There are defining moments in every gamer's experience - moments that link you to a game forever. One of my best moments is the Jedi Training area in Jedi Knight II - the combination of John Williams' lifting score and the catharsis of coming into your powers really struck me then and continues to this day. Not included amongst these iconic moments is an early play session with Dragoneer's Aria. I was in bed in the evening, had played some of another PSP game and then switched to this one. I had already played a bit - enough to get past the first series of cut scenes and into the area where I had some control and engaged in combat. I started playing and had to wait for area loads, for drawn-out battles, for cut scenes - for everything. And before long I found myself nodding off to sleep during a battle. So that is my singular memory for Dragoneer's Aria - it managed to take me from very awake to fast asleep within about twenty minutes.

Dragoneer's Aria tells the story of Valen, a novice dragoneer with hair in a long braid done nicely enough to make women jealous. He learns of the history of the land in which two mighty dragons once battled and the good dragon was defeated by the evil dragon. But as he fell, the good dragon split into six parts and spawned elemental dragons to watch over the land. For a long time the dragons have worked together with the powerful warrior dragoons to protect the lands. Valen is to graduate when suddenly everything goes wrong and the balance of good and evil is suddenly shifted, as a massive dragon attacks and everything is torn asunder. Now it's up to Valen to set out to find the surviving dragons and work to defeat the evil Black Dragon. The thought of playing a game in which you work side by side with dragons is terribly exciting, and many of the details of the game - from the combination of real-time and turn-based elements to crafting to fully voiced characters and more - have all the makings of a great RPG. Unfortunately, not a single one of those elements is compelling and the overall impact of the game is that it is a boring and frustrating grind.

Once you are out of the initial scenes, the game feels very much like Blade Dancer - you run around the world with small parts of the map visible at any given time and generic enemies floating around the paths. To move to a new area you simply run to the end of the map, denoted by a thicker line, then you make the transition automatically. Touching any enemies launches you into a battle, so if you don't want to battle then you simply evade the floating enemies and continue on your way. Also on the field are traditional save points to allow you to save your progress as you progress.

Here is the first of my pet peeves - give me some control! Brave Story put some value to my time by allowing me to speed up combat and other elements of the game. I really appreciate it when games like Brave Story and Etrian Odyssey allow you to break free of the confines of the linear flow of the game and keep things moving at a reasonable pace. Other games let you move more quickly through cut scenes and dialogue, but Dragoneer's Aria seems determined to hold you captive as long as possible while it spoon-feeds you the story and battles.

The combat system ... no, let me come back to that ...

Visually the game looks very nice but isn't up to par with many of the current PSP releases. Blade Dancer would be a good comparison here as well. The choice to localize all voice acting is somewhat of a mixed bag; there are some nice voices and accents, but the overall quality of the dialog and voice acting is not very good. There is a lesson here - if you cannot assure perfection in your voice acting then let the player read, since reading mediocre writing and translation is much more forgivable than listening, since you tend to read for content and listen for nuance. Having both in this case tends to be the worst of both worlds.

Camera, controls and load times are all in the 'fairly acceptable' range. The camera is entirely controlled by the game, but this isn't a real problem since battles themselves are carried out on the exploration field and aren't direction-based. The load times feel long compared to current games, but going back to games like Blade Dancer once again, Dragoneer's Aria feels more like a game from a year or so ago, when fairly lengthy area load times were commonplace. However, compared to more recent games, the load times are noticeably long and slow the game down even more.

The controls are also adequate, though navigating across the field can be a real pain, especially if you don't want to battle every single enemy you see. This is one thing that Blade Dancer did much better - not only could you see enemies on the field, you could tell their relative strength and leader, and realistically avoid them as you move from area to area. This is a great ability, since you no longer have to deal with what Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel calls 'the trash' as you move along through early areas at higher levels where the enemies would give you little experience and only waste time. The problem in Blade Dancer is that the areas are like corridors, so you cannot really expect to avoid enemies - meaning that the entire system is pretty much useless. In this case a random encounter system would have been preferable, since then you assume constant battle-readiness rather than assuming that you have any control over when battles occur.

The combat system should be my favorite part of this game, and given the amount of options and items available it really seemed as though all concerns about story and pacing could be put aside, as I dug into the battles. Unfortunately, the combat system is as flawed as the rest of the game and, like the story, the biggest problem is that everything happens so slowly that it is constantly boring. Kill a really tough enemy? Yawn. Lose half your party? Yawn. And so on. In combat, each character selects an action from a menu and then your turn plays out. There are standard attacks and special attacks based on the elements or dragon stones you have equipped. You can choose to guard, which is a sort of roulette wheel that determines how well you do so. Once all selections are in, the order of battle proceeds based on each character's agility rating and eventually it ends.

It is perhaps fitting that Final Fantasy II was recently released, reminding us of how terrible its combat system was even when it first came out. It is even worse with the benefit of hindsight and therefore completely mind-boggling that Dragoneer's Aria would utilize such a similar system. Mana is required for almost every non-standard action, but it is something you can only gain by attacks and guarding, failing to replenish in any normal sort of way. Even worse is that all of your attributes level through use. This isn't inherently evil, as it works quite well in the Elder Scrolls games, but in a game with limited, non-regenerating mana, you are constantly faced with the conundrum of needing to use skills to improve them and being afraid to use them too much for risk of draining your mana, and further concern over what enemies you'll meet while trying to escape down the corridor-like maps.

For my final comparison to Blade Dancer, I'll talk about the crafting system. That was the best part of Blade Dancer and while I didn't truly expect Dragoneer's Aria to reach that high, I expected more than what is on offer. Most games either make crafting too hard, unnecessary or too easy. Dragoneer's Aria is a case of overly simplistic crafting. You get the recipe, get the materials, press a button and you're done. I'm not asking for the complex alchemy schemes of Two Worlds, but something a bit more complex or risky would certainly have been nice.

If Dragoneer's Aria was a book then it might be called 'A Series of Mediocre Events'. However, it is a game that essentially boils down to two key attributes - boredom and frustration. It's amazing to me that as I played this game I was constantly referring back to Blade Dancer, a game that I thought was deeply flawed - and thinking that it was better in almost every way! There is not a single element here that I would call bad, but the way they are assembled makes for an experience almost completely devoid of enjoyment. I relish long games and have no problems when a game makes it clear that I will have to level grind to survive - those are all part and parcel of being a RPG lover. But games that seem to go out of their way to waste my time raise my ire like nothing else I know.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).