I completed story mode with all 10 kingdoms (including both paths for the recommended starting kingdom, Dravania) and the "parallel world" scenario in the Story Mode, and once through the Koc Mode. After the initial playthrough which took me about 70.5 hrs while figuring everything out, Story Mode took me between about 12-19 hrs. The Koc Mode took a little under 9 hrs - likely due to there being no story segments.
The game is a turn-based strategy game with real-time battles. While commanders do gain experience from battles and level up, at which point you get to choose one stat to raise, that's about the extent of its RPG elements. The only strategy game I've played that has a similar battle system is Dragon Force on Sega Saturn, with the biggest difference being the commanders (generals in DF) being able to move around the battlefield as opposed to being stationary in DF. Each commander can have up to 29 troops under their command (30 with a partner), so there can be up to 62 units on the battlefield. Unlike DF (where the generals can control up to 100 troops), the number of units can result in some severe slowdown. When you enter battle, you have to choose a battle formation from about a half-dozen options, which you cannot change once the battle starts. You then choose an Operation from about 5-10 options, depending on the type of battle (e.g. castle seige, random map battle) and whether you're on offense or defense - this can be changed at any point during the battle. Unless you give the Operation of Wait, your troops will break the formation when they start moving. For commanders, in addition to having a standard attack, they have spells/skills that use their rather limited amount of SP as well as Super Moves that can be performed when their SUP gauge fills up, with them being able to store up to 3 Super Moves. The Super Move gauge carries over between battles. For probably the majority of battles, success is based on the use of Super Moves. The winner of the battle captures the opposing commander, unless s/he ran, and any captured commander the losing commander was traveling with. If any of those captured commanders were from the winning side, they get rescued and sent back to the country's HQ. If you win a random battle, which can only happen if a commander ends on an open map square or a graveyard (or base, as the graveyard is called in the menu for building a structure), there are three possibilities regarding the opposing commander: it's a "roaming" commander and thus you capture it, nothing happens, or it becomes your commander's partner and fights as the 30th troop.
Outside of battle, you can perform tasks, like trying to convert, release, or execute captured commanders (released commanders can be re-encountered); upgrading towns and castles; terraforming the traveling paths; building stuctures; trying to damage enemy towns and castles with spells; searching towns and castles (you can find items, commanders, or new paths on the map); and trying to create alliances. While upgrading towns/castles, terraforming, and building structures usually takes a commander more than 1 turn to perform (commanders have a level of proficiency in each of the options, with some being able to perform these tasks in one turn), as well as casting spells against enemy having a multi-turn cool down, the rest simply end the commander's turn. One aspect I am not a fan of is that you can only perform 5 actions per turn. Fortunately, the only tasks that count as actions are moving a commander, casting a spell, or using an item. While this is annoying, I can see the purpose for the limit, as otherwise you (or the enemies) could just stack up 30 commanders at an opponent's doorstep and basically guarantee a win via a virtually unending stream of attackers.
There is only one map in the game. In Story Mode, about half of the factions have you start out with the whole map visible, all 10 factions in play (they do fight each other, so you don't have to worry about the other 9 ganging up on you), and the story is given in cutscenes between turns, starting out with one cutscene after every turn for probably 15 or so turns and then reducing to only appearing after each faction is eliminated. The others are setup as chapters, with you only facing off against a small number of opponents in a small section of the map, and each chapter introducing new sides and opening up more of the map. They all end with you needing to eliminate one reawakened Dragon God (or 5 in the case of Dravania). A handful of the factions introduce commanders with roles in the story that offer to join, and I'm guessing that the cutscenes change based on whether you accept or decline adding them to your ranks. In Koc Mode, which is unlocked after playing through the Story Mode of one of two possible factions, you pick a leader and then are randomly assigned about 10 commanders and are randomly placed on the map. You then simply have to be the last faction standing.
The biggest barrier to entry from what I've read, and I would agree, is that just about everything is abbreviated to 3 or 4 letters, with no in-game explanation of the abbreviations, virtually requiring you to have the manual sitting by your side for quite a while. Not helping is that several of the abbreviations will likely have you scratching your head as to how they arrived at the abbreviation. It also doesn't ease you into the game, as there's no tutorial and you're started out in a situation that is pretty much the same as you'll be in a few hours into the game. One of the very first bits of dialog (if you choose the recommended Dravania Empire), if not the first bit, is of your leader's battle partner strongly implying that it would walk you through the battle system. It'll probably take you a few hours to start feeling comfortable with just the basics.
The biggest issues I have with the game aren't really major, except for one:
The skills/spells have unnecessarily long animations, with them lingering for several seconds longer than I feel they should (especially considering the amount of times you'll have to sit through them). While you can turn off the opening 15+ second intro to the Super Moves specific to certain commanders, the actual spell animations on the battlefield for all of them are around 30 seconds long.
Enemy commanders seem to do things solely to waste your time. Things like repeatedly using a skill that is ineffective during the same battle (the message "INEF" pops up), repeatedly using skills that don't stack (buffing/debuffing only works once, so you can't repeatly buff attack strength, for example), using a healing item almost instantly after the battle starts when the commander has perfect health (the commander's troops enter battle with full health), and using an offensive skill when the commander is no where near close enough to damage the enemy.
If you are attacked at a location where you have more than one commander, the first thing you do is determine the order that you want your commanders to fight in. However, it doesn't show you any info that might help determine what the preferred order would be, such as weather, time of day, or what type of troops the attacker has.
The biggest issue I have is with the AI. Since you can't easily direct your troops where to move, you are reliant on the AI getting them where they need to go. Unfortunately, they tend to get stuck on corners of rocks, and other troops, to where they can't figure out that they can, say, take a half-step to the right to get around the obstacle.
There are several other minor-to-nitpicky issues:
Entering the name of a save file before showing the list of save files makes it pointless to rename your file, as you'll have to re-enter it every time you go to overwrite a file. From my experience, the normal thing to do is to first ask if you want to create a new file or overwrite an existing file - it does not do this. It also first asks if you want to delete files on the memory card, as if the card is full and you need to make room.
It doesn't create an extra system file that indicates that you've cleared the story mode in order to unlock Koc Mode and the other factions to play as. So, you'll likely want to create a 2nd save file at the main menu when you have cleared the story mode since you can't quit back to the main menu during the game. If you think you've gotten into a situation that seems unwinnable after saving it, there's no way to restart the game, and if you haven't created a 2nd file, you'll be stuck having to replay the beginning story mode to unlock the other factions to play as, as well as Koc Mode.
When you go shopping, you have to choose which market to shop at. This is rather pointless, and makes it a chore, since all items are pooled together and can be given to any commander that's at a base. Making it even worse is that there is a short animated sequence every time you enter and exit a shop, meaning if you're looking for a specific item, you have to sit through the sequences at every location as you go through all the shops until you find one that has what you're looking for (if any of them have it).
There's no quick way to go through your commanders if you want to equip an item. For example, it you find a nice axe and want to find someone who can use it, the fastest way is to, from the Main Command Menu, open up View, then Commander, then select a commander, then choose Stats (unless you've memorized the professions of all your commanders, and there are well over 100 in the game and you can have up to 50 in your army, you'll have to check their stats) to see if it can equip it (and some commanders can equip multiple types of weapons, so even this won't make it a certainty that the commander cannot equip it). If that commander can equip it, and is at a base (since only commanders at bases can change equipment), you'll have to back out of viewing stats and choose Command, then from the Base Command Menu, select STAT, then choose that commander, and finally make the equipment change. To me, not being able to change out equipment from the View submenu of the Main Command Menu severely discourages giving commanders better equipment -- I hardly ever changed out equipment.
Two of the four characters featured in the manual aren't part of any faction in Story Mode and only appear in Koc Mode. So, beyond the two sentences they're given in the manual, there is no real story to these seemingly important characters.
What Koc is short for is never given - not in the manual, not in the game. It's "KOC Mode" in the manual, but "Koc Mode" on the game's main menu screen. Since it doesn't give what KOC stands for, I'm going with "Koc" because...
There can be up to four commanders defending a town/castle. Since it's always a 1-on-1 battle, the attacker has to fight through each defender in succession. At the start of each round, it'll display which round it is. For one, two, and four defenders, there's no issue. But for three defenders, it goes from the 1st Round to 3rd Round to Final Round.
It seems like the story for the Beasts Arcana got lost during the localization. After the first chunk of story segments that set up the faction's story, there are no more story segments as the other factions are eliminated, like with every other faction, until the Dragon God appears after eliminating the final faction.
If you pick the "duty" path of Dravania, the final sequence of the end sequence is not subtitled. So, if you don't understand spoken Japanese, you'll be out of luck knowing what's said if you have it set to Japanese voices (you can change the language setting at any time).
There are a handful of places where the subtitles are formatted poorly in that the text runs off the side of the screen rather than wrapping to the next line.
Starting with the 3rd Chapter of the Dravania story, between chapters there is about 30 seconds of dead space (and one, if you choose the path of duty, being close to 45 seconds) with absolutely zero indication that anything's happening before showing the "Ch. 3" (or whatever chapter it's advancing to) screen. Not the "accessing disc" message, not even the PSP light flickering to indicate it's thinking, just a black screen. There is no similar delay for any other faction.
It does have a Gheorghe Muresan, of all people, reference, so there's that. The reference isn't even about his height, which would seem to be the logical reason for referencing him.
All in all, if you are looking for a strategy game for the PSP, I'd say this is worth picking up if it's cheap - like around $10 or less. I think I picked this up when GameStop was clearing out their previous gen inventory. If you can stick through the beginning to get the hang of it, and can put up with the long skill/spell animations, it's a decent game.
