I haven’t used any of my PSPs (I own 3 of them — one of each generation ^^) in a long while but suddenly decided to check out some demos yesterday. After playing a bit of Konami’s Frontier Gate and Square Enix’s FF Type-0, I thought I’d write down some thoughts about both games. I’ll be skipping the synopsis on story and gameplay though:

FRONTIER GATE
I’ve read that Frontier Gate is supposedly a Monster Hunter clone. I’ve never played any MH games before and the closest I’ve ever gotten was the demo of Bamco’s God Eater and I really didn’t like that one due to the stupid camera being useless in battles. (Or maybe there was just some auto-lock/auto-target option I didn’t know about.)

To me, Frontier Gate feels like GE + Last Ranker (with a party) + every bloody KRPG that’s on the iOS right now. All I’m doing is running around the same bloody town talking to the same bloody people, nabbing quests from the guild master or whatever (never bothered to try and figure out what he was and it’s hard to check now since I’m in the middle of a quest), and then running into set quest areas to complete whatever tasks I need to complete. (I finally triggered the fusion option. It took about 5 quests before I was given the quest that unlocks it. >_>) The gameplay is overly monotonous and boring. I do like the combat system, however.

Being illiterate to Japanese, I’m missing out on whatever underlying story there is. There seems to be something about a Legendary Sword but I dunno if that’s still going or if it’s exclusive to the NPC, Emilio.

The sad thing, however, is that although I complain about monotonous gameplay, these are the kinds of games I usually end up playing and liking to some extent. Or at least, I’ll stick with them for an extended period of time. 😛 I mean, I managed to finish Koei’s mind-numbing TRINITY: Souls of Zill O’ll — with a good deal of the trophies obtained too. :3

FF TYPE-0
While Frontier Gate felt very familiar, FF Type-0 was completely the opposite. Aside from it feeling a little like Crisis Core on crack, I felt overwhelmed by the menu and I didn’t know what the heck was going on in the game.

I was very annoyed with Guest “NPCs” constantly being swapped in and out in the middle of battles. I sincerely hope the wifi or ad-hoc or whatever option the game has doesn’t actually allow this to happen because it’s grating. I WANT the party I picked to stay with me, not some random person playing 238472 miles away to suddenly butt in. I mean, I don’t believe I could swap between the characters I selected if they joined. (Honestly, I didn’t try. ^^;;)

Sometimes, because their levels were a bit higher than my party, their help was welcomed. Otherwise, I don’t want them to be a part of my game. I eventually turned off the option in the menu since it was simply too annoying.

I’m still learning though but because I can’t read Japanese very well, there were a lot of things that lead to frustration. For example, is there any way to replenish MP beside sucking it out of defeated enemies and those restoration points? I thought there was an item in the menu that would do it but it didn’t seem there was any. ^^

I was using Rem and ran out of MP during the fight against the giant multi-legged mechanical enemy. 9__9; I didn’t want to switch to anyone else since no one had any ranged magic that didn’t require charging.

My right hand hurt after playing the demo for a while since I was gripping onto the R button in battle. Maybe I didn’t experiment enough but it seems like you NEED to keep the button pressed to keep a lock on an enemy. Very annoying.

I suppose I should do some searching online to see if anyone’s whipped up a tutorial on the gameplay and provided explanation of the menus. For some reason, while I usually love to experiment and explore, I don’t feel the urge with this game.