PoPoLoCrois is a lighthearted adventure that doesn't put the player into a complex series of events. The storyline is fairly simple: find a way to help your mother wake up from an evil spell that the great ice demon put over her. After turning into a dragon and protecting the PoPoLoCrois Kingdom, she falls into a deep slumber and her soul is stolen.

            Funny thing is, later on as you meet the other cast members, they don't really give good reasons as to why they join. Like the white knight for example just kind of meets up with you and after a small altercation, he feels he all of a sudden needs to be your bodyguard, but those are just minor gripes.

Nice textures!

Flash-forward after the events of the first game and it basically begins a brand new chapter as the story goes on. Between each game, PopLoCrois is divided into a series of books. For example the first episode is: Book I- Ice Demon: Journey Begins, then as you make it further you'll see Book II - Ice Demon: Dark World. When you reach what is supposed to be PoPoLoCrois 2, it starts over with Book I - Dark King: Pietro's Trial, and so on and so forth. If you had a lot of time on your hands you can pretty much sit through this game and finish it in a good couple of days. The first Book, which is part one, took this reviewer a total of twelve hours game playtime to complete.

So let's talk gameplay. PoPoLoCrois has a very simplistic menu, typical of most old school RPG's, including item, special skills, change equipment, set combat AI, etc. All battles are random encounters where monsters appear on screen after a few steps. But here's where the gameplay changes: monsters appear on the same screen as where the battle was first executed, but then everything turns grid based. The best example of this would be like any sort of tactical role-playing game. The blue boxes represent your stepping range and red boxes mean attack range. You can set your combat AI in battle so that you attack automatically or control the characters yourself. Also while in battle you can skip your turn to improve the power of you next attack. This proves very valuable as the game progresses. A neat little function that was added to this game is a quick save feature so that at any point during the game (outside of battle) you can save your progress.

Nice cut scene movies.

As far as graphics go, PoPoLoCrois features nice cel-shaded visuals. Although it is fully 2D in nature the presentation is very nice and clean to look at. To keep the story book like events going, the pictures in certain cut-scenes paint excellent anime-esque feelings, and the voice acted narrator makes the player feel like he/she's listening to a fairy tale story. At important events, however, there are live anime movies that run great on the PSP's 4-inch LCD screen. It is just like watching a television show. Musically, this game doesn't have a stellar soundtrack, but rather a kiddy feel to it. This might have been expected, considering our main hero is just a boy. So there's nothing overly dramatic but it gets the job done well and complements the overall fairy tale feeling.

PoPoLoCrois is a good game for avid old school RPG players. Although this reviewer wishes there were more attacks and spells and the story was a bit longer, it still shouldn't stop any PSP owner from giving it a go.