Title: BLUE ROSES ~Yousei to Aoi Hitomi no Senshitachi~ (BLUE ROSES(ブルーローゼス) ～妖精と青い瞳の戦士たち～)
Console: PSP
Genre: Strategy + Turn-based RPG
Language: Japanese
Company: Nippon Ichi, Apollosoft
Summary: You choose to play either the guy (Roche) or the girl (Alicia). I picked this up because Kaji Yuuki gave it the bump on his twitter and blog. XD
Story: 6. Typical fantasy world where Faeries oversee the balance of nature and all that good stuff, and Phantoms are the opposites, attacking the innocent and causing destruction. In Roche’s case, his parents were killed by Phantoms when he was young. He grows up to become a mail deliverer, until he essentially gets scouted into Blue Roses, an organization built to protect people from the Phantoms.

Last boss is completely predictable, and the story is pretty anti-climatic in general. Oh well.
Characters: 6. The main reason why I even picked this game up in the first place was because Kaji Yuuki voices the guy, Roche.~ The rest of the cast is fine too. XD
…Guren was Kobayashi Yuu…???? This woman is crazy. .___________.!

I am pretty disappointed at the lack of relationship development between any of the characters, however. On that, it’s the same as Summon Night (See Overall note below).
Graphics: 9. Good graphics. Good use of 2-D in a generation where everyone wants 3-D even if it’s ugly >_>; Character portraits and poses are good, the battle graphics are cute and flow nicely as well. It’s funny watching the enemies run away and your characters getting all ~ faced when you use support stuff on them.
Sound: 10. The soundtrack is definitely the game’s strongest element (along with some plus of the seiyuu selection, Kaji~~). Quite impressed so far with the music. Some of the tracks start off slow, but develop into very catchy rhythms, and there’s a good variety in the gameplay to keep repetition out. I gotta agree with a post I read on a Japanese forum… the game isn’t worth keeping but the soundtrack would be.
Gameplay: 9. The mix of strategy + turn-based RPG is welcome, and even a tiniest bit of action element with having to respond to correct buttons in order to do more damage/defend better. Keeps things interesting without demanding too much of your attention. Also, 8 characters in the battlefield makes more fun, I love being able to employ more characters. Only issue with that is that the maps aren’t all that big in the first place, and you don’t want to separate characters much so you can team up with them, so there’s a lot of crowding going on. Towards the end game, I ended up only using the four younger guys as my main offensive, with all the girls supporting in the back even though Euphemia is really strong offensively too .___.;

Also, regular storyline battles get pretty easy as long as you train up in free battles. But there are two battles that frustrated me quite a bit, both because of an enemy that did wide-spread distant magic damage that afflict status ailments. :|

And of all things, you can put the final boss to sleep status. What.

Screenshots below.~ I did Roche and got Marius’s ending, but I dunno if I want to bother with the others.

Replay Value: 3. Nothing gets carried over into a new game? Everything gets reset? am I shitting myself here? I do not want to do that leveling all over again.

From what I’m reading on japanese forums, there’s a special ending if you clear both Roche and Alicia’s storylines, but is it worth it. :|
Overall: 8. It’s good for one play, but you’ve got to have a lot of time to waste on your hands to want to complete the storyline more than once. But after the disappointment I got from Luminous Arc 3, this is a really good pickup for my strategy RPG cravings. The best way I can think to sum this up is it feels exactly like a Summon Night game, just that Summons are Faeries instead. To be more precise, it feels like the first two Summon Night games (the PlayStation ones that were later imported to the DS). The initial choice between the male or female as the starting character, along with the exclusive dialogue scenes with a character of your choice after certain events are especially like Summon Night. Heck, the only thing that makes this game seem any different is the Faeries instead of Summons part, since the existence of the Faeries becomes a main focus of the story.

However, with a couple gameplay elements that are different from the original Summon Night games, it might just well be enough to say this game is worth playing for its own qualities. The fact that all the main cutscenes are fully voiced and portable, unlike the portable Summon Night versions which have the voices cut out, is enough for me to say this.

Official Site
Dengeki article for images
Wiki
My sloppy mess of screenshots

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