Title - Arc Rise Fantasia
Platform - Wii
Date Started - January 1 2011
Date Completed - February 10 2011
Overall Score - 7.9
My Face -
Recommendation - Yes! It's clunky and the voice acting is intolerable, but if you turn the voice volume off it's highly enjoyable. It's probably not to everyone's taste for an rpg but do give it a try.
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Alright let's begin by talking a little of the team that made this game. This is the first crack at a console rpg from people that made the Luminous Arc games for the DS. Now I FREAKIN' LOVE me some Luminous Arc and I think I fit into the mob that really wants Luminous Arc 3 localized. So when I heard that Arc Rise Fantasia was from that same team and being localized........ well let's just say that THAT was the one game that broke me into wanting a wii. Well I wanted to play Tales of Symphonia 2 but Arc Rise took precedence. I pre-ordered this game and bought it before I even had the console. That's how bad I wanted it. :p Now the Luminous Arc games are SRPGs with character interaction being the 'slide in and out of the frame' kind of thing. The stories were good, the battle systems were great, the characters and comedy were interesting, and the music being from Yasunori Mitsuda's Procyon Studio was a treat. I was happy to try something new from the team.
The art direction and graphics were the first thing I noticed when I started playing. Now I understand that the wii doesn't have very good graphic output on a 720p tv..... Well I didn't know that before I started playing :p So playing through this, it felt like I was just playing a big DS game. And that's alright. Going through this game felt very.............. retro and nostalgic. It doesn't need to be sharp and shiny looking. It reminded me of playing past games that were great but not so good looking. But who cares as long as it's fun right?
Now getting into the game I noticed that the character designs were different from what the LA team usually makes and I'm not sure if I entirely liked that. The character designs in ARF didn't seem as original like the ones in LA did. I started sensing some Stella Deus qualities (gawd I hate that game but that's for another review) and I started sensing some Kingdom Hearts qualities. Of course the game looking slightly childish on the wii didn't make the Kingdom Hearts qualities look less noticeable. Now not everything had that look to it but it is most noticeable in a couple of the characters.
The look of the towns were great and I was highly pleased with how big the towns were. Instead of recent rpgs having small towns that are supposed to be big, Arc Rise actually has large towns. BUT, having good sized towns came at a cost....... The world is kind of small. :( There's still the basic areas though - town in the snow, town in the desert, big castle town, big city-ish town, small rural town......... you get the idea. Basic rpg town formula. The strange thing is that if you're in a large town and you're running in certain areas, the screen will have a tendency to lag every time in the same areas. I don't know if that happens in other wii titles, but it was definitely noticeable here.
Now let's get on to gameplay. I played the whole game with the gamecube controller and I am soooooooo grateful that this game has that option. Playing with the nunchuk........ It works, but the button setup that this game has on it is by no means comfortable to work with. The gc controller has an excellent setup on it though. It made this game that much more nostalgic to play with a controller. Now the control works alright. Movement is fine, battle selecting works fine.... Not much complaining in that department.
The biggest complaint that I have though is the lack of camera control. As far as I can tell.......... you can't control it, well you can control it a little on the overworld but other than that NO. It's incredibly annoying in dungeons. You walk in and the camera is in a fixed position behind you, you run a little ways avoid an enemy, but 'hey what was that? did you just miss something?', you turn around to run back to see what you missed and BAM!, you just ran into the enemy you avoided and it never showed up on the screen. The camera is not your friend in this game. Not at all. In the hallways it will always be in the fixed position. You can not get the camera to follow behind you the way you want. If you run back to the door, you're watching yourself run at the screen..... it gets old quick. Now the only time you can move it is on the overworld map, but even when you do try to move it it's incredibly..... stiff. Try to move it ever so slightly to the left........ doesn't move. So you push harder and it does an insta jump 90 degrees... and that camera will be the biggest hindrance of one the sidequests in the game. So much so that you basically just have to look at the corner map as you're going. Now here's another thing that irked me, the map. The map takes up a very large portion of the corner of the screen and if you want it there it HAS to take up that much room. And in the menu area if you look at the map... you can't zoom in on the thing......
Anyway moving on to the battle system, this game.................. it want's so badly to be a Tales game (Tales of Symphonia, Abyss, Vesperia so on and so on). I mean it REALLY wants to be a Tales game. The battle system just screams Tales. BUT the system is a bit different.
First let's go through the character count. Now in any Tales game you usually get 4 characters on your team. They usually control themselves but you get 4. 4! Now in Arc Rise you get 3! 3!!! There is a constant space on the screen for a 4th character, BUT NO you have 3. Now every so often in the game a 4th character will come into the battle and be in your team as a GHOST player, but you can't control them and they just do whatever the hell they want! That is usually counter productive to what your battle plans are. Oh no my guy is about to die in the next turn I'll heal him up right now.... ghost character decides 'I'll heal you dying guy!' right after you fully healed him.... -___- If I can't control you then I want you out.......... Get off the team!
Next is how the battle system actually works. Usually in the Tales series you run up to a monster whack it a few times wait half a second and whack some more in an active battle........ Well Arc Rise is a turn-base version of that idea. Now the LA team does very well with SRPG formats...... so this battle system came out clunky...... you could already tell that by the strange ghost character idea. Now each character has an allotted number of Ability Points to use in battle, and all 3 characters points add up. The AP is basically the same idea as a mana pool. At the top left of the screen you'll see something like 11/14. That's your AP pool. When your turn starts you have an amount of usable AP for that turn, that would be the 11. Attacking, defending, magic... it all costs something. Attacking costs 2 points, let's say you want a character to strike an enemy 4 times so you choose Attack 4x costing you 8 points. Now if you stop right there and end your turn, that means that there were 3 points that you didn't use that turn. When your next turn starts those 3 points that you saved are now added into your AP pool giving you 14/14. The AP pool is used for all of your characters, they have to share it.
The whole AP idea is fine with me and it's not unheard of, but some of the other things in the battles irks me. It took me a good few minutes to figure out how to move to another one of my characters to tell him what to do. If I place a character somewhere on the field for strategic purposes, I want them to stay there.... if the enemy moves closer to them they'll run away from it without me telling them to do that....... so that group healing I just wanted to do ain't gonna work with my characters all split up...
But here's an interesting thing they did in this game. The magic system. EVERYONE can use magic. No one is innate to any certain kind or anything like that. Everyone can use any kind of magic. That means everyone on your team can use the same healing magic. Now I found that to be amazingly helpful. The only real problem with the idea is that you still have character stat basics in play. Main character is your basic main that's pretty much level in his stats. Magic girl character has better magic than anyone else. Other attacker guy has better attack than magic.... You see how the usual stats go. Now there's not many items you can get to help balance that out. So if everyone can use the same things then why have the stats hindering that ability?
There are also a set of 'summons' in this game, but they're called Rogress. My only complaint about them is that we don't really get to see them or get to know them. Now these summon creatures are some of the strangest designs I've ever seen in my life... Ok the weirdest one is named Banchu. Now I'm gonna have you visualize this in your head with me here. Now I want you to picture a 'bus'. Ya, a bus. Ok, now I want you to picture an airplane. Big ol' aiplane with turbines on the wings. Alright, now put the bus and the airplane together in your head.... Got it? Big ol' bus with airplane wings......... We're not done yet... Now take your big ol' airplane bus............ and cross it............... with a whale........... Yes you read that right. A WHALE........
The story of Arc Rise Fantasia is pretty much your basic RPG storyline to any game ever. Politics suck, religion is whack, the ecosystem is effed up, and lots of frenemies. See basic. BUT, the elements of this story are presented in a great way. There where several times when important big stuff was happening and somebody would say something completely out of left field. I mean giant pieces of info that I never suspected and just blew my mind! Kind of those situations where you just go 'why didn't you say this earlier?!'.
The pacing of the story is great, but the pacing of the game needed some help. It was almost completely linear until 3/4 of the way through the story. Every time I was able to get on a boat or a lightship I kept thinking 'do I get to control it?' and it kept turning out that the answer was NO. I was getting a little irritated watching them zip on by without me controlling it........ but then I finally obtained a lightship of my very own and boy was I happy about that. I was starting to think I would never get one.
There's not a ton of sidequests but there are some. There's guild work to do which doesn't prove to be too terribly helpful but it's not hard to do. There are extra bosses to beat which sometimes don't give you any exp or money but they do drop good items. And a lot of those bosses are easy to miss.
The music in this game is from Yasunori Mitsuda himself! It's by no means his best work, but the score is good and it really adds to that nostalgic factor. A lot of it made me think of other games....
The characters were good for the most part and the comedy was good as well. There were some sad times that did make me shed a tear or two, but hey I'm girl so that's not saying much :p A couple of the characters though really started to get on my nerves.... and well...... I have to spoiler this part, if you're reading this and you don't want any part of the story ruined for you then don't read it....
One character that I hated the most....... He's just soooo useless. And he KNOWS that he's useless. He runs away from battles, gets the crap beat out of him, he whines all the time....... And I'm not kidding when I say he runs away from battles.... Big boss fight comes up and he runs away... not in your party..... just gone! Frikin' jerk. Fine go cry in the corner! I didn't want you in my team anyways!........... So he actually does run away............ He really does. This time I mean he just left. He felt bad for causing so much trouble so he's just gone leaving us to adventure around the world without him. We meet up with him again after a while, and he goes with us to a dungeon where he starts feeling bad about himself again.......... And well he kills himself because he knows he sucks....... Well he kills himself in the exact same way as Russell here....
There's a strange thing in this game that tries once again to imitate a Tales game. Costumes. Now in a Tales game, if you change the costume your character is wearing, you see it in the gameplay. Well here......... you don't. You get costumes, but you only see them on the menu screen. They don't really add anything special. The only thing the costumes do is activate conversations. Now you don't have to have the costume on your characters, you just have to own them and the conversations will happen. I find that to be awkward since there are a lot of conversations you can miss this way.
Now before the game came out in English, there was a lot of talk about the voice acting. The rumors were that there would only be an English track and the original Japanese track would be cut, and from the trailers at the time we all cringed at the English voice acting....... Well the rumor proved true and the voices were still atrocious. I gave it a chance. I really did. But after 3 hours into the game, I just couldn't take it anymore. I went into the menu and muted all the voices....... PHEW! That was so much better! The only thing was that when you mute all the voices, you mute ALL the voices. That even means all the voices in the battles too.... Oh well, the battle cries couldn't have been that pleasant to listen to right?
All in all, even though this game has flaws, I found it incredibly enjoyable and I was absolutely glued to it for days. The story held me, the music was a treat and not once did I mute it to listen to something else, the graphics reminded me of simpler times, and some of the Luminous Arc cameos made me smile. It was really hard for me to give this game a score. Personally I loved it once I got used to all the flaws, but it was all those flaws that prevented me from scoring it higher. The flaws are annoying but the game is still highly playable. I do recommend it. You don't have to know anything about Luminous Arc to play it. Well, I think I've gone on long enough. :)
