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Mytran Wars Review for PlayStation Portable (PSP)

Mytran Wars Review for PlayStation Portable (PSP)

Botched Invasion

Call it a bad taste leftover from the short-lived yet horrific FMV-game genre that reared its ugly head in the early-to-mid-nineties, but I’m always wary of any game that uses live-action actors in CG settings. So when the intro movie to Mytran Wars started off with exactly that, it threw up a cautionary red flag in my head. Nothing personal against a series like Command & Conquer; these kinds of signs just don’t usually end up representing a product you should take too seriously.

Mytran Wars screenshot

You would be wise to bear this in mind when approaching Mytran Wars. It’s sluggish, sloppily-made, and, perhaps worst of all for the genre, has no concept of what the word “strategy” means. In fact, it may be the poorest excuse for a strategy RPG I’ve ever seen, which makes its exclusive presence on the PSP, a platform graced with Jeanne D’Arc, the Final Fantasy Tactics remake War of the Lions, and the Disgaea series all the more insulting.

But, as is all too common with the plague of bad game design, this won’t be immediately apparent-not that other signs pointing to a lack of quality can be easily missed. The game begins inexplicably by replacing the intro’s CG with a flash animation-style motion-comic cutscene. The art is hideous enough, but the voice acting is the stuff nightmares are made of, making the performance of the FFX laughing scene look like Shakespeare in the park. Adding insult to injury, the script sounds like it may as well have been written by a tenth grader whose main inspirations were Starship Troopers and his own naïve perceptions about what romantic dialogue should sound like. Even the plot is tired and cliché ridden, following a small band of mech pilots standing up to an evil corporation that’s destroying an alien world in order to get its planet’s wellspring of resources.

Despite all these immediate strikes against it, Mytran Wars could’ve still earned its stripes on the battlefield. Had it provided a balanced and effectively strategic campaign to play through, its awful production values and generic plot probably could have been overlooked without too much of a loss, if begrudgingly so. But this isn’t the case, thanks to a few very glaring problems with the game’s design.

Mytran Wars screenshot

Mytran Wars comes from a typical turn-based strategy RPG template, using grid-based maps, weapons and equipment upgrades, and customizable unit types. Basically, there is nothing here you haven’t seen before. The mechs are ripped from Front Mission, right down to the individual body part modifications. The game employs a fog of war to obscure the enemy from your site a la Advance Wars, but (maddeningly) only in some levels. The prerequisite elemental and unit strengths and weaknesses, melee combat and everything else you take for granted in the genre also are presented and accounted for.

Mytran Wars screenshot

But unlike most SRPGs, cure items in Mytran Wars are not perishable, and they can be used as many times as need be in battle. The catch is they must recharge, meaning you can only use one such item once every three or four turns (or thereabouts). Here’s where the game’s balance is seriously maligned. For some reason, someone thought it’d be a good idea to have each cure item automatically refill all your hit points, no matter how much or little life you’re missing, in order to compensate for the unlimited uses.

Making matters worse, your enemies have the same advantage. So, if you commit to attacking one foe, you’re basically forced to bum-rush them with every unit you have and praying you do enough damage to kill them before your turn is over. If you fail, they will cure themselves at the start of the enemy phase, effectively making your previous turn amount to a huge waste of time. Part of the strategy in a good SRPG comes from learning to approach a group of enemies and slowly taking them down through various means; this tactic isn’t even possible in Mytran Wars. The developers could have even compensated by lessening the enemy count, but you are often so overwhelmed that even with the recharge time on curing there are too many enemies to make your actions worthwhile. Not even the elemental properties of each unit, whose strengths and weaknesses between units could have theoretically played a bigger part in making the game seem more balanced and fair, really make a difference.

Mytran Wars screenshot

Objectives are often infuriatingly vague, as well. For instance, near the one-third mark of the game is an escort mission that instructs you to travel across a winding canyon. When you finally slog your way to the waypoint, a message appears, saying that a big bruiser mech that’s been in your party is dropping out. The brusier, although “dropping”, still functioned and now had a self-destruct command for unknown reasons. It took about half an hour to figure out to use the self-destruct command to blow a hole in the canyon wall to continue down another path-a realization I came to on entirely on my own. The objectives hadn’t changed, and there were no prompts about what to do.

Similarly, if you’re supposed to, say, capture an alien base but accidentally end up destroying it, the mission doesn’t end. Incompetent design like this is everywhere in Mytran Wars, and it will make you want to smash your PSP against the nearest wall. Finally, battle speeds and animations and are irritatingly slow, dragging out the length of the game’s overly long 30 level campaign. These can be turned off, but only at the cost of you being blindsided by enemies that seemingly drop from the sky.

Unless you’re really, really into SRPGs, the flaws in Mytran Wars’ mechanics almost completely cripple the game. I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone, nor can I be any clearer than that. Do yourself a favor-play War of the Lions instead.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.0 Graphics
Mytran Wars’ visuals are one of the few things the developers didn’t screw up too much. 4.0 Control
Controls exactly how you would expect a strategy RPG to. It can sometimes be hard to tell which grid the cursor is highlighting. 1.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The music is a limited collection of forgettable, mid-nineties techno tracks, and the sound is passable. The voice acting will make your ears bleed. 1.0 Play Value
If the fate of most badly designed games is to suffer an excruciatingly slow end by falling on their own swords, Mytran Wars is so awful it doesn’t have a sword with which to end it all, and it is instead forced to starve to death. 1.4 Overall Rating – Avoid
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

Game Features:

  • Motion-comic cutscenes.
  • 30 mission single-player campaign.
  • Two player ad-hoc multiplayer.
  • Unlockable extras, secret mission objectives, and 250 item upgrades on six different ability trees.
  • Four total unlockable campaigns.

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