Gurumin came out for the PSP in the US a couple months ago. I have been looking forward to the game for a while, but when I saw that the price was $40, well, I don’t trust any PSP game for that much money. Unfortunately, I wasn’t willing to put my money where my mouth was.

About a month back a few PR statements were made by Mastiff (the US publisher of the game) that the title was becoming hard to find on store shelves, and they even offered sell-through from publisher to customers wanting the title instantly. They also stated that they were working on printing more copies for distribution. After this announcement I was nearly in a panic (I get that way, don’t ask why) and then I remembered that I had seen quite a few copies last time I looked. I made a trip to Best Buy even and they had four copies on the shelves. I decided to hold off again for either a price drop, or a huge slump in games.

After the re-print of the game happen the MSRP was dropped from $40 to $20 dollars: a much better price for a niche title on a handheld system. Honestly I would have been ok at a $30 price point. Either way, after I found out about the price drop I went looking for the game. Now the game has become hard to find. I stopped at a Best Buy, Gamestop, and Game Crazy all without a single copy. On an off hand chance I made a stop at my local EB and they did have a new copy (unopened even!).

So that was Saturday. I got home and knew I had other things to do (sorry magazine) but I just wasn’t feeling too well about it. I hadn’t seriously played a game in weeks, and I’m still a bit off from the whole events of the past couple weeks. Even though I knew I had more important things to do I put them off, plugged in my PSP and started to play Gurumin.

I’m sure some of you are familiar with Falcom, the developers of Gurumin, but some may not be. Their most famous series is most likely the Ys series of games. Falcom is mostly a PC developer who has been releasing game for over 20 years now. Most of their games are ported from the PC to other consoles. For the past decade or so Falcom hasn’t ported a single PC game to consoles themselves, but decided to with Gurumin. I can only hope it was inspired by the piss poor handling by Konami of the Ys VI PSP port. Gurumin was originally released for the PC in 2004 (probably priced at $100, which is about the average price for their releases). The first time I heard of the game was in a discussion about Drill Dozer prior to its release, and I then promptly forgot about it for a little while. Being a bit of a Falcom fan boy (I like to root for the underdog) I took quick notice of Gurumin getting ported to the PSP, and more interestingly that Falcom was doing it themselves.

Anyways, so I got the game and I played it quite a bit this weekend. The back of the box describes the game as an action role playing game (ARPG), but that’s not right at all. If anything I would say it’s a platforming game, but mostly it’s just an action/adventure game. That’s just the play style though, and who cares about that?

The characters are all lively and unique (not to be confused with original, most characters are a cliché of something) and the settings are fairly standard for this children’s adventure. The script is decently well put together with writing above what would be expected from something that’s the equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon. Speaking of which, the voice acting is on par with equivalent cartoons: not great, but not bad or grating either.

Ok, I just took like a five hour break from writing, so excuse me if this ends up disjointed.

Mostly the game reminds me of Megaman Legends. Everything from the camera (and it’s problems) to the way that enemies are placed around the areas. Unlike MML though, this game’s overworld is a mere map (and I’m mildly thankful for that). The combat is a fairly barebones attack system. Easy combos through one attack button and a few special moves (no shooting ala MML). There are some interesting combos to be created through using jumping in combination with attacks, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The game is also fairly small. There is a main strip in town with a couple shops (literally) and half a dozen town folks who each serve a unique purpose. At first this seems very empty, but the developers use this minimalist approach to the game’s advantage. Everyone is familiar with a unique attitude and it rather than feeling like there are a bunch of random people thrown in who you don’t care about, you find that everyone is brimming with originality (outside of clichéd character types.) This also gives the writers time to write more for each character, so you find them repeating less. This also helps because the structure of the game doesn’t have you going back to town too often.

The progress of the game works. Rather than having literal locks and keys, you have areas you can’t go too because of dark mist that reflects the mood of the monsters. As you slowly recover and return objects to the monsters they will become happier and as a result new areas are exposed.

There are some problems with the game, but most of them I am stiffly blaming on the PSP. Most specifically load times. Knowing that the game was originally designed for something which isn’t going to have a whole lot of load times, it makes more sense to organize things the way they are (clear dungeon -> get item -> return item -> make monster happy and expose new area -> Go to new dungeon -> repeat). But toss in some long load times (ok, perhaps not long for early PS1 games and they’re better than most PSP games) between the segments and you start wishing that Falcom had cut some of the more tedious parts to stream line things. The only other thing is that the game starts off too easy. Until the first boss fight I was actullay worried that I wouldn’t keep playing the game because it was so simple (and I’m playing on Normal with the other option being Easy. Side Rant: The back of the box claims Five difficulties, which is irritating because I would probably be enjoying myself a bit more with the highest of three staring difficulties).

Overall the game is better than I expected it to be. Everything is tightly organized into goal and tasks that are easy to accomplish so they don’t seem overwhelming (as opposed to collecting all the Pokemans or all the souls in Igavania) but they aren’t so shallow that you feel like you have everything accomplished too soon. I’m hoping and guessing that the game only lasts about 15 hours, which is pretty perfect for a portable game, and short enough that I could play through it at a higher difficulty later if I want.

Umm, well, I’m done talking about it I guess. I have to head home now. Again, yeah, disjointed.