Nobody is going to hold up the launch library of the PlayStation Portable as the greatest collection of games, but when you consider there are only a couple dozen games for the market, it still has a surprising depth of genre.

Two excellent racing games, a surprisingly good baseball title, an addictive puzzler, a Capcom fighter, and even a hack-and-slash RPG: Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade. Again, nothing that’s going to set the world on fire in the long run, but it still beats the launch of the PlayStation 2 hollow. Lest we forget: FantaVision, SSX, Madden 2001, and EverGrace.

The first, and perhaps most important, bit of information I can give you about Untold Legends is that it is not a terribly innovative game, nor even particularly derivative. Legends is a formulaic clone of the recent spate of Action/RPG titles to hit the PS2 (and Xbox, to a lesser degree), and as far as that goes, Legends succeeds quite nicely. Put more simply, if you’ve enjoyed games such as Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest, you’re probably going to be right at home with Legends.

The plot is a simple one. You’ve just won the Champions’ Tournament in the city of Aven. Until now, the title of Champion has been a meaningless honorific, basically an excuse for you to get stinking drunk, and presumably other things as well. We’ll leave those other things to the imagination of the reader. Then, without warning, disaster strikes, an ageless evil is loosed upon the world, and it’s your job to go save the world. You know the drill.

Untold Legends looks good, although it’s not going to blow your socks off; unlike Champions of Norrath, Legends doesn’t significantly improve on the Dark Alliance engine, choosing instead to simply adapt the engine to its own purposes. Like the Champions titles, you can actually zoom in closer than the standard 3D isometric view; unlike the aforementioned, however, there is no practical advantage in doing so, as the screen is really too small to allow you to properly see where you’re going or what you’re doing when zoomed in that close.

The gameplay is also nearly identical. The hardware differences change things, of course; the different controller layout makes things like rotating the camera a slightly more difficult task, and moving from one zone to another requires holding down the square button for a few seconds. Presumably, the reasoning is that loading times drain battery life, and so it’s better to make sure that loads only happen when the user directly intends for them to happen. Like the Action/RPGs that have gone before, this isn’t exactly new, but it certainly has greater utility in this instance, all things considered.

The battery issues crop up in another way, as well. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, speech is typically either not present, or else greatly reduced, because it, too, requires constant accessing of the UMD drive. Untold Legends, like so many other PSP games, has music a-plenty, but no voice talent. It’s been a recurring theme for the platform, and I don’t anticipate that it will go away anytime soon.

That said, Sony definitely got one thing right, and I have to give them credit for it: virtually every title I’ve played thus far has supported, at minimum, Ad Hoc WiFi, and several have even supported true online play in the way of Infrastructure WiFi. Dreamcast, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 were all much slower to get their various multi-player initiatives off the ground. Untold Legends is no exception; it doesn’t support Infrastructure play as some of the sports titles do, but it does support Ad Hoc, meaning that you and up to three of your best buddies can team up for some monster bashing. Even better, Untold Legends is one of the select launch titles that allows such connectivity with only a single copy of the game.

The item creation function present in the other Dark Alliance-inspired RPGs is also present here, alleging “1000s of items.” That’s true, as far as it goes, but that also means several variations on a theme, ranging from, say, “Ruined Scale Mail” on up to various magical iterations of the item.

In the end, Untold Legends joins a handful of other launch titles in a select, if unfortunate, category: More Of The Same. If you’ve previously enjoyed Champions of Norrath or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, you ought to enjoy Legends. That you and three friends can enjoy multiplayer mayhem with only a single copy of the game helps to lessen the monotony that might otherwise creep in.

If you’re looking for a game to play on your new PSP, you could certainly do far worse than Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade. It’s certainly the best (and for now, only) Action/RPG title on the platform. It doesn’t, however, appear destined to be a memorable game in the long run.