Dungeons and Dragons is one of the longest running RPG franchises it seems, harkening back to the days when most RPGs were solely tabletop pen and paper affairs. In this day and age, however, though you'll still find people questing with a pad of paper in their hand, more people are questing with a game console in their hand more than anything else. The latest handheld RPG for the PSP is Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics, but is this game in desperate need of a saving throw?

THE STORY SO FAR
As your mighty band of heroes, you'll start out by just trying to make a name for yourself, slowly working your way up to more respectable levels until finally the fate of a kingdom rests in your hands. You'll journey forth trying to seek favor with leaders, proving yourself to make new allies, and ultimately bring down evil and have all the men and women live happily ever after.

The story of Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics (DnD:Tactics from here on) unfolds mostly through static cutscenes featuring unanimated faces that stay still while text scrolls at the bottom. Though the characters are drawn nicely the storytelling method is pretty lousy, as there just isn't enough to draw you in. The story is good enough, but nothing amazingly engrossing or epic, and watching paintings talk isn't exactly thrilling either. Besides the static cutscenes, occasionally you'll have your characters stop long enough to say something important to the mission or the story, but once again it doesn't exactly unfold in a great narrative fashion.

There are many RPGs where you can sometimes suffer through gameplay issues as long as you want to see what happens in the story next, but DnD:Tactics' indifferent story certainly isn't a reason to stick with the game, slogging through its endless menus and its utter randomness.

SINGLE-PLAYER: GAMEPLAY
The heart of the single-player game is all in the campaign mode of the game, which has you journeying across the country, battling demons and buying goods from local merchants. Before you get started, however, you'll have to gather your band of merry men and women. The game gives you the option of choosing between a variety of pre-made characters, but chances are you'll want to customize the game to the best of your abilities, and so you'll want to form up your own personally made party.

When choosing your party there are a number of options and possibilities, some being merely cosmetic while others will greatly affect your gameplay. On the cosmetic side of things you'll be able to pick your character's sex (technically could fit both categories), be able to choose their visual portrait, and their character head as it will appear on the actual battlefield. On the gameplay side of things you'll pick from a wide variety of character races, jobs/classes, abilities and skills, and even what god they worship.

Problems with DnD:Tactics emerge here as you're really in the dark about what will and won't work, as many won't be familiar with many of these abilities or what they might mean gameplay wise unless they've actually played with the latest DnD rulebook. You'll put together your idea for a character that you think will be cool and functional in battle, and then you find they are utterly worthless and will reload the game just so you can spend even more time trying to create a new set of adventurers.

The real faults of DnD:Tactics come from the gameplay, which perhaps remains too faithful to the franchise. You'll start the isometric levels exploring around, looking for mission clues, chests, and you'll keep looking around until you run across an enemy. Once you meet an enemy you'll find yourselves in a queue of battle commands, where when it is your turn you have exactly two options at your command before your turn is over and another one of your characters has to act. Typically your two move turn will include you moving into position and then your second turn attacking the enemy. It's easy enough to figure out that you need to move to the yellow squares around enemies to perform an attack, but it can be difficult to move into place as your guide arrow doesn't like taking diagonals based on camera position, so you'll sometimes have to angle your camera just perfect so that your movement arrow can be recognized.

So you finally get your character into attack position, you issue your attack command, and then…you miss. Okay, no problem you think, that's just one attack, but then you miss the next, and the next, and the next, and suddenly you find yourself wanting to hurl your PSP across the room. DnD:Tactics adheres to the dice rolling fundamentals of the franchise, so it's purely random. We have no problem missing an attack here or there, as it is part of tactical and regular RPGs, but here you'll miss more than you hit, which is just silly. It's not fun to feel like a failure and loser just because the game deems it that your character will miss time and time again.

Another constant of RPGs is buying the newest armor and weapons, keeping yourself at the ready and improving your attacks and defenses at every chance you get. Many RPGs implement a solid buying system to show just how a new weapon will compare to your current one, such as showing an arrow pointing up with green writing to indicate equipping this item will improve you over the current one. In DnD:Tactics there is no such system, only numbers and terminology that you'll probably not understand and will go right over your head. There is no easy way to compare items, so you'll often have to look at your currently equipped goods, save them to memory, and then go to the store to compare items and make your purchase. The merchant store also isn't set-up very well, as all the items are in one list with very little in the way of classification, so you'll have to scroll through a bunch of junk until you find what item you are looking for.

The game also relies on menus way too much, as you'll have to sometimes navigate through possibly four or five screens just to perhaps use an item or spell. It probably wouldn't be an issue if things were grouped properly or the system was designed well, but instead you'll be drolly working your way through menus, searching over and over just to find an item you want to heal yourself with. There isn't one single aspect of DnD:Tactics that screams ease of use.

MULTIPLAYER: GAMEPLAY
The fundamentals are the same for the multiplayer games as it is for the single-player adventure, with the only things changing are a few gamestyles and the fact that players can play against each other. You can go co-op in the Dungeon Bash mode or either take on each other in the various deathmatch modes, which include putting one party of heroes against another, be the one to kill the dragon with the last blow before your opponent, or kill more monsters than your opponent. If you don't mind the gameplay the games have the potential to be fun, but then again that's a really, really big "if."

GRAPHICS
The environments aren't beyond terrible, but they aren't exactly beautiful either. The enemy characters are also wishy-washy, ranging in quality from poor to fairly nice or average at best. As for your characters, well, let's just say someone swung a whole tree trunk instead of using a regular ol' ugly stick. But hey, if blocky and jagged edged faces is your thing then be prepared to be wowed.

SOUND
Much like the graphics, the sound work is average at best during its highs, but can equally suffer from some unbearable lows. The background music is perhaps the best thing, while the sound effects repeat way too much, as you basically have one noise for every attack and miss and spell, but that's about it.

IN CONCLUSION
It's hard to recommend the game to any people, because there certainly isn't enough story to please an RPG fan, and the tactics are infuriating so those strategy fans won't be happy either. The only people who will like Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics are those players already playing the game on papers scattered about. Our advice to the DnD fans – stick to the pen and paper.

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