copypasted from my other internet haunts because you all are buttfaces that need to play this:
I beat it this morning so I feel adequately prepared to give it a decent review now.
The Third Birthday is basically what would happen if a Metal Gear Solid game took out the stealth elements, featured Parasite Eve characters, and was directed by a Tetsuya Nomura with a large dose of MGS envy. It became apparent to me that my earlier loose comparison that I made with MGS was more apt than I initially thought the further I got into the game, as the plot definitely tries to emulate the intrigue of those games. The biggest reason I say that is that the biggest plot twists don't happen until after you beat the last boss. The funny thing about the attempted emulation of MGS intrigue is that the underlying premise of the game is just as silly as the first games, so it just kind of gets lost in the surreality. Unfortunately, game doesn't afford you enough time to get to be attached to the characters, so most of the emotional scenes tend to fall flat (Which in itself is somewhat paradoxical because I put more time on the counter in my first playthrough than both PE1 and PE2 combined: 4 hours on PE1, 6 on PE2, 13 on T3B.)
The graphics are some of the best I've seen on the PSP; I know that saying that these days doesn't have all that much impact, what with 7 year old hardware; but still it manages to look really nice (even on my TV) while maintaining ~60 FPS until one of the last boss fights where you're fighting like five of the giant Twisted all at once, and even then it doesn't dip below 30.
Now, about the gameplay: I honestly think the game does a fantastic job of being playable without having a second analog stick. The camera does a fairly decent job looking where I want. Aya is pretty nimble and the controls are fairly snappy. It was honestly a lot better than Portable Ops where I was having to fight with the completely static camera for a good view of anything.
Missions are divided up really well for a portable game with each one taking ~30 minutes to an hour the first time you play through them and save points generously scattered through the missions for easy break points. The fact that you can go back at any time and revisit past missions, and even just portions of missions to grind BP and/or practice a section of a speed run is pretty great.
As a game, it's chock full of the goodies that I enjoy in a good game. One of the things that got borrowed from the MGS games was the relatively large arsenal that you can acquire during the game: you have numerous handguns, rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, and special weapons, all of which can be customized for better performance. Whoever was in charge of game balance did a great job of only allowing you to unlock just enough of the weaponry though so that you're not completely overpowered until you've beaten the game at least once. New Game+ really is where the unlockables start showing up, things like the better rifles and also a minigun. Also I love that they put in unlockable cheat codes; I fucking love cheat codes. So yeah, tons of unlockables is a major plus in my book.
So in short, I fucking love this game and it's definitely one of my very favorites for the PSP.
also holy crap this is the longest post I've written in ages heh