If you've never played or heard of Yggdra Union before, it's a somewhat niche take on the typical grid based strategy RPG formula, with a heavy emphasis on cards to augment your characters, using these to base movement allocation and certain special skills on. The other variation in the genre comes from only allowing a single character to instigate an attack on your opponent each round, but if you've managed to position yourself correctly on the grid, you can bring in a small force of characters that surround you, and hope to overpower whatever defense your opponent has set up.

It even makes a difference if you're trying to set up male or female characters for an attack, as their ability to form unions differs. Male characters can match up in an X shape, and the females can form a cross shape on the field. You can match up with 5 characters, who take turns wailing on whatever enemy you selected to attack. Typically, even matches don't work out too well, so you'll want to try and position yourself on the map to take out the weakest groups of enemies, instead of trying to go for a fair fight or two.

For attacking purposes, the game uses a formula similar to Fire Emblem, with weapons like axes and swords that work in a paper/rock/scissors formula. When it comes to drawing a card at the beginning of the round, a weapon icon will be on that card that will hopefully match up with a character you have in play, making that person a lead in the sense that they can use whatever special ability that card grants.

On paper this all sounds confusing as hell I suspect, but be assured that there are some tutorials in place that can help to navigate first time players thru the process. After a few rounds it's pretty easy to get into the swing of things, and the strategy needed in later stages starts to get pretty deep, and it's definitely engaging throughout the game.

Graphically, Yggdra Union makes some slight improvements on it's GBA predecessor, with an obviously bigger screen size to fully display the artwork and sprites, and some decent animated sequences, it's definitely a step up. However, it's not a mind-blowing difference between the original and this new port, and it's definitely not showing off the full capabilities of the system.

The music is exceptional though, and the speaker output on the PSP does a much better job of pumping out the soundtrack by Minako Adachi. It's not the best RPG soundtrack out there, but it's a pretty solid one nonetheless. Even the voice acting isn't particularly horrible, but it falls into that generic anime dubbing category for the most part, and while it won't grate on your nerves, there's far better examples of dialogue and voice work in gaming today.

So what other differences are there between the GBA original and this port? You can now speed up battles, which helps quite a bit considering some of the lengthy battle animations, there's also a some difficulty adjustments with a new default mode and the hard mode more resembles the original. There are more weapons with elements, more characters, and a few smaller changes. Needless to say, the game plays and feels a lot like the original outside of these changes, and while there are some slight differences between the graphics, and the sound comes off a bit better, there's not enough of a difference here to warrant a second play through just to see the new stuff (unless you just want to play it again obviously).

All together though, this is a fantastic port, but it doesn't change or enhance the original in any meaningful way. Considering that the GBA title is definitely harder to come across nowadays, it's well worth picking up this port if you missed out the first time, and it's a great change up in your typical SRPG gameplay. The Union system is a lot of fun to figure out from battle to battle, and presents enough of a change in strategy from other games in the genre to keep the veteran players entertained. The difficulty might prove to be a barrier to newcomers, but rest assured that the pay off for learning the system is well worth it.