I have to be honest, I almost didnt give this game a chance after Gamespot gave it a 5.0. Luckily, my queue was empty anyway, so I decided to give this game a shot and I'm glad I did. Yeah its a bit outdated in terms of the RPG's avaialbe on consoles, but its a great throwback RPG reminicent of Breath of Fire. The characters, setting, voice overs, are all EXCELLENT, and although i havent gotten too deep into the game yet, the story is tolerable.

Do yourself a favor, if you have room on your queue give this game a shot and judge for yourself.

Crimson Gem Saga is an RPG throwback with enough fourth-wall breaking commentary (ala Disgaea) to justify its bland story and blander characters. It's also got nice hand-drawn areas that help to make the redundancy of dungeons a little more palatable.

But by the end of the second (of four) chapters, you'll find yourself saying "Again?" more often than anything. If you tweak your skill tree properly, grinding is a snap, but even when you're spamming attacks that hit all enemies, battling still takes ages, and leaves you feel unrewarded, to boot.

Between this and Black Sigil, another recent old-school RPG, the latter is better in just about every way, and ultimately, is just one more reason why the DS is beating the PSP.