Dragoneer's Aria begins with Valen graduating from the Dragoon academy in the capital city of Granadis. Almost immediately players have control of Valen and can go anywhere in the main town square. There are item, weapon, armor and Lusce. Most of these items are pretty straight forward, except the Lusce which are spheres that are installed into weapons and accessories. Once this is done, characters can use the abilities that are inherent in the Lusces. As these are used, Luminescence is gained, and when enough has been acquired, the Lusces level up, making the skills that are inherent in them stronger.

After Granadis is destroyed, Valen leaves the city and meets up with Euphe just outside town. She joins up with Valen after showing him the Blue Dragon orb. These orbs are given as a sign of trust between dragons and other races. Here is where the adventure begins. The first thing that players will notice is the great detail in the buildings and surrounding area. The character models, and the surrounding buildings and plant life are fleshed out well for a PSP game. The music in the game fits extremely well for the different areas. The other item that players will notice is the load times for the start of cut scenes are rather high.

Random encounters are eliminated by the enemies showing up on the field. Their avatar's are all the same, so players cannot tell what they are until battle has been started. Once battle is joined, the game plays like most RPG titles out there. At the start of the round, a player chooses which characters go first, second, third, etc. For example, if you want Euphe to cast a support spell like attack up before Valen attacks, it can be done. Simply select Euphe and tell her to cast the spell before you select Valen to attack. Once all the commands have been entered for all characters, the round begins. This can get a little confusing, the person who goes first is the fastest normally, in this case, if a monster is faster than the first person you picked to do an action, then the monster goes first. So players need to keep in mind who in the party is fastest, mainly for healing purposes. For example, let us say that Valen is slow and is always going last, and Euphe is very fast and always going first. In order to make sure that Euphe is the first to act in a fight, players must choose Euphe's action first. If Valen's action is chosen first, Euphe's action is delayed until after Valen's.

When battles start things can be quite confusing. It seems that the PSP is not powerful enough to show the entire battle field, so it chooses to just show one character and one enemy at a time. The only way players can tell if there is more than one monster is looking at the enemy list in the lower right corner of the screen. The actual battles in the game take forever with just the two opening characters. Whenever a spell is cast, or an ability is used, the game likes to show the characters powering up for something, and this takes a lot of extra time. I found myself setting the PSP down after inputting all of the commands because one round seems to take a couple of minutes. Some of the opening fights of the game have taken more than five to ten minutes. The nicest part of battle is the auto log that is at the top of the screen that prompts what is happening. If players want to view the past events of the battle, just press the square button to enlarge the log.

Spells and abilities are used differently than most games of this nature. When an attack is made, Mana is received, it takes 100 energy to fill one mana point. The average energy received is 50. Mana energy can be received several different ways. First is by attacking. Every regular attack nets 50 energy and a critical hit will gain 80. There are items that can be used to boost Mana, as well as mana points on the field, which are one use spots that give 300 points. Guarding is the final way to gain mana, however there is some actual skill involved with guarding. When the guard action is selected, a circle of crystals appear around the character, all of them are white except five of them. A cursor will spin around the circle highlighting crystals as it goes around. Players must press the OK button on each of the off colored crystals to turn them white without making a mistake in order for the character to guard. Upon success, the guard works and 100% of the attack is blocked. If the player doesn't get them all, for each one that was turned white, 20% of the attack will be guarded against. This works on physical attacks only, if a spell is cast, the guard will have no effect.

Magic and special abilities are gained by Dragon orbs and Lusce. The Dragon orbs give characters attacks related to the specific color of the dragon. For example, Valen's orb is red, therefore, the attacks using the Dragon Orb command are all fire based. Elements can be combined to create after effects of special abilities. There are eight different attributes for spells: fire, frost, wind, earth, thunder, water, light and dark. Players can combine these different attributes to create different effects. For example, I used Valen's burning blade skill with Euphe's drowning blade skill, once both attacks were made, a thunder attack was created in the aftermath.

As the game progresses, items can be crafted. Before Valen can go all out in creating items, three things are needed. First, a recipe is needed to tell players what items are needed to create the item. Second the ingredients themselves are needed, and third the Dragon orb for the attribute of the item. When players collect recipes, the ingredients are listed under the recipe. If an item needs to be collected it will appear grey, however, if the items that are already collected will appear white. Crafting can be done anywhere, unlike some games which require a craft shop, or worse still people to run them, I'm looking at you Star Ocean 3.

The story of the game is very different from most RPGs. The guardians of the world need protection, go find them and protect them. The presentation is all right, there are a few spots in the story presentation that feel disjointed with voice acting in Japanese and English. Unfortunately, the only place to select it is in the main menu, which means once a game is started in that language, it cannot be changed. But not to worry, the voice acting for both English and Japanese is reasonably well done.

Overall nothing really stands out in Dragoneer's Aria. The look and feel of the different areas and environments are pretty well done, unfortunately, the fighting aspect of the game tends to be reasonably boring, slow and uncharacteristically hard especially when players can easily receive a game over screen in the first dungeon. Pick this one up at your own risk.