US game cover
Neverland
A world of chaos where rival species fight for supremacy.
Countless nations have gone to war to unify the lands, only to fade into failed obscurity.
— Opening title
Spectral Souls: Resurrection of the Ethereal Empires is the Updated Re-release of the PS2 Strategy RPG game, Spectral Souls II, for the Playstation Portable, and one of the few games in the Neverland series to get a western release. The game was developed by Idea Factory, published in the U.S. by NIS America, and published in Europe by Ghostlight.
The game was later ported to iOS and Android, which fixed all the slowdowns from the PSP version.
This game provides examples of:
- All There in the Manual: Most information about the character backstories are only mentioned in their character profiles.
- Alternative Calendar: The game opens in "Magic Age 1053".
- Amazon Brigade: The Rozess army starts with six girls and one guy.
- Child Soldiers: The Rozess army is largely the precociously talented type.
- Combination Attack: Individual skills do very little damage. Stringing them together into combos is essential from the first battle. (And the game tell you this outright.)
- Combos: The Hold and Charge commands allow you to unleash two or more skills at once, creating powerful combos.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Most towns in the game are Palette Swap versions of each other.
- He Knows About Timed Hits: The very first battle has Naiz explaining Hold attacks (single character combos) to the player. The second battle has Marx and Corwin discussing Charge attacks (multi-character combos) for the player's benefit. Then, in the third battle, Gail and Leila discuss how to combine the two.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: The Playstation Portable release suffered from severe laod times. It was pretty common to see the "Disc Access" message pooping up, be it during attack animations in battles or even in cutscenes, when the characters were talking. The iOS and Android ports are free of this.
- Market-Based Title:
- The localization changed the title from "Spectral Souls II" to "Spectral Souls: Ressurrection of the Ethereal Empires" because the first game never left Japan.
- The mobile ports are simply called "Spectral Souls."
- Our Demons Are Different: The Demon Army members look like elves than anything.
- Point Build System: You gain Skill Points when leveling up, and can distribute them to increase various staus, like strengh, vitality and agility.
- Previously on…: The game opens with a recap of the first Spectral Souls, which is handy for western players, as that game was never released outside Japan.
- "Rashomon"-Style: Some events are witnessed from both Simba army and Neverland army perspectives, and play out differently depending on which army the player is controlling.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: The game follows two opposing armies, and requires you to switch between then to progress.
- Visual Initiative Queue: Of the line-of-portraits variety.
