Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Grows on you"

Unchained blades is a dungeon crawler but adds a decent story, crafting and pet collecting. Turnbased combat is good on a portable.

Learning curve is somewhat steep but in the end it provides a complex system that makes gameplay more exciting. Not really any part is hard to learn there is just a decent amount of systems that go into the game.

The art is really drawn well. I wish there were more animations, but what is here is great.

Music is good at some parts, really lame in others, and sometimes just inappropriate of the setting in other parts. For instance, the music in the town is lame to me...I just have to turn it down..the music in the lava type dungeon is all metal and it also gets annoying. They should've just stuck with an ambient soundtrack.

Alot of the game is collecting monsters. The system is so complex I won't bother explaining it. Whats good about it, is that its fun to try to "unchain" or turn monsters to help you. Also you never have direct control over them so its not like you control more than 4 people at a time.
Whats bad is it feels somewhat watered down as you never have control over these monsters. And there are battles called judgement battles that are the weakest part of the game, but still enjoyable for me.

The UI seems not the most intuative but works.

Women are way too objectified for my tastes. Breasts are shown whenever possible, shopkeep has cat ears for no reason, the armor is just text and not shown but has to be made of things like bondage and leather for no reason. Its just lame and doesn't add to suspension of disbelief. Why would you wear bondage in a dungeon and why would it protect you from monsters more?

Which brings me to art style. Its way overly anime. I like anime, but its to the point where If you buy a book on how to draw anime, you are gonna draw most of the characters and thats not very orginal. The characters that are original are sort of awkward though and don't really fit too well into the world, their weak voice acting doesn't help.

The game has multple artists that work on it and it shows, some of the characters feel disconnected.

Crafting is pretty cool, but I am left wondering why I am harvesting trees in a dungeon sometimes.

Overall this game is good, I love the mechanics of it. It seems like its a 60+ hour game. I would reccommend it. Its surprisingly hard, but if you put in enough time you'll overcome any obstacle in a game like this.

Also worth noting:
I downloaded this for my Vita and graphics are really good even for PSP native it really holds up compared to Vita graphics