Brave Story New Traveler is easily one of the most beautiful games to come out for the Sony Playstation Portable, featuring gorgeous 3D visuals and a quirky art style that straddles the line between anime and those cute little hallmark figurines. But don’t let the visuals fool you into thinking that it’s a complex and ultra modern take on the fantasy RPG genre. The game is a throwback to the simple yet engrossing turn based RPGs that were so popular during the 16 bit and 32 bit era,
The story behind Brave Story New Traveler is not something that you haven’t encountered before: you are given control of a boy named Tatsuya, whose best friend Miki has mysteriously contracted an unknown illness. A voice asks Tatsuya if he wants to save his friend, and upon agreeing, our little hero is magically transported to a medieval fantasy land and tasked with gathering 5 different gems for the Traveler’s Sword.
If you’ve played old school 2D RPGs like the Final Fantasies or Chrono Trigger, Brave Story New Traveler will be familiar and would require no tutorial – you run around over a large map screen in order to get to various towns full of NPCs to talk to and dungeons and overworld areas full of random enemies to fight, which could be anything from spiky snails to walking trees that throw fruit at you.
The game starts out a little bit slow and leveling can be a little bit grindy especially considering that this is a handheld RPG, but if you manage to stick for a couple of hours or so of game time, the game – both the story and the mechanics – will start to open up and you’ll find an RPG that is fun to play in short bursts while you wait for enough time to complete the main quests.
