PoPoLoCrois Post-Mortem

[Now Experiencing] [Computer Gaming]

Because Grant demanded it.

If you, like me, are a PSP owner with a love of good RPGs, you've probably been looking at the PSP game selection with something approaching despair. On one hand, you have Tales of Eternia, an unobjectionable port of a ageing PSOne game. And on the other, you have Untold Legends and its sequel, which can be largely summed up using the words "not completely awful". It's a state of affairs much like that of a starving man on a desert island who has to choose between eating lychees, bean curd, or his own severed foot.

So when you saw PoPoLoCrois come floating into your local game store's inventory, you may have, like me, made the mistake of purchasing it. Oh, how you will rue that terrible day.

Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating. PoPoLoCrois isn't the worst game ever made. It is neither an abomination that should never have been spawned, nor a crime against God, nature, and gamers everywhere. It even, dare I say it, caused me to hazard the occasional smile and moment of enjoyment.

Now I'm done with the good part. On to the bad.

The first warning sign about PoPoLoCrois should have been all those capital letters. When the ratio of uppercase to lowercase within a single word is higher than 1:2, you know something's up right there. And it's not just a logo embellishment - the game insists on using that bizarre abberration of spelling throughout the length of its insipid and uninspired story.

PSP PoPoLoCrois is apparently something of a remix of two quite popular PSOne games that were previously only released in Japan (called, unsurprisingly, PoPoLoCrois and PoPoLoCrois 2). Don't worry - you're not getting the full version of either game. Every last quest throughout each title has been shortened, dumbed down, and turned into little more than a fetch-and-carry trek across an eye-gougingly boring countryside. The two plots have been rammed end-to-end in a mind-boggingly crude way, and have had everything that may have made them good ripped from them with rusty hooks operated by brain-damaged lepers.

You may think, "At least it'll be a long game." And to be fair, it is. It's quite long. It's long in the sense that, at about the time you're weeping into your pillow and screaming, "Why won't it end? In the name of all that's holy, why won't it end?", you'll come to what appears to be the final boss fight - only to discover in eye-widening gut-clenching horror that you've merely completed the first story and have still to wade through another whole two major questlines, each individually longer than the entirety of what you've played so far. That dedication to packing content onto a tiny little UMD takes a special kind of genius - to be specific, the cat-stroking Bond-killing death-rays-from-space kind of genius.

There's a plot, of course, which should probably win an award for its craftsmanship in taking ideas from every fantasy epic ever and weaving them into an utterly unengaging pastiche of young princes, lost mothers, ancient demons, and dark kings. As you slog through the never-ending story of Pietro, nauseatingly cheeful heir to the kingdom of PoPoLoCrois, you'll be joined by a variety of two-dimensonal companions, such as Narcia (a forest fairy with a love of wimples), Gami Gami Devil (the self-professed most evil man in the world), and.... uh... White Knight (no, really, that's his name).

Even the most limpid RPG can occasionally be redeemed by really satisfying combat or an addictive levelling-up system, so it's a good thing that PoPoLoCrois doesn't have either of these, or it would be breaking an otherwise uninterrupted losing streak. Levelling up is of the straight "gain XP to get tougher" variety, with no meaningful chance for the player to direct this linear process. You also have skills, which behave in pretty much exactly the same way. Not that you'll be using them much, because, really, they're mostly kind of pointless.

Combat (of which there is a lot) devolves into a kind of turn-based strategy game, where you're theoretically supposed to move your characters around to gain some kind of tactical advantage. Unfortunately, most of the time, you'll just start each battle with your apocalyptic ranged area-effect attack, and watch the baddies drop dead before they can even launch into one of their poorly-animated rejoinders.

Speaking of animation and all things graphical, it's worth pointing out that PoPoLoCrois belongs to the old school isometric 2D school of design that you might remember well from your days playing Squaresoft games on your Super Nintendo. That's not a blot against the game - it suits the gameplay perfectly, and the graphical style has a really nice anime charm. What is a horrible brown stain on the game's underwear is the fact that despite this relatively undemanding visual aesthetic, the game's frame rate still drops regularly into the single digits, mostly while you're performing such high-processor-demand tasks as walking places, meeting enemies, or standing still.

Now, I'm sure all of the above sounds like exactly your cup of tea, and you're going to run out and buy the game this second. So it's worth mentioning that you'll only get to see any of the thrilling gameplay I've described during the odd second or two when the game isn't loading. The PSP already has a horrible reputation for sickeningly long load times when reading from the UMD, and PoPoLoCrois takes this unfortunate trend to entirely new levels. You'll face a good minute of loading just to get to the title screen. Then you've got loading your save file, booting the world, a good ten seconds of loading every time you enter a new area, and - get this - even more loading each and every time you're subjected to a random monster encounter. Which is, in such areas as random encounters occur in, roughly every three or four steps.

Oh, and in case you see this all as some sort of challenge, designed to seperate the casual chaff from the hardcore gaming wheat, then it's also of note that PoPoLoCrois is really, really easy. No, really. Even the boss fights. Really, really easy. Not hard - just long.

So in short, if you're a newcomer to RPGs, who absolutely must buy one for your PSP, no matter what the cost to your wallet, love life, and personal sanity, then I highly recommend PoPoLoCrois. Go nuts.