The PSP system has had a whole bevy of ports at this point. Ports of PS2 games, ports of PS1 games, ports of Saturn games, and pretty soon ports it will have ports of Dreamcast games as well. This is both a good and bad thing. It’s good because it’s the first time both CD and DVD-based games are finally able to be played on a handheld, but it’s also a bad thing because it tends to curb development of original titles for the system. But at the end of the day, almost everyone can agree that if a game is to be ported and take up resources that could’ve been used on a new game, that port better be darn good. Unfortunately in the case of Valkyrie Profile Lenneth it’s not.

Lenneth is a port of 1999’s Valkyrie Profile for the original Playstation system. The original game is an excellent non-traditional rpg title filled with mature and well written stories and a strong battle system. Originally developed by Tri-Ace, known for their Star Ocean series and recently Radiata Stories, VP was a culmination of their best staff and best skills. Taking a look at any review of the title it’s fair to say that they pulled it off. VP is often revered as not only Tri-Ace’s best game, but also one of the best rpgs of all time. So with that in mind, it’s not such a bad candidate for the transition to handheld. I mean, who wouldn’t want to play one of the best rpgs of all time on the go?

Well, the problem here is that like many other Square Enix ports to handheld systems, they chose the developers TOSE to handle the port, and like most of TOSE’s other mishaps, the company has completely messed up Lenneth in the transition.

The first and foremost apparent issue with Lenneth is the sprite filtering. Basically instead of making the game show a lot of pixels like the PS version, they’ve decided to use a filter and blur everything. While this may look ok when characters are at a distance, whenever characters come close to the screen it looks absolutely dreadful and all you see is a bunch of blurry messes talking to each other. This blur filter further detriments the game by completely blurring all the text in the game. Yes, rather than erase all the text bubbles and replace text with font according to the PSP resolution like every other rpg on the system, TOSE decided to just leave the original text alone and stretch it to fill the PSP screen while blurring it to remove pixels. The overall result is that every time one’s eyes fix on the text, everything becomes blurry and just looks terrible.