Besides the abilities you'll use in battle, each character has a predetermined set of field and dragon abilities. Field abilities let you do stuff when not in combat (depending on which character you're using) like heal the party, repel enemies, giving a speed boost or setting traps. Dragon skills are obtained by equipping orbs to your gear. These orbs might give you an elemental attack or a bonus against certain types of monsters. Tinkering with these different types of orbs is interesting. But as I've already mentioned, getting the mana to use these attacks is frustrating.

Every time you use a special attack, its luminescence grows -- which is pretty easy to do with battle abilities. Unfortunately, Players must also level up other abilities with regular usage, something that can be difficult with skills you don't use all the time -- like resurrection. In addition to that, you'll have to level up your character to gain hit points, so you essentially have to pull double duty to grow in the game.

Dragoneer's Aria suffers from the sum of its parts being unbalanced right from the very first scene. Battles are poorly paced, exploration takes a lot longer than it should (especially in the early parts of the game), and the battle system is a mess because of the mana system that forces you to use regular attacks more than you should have to. At the end of it all it feels like all that grinding and exploration wasn't worth the effort. To its credit, Juno Jeong's contributions to the character development and storyline are top shelf and the story has some great moments. In the final analysis, Dragoneer's Aria just doesn't feel right in NIS America's line-up and is a road bump on the highway to the company's next promising PSP RPG, Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness..