Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade

[Tonner Cyn]

Well, I just managed to finish this over my lunch break. Now that I've done that, let me try to give a review on this PSP title.

 

Storyline

I won't go into too many spoilers here, but I will give a basic overview along with my opinion on it. Your character is the Guardian, one assigned to protect the new Crown. Based on some of the interaction with some NPCs, it sounds like your character has a somewhat poor reputation at the start. First negative - this is never really developed and since there is no mechanic in game to really affect reputation it comes off completely arbitrary. The story begins with some creatures attacking you, waking you from your sleep. As you go about eliminating this threat you find yourself drawn into deeper story involving an imprisoned god-like creature, the various citizens of your city, and wise outcasts who may know more about what's going on than you do. It's pretty standard fantasy fare.

 

Gameplay

You begin the game by selecting one of four classes. No gender selection here, two are male and two are female. What class you select will affect what weapons and armor you can use. Also, each class has a skill tree. As you level you will gain skill points (more points per level as you get higher) that you can use to either unlock more advanced skills or enhance already selected ones. Many of these skill choices can then be assigned to either the circle or triangle buttons. Your character also has the ability to use ranged weapons which can be selected by using the right button and x.

 

Graphics

I found the graphics to be fairly nice, although the default camera angle does not allow for a great amount of detail to be seen. You can zoom in some, but you sacrifice seeing a lot of your surroundings which can make it difficult when facing mobs of enemies. In some areas I did see lights where I assume the tiles connected. This did not distract or bother me too much, but it seems like a little more polishing could have been done. The weapons and armor you wear are represented on your avatar, which is always something I appreciate in games of this genre.

 

Sounds

The background music seemed to get repetitive and boring pretty quickly. It sure sounds nice through the earphones that came with the PSP, but nothing really enhanced the mood of the game for me. I think the music did get more ephatic during boss encounters, but the fact that I am not 100% sure of that says something to the impact it had on me.

 

Comments

- I finished the game as a Knight. This character gets the ability to Dual Wield fairly quickly, which along with a skill that increases melee damage, becomes a very powerful ability. In fact, 90% of the fighting I did was just mashing the X button. While it was kind of fun at first, it got to be fairly tedious by the end of the game (which took about 15 hours I'd guess).

 

- Marginally introduced in the story, your character has the ability to teleport from any location to town and back again. While this eliminates a lot of boring travel (though it would be good xp gathering), it seemed to be an obstacle to me immersing myself in the character and the world. Also...

 

- Load times. Every time you either walk to teleport to a new location, the game has to load. The load times can seem fairly short at times, but at others they are pretty long.

 

- On a more positive note, the game scales the difficulty of the enemies to your experience level. That means that there are no areas that you will completely out-level.

 

- About the final boss and the ending....Spoilers follow....

The final boss pretty much comes from nowhere. His presence gets explained in the epilogue, after you've beaten him, but I didn't really understand who he was until after I had defeated him. The ending itself is quit plain - some scrolling text over some images.

 

Overall Score: 6.5 out of 10

 

NOTE: This may have ended up with a little less detail than I intended - I am doing it at work and have to run, so...

[JoeyN]

I fixed your spoiler to use the

tag

[Romier S]

Thanks for the review! I'm still going back and forth on buying this. I want to play it but Mercury and Metal Gear Ac!d interest me more right now. I think I'll end up gamefly'in it in the end.

[Tonner Cyn]

I fixed your spoiler to use the [spoiler'] tag

 

Thanks . I know how to use them at HTF but since I didn't see an option for it here I wasn't sure if it was the same format.

 

Romier - I'm inclined to say that this would be a good rental. It will take a decent amount of time to finish and since you could then return it it shouldn't feel too repetitive (unless you really have a desire to use a different character). I've moved on to Acid myself (seems tough to get through with no kills) but at this point I'll keep UL to use as a demo for a couple friends.

 

On a different note, is there a list anywhere with people's real names? I know a handful but no everyone's, even though I'm quite familiar with most of you (from here or HTF).

 

James (realizing that my name is nowhere either)

[Big Daddy Bling Bling]

I'm kind of interested in this game but I still haven't really seen clarification on why it's generally regarded as inferior to games like BGDA and Champions of Norrath. What are the problems that make Untold Legends not as good as those games?