As Trane, a young graff artist on the rise, you must make your mark, or “get up”, on the city of New Radius, all the while avoiding the “Big Brother”-like militia cops, and eventually uncovering the plot of a corrupt politician. Armed with your black book (a graff artist’s pad where he or she would keep sketch ideas of their graffiti, or even keep marks from other artists to adapt to their own work) and a myriad of sprays, wheat glue, markers, stickers and the like, you have plenty of ways to get your name out into the world.

Incorporating a PRINCE OF PERSIA control style, Trane must scale buildings, shimmy across railings and pipes and generally perform acrobatic feats of daring do in order to get his message out for the world to see. For the most part, the control for these sections of the game are adequate, but at times the control can become confusing, as some ledges where you’d think Trane would naturally latch onto, he simply won’t, despite your best attempts and the fact that he can jump well above them, yet not over. That, coupled with a camera that more often hinders than helps tends to detract from finding one’s path up the buildings and scaffolding strewn about the city.

Along the way, you encounter rival taggers, and even an anti-graffiti police known simply as the CCK. When you come across these aggressors, Trane must use his skills as a graff artist to…lay the smack down? For some reason, there’s a heavy dose of combat here in the game, and sadly, it feels very clunky. Trane has a series of punches and kicks that he can execute with flare and style, but the blocking is practically non-existent, and while the degree of the attacks is varied (even so far as to include “insult” attacks as specials), most of the time you’ll just wail on the buttons in the hopes of just one hit in your three chain attack connects. It’s serviceable, but it would have been nice if the control here were tightened up.

That being said, the key element of the game, the tagging, is probably the most solid, and yet still not-quite-complete element to the title. As this is a game ABOUT graffiti and graffiti culture, one would expect that the utmost attention would be paid to this element of the gameplay, and for the most part, yes, this is true. As you enter each new area, Trane can use his “intuition” to scope out places to “get up” as ghostly outlines streak across your field of vision to wind up on walls and billboards and highlight themselves with colored Xs on their final locales. You use your varied supply of graff tools to tag each section (orange Xs for main goals, blue Xs for secondary tags) and you can cycle through different designs (taken from your black book and with more unlocked as you progress) and adjust the size and color they will finish at, but that just about as far as the customization goes. For a game about art, it certainly doesn’t allow the player to be artistic. There’s no section to design your own tag or even adjust the given tags beyond the methods I mentioned. So, all you’re left with once you finally settle up to a place to tag is a simple “color in the outline” game, where you just rotate the left analog stick over the outlined tag, filling it in automatically with color. Lingering too long on a spot will cause drips, but overall, it’s a simple task that can be completed with nary a fault.

There are style and respect points to be won by finding interesting (yet predetermined by the game developers) places to tag, or by “tagging big” with your designs (size does matter), but overall, the game feels very restricted. You can’t REALLY tag anywhere (often I found myself against a nice clean wall, but Trane simply said “not here”…odd to say the least) but when you can, at least the control is simple and effective enough to accomplish it with a minimum of fuss.

If all these gameplay points were tightened, and there was a bit more customization involved to incorporate the player’s own designs, the game would be a definite recommend. As it stands, it is a fun title, but unless you’re steeped in graff culture (and will really dig on the appearance of true legends like Futura and Cope2) its simple restrictions may only warrant a rental.

One Gamer’s Opinion:

YS-Y DOES IT

As the red-haired Adol Christin, you explore the islands of Canaan and unlock the secrets of the mysterious Vortex that apparently keeps sucking in ships and stranding their passengers onto the island’s shores. Initially, this action RPG has you wandering the countryside after you yourself have washed up on shore armed with just your simple metal sword, but as you progress you gain three elemental swords that you can imbue with powerful gems. Each sword has a special attack skill (fire, wind and electricity) and your attacks are dolled out as button mashing glee. There are no parties to speak of in this adventure, but you certainly meet your share of characters along your admittedly short quest.

Despite the game’s colorful graphics and excellent sound design, the game is sadly troubled by some serious load times. Every time you enter a new area, be it a building, dungeon, new section of field, even when entering shops, a cheery “now loading” message pops up on a blank screen, sometimes lasting half a minute at most. There are times when you level up that the screen even freezes for a moment with the “Level Up” message loads above your head. This certainly adds to the playtime, but that’s not quite what I had in mind.

What is new beyond the PS2 version (and actually is welcome) are the various mini-games strewn about the adventure. Sadly, these too don’t add much to the length of your quest, and aren’t necessary for completing the game, but they do offer some cool unlockables, such as the game’s soundtrack and character databases, video, trailers and more for the series history. Yet, while this version features some nice anime cut-scenes, all traces of the voice work that was in the home console version have been removed for the handheld port. What’s added and what’s taken away certainly make for a mixed port.

YS: AON is an RPG in the loosest sense of the word: you play a role in this game. As Adol you hack and slash various enemies (who essentially all move along specific attack paths) and level up to do the same to stronger foes and eventual boss characters. Unfortunately, to do even that takes precious load times as you fight foes, leave an area, then re-enter to do it all again in the hopes of gaining levels…and waiting through those load times. It looks nice, sounds great, and its control is basic but well done…but still doesn’t stand as a must-have RPG for the system.

One Gamer’s Opinion:

SUPREMELY TEDIOUS

Here, the developers of the popular TOKYO XTREME RACER series has taken the idea of Japanese street racing and tried to scale it down for PSP as a sort of strategic “caRPG”. You begin the game in “Team battle”, where, instead of driving around solo in a free-roaming city, choosing races as you find them, you buy a car and join a race team, challenging other teams to race battles, or even racing other members of your team to gain ranking and eventually lead them. As you race, you and your opponent each have a health bar of sorts at the top of the screen. These “spirit points” decrease as you either hit walls, or fall behind in the race. While this is an interesting concept, it really shortens the race times. You either fall behind too quickly with no hope of catching up, or you gain such a lead that there’s no chance of you getting passed, and the race ends as soon as your opponents SP is depleted (which doesn’t take long at all). This would make for some good handheld racing, if the races weren’t so basic, and the load times weren’t so plentiful.

Once again, there’s a series of menus to navigate through, and each is accompanied by a 10 to 20 second load time as each new menu approaches. With races that barely last longer than 30 seconds at most, spending most of your time before and after the races waiting really isn’t all that fun. To top it all off, the races are fairly bland to begin with, as the cars don’t handle all that well. You invariably lose SP right off the bat, because you will ALWAYS hit a wall, no matter how well you tune your car (with which, yes, there are plenty of options to do so, but also, yes, plenty of load times).

There’re plenty of licensed cars to choose from, and they all look sharp and detailed, but the game’s attempts to be original and new fall flat with basic control and bland backgrounds. It’s a decent effort, but it’s not worth the wait times you’ll experience between the insanely short races.

One Gamer’s Opinion:

Once again, another column ends. Good or bad, I play them all, and hopefully, you all enjoy what I write. So, why don’t you drop me a line and let me know? I’m always open for suggestions for various gaming topics to discuss, and would love for some new ideas for future column topics (beyond what I have planned for some upcoming VIDEO GAMES 101 and COMICS TO GAMES features). E-mail or hit the MoviePoopShoot message boards and let me know what’s on your minds, folks, I love to hear from you all. Until next time, friends…

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