Untold Legends brings nothing new to the table but still a little fun with this Hack & Slash.
Other Platforms: None
Release Date: March 22nd 2005
Genre: Action-RPG
Number of Players: 1-4
ERSB Rating: Teen
Coming from the Sony Online Entertainment company, I was expecting exactly what I got from Untold Legends. With influences from many a Action/RPG thrown in, SOE brought a game that has been done before, with little variations, except to the PSP this time. Games such as Everquest and Champions of Norrath had profound influences on this title, although maybe not to the quality of some of the other titles. You will see things that remind you very much of Baldur's Gate series as well as Diablo and other things from Champions developed by the same people. Untold Legends is a an early PSP game which is something not to be forgotten when looking at it now, more then 4 years from its release. Playing through the game, I didn't forget this as I was trudging my way through levels of monsters and undead.
The game starts from a town called Aven which is being overrun by giant attacking spiders in the local tavern. You of course are the lucky on to go check things out. Aven is where you spend a fair amount of time during the game. You can shop, get quests, talk to others, and even fight through some catacombs. At times the story can be hard to follow, knowing that you are the Guardian you get the feel you just need to follow the quests and go bash some monsters heads in. As others have said the plot can be very generic and feel like the game has been played out in other titles in this genre. With that along with long story mode, you can also gain other sub quests by talking to people in Aven and other dungeons.
The meat of the game starts off with you choosing what you character you would like to be, of which you have four to choose from. I chose Knight as I do with most Hack & Slash as I love the hand to hand combat. Depending on what you choose, you can have different weapons and armor, some specific to each character. Like other games in this genre, you gain experience from killing things and eventually you can level up. You then are able to choose how to build your character, around strength or intelligence or what have you. When you level up you also are able to put 3 or 4 points into a special ability that you can use in combat. Depending on how you build your character, you will have a limited amount of power to use your abilities. This system works ok, but is very generic again and feels like you have played it before.
One thing I wasn't a large fan of during my time in the game is that your health and power regain at a fairly quick pace. So if you are low on life and wanted to, you could just sit in a safe place and heal up in between monsters. I would have preferred maybe a healing pool or something in the level or something a little more difficult. Also if you die, you just return to the beginning of the stage and lose the stuff you had gained since. Otherwise there is no penalty for failure, a little to nice if you ask me.
The game can be hard to follow and find out where to go. Once you receive a quest you can read it again in your menus. However it may be 3 or 4 levels into an area that you may need to get to. If you forget the names of places and how to get there, it may be a long walk that could be fixed with a simple map. On the other hand many areas to explore brings a new sense of adventure and other creatures to kill. Usually at the end of your quest is a boss type of character to try to kill, once you manage that, you can teleport right back to Aven.
The side quests add to the replay value slightly as you can do a few other things to finish up the game but nothing really new is found out in the story.
The dungeons are Random as well as the monster placement in the game. So you can run for a few rooms and not see anyone then get smashed upon by a half dozen or so guys which can cause problems. Otherwise the dungeon and monsters abilities and damage were pretty good based upon what level you are.
The sound for the game is pretty bland and I honestly played through most of the game on mute with other things playing in the background. The music is very generic and doesn't have that high stress tense music it needs if you really were traveling through the depths of underworlds. The voices were bad, simply because there was none, at all. This alone can drop this game a notch or two, but remember it was early in the stages of the PSP. Cut scenes as well are missing in action bringing it hard to get this story into anything else than words. You also have large load times, of 20-30 seconds typically between stages. Now for me, a game with load times really isn't the end of the world, but for others people really hate it. Not a large factor in my scoring however. The levels look awesome with chests to open and other things to break to find gold and other goodies. Walls are fulled with scary rock formations, lava, snow, sand and forests alike. A good variety that helps you figure out stages.
I really enjoyed playing through this first game of two on the PSP. Even though the story is weak the fun factory was still high. I really recommend this if you are a level grinder that loves to finish quests and get on to the next without much talking or interruption. The replay value is good for awhile until you finish the side quests, then I can say I put it down and won't pick it up again for sometime. So even though it has been done before on other consoles and better, Untold Legends still has a bit of fun to be had here, even for the casual gamer. Final score of 7.0