
The difficulty was right on. Some easy battles while others took many tries. Certain characters being able to transform at the right time can really sway the battle to your favor but even then you can still lose if your not paying attention. Free combat is nice so you can train up your troops to hopefully beat the next area.
Some say the gameplay is not innovative but if something is not broken why fix it haha. I could see a sequel to this being even better when they do decide to take some chances and implement some new innovative features to set it further apart from similar games. I could go on and on but as it stands now I would say this is the best RPG for the psp to date and a game not to be missed. The fact that it is $29.99 instead of the usual $39.99 is just icing on the cake.