Neopets Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing (PSP)

In the world of Neopets the player is able to feed and play with pets from a variety of fictional species. However, an awkward situation arises if you decide to explore the story content and lore of the world of Neopia, the creators deciding to make important characters who are Neopets themselves so players can encounter things like a princess that is the same species as their pet that drinks from a water bowl back at home. Complicating this odd situation further is the fact that your pets can raise pets themselves, these Petpets at least seeming to stick to being purely animalistic in nature… until Neopets Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing for PSP where they begin to walk on two feet, wear clothes, and speak human languages. At least the buglike Petpetpets that you can equip to you Petpets for stat boosts in this game remain purely non-anthropomorphic creatures for now.

The story of Neopets Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing does at least give an explanation for why suddenly the pets for your pets are now walking on two legs and talking though. The Wand of Wishing is a powerful item that can grant the wishes of the wielder and an evil figure named Archos believes he knows a way to find it. Attacking a woman named Megan for answers, the two end up stumbling into the area where the wand is kept, but before either of them can activate its powers, a hound belonging to Archos knocks the wand through a wall that actually serves as a portal to the world of Petaria. Only Megan’s Petpet is able to leap in after the wand, Petaria twisting the little creature into a more humanoid shape so they can interact with similarly proportioned Petpets inhabiting this medieval fantasy world.

Players are able to pick from a set of four species for their main character, the gator-like Krawk, the cycloptic cat Meowclops, the dog and fox mix Doglefox, and another doglike creature with an almost shark-like tail known as the Mazzew being your four options. You can’t change their basic color until you find puddles later in the game to soak in, and while you can choose a name for the Petpet, the cutscenes still have Megan call it Fluffy even if it is the hairless Krawk. The main differences between the Petpets are their starting stats and whether or not they can equip certain pieces of armor later, but the slight skew in capabilities doesn’t make it feel like you need to pick a species simply for its stats. When the adventure kicks off your Petpet hero will be dressed in a rather ugly rag but they can wear beneficial equipment during the adventure to increase their stats. However, even as you get late into the game and are wearing glistening mail and a golden crown it still looks rather cheap and ugly on your pet, perhaps because it had to in order for the game to make swapping outfits across different pets feasible on the limited hardware. The citizens of Petaria look nice in their wardrobes at least, but don’t expect to look as good as even other members of your species.

Your quest to find the Wand of Wishing in Petaria and keep it out of the hands of more evil sorts will take you all across the land, this action role-playing game having a good amount of setting variety and some rather intricate area designs that encourage you to poke around. You’ll cross a wide desert, explore some ruins inspired by Mesoamerican structures, walk across a land in the clouds, explore a boggy jungle, and more in your quest to ally with powerful beings or stop those looking to cause trouble. There are a few city hubs along the way with shops so you can buy and sell items or equipment, but while some of the citizens will give you side quests, these often are boilerplate in design, the player needing to find a certain amount of objects in a nearby area or kill enemies in the hope they’ll drop what you need to meet the requirements. If you can flag these before heading off into the new area then it at least adds an extra bit to do while exploring, but if you don’t complete the task there are many points of no return in the plot where you can’t head back to complete them. The rewards are often cash or something that isn’t too important at least, but the motivation to grab these quests and the fact some are tied to an area you just explored and only add a few little trinkets laying around that area makes these a fairly weak addition.

The game does try to realize Petaria as a world and in that regard it does make its story more interesting than stopping a powerful baddie from using the all-powerful wand. The game is aiming for a younger audience so they might not notice some of the more baffling story developments like a point where your character ignores the wand to check on a friend across the room while a villain is still nearby whose whole goal is to steal it, but heading to a new area and seeing how it plays into the world and who inhabits it makes the adventure a bit more layered. A bit too quickly the game does settle into having only one hub city for the rest of the adventure and it can’t even access all of the old areas that it should still be connected to, but it does at least offer a lot of merchants and services so it was at least the best one to settle into.

Combat in Neopets Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing is not put together too well. As you explore the adventuring areas enemies will be lurking about ready to fight the moment they spot you. You have one attack button so your part of a fight is often just flailing whatever sword, mace, or ax you might have equipped in the face of the enemy creature, the attack sometimes not registering when it looks like it hits but landing often enough to deal a good amount of consistent damage. The opponent will be swinging for you at the same time and often deals a lot more damage with a single successful blow, and even early in the game you’ll find that you are at a rather large power deficit compared to your foes. You can block attacks, but not all of them and you often have to learn the hard way if it can be blocked, and even then you need to face them properly so it won’t help too much if there’s more than one foe. However, while you do have to worry about your health thanks to your own fragility, this does make even normal battles a little more tense. You’ll need to find your opportunities to strike and to flee, and if recovery was a bit easier to do between battles, a sequence of small but close fights could have made an interesting gameplay loop. Healing often involves standing in place and waiting or utilizing your somewhat abundant healing items that would get quickly depleted if overused though, so fights end up more like nuisances even though the enemies can often drop useful items or cash if you do stop to beat them. Many times you’ll need to kill them to make progress anyway, so the fights lead to a lot of starting and stopping as you’ll often be flagging even after a basic encounter.

Projectiles do disrupt this though, both in helping you out and making enemies more dangerous. You can get weapons like a magic staff or bow so you can fight from afar and avoid some of the heavy damage you can take from getting in close, and you do almost have a secondary attack method when it comes to your Quick Items. You can set things like healing items or magic scrolls to Quick Item slots that you can use in a fight, the scrolls relying on your magic power but that recovers much more quickly than health. Spells can be simple projectiles, traps, or even more extravagant elemental powers, but they can also be a means of healing and it’s hard to argue with such a use since it speeds up the flow of the game so much. When enemies start using projectiles more it’s also fairly useful to be able to strike back at them from afar, but even as you grow stronger or get additional attack options you can still be overwhelmed if the enemy group boxes you in or a boss monster is so big it can easily close the distance for an attack. Running around and hoping you can heal quickly enough is part of the combat experience and, while it is manageable, it leads to fights being defined mostly by the time spent on the run with the actual fighting being about striking when you can. Even if you did try to get clever with the magic traps, the power investment is rarely worth the small payoff and you could have more easily hit the foe some other way for possibly more damage.

Things can sort of even out once you’ve got enough items to stay topped off or you’re equipped with the appropriate spells and weapons, so while the combat never really feels too good, the sense of danger around it can make some confrontations a bit thrilling as you know defeat is never too far away, that even making up for how enemies don’t often bring new dangers to the table. However, while Neopets Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing is a role-playing game, you don’t level up in the traditional sense. Rather than growing from the creatures you fight in the field, towns have areas called the Battledome where you can pay to rematch some strong enemy from earlier in the game or a new variation on them. Once you defeat them in a best two out of three battle, you will get an item you can redeem for a single point boost to your strength, defense, health, agility, or magic power. The weaker bosses featured here will only let you upgrade a stat so far before you need to move up the next tier to keep upgrading your character, and these fights don’t really break away from the game’s typical battle formula either. Essentially, after fighting all the monsters out in the field during the adventure, you must go back to town and spend hard-earned cash to fight the same enemies repeatedly to earn marginal but incredibly important stat increases. It’s a mindless and monotonous task that hampers progression unless engaged with routinely and perhaps the only reason it doesn’t drag the game down immensely is because you can beat the game without having to rematch too many of the stronger foes to get to a level where you can stand a chance against the final boss.

THE VERDICT: Neopets Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing almost stumbled into having a truly tense hack and slash battle system where you’re almost always in danger of dying and need to plan your moments of attack well. However, some issues with actually hitting with your attacks and poor means for healing between such close fights make this battle system more tedious than thrilling. To get to a power level where these are more even you also need to engage in a rather baffling means of increasing stats at the battle arena back in town, and the side content is too generic to captivate you into wanting to get more out of the game’s world. The actual journeying side of things can be a bit interesting and there are occasional sweet spots where your vulnerability and strength align for an exciting fight, but it can’t cover up the moments where progress isn’t so much hard-earned as it is earned through bland tactics that are hard to stay interested in.

And so, I give Neopets Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing for the PlayStation Portable…

A BAD rating. While its biggest flaws are certainly egregious, when you put things on a scale, the moments where it is at its worst are at least counterbalanced by ones where the issues are more mundane. The Battledome system is incredibly weak in concept but at least the scaling of it means you can grind out upgrades in easier skirmishes without having to dip too deep into the more involved fights. Earning the experience from regular combat would definitely be preferred and smarter all around, the game then possibly able to scale things appropriately rather than city visits leading to a jump in power that doesn’t put too huge a dent in your deficiencies since increases still have a cash cost on top of pointless fights tied to them. Neopets Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing is at its best when your foes still are dangerous enough to cut out a huge part of your health bar even when they’re regular enemies but you actually have the means to bounce back from that. Early on before you get your magics and projectile options it can feel incredibly rough to make progress and that isn’t helped by the little imperfections in hit detection or scenarios where you can get inescapably cornered. Once you do build up a stockpile and power up a little though, needing to treat even basic enemies as a threat does give some zest to entering new areas, the adventure still weakened too much by other elements to truly appreciate but occasionally it can still slip in moments where your little Petpet feels like they’re in appropriate danger but are still fit for the challenge ahead.

I would like to see the hack and slash action RPG Neopets: Petpet Adventures: The Wand of Wishing almost was. Petaria is a wholly new location in the Neopets world made for this game so learning about its new lore and seeing diverse locations does give the player a sense of adventure, and having fights value caution is a nice way of overcoming some of the simplicity that would otherwise come from few attack options and enemies that are pretty lacking in attack variation. The battle system stumbles far too much and makes things hard for the wrong reasons, the player far too often having to slowly wait for recoveries, slowly build up their power at the Battledome, or slowly take potshots at a boss rather than trying to balance their own safety with moments of opportunity. The basic concept behind the fighting’s difficulty feels like it captures the ideas of a pet of a pet being upgraded to a warrior, but managing your power and health is made too obnoxious to really realize a fighting style that could have otherwise embodied the feeling of punching above your weight class in an exciting way.