Tsuku Monogatari

Overview

Tsuku Monogatari is a PSP game developed by Killaware and published by FuRyu. Incorporating a mix of visual novels and RPG gameplay, Tsuku Monogatari has players living the life of Yuuto Ishigami, a Japanese high schooler who, after somehow surviving a surprise drop from a school window, lives to tell the tale and is able to see demons, to boot. With his newfound powers, Yuuto battles the demons who inhabit his school by capturing them inside photographs, as well as manipulating their abilities with special words he encounters throughout his journey.
 

Gameplay

Tsuku Monogatari's gameplay is split up into three separate systems: photography, conversations, and battling, with each part have distinct connections to the other aspects of the game. Photography is the means by which Yuuto recruits demons to join his team and battling his side. Possessing seemingly ordinary-looking objects known as "yorishiro" throughout the school, the demons can be captured and utilized in battle when Yuuto successfully photographs the object in which one is inhabiting. However, doing so takes up five minutes worth of in-game time, a measure that's meant to prevent the player from running hog-wild taking photographs of everything with no repercussions.
 
Complimenting this system are the in-game conversations, which is where the game's visual novel-derived trappings come into play. As Yuuto navigates the school and interacts with people, sometimes they'll say key words that have a hidden power.  By discovering these words, particularly during rumor-mongering or recollections of old tales, Yuuto can imbue up to three of these words in the demons that he's found and thereby influence the sort of powers that they can utilize in combat.
 

Battling is the final main component that the game has to offer. Since the demons are Yuuto's main source of strength in fighting, he can call upon existing ones that he has by sending an email with the demon's photograph via cell phone. The demons are then brought to his side, looking like the objects they once inhabited. Fighting then commences in a turn-based fashion.