After tackling the RPG genre in the innovative Riviera, Sting decided to follow up with their take on the strategy genre. As someone who absolutely loved Riviera (I played the entire 20+ hour game in a weekend), I bought Yggdra Union on the day that it hit the Game Boy Advance. While it wasn’t a revolution, it was definitely a solid addition to the genre. Atlus and the original development team have now brought this “remastered edition” to the PSP with a scattering of new content and several major gameplay modifications.

The PSP is already rife with Strategy RPGs. Does Yggdra Union stand up to the competition? Have the changes improved on the original?

Gulcasa’s empire has spread, consuming country after country in its wake. The Princess of Fantasinia, Yggdra Yuril Artwaltz, has barely escaped with her life. She joins up with a thief named Milanor and Durant, the former leader of Fantasinia’s Third Calvary. Together, they must gather allies, retake her kingdom, and stop the Empire. While the storyline is basically RPG-101, the characters and script are intriguing enough to keep you fairly interested. The story does manage to take a couple of unexpected turns before reaching its conclusion. Retaking Yggdra’s kingdom winds up being one of the smallest problems that you have to tackle throughout the course of the game.

The PSP release of Yggdra Union contains the basic core game of the 2006 GBA original, but there are a number of major differences. The most obvious change is that Union takes advantage of the increased screen space. The GBA version looked nice, but the PSP release blows it away in terms of graphical presentation. In general, everything looks cleaner on the PSP screen. Sting’s artists do some amazing work, and the high-resolution art in the PSP version really shows off their talent. The 2D grid-based battlefields and sprite-work look fantastic. Yggdra Union isn’t the kind of game to push the system to its limits, but it doesn’t have to be. Regardless of appearance, strategy lovers will eat a game up as long as the gameplay holds up.

The basic gameplay of Yggdra Union is similar to that of other tactical games, but diverges in a couple of major ways. The closest parallel is probably Fire Emblem. At the start of a battle, you’ll choose your characters and a dozen or so cards. You choose a new card at the start of every turn, and you’ll lose the battle if you run out. During longer battles, you earn cards back at pre-determined story points. The cards all have three attributes - POW, MOV, and ACE. The POW determines the base amount of damage that you’ll do. As you win battles using cards, they will actually grow more powerful. MOV determines how many steps you’ll be able to take during that turn. The last attribute, ACE, is a weapon type. If your weapon matches that type, you’ll get a power boost and will be able to use that card’s special powers. Cards with no ACE type grant abilities that anyone can use.

Once you choose a card for that round, you’ll be presented with a view familiar to any Strategy RPG fan. Your characters and the enemies occupy positions on a 2D grid. You can move any of your characters as many times as you’d like, but you are limited by the step total dictated by your card. If you position a character next to an enemy unit, you’ll be able to engage them in battle (called a union). You can only wage one battle per round, but if you position characters in the right formation, you’ll be able to bring all of them into the union. Once you enter a union, the game switches to a side view as each side’s units dive at each other. Battles are largely automatic, you don’t need to issue constant commands. You can dictate battle style between aggressive or passive. An energy meter at the top drains as you maintain an aggressive stance, and a passive stance fills the meter. If the meter fills completely and you match the ACE type, you’ll be able to use a special ability. Some of these are powerful attacks, some put up defensive shields, and others can steal items from the enemy or brainwash them into joining your side.

A large amount of the tactical portion of the title takes place before the battles, especially in coming up with optimal troop formations and managing your cards. Your choice of attacker is absolutely critical, and it’s important to remember which weapon types are effective against which. While the battles are mostly hands-off affairs, you still have to pay some attention. Applying more pressure at just the right moment can change the entire course of a union. The battles are fun, and the strategy portion does require a little thought, but there isn’t quite enough interactivity to always keep you interested in the drawn-out fights. You spend most of your time literally just watching animations of people hitting each other with weapons. Sting has added the ability to speed up battles, an incredibly welcome change after the snail’s pace of some battles in the GBA original. The speed increase helps, but some unions seem to drag on and on, especially when someone uses a special ability.

As you might expect, characters gain experience and level up as they survive battle after battle. This process is automatic — you don’t really get any say in how they grow. The main thing to get excited about is that your morale (HP) is fully restored when you level a character. In the GBA original, the only way to regain morale was to use items or to let weakened characters sit out of stages for awhile. This change makes the game much less frustrating, as items aren’t exactly plentiful and you only have so many characters that you can switch out.

If you’re like me, you usually just mute handheld games. Yggdra Union, however, is a game where you might not mind donning some headphones. Shigeki Hayashi and Minako Adachi did a fantastic job on the soundtrack, which features over sixty tracks. The PSP version also has full voice acting. While they aren’t amazing, the voices are, at least, not cringe-inducing like so many other Japanese RPG localizations of late (Namco, I’m looking right at you).

With forty-eight battlefields (some containing multiple stages), you won’t have to worry about running out of content too quickly. Each battle takes roughly thirty minutes to an hour, so expect at least a good thirty hours out of the game. The bottom line? For fans of the genre, Yggdra Union is definitely worth a try. It’s familiar enough that fans of SRPGs will immediately be comfortable, but is different enough to provide a breath of fresh air. Even if you’ve played the GBA version, the new content and gameplay tweaks have changed the experience enough that it’s worth another look.

Score: