Mitchell Dyer

Kingdom of Paradise

Shinbu is a banished member of some sort of fictional legendary martial-arts clan, seeking adventure. You, as Shinbu, find your entire former clan completely slaughtered, save for one woman. Shinbu and friend then pursue the perpetrators, as they aim to recover some mystical stolen sword, and avenge their clan. All in all, you’ll have a pretty damn good time avenging your clan.

The Good

The primary focus of this 3D-Third-Person-Action-RPG is the combat. As you progress throughout, you will find tiles, each tile containing a certain action move (A sword swing, a kick, etc.) for combat, then, you will attach them to a scroll, which is basically Shinbu’s personal notes on how to kick ass. You start off with a two-tile, two hit combo, but as you progress, and level up, you can blend more and more tiles together for massive combos. Nothing rocks more than seeing shinbu stab a foe, jump in the air, land on him with a kick, and then juggle him in the air in a glorious ten hit combo.

Visually, the game isn’t stunning, but it sure doesn’t hurt the eyes. Being that the environments are gargantuan, you have a lot of scenery to look at, so there was obviously a lot of effort put into the mountains, trails, and rivers. Dust particles follow Shinbu as he runs across the globe, water splashes as he runs through streams, stuff like that. Character models are fairly generic, but my god, can they move. Not only do Shinbu’s massive amount of combat moves look smooth, but the running, and fighting of literally everyone else is animated with a ton of realism, while maintain that anime touch. The animation truly is great in this title, and stands out above most PSP, and even PS2 games.

Clearly influenced by ancient China as well as feudal Japan, the story is fairly lengthy (15 hours, great for a portable epic!) and the music suits accordingly. You’ll never get sick of the score, as it crescendos as the battle heats up, and mellows out as you near that serene river, all as if it were a single track. The character outfits suit accordingly, and mix up as you move along.

The Not-So-Good

I mentioned the story having some cool history behind it, but there’s a problem. A big one. At least 75 % of the time, you’ll sit wondering where the heck you’re supposed to go, and what you need to do. Shinbu’s ‘Journal’ doesn’t ever help, either.

“I need to find ((Someone important))!”
Okay.
Where?
You’ll find yourself backtracking across the entire world more than once talking to familiar faces, and familiar generic villiagers… You’ll beg to whatever god Shinbu worships for some aid that you’ll never get.

When you finally get to where you need to be, you’ll be lucky to find the save point you so desperately desire, as you are encountered with (Good looking, and mostly fun) cinematics, with absolutely painful voiceovers. Accelerated dialogue to match the mouths of the would-be-speaking-Japanese-characters just doesn’t work… An entire sentence comes out as gibberish, sounding like a whole word, and if it’s not that, it’s just the actors obviously not caring about their job, as they speak in total monotone. I don’t know if it’s an audio glitch, or something, but I could have waited a little more time for the game for decent VOs…

Conclusion

Other than a confusing story, awful VOs, and some minor camera issues, Kingdom of Paradise will have you happily slicing and dicing at the hordes of thugs, samurai, skeletons, and other unfortunate saps who get in the way of your decent looking character. Animations are stunning, deep, complex combat (which is heavily in favor of magic, unfortunately), Infrastructure multiplayer, tons of goodies to find and buy, make this level-up adventure worth a purchase for any RPG fan who has access to a walkthrough.

7.5/10

Another review I dug up from a while ago… I miss playing this game, but holy crap was it frustrating, but I recommend it if you need a PSP RPG!