My intro to the Monster Hunter/ Dungeon Crawler genre of games. Perfect gameplay loop of fighting (somewhat repetitive) missions to get upgrade mats and then come back to town to gear back up. Really cool story, gothic fantasy setting with some really nice graphics for the PSP, kinda standard aesthetics insofar as the dungeons are concerned, a lot of different colored caves as well as your standard jungles, deserts and grasslands maps. I felt like there was always something a bit extra though, from the interestingly carved out paths of the desert inferring some long gone water or civilization to the sparkling caves glittering with some sparse mineral, the devs really threw some funk into the meshes or textures to get at something a little more unique. Weapon selection is kind of low and the grind really is monotonous for how few missions/mission types there are. The only thing that makes the grind more viable is the chance to distill rare materials out of the monster's corpse, complete with glistening rays of magic for a success to a dark and bloody collapse upon failure. This can end up doing more harm than good though, as many components can only be obtained through this transfiguration, causing a lot of repeat missions due to a failed transfiguration, I think there was a stat to help with this but it may have been a fixed chance. Never finished this one, wasn't given much of a reason to honestly, weakest part of the writing is the protagonist's motivations beyond MORE POWAAAAH