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Blazing Souls Accelate Review

Game Name: Blazing Souls Accelate
Genre: Strategic RPG
Developer/Publisher: Never-Land Games /Aksys Games
Price: $39.99
Console: PSP

Story

“It has been years since a war called the Seven Year War ended and peace finally arrived in the land.
The story begins with Zero the protagonist making his living as an independent contractor. One day he is investigating a certain site. It is there that he finds a mysterious stone infused with a powerful magic known as the Core Elemental. As he takes on more and more jobs to investigate other locations, he discovers more and more Core Elemental stones. On his travels, he begins to encounter the Human Genomes—new creatures created by God to replace mankind.

One thirsts for power.  One desires only the eradication of mankind.  And one hopes to retrieve what he has lost.To get what they desire, each one appears before our protagonist. Through his battles against the Human Genomes, our protagonist begins to learn the truth about the secret of his birth, and before long finds himself at the very place where he was born… Finally, he will learn the truth of his existence…” (via Aksys Games)

The best part of the story is that it is deep.  However, I don’t mean deep in a compelling, emotional sense.  I mean deep in the “What the hell is going on” sense.  This is not a bad thing, if you like that type of story.  A story like that also keeps the game moving, so that is a good thing.  Often, I felt like I was dropped in the middle of some storied universe, but I had no idea why exactly the I was was there, and what kind of back story these characters had. Perhaps if I had played previous iterations, I would have known what was going on, but for now, my head still pounds with questions. All in all, if you are looking for a tale that will make for roller coaster like hills of confusion, your gonna love Accelate.  Mainly, though, the story merely provides a cover for the gameplay.

Gameplay

Gameplay is also deep.  However, this kind of deep is like, “WOW, I can create and do all kinds of stuff!”  For example, players can find and fuse together grass and ore to create a powerful ring.  Sure that may not make a whole ton of sense, but the title of the game doesn’t really make sense either.  What is more impressive though is that gamers can keep fusing the ring with other items found.  Options are virtually limitless, especially when you consider the fact that there are a lot more things than just grass and ore available.  Of course, what is a PSP enthusiast supposed to do with these alchemist creations?

Combat is where you get to use all your fancy new created duds.  Sure, some of them may only increase your strength and the like, but it is very satisfying to crack the skulls on some monsters with attacks and items.  It is even more fun to “chain” together these attacks.  To illustrate, each character you have in the party builds up AP.  Once they have AP, they can do different attacks.  AP seems to come from any type of move.   At any time you have an attack, you can do a charge attack.  Choose either to unleash the attack right then and there, or hold the attack.  If you choose to hold the attack, other characters can also hold their attacks.  Once you actually unleash an attack with a character though, every character gets to unleash their held walloping attack.  That. Is. Awesome.  Characters also have many many unique attacks and carrying them out is a great part of the game.  These things mentioned above only scratch the surface.  If you want to take the time to upgrade and get all fancy with everything, you are going to have a long, satisfying game in which to do that.

The only part I really didn’t enjoy about the gameplay was the fact that nothing was explained.  A plethora of old school gamers are probably laughing at me right now and saying, “Sonny, back in the old days we didn’t have nothing explained.  You young’uns never wanting to do anything….etc, etc.”  The point still remains though. It took me forever to finally figure out exactly how the strategies and even simple controls worked.  My first hour of the game, I was unable to even attack because I had no clue what to do.  This seems especially imperative when you realize that this was my first strategic rpg.  New SRPG gamers will certainly be turned off if they have no clue what to do.  What makes it even worse is that the downloadable copy has no instruction manual.  However, although I did not enjoy that part,  I do realize that most games require a lot of practice, and that practice is what actually makes the better strategies in the long run.

Graphics and Audio

Although I can rarely really tell the difference between graphics on games, Accelate’s graphics seemed to have no weird glitches or parts that would make your eyes want to bleed.  The graphics did their job and didn’t get in the way.  As far as I am concerned, those are some darn fine graphics.

However, audio is seriously lacking.  Every character in every battle sequence says the same line, over, over and over again.  Another point to bring out is that during cutscenes, you must press X to advance to the next line of dialogue.  With all the high quality voice acting present in the game, why must I press a button after every sentence, especially when that scene can be quite lengthy?

Overview

Blazing Souls Accelate is a good game.  No way around that.  Great gameplay can often make up for many shortcomings.  That is certainly the case with Blazing Souls Accelate. Extremely short loading times are also a great plus to add to the good parts of the game.  A funky story, some weird audio/text choices and a lack of direction for new players are the only low points to this stellar title.

I give Blazing Souls Accelate:

8-0-capsules-out-of-10