11 Best PSP Adventure Games

Clannad is a visual novel from Key, the studio behind Kanon and Air. Those two started out as adult games and were cut down for a wider audience later. Clannad was made for all ages from the start. It was later ported to the PlayStation Portable along with a long run of other consoles. The story branches into different scenarios depending on how you treat the people around you, and when it came out it was the best-selling PC game in Japan.

The only official English version came out in 2015, and it was for Windows. On the PSP, players name it when they list the anime games worth playing on the system. Kyoto Animation made two anime series out of it, and both were released in North America in 2009.

Hakuoki is set in the Edo period, around the 1860s. Chizuru Yukimura goes to Kyoto to look for her father, gets attacked, and is saved by the Shinsengumi, who mistake her for a boy and take her in for questioning. Her father turns out to be the doctor behind the Water of Life, an elixir that turns the people who drink it into berserkers called Furies. The game moves forward through choices, and the story pauses until you make one.

This is the one for people who want romance with their swords. It is an otome game, and players put it next to Sweet Fuse when someone asks for romance games on the PSP. Pick your choices carefully. One player stopped after a bad ending because "it hit me hard".

The sequel moves the killing game from a school to a group of islands, and writer Kazutaka Kodaka took the idea from the TV show Lost. The rules have not changed. To leave the island, students must kill one of their peers and not get caught at the trial that follows. New to the class trials are the Rebuttal Showdowns, where you duel one student at a time. There is also Logic Dive, a snowboarding minigame where you ride down a tube of logic and pick a route at each question.

It was first released on the PSP in Japan in July 2012. NIS America brought it out worldwide in September 2014, but on other systems. PSP owners play it the same way as the first game, with a fan translation patch.

Sweet Fuse has one of the funniest setups on the system. You play Saki Inafune, a high-school girl whose uncle is Keiji Inafune, the legendary video game designer. He is a character in the game, and so are a gang of odd men who end up around her. One of them is a gloomy shut-in obsessed with video games. Another is a college student who was attacked by piglets right before the opening ceremony.

Aksys Games released it in English in August 2013, and it can also be downloaded and played on the Vita. Players point visual novel fans to it, often in the same breath as Danganronpa. The story branches into several endings, depending on the choices you make.

Harvey Birdman was an Adult Swim show about an old Hanna-Barbera superhero who became a lawyer and defended other cartoon characters. It ran for 39 episodes. The game came out on the PlayStation 2, Wii and PSP, made by High Voltage Software and published by Capcom. Capcom made Ace Attorney, and it shows. It plays a lot like those games.

Players love how silly it is. It is a parody of Phoenix Wright full of jokes about the show and about Capcom itself, and the people who played it call it funny almost every time it comes up. If you have never seen the show, you will still get the courtroom jokes.

Book of Shadows is the sequel to Corpse Party, and it goes back into the cursed school instead of moving forward. It is told in nonlinear chapters that add new twists and back stories for the cast. Most of it happens during the same time as the first game, picking up from one of the wrong endings, where Sachiko sends the students back in time. The epilogue, Blood Drive, sets up the next game.

Critics liked it less than the original. Players still tell anyone who finished Corpse Party to play this one next, because it gives you more of the story. It is a game for people who already know these characters and want to suffer with them a little longer.

Steins;Gate is a visual novel by 5pb. and Nitroplus about time travel in Akihabara in 2010. It is the second game in the Science Adventure series, after Chaos;Head. The plot branches depending on how you deal with the people around you. It came out on the Xbox 360 in Japan in October 2009 and reached the PSP in June 2011.

The PSP version stayed in Japanese. The first official English release was on PC, from JAST USA in March 2014. Players still call it one of the best visual novels you can play, and a good first one if you have never tried the genre. Fans made an English patch for the PSP version.

Shadow of Destiny came out on the PlayStation 2 in 2001, and the PSP version arrived in Japan on October 1, 2009 and in North America on January 26, 2010. Players sum it up the same way. You get murdered, then you get a second chance to go back in time and stop it.

It has eight endings, six of them open from the start and the last two unlocked by seeing the first six. Players remember it as a strange and mysterious time travel story, and it was one of the few adventure games on the PSP that came over from a home console.

Danganronpa was first released on the PSP in Japan in November 2010. A group of students are locked inside their school, and the only way out is to murder a classmate and avoid being identified as the culprit. When someone dies, you collect evidence and testimony, then argue it out in a class trial. Your evidence becomes Truth Bullets, and you literally shoot down the lies of your classmates. Between murders, the Daily Life parts let you hang out with the cast like a dating sim.

NIS America released it in English in 2014, but not on the PSP. Fans translated the PSP version, and the players who tried it call it one of the most fun games they have had on the system.

Corpse Party started life in 1996 as an RPG Maker game on the PC-9801. A group of friends unknowingly perform an occult ritual and get trapped in an otherworldly elementary school, haunted by the vengeful spirits of young children. The PSP version, Repeated Fear, came out in Japan on August 12, 2010. Xseed Games and Marvelous Europe released it in English as Corpse Party.

It is the first game players suggest when someone asks for something creepy on the PSP. Your only hope of getting out is to uncover how the people trapped before you were murdered, and the details are grim. Play it with headphones and the lights off.

Shattered Memories is a reimagining of the first Silent Hill. Harry Mason is looking for his missing daughter Cheryl again, but the plot and the characters are different. The big change is that Harry has no weapons. When the world turns to ice and the monsters come out, he must literally run for his life. Between scenes, the game cuts to a psychiatrist's office, where your answers to personal questions change the characters you meet.

It was released for the Wii in December and ported to the PSP in January 2010. Akira Yamaoka wrote the music, and it was the first Silent Hill to make heavy use of dynamic music. Players say it is more of a story-heavy adventure than a horror game. More players name it than any other PSP adventure game.