My first appointment at E3 takes me to the Marvelous & XSeed booth. They had quite the variety going for them on the DS. Unfortunately Little King’s Story was not shown, but we’ll have some media posted of that later along with the other titles that were shown or otherwise.
(PSP) Valhalla Knights 2
I honestly didn’t know they even made a first, but that’s probably why I’m NintendoGal and not SonyGal. Anyway the game is an RPG and looks pretty good for the PSP. Maybe not quite Crisis Core quality, but still it looked nice. It seems to try to eliminate some elements that many RPG fans hate such as random encounters. You can see all the enemies on the map which makes planning your route a little less tedious. Each enemy has an area that players can be seen and attacked from. Using the sneak ability lowers their range by quite a bit. The sneak ability can be used in the other direction and you can get the jump on enemies for a bit of extra damage. On the down side, I did see enemies start to respawn. If you need to grind XP for your party, this shouldn’t prove to be an issue, except with the enemies that scale to your level. Great for XP, but if you’re just trying to get by you’ll need to slow down and sneak past.
If going around and killing constantly isn’t your thing, you can do quests. Quests are a big focus in the game and they’ve added some nice touches such as a quest completion tracker. The rewards and experience are also listed. This is great for on the go if you’re in the middle of a quest.
As for your party, it consists of you plus five other NPCs. Unlike other games with UIs that generally are dumb as bricks, you can customize your NPCs individually so they’ll attack more in line with what you had in mind for them. As you level, you’ll gain points to put into different categories for different focuses for each.
At eighty hours to finish the basic storyline, this might be a good candidate for those PSP users looking for bang for their buck.
Overall
I’d say they had a decent showing even if Little King’s Story and Avalon Code were not present at their booth.
