Like many of you, I also grew up with the PSP – I got one on my tenth birthday, bless! – and have immense nostalgia for the console. It's easily my favourite handheld and, like the PS1 before it, I really think that a lack of experience in portable gaming helped developers turn out some really creative, unique titles. As I said in the
retro gaming magazine thread, I had the Official Playstation Magazine's guide to PSP games, which informed a ton of my purchases and, as such, taste in video gaming going forward. Here are my top picks:
First off, if you've never played the series before,
Patapon 2 is an essential PSP title (it's in HD on PS4, too) and probably one of the best handheld games ever made. It's a crazy mix of rhythm game and strategy RPG, all wrapped up in a gorgeous cartoony artstyle with plenty of tongue-in-cheek humour and adorable music. You can absolutely play it without playing the first game, and rest assured – it's the best entry in the series by far, loaded with different unit classes, incredibly fun boss battles, customizable player characters, and hilarious minigames.
The Patapon games were forgotten for a long time by the internet, but they've recently seen a surge in interest because a spiritual successor is coming out. I think that game looks pretty dreadful, and after Patapon 3, I'm not particularly confident in the dev team, so I'd say just stick with this one.
WTF: Work Time Fun is
insane. It's a mini-game collection where you play as a temp worker living in Hell and taking jobs from disgusting demon bosses. By completing those minigames – which include counting safari animals alongside a multicultural survey group, guessing the phone numbers of mid-20s women at mixer clubs, and exorcising ghosts from real-world photographs – you earn money that can be spent on gachapon machines, unlocking new games, little toys, and extremely weird utilities.
The game has a wide variety of art styles for each minigame and an outrageous, hilarious sense of black humour, keeping you engaged just to see what could possibly happen next. This is the only video game that's ever sent me into a minutes-long laughing fit, and I think it's just the tops.
Queen's Blade was a popular fantasy/ecchi anime series in the mid-2000s
, and I was a huge fan of it, so when I discovered
Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos, my twelve-year-old self's head just about exploded. It's an
extremely well-put-together strategy RPG built on the Super Robot Wars engine, where you play as several characters from the show in an original storyline. Every character has their own unique, fully-animated moveset and special abilities, and they're all voiced by their actual VAs, so the game feels "real" in a way that most anime spin-offs don't. There are tons of original anime cutscenes and
vocal songs, too!
Where most anime games slap stock images of their characters on a generic engine, Spiral Chaos had a ton of effort put into it – especially for a series that's ostensibly just perv material. The Queen's Blade franchise is a wonderfully-detailed brand, and this game lives up to that standard (and then some).
Who, dare I ask, is the man in the suit? Why, it's
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law! I watched through this whole show last year, and I thought it was hilarious. Imagine my surprise when I learned that there's a fully-animated PSP game for it built on the effing
Ace Attorney engine? Yes, really – this game is exactly like Phoenix Wright, except you're defending (or prosecuting) Hanna-Barbera characters in superhero court.
The game looks just like the show, and most of the voice actors return, so it's essentially just five more episodes of the series that you get to play through. You do need to have seen the TV series to pick up on a lot of the jokes, but if you have, this game makes an excellent way to finish off a very funny golden-age Adult Swim cartoon. (It's a lot better than the
Birdgirl show, that's for sure!!!!!!!!!)
Patchwork Heroes has been completely buried by time, which is sad, so it's worth a highlight here. It's a mix of Qix (the old arcade game where you draw lines across the screen to capture areas of the game field) and a bullet hell game. You play as a grizzled soldier who tears airships apart mid-flight, dodging attacks and gathering power-ups along the way. It has a very unique art-style reminiscent of Professor Layton, and it's very fun if you like Qix or any of its clones.
At the time, this game was promoted quite a bit on PSN as the standout title from Playstation C.A.M.P., which was an incubation project run by Japan Studio that helped university students get into video game development. As a first game made by a bunch of kids in their late teens/early 20s, it's excellent. Now that Japan Studio is dead and gone, I'd definitely say this is worth a pity play.
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!, also known as
What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord? is a genius little puzzle game where you carve out an underground RPG dungeon on a grid. The dungeon is a living, breathing, ecosystem, so you need to grow and evolve monsters by building areas for them to live and breed and establishing a workable food chain. After a few minutes, a hero enters the dungeon, and you get to see how your ecosystem gradually wears them down, eventually defeating them and bringing you to the next level. It's like
Dragon Quest crossed with an ant farm.
I love this game's humor – the final boss (who you're trying to defend) is extremely funny and sarcastic, and the game is loaded with cheeky jabs at JRPG tropes (way before every indie game did that). It's also the game which mocked people who say "anime
s" and "manga
s", which is hilarious (and depressing) today.
And there you go! Unless I'm forgetting anything, these are my fave PSP games, and most of them are exclusive. The PSP really had a lot of very unique, memorable titles, and it's such a shame that the industry has moved so far away from making games like these. Sony may not have understood handheld gaming, but a lot of their developers did, and I personally think that they left us with a ton of gems.
) is essentially PSO on the PSP. SOLD!
