For the last several years, Kemco has released JRPG title after title, with only recently a lot of them making it to Android and IOS devices in the West. Although, the in game translations done leave a lot to be desired. That’s where companies like Natsume come in. They take on the taxing job of not only localizing the various ports of some of these games, but they translate them in such a way that one wonders why they haven’t been hired to localize all the other smartphone games. Still, Natsume tackling the PSP port of End of Aspirations and rechristening it End of Serenity is interesting. Apparently PSP While the game is serviceable. The renamed title doesn’t provide much context within the game.

End of Serenity is a traditional turned based JRPG that’s in the mold of many other JRPGs before it. Your sprites walk around the maps and after a while you will run into a random battle. Battles themselves are typical affairs. Once it’s a character’s turn, they will act. The character turn order is based on their speed stat. You have your attack, defend, skill, item, and run options. There’s even a ‘Familiar Spirits’ option which act as your summon monsters. The interesting thing here though is that they are used by a three-level meter that fills when inflicting or receiving damage. Each action takes up about on whole level. And each familiar can do three different things. While they are very useful in the beginning of the game, their combat abilities taper off in usefulness. The healing abilities are somewhat game breaking though. You’d think that the ability to completely heal your entire party would take all three levels of the meter, but nope. Not that the game is very difficult. Honestly, some enemy mobs are more dangerous than the majority of bosses that you will face.

Making sure to grind to be able to cough up the money for buying skills is the key for the endgame to be an easy ride. If you need more places to grind, there are extra dungeons. Unfortunately, these dungeons are gated behind an in-game paywall, which is gated by an in app purchase system. Finally the true nature of a mobile game is revealed. For 10 bucks, you can buy all the EP needed to unlock these extra dungeons and items. You could grind them out by catching fish at ponds across the game world, but considering how much you earn per catch, it’s a non-option. But like I said, you don’t need to anyway, as the game is very easy and can last about 10 hours. While the story is simple, there isn’t much in the way of character development or world building. Which is kind of a shame, the plot revolves around trying to stop an organization called The Underworld (Mafia) from using the power of Atomigems to rule the world, or something. It’s too bad that the Atomigems weren’t integrated into the gameplay at all and that the summon sub-system was a bit more balanced. But at the end of the day, End of Serenity is merely an inoffensive game. Not bad, but those wanting more need to look elsewhere. Kemco is largely in the business of making ‘comfort food’ quality RPG. Not great, but it gets the job done. But maybe it would sell more if it were somewhere in the ballpark of 6-10 dollars and not $15.

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