Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

Brandish: The Dark Revenant makes its dungeon feel hostile from the first steps. You are not simply clearing rooms for loot. You are working your way through an underground escape route where false floors, hidden walls, spikes, poison, rolling boulders, and teleporters can punish careless movement. That constant suspicion gives even routine exploration some tension.

Real-time combat keeps the pressure on, especially because the camera stays behind Ares while the environment rotates whenever he turns. It is an unusual perspective for a dungeon RPG, and it asks you to build a real sense of direction instead of relying on a fixed overhead view. Once that starts to click, navigating corridors and reacting to danger becomes the game’s defining pleasure.

The downside is that this is not a relaxed crawl. Traps and hazards can turn progress into frustration, and the harder stretch of the labyrinth will test whether you enjoy methodical exploration or merely tolerate it. Puzzles and treasure give you good reasons to investigate, though, and more than 40 floors make the escape feel substantial rather than like a short novelty.

Finishing Ares’s adventure opens ten additional floors starring Dela Delon, with tougher enemies and traps. That is meaningful extra challenge rather than a token reward, particularly if the main dungeon left you wanting a stricter test. Slots and the Blade card game also offer prizes, giving you a couple of breaks from the main descent without distracting from it.

Graphics

The PSP remake frames the dungeon from directly behind Ares, so you see corridors, hazards, and enemies from his immediate point of view as the environment turns around him. That rotating viewpoint makes the labyrinth’s walls and passages feel more physical than a conventional top-down dungeon, even if it can leave you briefly disoriented.

Story

The story begins with a clean, useful goal: swordsman Ares Toraernos is trying to escape an underground labyrinth. It is a premise built to keep you moving, and the game does not need a complicated setup to make each deeper floor feel like another obstacle between him and daylight.

Dela Delon provides the central complication. She is a sorceress pursuing Ares’s bounty, but she also wants to escape the same labyrinth. That shared predicament gives the chase a little more texture than a simple hunter-and-target setup.

Do not come in expecting the narrative to overshadow the dungeon. The story works best as motivation for the long climb through dangerous floors, with Dela’s separate unlockable section extending the conflict after Ares’s route ends. For more on this PSP edition’s setup, the official Brandish overview lays out the premise and characters.

Overall Experience

Brandish: The Dark Revenant is rewarding because it commits to making you earn your escape. Its rotating behind-the-character perspective, real-time fighting, and trap-heavy floors create a dungeon crawl that feels distinct from the usual fixed-view RPG format. The moment you begin reading the spaces confidently, it becomes much easier to appreciate what it is doing.

That same commitment limits its reach. If repeated hazards, careful navigation, and punishing mistakes sound exhausting, the labyrinth can feel more aggravating than adventurous. There is little room for autopilot here, and the game is better when you treat every new corridor as something that may have a trick waiting for you.

For gamers who like old-school action RPGs with a demanding central dungeon and a strong spatial hook, this PSP rebuild is well worth the effort. The extra Dela floors and side activities add welcome longevity, but the real payoff is learning to survive a labyrinth that keeps finding new ways to turn your next step into a problem.

Retro Replay Score

7.1/10