Crimson Gem Saga for PSP Reviews by Gamers

Before I begin, I will state that I am a HUGE fan of JRPGs. My first was Dragon Warrior 1 for the NES and moved right along to DW2, 3, 4 and all the Final Fantasy games. I currently own nearly every JRPG for the 360 and PSP in addition to a healthy amount for the DS and PS2. I love JRPGs.

Now that that's over with here is my review of Crimson Gem Saga:

Crimson Gem Saga is probably one of the most frustrating RPGs I have ever played. In fact, it got to the point where even thinking about playing it made me cringe. While the game has all the traditional elements of a great JRPG it severely lacked any meaningful story and level progression.

CSG is hard. It's not good hard... it's hard hard and it's ahrd for all the wrong reasons. Never, once, during my 20+ hours of play did I fight a boss that was particularly hard. However, the normal enemies you encounter in the dungeons are the REAL enemy. Nearly every battle was a struggle and god forbid you fight 4 very fast enemies. It was frustratingly hard and you got little reward when defeating an enemy.

Of course, what made the battles even worse was the frustratingly long dungeons where you'd be constantly cris-crossing to finally reach your objective. This means fighting the same enemies over and over again simply to reach, yet another, switch to exit the dungeon.

Now you'd think the enemies wouldn't so frustrating with a little bit of leveling right? Wrong. I honestly don't know why CSG had levels as they did very little to strengthen your characters. Over the course of 5 levels the same enemies would still be just as hard.

Finally, the story was only there to serve the length of the game. This was very evident when, at one point, I had to sleep at an Inn to wait until nightfall. Unfortunately the Inn keeper was sick. So instead of sleeping at another inn or asking her daughter for a bed we had to go on a 3 hour long quest to find some magic water. Ridiculous.

CSG is a very pretty game, but its just not worth it.