A fine example of how to make a good liscensed game... also a fine example of how NOT to appeal to your target audience.
As *painful* as it may be to accept, Neopets - PetPet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing on the Sony Playstation Portable is absolutely nothing like the aforementioned website, or any entry of it's franchise. Instead, The Wand of Wishing is an action game of the role-playing genre, or more professional labeled; an Action-RPG. As a matter of fact, if it weren't for the direct usage of some terminology from the Neopets universe(such as Neopoints), and some appearances of characters from the Neopets universe it could be mistaken for something completely new.
*Unfortunately*, the Neopets we knew before is not present here, this Neopets is a tale of combat, war, trechery and ancient prophecies of darkness. This Neopets presents a world where the cute little Neopets of yesteryear can be found stabbing each other to death with swords, clawing viciously at each other with steel claws of lightning, chucking grenades and bombs at each other, piercing the skulls of other Neopets with flaming arrows, burning down the villages of those they loathe, and causing worldwide disaster through impure desires, greed and hatred. Yeah, if it hasn't become obvious yet, this is just a bit different than the Neopets of past times, how this game escaped with an "E" rating is nothing short of a miracle. As the keen gamer could expect from said description, this is all done in hack&slash format.
Unlike other dungeon-crawling action-RPGs, The Wand of Wishing takes a more "Legend of Zelda"-esque approach, but contains just enough RPG elements to keep it from being strictly Action-Adventure like Legend of Zelda games are. To cite a PSP-related example, this game's gameplay seems very similar to that of Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade, except, due to the dungeon design actually being interesting, Neopets ends up quite a bit more interesting than the first Untold Legends game.
The premise and progression of the game are both pretty simple. A girl named Megan was granted a magical wand and chosen as the divine protector of it. This wand has the power to grant wishes, and of course there is the big, bad dark guy and his cohorts who want it for their own evildoing. As expected with a cut-and-paste storyline such as that, the big, bad dark guy gets his hands on the wand of wishing with the aid of his Werhond minion, and with that, you set out on your journey to retrieve The Wand of Wishing.
As you travel this oddball world - slaying monsters and gaining, you will meet many characters, most of which feature some simply terrific writing, and are very humorous to socialize with. While there are many sidequests that townsfolk will shower you with, you will progress the game by doing specific tasks that usually involve dungeons. As expected from a Zelda-like game, the dungeons are filled with puzzles of sorts for the player to solve, and are generally pretty large.
To aid you in your adventures, you are given a massive archive of weapons to use, including - but not limited to: Sword, Axes, Hammers, Claws, Brass Knuckles, Bows, Autocrossbows, Staffs, Spoons, Battle Potatoes, Moldy Food and a ton of magical wands for each level of each element... yes, you can tear down the forces of evil with a spoon, if that's what you're into. For the spellcasting experts, there's also many scrolls you can equip that will allow you cast spells that will, of course, consume MP... and of course, to stay true to at least a portion of the Neopets franchise, you can buy all kinds of clothes to customize your Neopet.
Unlike the Untold Legends this system was practically cut & pasted from, you do not gain experience by fighting to level up and distribute points to increase your stats. Instead, you are given two methods of getting stronger. Progressing through dungeons and defeating main quest bosses will yield items that permanently increase your certain stats(primarily health), and there is a battle arena where you can fight bosses you've beaten for tokens that can be spent to increase your health, agility, intelligence, defense and strength.
A glaring oddity of this game is that The Wand of Wishing is a really, really freaking hard game. Enemies can, and will upon many occasions, crowd around you and crush you with overpowered melee attacks, chuck grenades at you that explode with some unreasonably massive range, paralyze you so that you have to watch them pound you to death, shoot projectiles at you with 100% accuracy which are almost always bound to induce some kind of status effect, or simply put the stomp on you with a one-shot kill. The bosses are the biggest pains to deal with, since they like to paralyze people, specialize in all kinds of physical attacks, and usually have a special combo that is near impossible to survive against. This isn't even a regular kind of hard, this is easily more challenging than a lot of things featured in Monster Hunter Freedom. It's so hard, in fact - that it makes this game nearly innaccessible to the kids who are into the Neopets franchise.
This causes a very great conflict when determining the audience this is aimed for. The game is simply too challenging to even consider giving to a child, yet the gamers who would likely understand and take to it would be put off simply because it has "Neopets" in the title... so who is this aimed for?
Another issue is the loading. The load times going from map to map, or even from the title screen to menus is pretty wild. The maps are large enough to warrant long loading, since you'll be in each one for a very long time, but with the high death rate that's bound to occur, seeing loading screens becomes all too common.
The world of Neopets - The Wand of Wishing, is definitely interesting, and filled with all kinds of events to span a long and fulfilling adventure. Although it was an odd move considering past iterations of the Neopets franchise, they ran with the Action RPG feel, and it was pulled off very nicely... so nicely, in fact, that the biggest con of this game would be going into a store and requesting a game with a title as humiliating as "Neopets - PetPet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing".