The Broken Lands are beckoning to brave adventurers.
Are you a brave enough dude (or dudette) to reveal the mysteries of the land?

Three heroes embark on a journey to the Broken Lands for their own reasons, and in transit the ship they're on capsizes off the coast, leaving the hero of your choice as the sole survivor. Making your way to the nearby town of Seahaven, you bring news of the wrecked ship and are tasked with helping the residents with defending the town from the slowly encroaching monster hordes, as well as gather food for the citizens or helping find some lost in the wilderness. And like any good dungeon crawler, you will have to fight and kill countless beasts and take massive amounts of loot as you search the Broken Lands for what you're looking for...

Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony is a 'consolized' version of the popular Dungeon Siege series. Like its big brothers, this game is a dungeon crawler, but it strays from the formulas already established by the PC titles and does things its own way. Instead of stats automatically developing due to weapon use, characters are given stat points to distribute across five attributes each time they level up. Skills are also different, in that they are set for each character and are gradually unlocked with levels, and skill points are awarded to increase these. A new feature to the series is defined classes. Unlike having a class set based on what attack type you're most proficient at, each character starts as a base class, and each has two unique "Hero Classes" and four "Legendary Classes." At level 30, you can pick from the two Hero Classes, and then at 60, you pick from two of the Legendary Classes. I've seen this system used before, namely in Seiken Densetsu 3, though there are probably more games that do branched classes. Each class brings a number of new skills for your character to learn, and changes the character's portrait too.

Combat has been drastically changed. Movement is controlled with the analog stick, and you will lock onto targets as they come into range. As there are active skills/spells, you can set up to six of them to shortcut keys, the Cross button does the basic attack, and Square interacts with things in the field and opens loot bags. Instead of there being a pickup-everything key, gold drops separately from monsters and can be walked over for collecting, and items drop in glittering bags. After looking at it with the Square button, you can then decide to take one, all, or none of the items, and carry on. Instead of a grid inventory for items, there is now a numerical limit based on the Strength stat and some skills. Items cannot be dropped, just destroyed on the spot or sold. Allies are also different. Instead of leading a small army to victory, you have your player character and a "follower" that assists you in battle. You have to choose between two at character creation (unique to each character), and during the game you are able to find and recruit five more, though you are only able to have one with you at a time. Followers have their own skills too, though you need to pay to level those up.


DESTROOOOOOOOOY BUSTERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!

Things I Liked

-Characters-
The characters are mostly identical in terms of the story (as far as I have played), so their personalities aren't really defined well, but they thankfully aren't identical in terms of skills. Mogrim the Half-Giant is meant to be the meaty powerhouse, Serrin the Elf is a ranged attacker, and Allister the Human is the nuke-em-dead caster. And despite these traits, you're able to build them in any way you like. Mogrim can wind up being a mage, Serrin can be a dual-wielding physical nightmare, and Allister can be a nigh-immortal staff-whacking behemoth. As every character has four final classes, there are technically twelve character setups just by class alone, and that says nothing of stat/skill layouts.

-Free Skills-
When you level up, your skills will unlock but you also get a free rank in them at the same time. It's pretty handy to try out some skills to see if they're worth using, and it's also good since there is no way to reset skills. A lot of skills seem decent on paper, but they may be slow-casts or just awkward to use, or even more powerful than you'd think.

-Cutscenes-
Though they're few and far between, I really liked the style of the cutscenes in the game. Fully-voiced, they're sorta like those "comic in motion" Flash comics I've seen a few places. There is no real animation, but still images are placed on layers and they move independently of other layers, or they rotate, or fade in/out, and so on. It's a bit of a shame there weren't more of them, but they were done rather well.

-Gear-
Good God can you equip stuff in this game. Not only do you have primary and secondary weapons (so you can actually use melee and ranged weapons on the same character without impacting your growth), but the basic body armor, helmets, boots, and gloves, but then a necklace, two rings, arm guard, cape, and a pair of trinkets. Since everything can come with enchantments of some type, this can lead to your character being exceptionally powerful...but then unable to really carry much. Everything you equip still counts against your carrying total.


What the...

Things I Didn't Like

-Buggy Mess-
I've had the good fortune of having the game freeze up on me only once, and others have fared much worse. There are a few things I noticed where the game sorta fell apart. I noticed some stats attempted to raise my Defense stat, but when confirmed the stat went back to its default value. Sometimes spells would just not affect my character at all, buffs would just disappear without warning, followers would either not teleport or just unsummon themselves...oh yeah, getting stuck on level geometry is awesome too. I've had the good fortune of not being the victim of many of these, but it kinda sucks there wasn't more polish added to the game.

-Increasing Skills-
In Dungeon Siege II, you are able to review what the each skill does when boosted to that specific level before you confirm your changes and you are allowed to reset them before confirming. Throne of Agony does this too...with the stats. The system's exactly the same--you put in points and can preview the changes, and then reset or confirm, but what gets me is why there is no such system in place for the skills. Accidentally pressing the Cross button on a skill puts a point into it, and there's no way to get it back. No confirmation or reset? I mean, this game even came out after the expansion for the second game, so the lack of a skill-preview system is really jarring.

-Final Boss-
I killed the final boss in three hits. With the mage. Granted, I built him with melee in mind, but I had more trouble with the bosses before this one. I didn't get hit, or rather, there wasn't even the chance for offensive action on her part. What the hell? I wasn't overleveled (still sub-60), and it wasn't like I steamrolled everything else in the game. It just made beating the game feel kinda hollow. Previous games in the series actually made the bosses challenging and even somewhat tactical in killing them. I guess we'll see how my other characters do, when I get there.

-Dungeon Siege?-
Differences aren't bad, but taking away the few references to the previous games (the copy-pasted books from the second game placed seemingly at random in this world, the races, reference to the apocalypse from the end of the second game), this game feels really nothing at all like previous Dungeon Siege games. I mean, I understand a lot had to be changed in order to work on a portable, but...this game felt closer to a portable Diablo more than anything. The skills are different, but there are a few places where they really could've used spell names from the series or something, but there's just so many differences it doesn't feel like improvements, but a completely different game. I dunno.


Mmm, I taste good.

The Final Verdict
It's not the best game ever, but this was my second dungeon-crawler for the PSP, so it was actually fairly decent. It's not on PSN, so if you really want it, it'll have to be on UMD on a non-GO/NGP system. TThere are many items to collect, and a number of different character setups to use, and they're all viable. It's not really a hard game, but the series isn't known for its difficulty. You will need patience, as it has long load times as well as the potential for much frustration due to the bugs and such.

A Tip From DF
Keep a ranged weapon with you as often as possible. It's the best defensive weapon type, and kiting enemies is really easy here too. Use ranged, soften up a target as it closes, and then switch to melee and finish it off with ease.

The Path To Victory
I went with Allister for my first playthrough. I generally used bows until the first class-change, but I eventually dumped all of my unspent points in Strength and boosted the Staff Mastery skill, as well as using the Weapon Enchant - Death skill to regenerate health whenever I hit anything. From there, I just mainly sniped things and then beat monsters up with a staff when they got close. This was before the Death Knight class, which gets a class that further boosts regeneration-on-attack. I'm also doing a run with Mogrim putting all points in Stamina and I'll maybe make him a bow-using mage of some sort. I won't die quickly, but neither will my foes.

Score:
10/10
The best of the best of the best, Game of the Year material, Best Game Ever candidate, instant Gaming Hall of Fame inductee, God Among Games winner, #1 on the "Games You Must Play Before You Die" list, Best Game Ever winner, approved by four out of five dentists, part of a complete breakfast.