24 Best PSP Strategy Games

Summon Night 5 came out in Japan on May 16, 2013, long after most people had moved on from the PSP. It is a tactical RPG and the only original entry made by Felistella and published by Bandai Namco, after the series' first developer, Flight-Plan, closed in 2010. You choose a male or female hero and one of 4 partner characters, and those choices change the dialogue and the story, for eight separate paths through the game.

The English version took its time. Gaijinworks released it digitally in North America on December 15, 2015, and a limited physical edition followed on April 7, 2016. A brand new UMD in 2016 is a funny thing to hold. It sold well enough for Gaijinworks to go on and translate Summon Night 6.

Fieldrunners first came out on October 1, 2008, as an iOS exclusive, and it was the first release from Subatomic Studios. It was later ported to the PSP and a few other systems. It is tower defense at its simplest. Enemies cross an open field from left to right, and you build towers in their way. Classic mode only lets you build the original four towers, Gatling, Goo, Missile and Tesla, and you have to make them work.

Classic and Extended games stop at 100 rounds. Endless mode has no cap, so it ends when you lose. The phone version is the one most people played, which makes the PSP port easy to forget, but it plays very nicely with real buttons.

Squad Command uses turns to copy the feel of the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game. The campaign follows the Ultramarines over 15 missions as they fight off the Chaos marines of the Word Bearers Legion on the planet Ruhr III. Units spend Action Points to move and shoot, and you can spend extra points to aim a shot for better accuracy. A unit on Overwatch fires at the first enemy that walks into its line of sight.

The terrain is destructible, so a big enough gun can knock down the wall an enemy is hiding behind and hurt him at the same time. Multiplayer supports up to eight players. If you have ever painted a Space Marine, this is the closest the PSP got to the tabletop.

Open Warfare is Worms the way most people remember it. You control an army of worms and take turns blowing up the other team with everything from grenades to banana bombs, a Worms staple. Each worm starts with 100 hit points, and you usually get 60 seconds a turn and only one attack. When a round's 20-minute timer runs out, every worm drops to 1 HP and it turns into sudden death.

It is turn-based strategy for people who would rather laugh than plan. The sequel, Open Warfare 2, is the better game and sits higher on this list. This one still does the job when friends are around, and watching a worm fall into the water never gets old.

Knights in the Nightmare started on the Nintendo DS, where Atlus USA released it in North America, and the PSP got its own version later. It is one of the strangest strategy games ever made. You move a wisp around the battlefield, and when it touches a Knight, you aim that Knight's attack. The Knights are the characters who do the fighting, and the wisp has to dodge the bullets enemies fill the screen with.

Time only runs down when you charge an attack or when the wisp takes damage from on-screen bullets. That makes it a tactics game and a bullet-hell shooter at once, and it takes a while to make sense. Once it does, nothing else on the PSP plays like it.

Amaze Entertainment made Tactics for the PSP, and it came out in North America on November 8, 2005. It follows Peter Jackson's films rather than the books, and the characters look like their film versions. Battles happen on a grid, and the characters all move at the same time instead of one by one. Its big idea is the Zone of Control: step next to an enemy's square and you both have to stop and fight, which means you can trap enemy units.

You can play as the Fellowship or as the minions of Sauron, which is the more fun way to spend an evening. Your heroes grow stronger as you go and fight alongside ordinary warriors. It also came to the PlayStation Store on September 30, 2009.

Crystal Defenders is Square Enix's tower defense game made out of Final Fantasy parts. It began as Crystal Guardians on Japanese mobile phones in 2008, was renamed for iOS, and later came to the PSP through the PlayStation Store. You guard a winding path with troops taken from the Final Fantasy job classes, such as Archers and Black Mages. Any enemy that gets all the way along the path costs you a crystal.

The art and music come from Final Fantasy Tactics A2, with music by Hitoshi Sakimoto. Critics were not kind. Reviews were generally poor, and they found it uninspired, though it still reached one million downloads worldwide by 2012. On a PSP it is a pleasant dose of Final Fantasy in short sittings.

Phantom Brave first came out on the PlayStation 2, and its North American release in 2004 was the first game NIS America ever published. The PSP version, Phantom Brave: The Hermuda Triangle, came to North America and Europe later, and European players only got it as a download. You play Marona, a 13 year old orphan who can talk to phantoms, and a phantom named Ash acts as her guardian.

The trick is called Confine. Marona binds a phantom to an object on the map, like a rock or a tree, and the object changes the phantom: a rock may make it stronger but slower. Phantoms only stay for a limited number of turns, so a battle is all about when you call them in.

Wild Arms XF took the Wild Arms series into tactics. It was unveiled at a Media.Vision fan event on September 2, 2006, and came out in Japan in 2007 and in North America and Europe in 2008. Its battlefields use hexagonal tiles instead of squares, which puts it in a small club of tactics games. Formation Arts raise your damage when your characters surround an enemy in set shapes, like a triangle.

You can hire generic Drifters to strengthen your ranks alongside the story characters, and a New Game Plus gives double the normal experience from battles. It is a demanding game with a slow start. If you have finished the big names further down this list, it is a good next stop.

Open Warfare 2 is a direct sequel to Worms: Open Warfare, released for the PSP and the Nintendo DS in 2007. It is the same turn-based worm war with more to do around it. On top of classic deathmatch, it added a fort mode and a new jetpack and rope race mode. There is a campaign and a puzzle mode for playing alone, and a demo came out as a download.

The online play is gone, because the PSP servers were shut down, and THQ was heavily criticized for this. Local play still works, and Worms was always better with friends anyway. The other complaint was that you cannot save or restart mid-battle, so be ready to finish what you start.

The Growlanser on this list is the PSP version of Growlanser IV: Wayfarer of Time, which Atlus published in North America. The series is made by Career Soft, and only a few entries ever reached English players. Working Designs brought Growlanser II and III over together as Growlanser Generations, and Atlus later handled the fifth game as Growlanser: Heritage of War.

That makes the PSP version a rare chance to play the series with an official translation. It is a slow starter, and the early hours ask for patience. Tactics fans who like a long story and a big cast will get the most out of it, and it needs none of the earlier games to make sense.

Afternoon of Darkness is the PSP version of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, which started the series in Japan on January 30, 2003. Missions come in chapters with cutscenes before and after, and a win pays out bonus items based on your combo attacks and special attacks. Between battles you go back to a central hub, where you can create new characters for your party.

The real hook is the Item World. Any item has a randomly generated dungeon inside it, and clearing floors makes the item stronger. Add New Game Plus and a level cap of 9999, and you get a game that can last as long as you want it to. Players recommend it readily. Laharl, Etna and Flonne, the leads here, are playable in each main Disgaea since.

Disgaea 2 first came out on the PlayStation 2 as the sequel to Disgaea, and the PSP version, Dark Hero Days, arrived in the United States on September 8, 2009. You play Adell, the only human unaffected by a curse, and each chapter opens with cutscenes that set up his next mission. The battles build directly on the first game, with your party on 3D isometric grid maps. The Item World is back, and you can go down it by beating all the enemies on a floor or by finding the exit portal.

The PSP version has bonus material the PS2 game lacked. Three of the main cast from Disgaea 3 join the playable line-up, and Level Spheres in the Item World come over from that game too. Players rank it just above the first one.

Field Commander comes from Sony Online Entertainment, the makers of Untold Legends on PSP, and it is a turn-based war game in the Advance Wars mould. You get 15 military units and 11 officers to lead them, across 30 single-player battles, plus a level designer. Divisions have a strength and a matching weakness, so the Card Sharks have strong infantry that move slowly. Fuel runs out, and a vehicle with an empty tank has a high chance of exploding.

Its odd extra was Transmission mode, where players take their turns and send them off to a server, a bit like play by email on old PCs. Players still recommend it to anyone after turn-based strategy on the PSP.

Acid 2 is the sequel to Metal Gear Acid, and it swapped the darker look of the first game for a completely new cel-shaded engine. The cards are the same idea: they are based on the other Metal Gear games, and most of them move Snake three blocks. Cost decides who goes next, so if your cost is lower than a guard's, you act first. This time Snake has to get into a research facility run by an arms maker called SaintLogic, on an isolated North American island.

It also came with the Solid Eye attachment, plus a Solid Eye Theater mode for watching videos of the Japanese women from posters and magazines across the series. It is exactly as odd as it sounds. Players tend to recommend the two Acid games together.

Valkyria Chronicles III came out in Japan in January 2011 and never got an official English release. Low sales of Valkyria Chronicles II kept it from being localized, but a fan translation of the expanded edition came out in 2014. The story runs parallel to the first game and follows the Nameless, a penal military unit doing black ops for Gallia. It is a story about outcasts and the search for redemption.

It uses the same mix of tactical and real-time play as the earlier games, and it carried over a large part of the work done on Valkyria Chronicles II. Composer Hitoshi Sakimoto and character designer Raita Honjou both came back, and it was praised by both Japanese and western critics. It is a shame it stayed in Japan.

Valkyria Chronicles II is the sequel to the PS3 game, and it came out only on the PSP in 2010. It takes place two years after the first game. You play a group of Gallian Military Academy cadets caught in a civil war when the new Gallian Revolutionary Army stages a coup. The students have to juggle classes with being soldiers, and the story mixes school and war.

The CANVAS engine was fully redesigned for the PSP. Classes now branch, so the base units lead to more powerful and specialized promotions, and the new Armored Tech carries a large shield and a hammer instead of a gun. It received mostly high scores from critics, and players rate it among the best strategy games on the system.

Metal Gear Acid was the first Metal Gear game on the PSP, and it took the series somewhere nobody expected: a turn-based card game. It was unveiled at E3 in May 2004 and came out in Japan on December 16, 2004, and in North America on March 24, 2005. Snake moves and fights by playing cards, and most of them are based on the series, Metal Gear itself included. The Acid in the title has three meanings, one of them an acronym for Active Command Intelligence Duel.

Cards have a cost, and the higher your cost, the longer you wait for your next turn. Two PSPs can link up for a sneak-off, where you race to collect diskettes before your rival. Once the cards make sense, it is very hard to put down.

Patapon 3 came out in North America on April 12, 2011, and it is the last game in the series. It reached Europe on April 15 and Japan on April 28. The gameplay is mostly unchanged, but it has a greater focus on multiplayer than Patapon 2, and the backgrounds are more detailed. The Hero is the first Patapon brought back, fused with the Almighty into the Uberhero, a stronger version of himself.

Players do not agree on which Patapon to start with, and this is the one that splits them most. If you loved the first two and have friends with a PSP, it gives you more of the same together. On your own, the earlier games feel tighter.

Patapon 2 is a direct sequel to Patapon, with the same mix of rhythm and strategy. It came out in Japan in November 2008 and in North America in May 2009. You command the tribe by pressing drum sequences on the face buttons in time to a beat. Hero Patapons are new, and each has a special move you can only use in Fever mode with a perfect beat. The story starts with a Kraken sinking the tribe and washing them up on a strange new land.

It added multiplayer stages and deep tutorials, over 60 stages in all. A remaster is part of Patapon 1+2 Replay, released on July 11, 2025. It is the one we would hand to anyone who found the first game a bit stiff.

Tactics Ogre is a remake of the Super Famicom game, made by Yasumi Matsuno, who directed and wrote the original. Matsuno left Quest Corporation after completing Tactics Ogre and went on to make Final Fantasy Tactics. The PSP remake re-translated the script and added new characters and events. It also brought in a crafting system. The biggest change is death. The old versions removed a character for good at zero hit points, and the remake gives you extra chances to keep them alive.

The storyline was inspired by conflicts in Europe and Asia, and it is heavy on personal and political drama. Akihiko Yoshida designed the characters, and Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata wrote the music. Players name it in the same breath as Final Fantasy Tactics and Jeanne d'Arc.

The War of the Lions is an updated version of Final Fantasy Tactics, the PlayStation game released in 1997. It was overhauled to take advantage of the PSP's screen ratio, and it added cel-shaded full motion videos, extra job classes and multiplayer. Balthier from Final Fantasy XII and Luso from Final Fantasy Tactics A2 join the cast, and Cloud from Final Fantasy VII is back.

The job system is the heart of it. Once a character learns a skill from a job, they keep it for good, though only one main group of skills is active at a time. The remake also adds a Dark Knight with extra abilities, so the original class was renamed Fell Knight in English. It received strong reviews and has since come to phones and tablets.

Jeanne d'Arc was Level-5's first tactics RPG and the studio's first PSP game. It came out in Japan on November 22, 2006, and in North America on August 21, 2007, and it is loosely based on Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years' War. Plenty of the cast were real allies of Joan, and then the game suggests King Henry VI of England was possessed by demons.

On a turn, each character moves and then acts, and actions earn experience. Magical armlets let characters transform, and in her first form Jeanne gets another turn right after killing any foe. One player called it "a 'lite' version of Final Fantasy Tactics", and that is fair: it is easier to pick up and still a lot of fun. Europe only got it with the 2024 re-release on PS4 and PS5.

Patapon came out in Japan in December 2007 and in North America and Europe in February 2008. It is a rhythm game and a war game at once. You never control a soldier directly. You lead the tribe with button-timed drumbeats in real time, and they march and fight to your rhythm. Over more than 30 missions you unlock new warrior types and collect more than 100 weapon and shield upgrades. The name was picked because it sounds like drums and marching.

Critics praised the art style and the music, and it won Best PSP Game of 2008 from IGN. Some reviewers found it repetitive and missed a pause option. Two sequels followed on the PSP. Players recommend it more than any other PSP strategy game.