Monstrous In A Good Way

By Paul Munn | July 28, 2008

Last week I picked Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure back up from my short stack of unfinished PSP games and jumped back into it.  I found 12 hours already on the saved game clock and was ready to drive through what would probably be maybe two or three more hours — this is a portable game after all — to finish it off while on vacation with my family.  Gurumin, as I’ve mentioned before, is a PSP exclusive cute Zelda clone featuring a little girl named Parin adventuring outside of an old mining town with a magic drill and various hot-swappable magic hats to protect her from evil phantoms while she rebuilds a friendly monster village.

By the time I finished opening up the whole map and killed the final boss for the third time — I’ll get to that in a minute — the save clock had hit just about 25 hours.  That did include a bit of padding as I replayed dungeons to grind some cash and earn Junk metal to trade for hat upgrades, but the grind wasn’t boring or unsatisfying.  Up until the end the game was pleasantly surprising me with things I didn’t expect in a handheld game.  These included optional powerful rewards for getting perfect-score gold medals and even harder to find platinum medals in dungeons, at least one extra outfit you could buy with all the cash you have sitting around if you play the game well enough, and new items granted by running extra errands for the townsfolk unrelated to the main quest.

I did opt out of a very tough optional boss fight, instead fighting the required boss three times.  The first time was easy — I was ready to end the game — and only after vanquishing it was I told that I had to keep playing to get the right ending before the game dropped me on the main menu without letting me save.  The second time I needed to confirm that yes, I wasn’t able to save after finishing it off.  By then I’d learned my lesson: clear your plate and then you may be excused.  I cleaned out the rest of the dungeons as required, ran into the optional boss fight, backed away from it, and then finished up the game proper.

To the very end I didn’t find any translation issues and the cuteness and overall simplicity of the story didn’t bother me at all.  The joy was in the doing, as I think some proverb says, and after 25 hours of solid action RPG gameplay I still recommend it to PSP gamers who haven’t taken it for a spin.

And if you have trouble locating the game for a bargain price, you can grab a digital copy of it via the PlayStation Store.  If you’re curious about what the game music sounds like you can download MP3s of most of the major tracks at the official game site here, and you can check out screen shots and a video trailer at the PlayStation.com site over here.  Lastly, you can find the Store listing for Gurumin here.

See also:
GameOver: Rainbow Six Gurumin Edition
GameOver: Cute Without Being Grating Edition
Gurumin’s Got The Goods and Puzzle Quest Pleases