The destruction of all armor will result in a "perfect knockdown" and eliminate the character from the board also giving you additional experience if you manage to perform one against an enemy. In addition to Queen's Blade characters there are also female "monsters" who can be captured by Jean if he achieves a perfect knockdown. The monster characters then become available to be called into battle on your team.

In addition to this, Jean or other characters are able to develop closer relationships to each other that effect the actions they take in battle. Characters with a close affinity to each other will join in the others attack, and if they are close enough, will even throw themselves in front of an enemy and defend the other.

Relationships can be built by two options in the communication menu; one is free...

Like mixing peanut butter and chocolate, Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos combines cute anime girls with strategy RPG gameplay in a junk-food-esque combination you simply can't get enough of. If your introduction to Queen's Blade has been the anime series you'll be encouraged to know that not only does the game feature an original scenario featuring your favorite characters, the gameplay is also rock solid. Building on a foundation laid by the Super Robot Wars games, Banpresto plugs the Queen's Blade universe into a successful game formula (much like the Gundam Musou or Hokuto Musou games) with great success. Keep reading my review of the Japanese PSP game Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos to find out how.

The first few minutes I spent with Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos on my PSP had me wondering if I may have fallen for a cleverly disguised ruse; a terrible game clothed in scantily clad illustrated women to lure as many lonely unsuspecting victims to pull out their wallets and sink hard...

You can hardly see a screenshot or video of this game and not appreciate the attention that was paid to how nice this game looks. It's arguably the best looking game to come out for the PS3 to date. Because of this, I feel it's fair to be appropriately harsh on the aspect of the game where I have one of my few criticisms. The environments and backgrounds while beautiful seem sometimes a bit sparse and not always up to the quality of the character models or of other levels. Chapter 5 in particular has a beautiful but repetitive level design which is hard to excuse when the level maps are as simple as they are. Pains should have been taken to make the backgrounds varied and interesting at every opportunity. That aside, everything else is top notch and genuinely impressive.

I'm far from a connoisseur of game soundtracks but the music in Final Fantasy XIII jumps out and stands in the spotlight tine after time in this game. The crowning achievement of Final Fantasy XIII however,...

During battle you only control one character, the leader. For this character you can chose what abilities they use based on their current role (more on that later). So let's say the enemy is weak against fire and water. If you're only controlling one character how do you get your party members to use fire and water? The answer is simple; you don't. Use Libra, you find out the enemies weaknesses and automatically your party members who have those abilities will start using them against that enemy. No tactics/gambits or any of that, your party will automatically make good use of the information you acquire without you so much as opening a menu.

Here is another example. Let's say that you are controlling Lightening (a character) and you chose for her to attack. Here's what happens. A set of attacks are queued up in a chain and the Active Time Battle gauge begins to fill. As it fills up past the first attack, hit triangle and you'll perform the attack. Let the gauge fill up all...