“One of the worst ports ever made. An unplayable game that makes you wonder how it ever got passed Q&A.” If the world was a perfect place, these would be the quotes gamers would see on the cover as they stepped up to buy the PSP port of Spectral Souls II (unfortunately coming to the US fairly soon). While there have been awful games made in recent year, and a great many of them ports onto the PSP as well, there’s really very little that compares to the pure pain of playing Spectral Souls II on the PSP system. It’s not that Spectral Souls II is a bad game; well it wasn’t originally when it was released on the PS2, but rather that Idea Factory has obviously no idea how to program PSP games and Spectral Souls II is the sad result of that.

Originally, Spectral Souls II was Idea Factory’s low-budget attempt at a Final Fantasy Tactics strategy meets Nippon Ichi number crunching and insane damage. Sounds good? Well, while it was a fair show by the team and possibly the strongest title put out by Idea Factory to date, it still was a long ways from standing up with the big boys. The visuals in SSII featured sprites that looked worse than most 16-bit RPGs, and animation that was a far cry from modern 2d as well. In fact, besides the PS1 level 3D backdrops, there was really no reason SSII couldn’t have ran on the Genesis.

But hey, SRPGS don’t really live or die based on their visuals. As the gameplay is good, many SRPGs will find a niche audience who are motivated to keep on trouncing through map after map. In SSII, indeed the gameplay was good enough to keep most players busy. Filled with hidden characters/scenarios, dozens of attacks, branching paths, tons of abilities, item alchemy, etc… Sure the balance was a bit off the charts as many N1 rpgs are, and the story can really only appeal to those who’ve followed the IF’s giant Neverland plotline that runs through multiple games; but at the end of the day, those looking for a new SRPG and willing to put up with 15 year old visuals and the most low-budget presentation one can get, will find themselves rewarded with an enjoyable game that’s probably a good 7/10 experience and 8 or maybe even 9/10 for huge fans of Neverland and IF.

But unfortunately now matter how good the PS2 version is, this isn’t the PS2 game that we’re talking about here. It’s not about a solid alternative to the mainstream SRPGs in the PS2 library system, but rather this is about the PSP SSII and “solid” and this game do not fit anywhere in the same sentence. While Idea Factory has had many years to learn the secrets of PS2 coding by this point in the system’s life, it must still be too early in the PSP’s lifetime because the same can’t be said of SII on the PSP.