Atlus USA has carved out a microscopic but top-20 video game publisher niche by providing the thinking man’s Japanese culture-steeped video game (any number of disposable Wii games being the populist counterpart).

"Growlanser: Heritage of War" looks on the surface to follow this formula of success. The back cover promises a sleek, anime-stylized role-playing game with "smart tactics," following a young lad who must maintain peace in a time of political tension and civil unrest due to the withering earth. Nothing revolutionary, but surely a competent entry in a respected series.

What it actually delivers is disappointment on every level, reducing the game to unplayable lows. It’s no rare occurrence if a game fails, and it’s certainly no reason to lament — but when a game with good prospects fails so miserably, it really is a letdown.

Opening with a montage of poorly animated clips, "Growlanser" immediately casts itself as heavily anime-styled. While this isn’t inherently bad, the sequences are not impressive in the slightest, leaving a generic first impression only worsened by an ugly, bland start menu. This lack of presentation is continued throughout the game.

The plot, broken into five chapters, starts you in control of Seldous, a painfully righteous, stiff adventurer seeking to end the war plaguing the land. The first chapter alone is slow-paced, incredibly hokey, drawn-out, and simply boring. Several hours into the game I was waiting for the pace to pick up, the plot to thicken and the gameplay to deepen, but I journeyed on in vain. It’s no wonder it boasts 70 hours of gameplay — it’s nothing but tedious repetition and errand-running, further dampened by slow battles, uninspired dialogue and an unfriendly main menu system split into two for no apparent reason.

The battle system is not unique by any means, and the tactics are as smart as a housecat. Battles involve controlling the main character, and either having your party fight on a weak AI system or tediously commanding their every move. Many aspects of this system are frustrating. There’s downtime between actions, similar to wait times in turn-based RPGs, but since it’s practically real-time, the waiting seems very out of place just to swing your damn sword again. Many battles involve simply pressing X repeatedly, as spells aren’t really needed in smaller fights, and they slow down already snail-paced battles. The combat menu and controls are also unforgivably sluggish, making even target selection difficult and battles a chore. Twisting the blade further, the battles are made even less bearable by the rigid voice acting’s ridiculous utterances, such as "This battle … is for the future," and "I will fight for your dreams!"

Each battle is followed by anywhere from five to 10 individual windows popping up telling you that your characters skills have leveled up. Consolidating this into one window would have been smart, but incongruous to the rest of the game’s annoyances. This brings us to the Plate System, the game’s "unique" method of building skills, which is just yet another skill tree system.

Is the game at least saved by pretty graphics, art design and well-composed music? Sadly, no, "Growlanser: HoW" disappoints again. The camera is uncontrollable and set very far above head, rendering characters into tiny pixilated blobs — but even when we see them closely, the character design is horribly simple. Setting and monster design, as well as spell animations, are equally hard on the eyes. The result is a late PS2 RPG that looks worse than many games from the original Playstation. The music is generally agreeable, rising above the rank and file of the rest of the game, but is by no means memorable. It’s very nice to see games attempting to make the most out of voice-acting, but as we know, this fails miserably all too often, especially in the English translation. Luckily, "Growlanser" allows the option of disabling battle voice acting and skipping through dialogue pretty easily.

"Growlanser" is unintentionally funny at its most amusingly clumsy moments and inexcusably unplayable at its worst. Fans clamored for years for Atlus USA to import a new entry in this series, and it simply wasn’t worth the wait.

1 1/2 stars out of 5