Kingdom of Paradise [PSP]

Adding a little much-needed variety to the PSP's somewhat sparse stable, Kingdom of Paradise is an action-heay role-playing game set in a pseudo-Asian fantasy world. The fighting system is smooth, the visuals are detailed and bright, and it even includes ad-hoc wireless multiplayer. Kingdom of Paradise has its flaws, but it's hard to see RPG fans not getting their money's worth from it.

Given Kingdom of Paradise's fast-paced combat and Chinese-Japanese theme, you might be thinking it sounds a little like Bioware's Xbox smash hit Jade Empire. It certainly has its similarities, although Paradise is viewed from a side-scrolling perspective, and the combat is even more of a focus in Paradise than in Jade Empire.

Fortunately, this combat is pretty good. Key to the whole system is the idea that combos aren't performed with complex button sequences (as in most games). Instead, they're written ahead of time, using a menu system and grouping different attacks in sequence. Once in battle, they're performed by just mashing the single attack button; your character does the rest. Once you get deeper into the game, you'll find a variety of new attacks, "chi" spells -- which can be awesomely powerful -- and ranged combat techniques.

It's let down by the blocking mechanism, which doesn't work as well as it should. You block by holding down the attack button instead of mashing it -- this would be fine, except it doesn't take effect for a few seconds. Those few seconds are usually enough for you to take a few hits, or even be knocked to the ground by stronger enemies. This is bound to be frustrating if you're more of a defensive player.

War and Peace this isn't, but the plot rolls along without getting in the way. The dialogue ranges from strong to hilariously silly, but keeps mostly on the good side of acceptable. It'd be nice to have a little more guidance in a few places -- it can be hard to see exactly how the map and play viewpoint relate as you travel from place to place -- but you're not plagued by random encounters or other distractions.

It's also smooth looking, especially during the in-engine cutscenes and bigger fights. Some of the game's combat moves are very impressive, especially as you don't need to do anything particularly complex to pull them off.

What about that multiplayer feature? It's limited to one-on-one battles, using your character from the single-player game, and set in a variety of arena-type environments. But you can also trade attacks you've found with other players, and customize the fight rules to a pretty significant degree.

Better still, there's an infrastructure mode that lets you download new content for the game by connecting to a wireless access point. It's good to see a PSP game making use of this feature, but Kingdom of Paradise's implementation is not up to scratch. You can't just download new content from the handheld. You have to futz around with the web browser to find a password, write it down, boot the game, realize you've lost the paper you wrote it on, and then probably get bored and decide you didn't want to download that stuff so badly after all.

Even without the downloadable content, you'll still find Kingdom of Paradise varied enough to keep you going through its roughly 15-hour story. For the PSP-owning role-playing fan on the go, there's not much choice out there, but Paradise is still smoothly presented and very enjoyable, regardless of the lack of competition.