0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Blend X Brand

     

Blend X Brand is an Adventure role playing game with construction elements, the game was developed and published by Tonkin House. Tonkin House were a former game developer and publisher but moved away from the video game industry, as of 2008 they make textbooks and educational software.

Blend X Brand was released exclusively on the Playstation on the 29^th of June 2000, the game was also released exclusively in Japan. In addition to the original release of the game, the received a release as a part of the Best Price 2500 range of budget titles, it released on the 7^th of June 2001.

 

Information in this section will be limited with Blend X Brand being a somewhat obscure title and information on the game has been very difficult to come by. From what I have been able to find the game it is a classic JRPG with construction and adventure elements, with the player taking control of a character named Amy.

 

Amy is an inventor in a little known town, the adventure starts in her workshop, when one of her customers arrives with a job for her, telling her to move to the City since the job is there. With her bags packed and her pet and his friend in tow she arrives at the city.

When she arrives at the job she is told she requires two items in order to build the requested item, this is where the main portion of the game is located with Amy finding the required materials to craft the requested items in the fields and dungeons surrounding the city. As you progress through the game more and more fields and dungeons around the city become available.

 

Basic controls for the game, movement is controlled with the D-Pad, the D-Pad is also used to move between actions and answers when interacting with the world or other characters. If you want to cancel and action the X button is used while selecting an action is done with the Circle button. Your character is also able to run this is done with the Square button, the menu can be accessed by pressing the Triangle button.

The game required the Sony PocketStation to be played, the PocketStation was a peripheral that was released by Sony in 1999. The peripheral was exclusive to Japan and while a global release was planned the upcoming PS2 release resulted in it never leaving Japan.

 

The peripheral was primarily used as a memory card with the PocketStation having a total of 15 memory card slots and worked just like any other memory card. The major difference though was the LCD display screen which could be used to play minigames.

This is the case for Blend X Brand, from what I have been able to find out about the game, you could play through the games dungeons on the PocketStation. One source I have found states that the game required to PocketStation in order to play it as the Dungeons were played on the PocketStation, I have however not been able to confirm this

  

This being a Japanese only release, critic reviews for this game are none existent. As a result we head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings, sadly like the lack of copies of the game on sale there is not much user data to go on.

At the time of writing this the game has not received any user ratings, the only data the game has is for the games difficulty and the games lifespan, even these only have one user rating for each. The single user rating for the games difficulty rates the game as having just the right difficulty level. While the single user rating for the game lifespan clocks the game in at around the 20 hour mark.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

 

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, where unsurprisingly this Japanese only release is not listed, the same goes for Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com. As a last hope we head over to Amazon.com in the hopes of finding at least one copy, sadly we are out of luck, the same for the co.uk version of Amazon as well.

I also checked Ebay.com in the hopes of finding as least one imported copy of the game but just like the other sites the game was none existent. So switching to the co.uk version of Ebay just for the hell of it, we finally strike lucky and find one copy of the game available.

This copy which is in good condition and comes complete ships from China and is priced at £19.99 and comes with free shipping. This converts to $27.54 in the United States or €22.45 in the euro zone countries. I scanned through many other listings on Ebay.co.uk but this was the only copy I was able to find.

Written by

P J Gibbon