Towns stretch around you, vast arenas that repeat only a texture or two and look barren, except for a few people who stand around. Head back outside such buildings and you’ll be struck immediately by the contrast. 'Hmm,' you tell yourself, 'they really wanted to make sure these environments look good.' That’s not always the case, though.

Sometimes it feels like it was worth it when you wander into a shop and there are barrels and trinkets littering the room, with nice textures and maybe a staircase winding up to rooms above.

Instead, things fade out to a load screen, which lasts several seconds before you appear in the next room. Of course, it’s not like there’s ever an ‘open the door’ animation, anyway.

Sometimes it’s silly, like when you run toward a building, target the door and open it before you even get within range for your character to touch it. Sometimes this is frustrating, when you’re facing the screen where you know a door is but you can’t open it to exit until you rotate the camera around so that you can target it first. For no reason I can see, the developers just want you to press an extra button. I could understand it if you had to choose between targets in an active combat system or something, but you don’t. This is true whether you’re right next to it on the screen or inches away, and it doesn’t seem to have any valuable purpose. You first must press the ‘square’ button to target the object with which you wish to interact and then you can press ‘X’ to do so. In Blade Dancer, you don’t just examine items. The heroes and plot are generic and the world is too, but that didn’t bother me. Nor should you be surprised by later plot developments, which include monsters rampaging through forests that were formerly peaceful, dark towers, an ancient evil that is now awakening from its slumber, and so forth. You’ve seen the same sort of creature in Lunar and its clones, so you shouldn’t be surprised to see it all over again in Blade Dancer. The game opens with promise, as a young hero lands on the shore of a distant land with his companion, a loveable rodent who looks like a mouse but isn’t quite. The end result, while playable and occasionally fun, is difficult to recommend to anyone but the most ardent of genre fans. There are definitely some great ideas, but they’re either marred by questionable execution, or they just never really take off in the first place. At least, it’s not on a consistent basis, which many who play it will agree amounts to the same thing. I really like what Blade Dancer is trying to do, but it’s not successful. There aren’t random battles in Blade Dancer, just scripted events and other confrontations that you can often avoid simply by running from floating enemy icons (sometimes they’ll even run from you if they’re particularly week).' There’s also plenty of mist, and you’ll see enemies patrolling. 'Head outside of a town and it’s more of the same, with green plains stretching as far as you can see toward featureless hills broken up only by the occasional tree or stone walkway. Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light (PSP) review

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