Lord of Arcana for PSP Reviews by Gamers

I had some high hopes for this game, especially since it was from Square Enix (who, admittedly, in my opinion haven't really released any gems recently, but are overall pretty good)

but I put the game pretty soon after picking it up in the first place.

First of all, you get thrown into a tutorial dungeon almost immediately after creating your character. There's a decent selection of things like hair color, etc., and weapons, which each have their pros and cons. So, sure, you get through the tutorial, boom, then you get thrown straight into main-game, which is basically made up of a bunch of missions.

The missions consist of you going into a dungeon-like area filled with different rooms, and doing things like killing monsters to get drops, or killing a boss.

This is the entire game.

You can sometimes use monster drops to create more weapons and armor. And by completing enough missions, you unlock...

Oh how exciting, more missions.

This game is centered around character building, like how MMORPGs center around grinding. But this has multiplayer, which supposedly makes the experience better. Which you really may need, because each individual monster battle can be fairly long, and boss battles can be really difficult by yourself. At least with other people for the boss to beat on you can get a little break once in a while.

What also is particularly frustrating is that the only way to keep everything from a mission is to complete the mission. Which you may not even know how to do the first or second time around, and the game doesn't exactly go out of its way to help you out.

Overall I see the potential with Lord of Arcana, but there are some pretty glaring flaws in execution, and the single-player mode is fairly repetitive and pretty unsatisfying.