Ys: The Oath in Felghana review (PSP)

New areas are filled with deadly monsters that need to be treated with great caution. As you rack up consecutive strikes on your assailants, you start to gain an earned experience bonus, and your targets are more likely to drop draughts. Draughts are items that grant temporary bonuses to your strength, defense, or the rate at which you recharge magic, and the boost is a big help in moving up in levels. Leveling up gradually equalizes the power differential, so by the time you've reached the end of the dungeon, you're thrashing enemies handily. Most of your foes slowly creep toward you, but others dodge your attacks or are particularly aggressive. There are also those that skitter around without any particular rhyme or reason. This can be both irritating and amusing when you're trying to grind experience because upon seeing you approach, certain creatures fling themselves backward and soar off a cliff into a multi-screen drop, taking your points with them in their kamikaze abandon.

Take care when entering new areas. There be monsters.

The largest rewards come from killing a dungeon's bosses, in terms of both experience points and overall satisfaction. Ys games always feature imposing gatekeeper monsters that loom tall and unleash all sorts of horror upon you, and this installment is no exception. You're challenged to prove your skill from the first boss you encounter, as you avoid devastating abilities and fight your way to an opening to do damage. A nice feature in The Oath in Felghana is a generous difficulty dial that at the beginning of the game allows you to choose anything from very easy all the way up to nightmare, adjusting the challenge you'll face. If you still find yourself struggling during a boss battle--after getting creamed a couple of times--you can decrease the difficulty of that encounter specifically. Mainly this feature increases your attack slightly while decreasing damage slightly, and if you need to, you can do this several times over several attempts. The most resolute players may ignore this particular option, but if you find yourself stuck on a particularly angry boss, decreasing the difficulty slightly can give you the edge you need for victory. These selectors really open up the game to players of all levels of competence while preserving the stiff challenge that fans of the series would expect, creating a good balance.

Upon completion, you unlock an image gallery, the brutally difficult Inferno mode, and a time-attack mode that pits you against the ferocious boss monsters back-to-back at a selectable difficulty level. Defeating these bosses unlocks new, even more difficult bosses for you to fight. In addition, you have the option to open a new save file and use points to carry over attributes of your character to a new game--like your stats, your gold, and so on. Defeating each of the difficulty modes grants you additional gallery images, as well as differing point amounts to spend carrying content over to a new game, so completionists have no shortage of things to do.

With a sword and a little ingenuity, you too can dispatch rude demon ladies and other foul creatures.

Ys: The Oath in Felghana is suitable for just about anyone who likes to cut up monsters, though it's the normal difficulty and higher settings that will offer the best challenge and sense of accomplishment. The story is compact and unpretentious, the action is fast paced, and the involute dungeons provide some tricky platforming and a host of foes to obliterate. If you're looking for an uncomplicated action role-playing game and don't mind occasionally wrangling with the environment, The Oath in Felghana surely fits the bill.