Let’s get this out of the way first, I love me some RPGs with classic turn-based battles. Give me Persona 4 over Mass Effect any day. I’d rather start my umpteenth run through FFX than play Modern Warfare 2 at all. I’ve been looking forward to Hexyz Force because it appeared to be everything a person like me would like.
Well, no.
Hexyz Force is your traditional turn based JRPG experience in basically every way. If you’ve played anything in this genre before you know what this is and how it works.
When you begin the game you get a choice between 2 different characters who both have different stories. Both characters run into each other often throughout the campaign, so getting both perspectives seems like a great idea...at least on paper.
After that it works like every other JRPG before it. You get a bad guy and you start moving from location to location, fighting monsters and talking to people in between.
The story in this game is just...funny. Funny in all the wrong ways. I played Levant’s story first and it started out with an intriguing and unique political intrigue/murder mystery premise, and then Levant discovers that he is the chosen one and an evil force of ultimate evil is coming to destroy the world. Great. There goes my interest in the story.
This just made me sad, because it had potential. After playing Levant’s story I started Cecilia’s campaign, and that one didn’t even have any potential, it started out being completely generic and boring. The dialog scenes throughout the game are way too drawn out and uninteresting as well. The game has it’s moments where some relatively interesting things are happening, but that’s like a 30 minute chunk after 3 hours of completely generic and yawnworthy nothingness.
Very often you’re not sure where you should be going and other times you can’t continue until you talk with every single NPC in an area, and they rarely have anything interesting to say. Playing the game is just tedious.
I played almost through the entire game without ever healing while in a battle. I beat almost every single random monster and boss monster by just attacking them harder than they did. That is just wrong, battles in JRPGs should be this easy for the first hour, not the entire game. I wasn’t overleveled or anything because I ran past basically every random battle I could, and I never equipped a piece of armor to a character, because I just didn’t need to. Let me repeat that, I never healed in a battle, I never equipped a piece of armor to a character and I ran past 90% of the regular monsters. The game was STILL easy enough to just mash the attack button until I win.
In the last hour or so the difficulty suddenly spiked, so I swapped a healer into my party and started healing every turn. That was it. Now I was healing, and then I won.
After every battle you earn FP (Force points) which you can use to fully heal yourself between battles, learn new skills, power up your weapons and even operate various sealed doors and locks in the environment. This system is great because you have a limited pool of resources to spend on a whole bunch of various things, which gives it an element of strategy.
The presentation in this game is great. Hexyz Force looks nice and sharp, the anime character artwork and anime cutscenes are both great. The soundtrack is also very good and I’m willing to even say memorable.
Therefore, when you look at it from a distance, Hexyz Force seems like an amazing turn based JRPG. Spend more than an hour or a Quick Look with it though, and the ridiculous lack of difficulty, the confusing maze-like dungeon design and the overall tedious gameplay will turn you off the game before you’ve even finished one of the campaigns, let alone even consider playing the other.
Not that playing the other campaign adds anything worthy to the story. Both campaigns go through basically the exact same paces, they meet the same characters and fight the same enemies and bosses. All you get is different dialog and a few casual winks and nudges at the other campaign.
If you need a JRPG on your PSP right now, then go and get Final Fantasy IX on PSN. If you have every other RPG ever made already, wait for Persona 3 portable. If you still want this game then go and backflip off a roof into a trashcan, just stay away from this.