Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits
Jan. 12th, 2010 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI hadn't heard much about the Arc the Lad series before I started playing Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits. It was mostly that I bought it (used for $5) on the strength of the continuing series. I read a Let's Play of the first game before playing this one, which actually gave me a better idea of what I was in for.
The game is sort-of in the Final Fantasy Tactics/Nippon Ichi tactical genre, though there's no movement grid and the character customization choices are very limited. You also can't tell the upcoming battle order, which makes strategic fighting problematic, at best. The game isn't terribly difficult and requires little grinding if you fight every battle you naturally encounter (I'm not sure I remember how to run from battles, I never bothered to do it). A number of the best character-specific accessories are Guide Dang Its, in that they're dropped by enemies or hidden in crates in a specific battle, and if you miss them, they're gone.
And the final boss deserves special mention: He's immobile, but has a shield that protects him from damage as he spits mooks at you. If you kill five mooks, the shield goes away. On his next turn, he'll use a mega-attack that blasts the entire center of the screen and restores the shield until you kill another five mooks. Remember what I said about not knowing the upcoming battle order? It means that you rarely get a chance to attack him between killing the mook and getting blasted. What you really need to do it hide your characters in safe spots on both sides of the screen, where one or two of them will be able to hit the boss, but because he can't target anyone with the mega-attack, he can't use it to restore his shield. When you finally find the safe spots and get this set up, it takes another 20 minutes to whittle down his HP, which is about five times more than any other enemy. Yes, he's an evil god, but still, this is rediculous.
The plot is very clever, though it falls flat at the end. There are dual protagonists, who semi-unite against a common foe, the evil Darkham Empire. Kharg and Darc are brothers, half-human and half-Deimos (uplifted monster, essentially), and each chapter the perspective switches between them. (They were raised seperately, Kharg doesn't know about his heritage, and they've lived very different lives. They don't actually meet until the 4th chapter.) Kharg's human party has a bunch of very good reasons to hate the Deimos (they killed one character's father and another's best friend, etc), while Darc's Deimos party has reasons that are just as justifiable to hate the humans. And despite the cultural differences, the game does a good job of not making the Deimos the sterotypical "bad guys". Not good or bad, just different.
The ending is a bit problematic, though, as the attempts to foreshadow the boss were lost on me because I didn't play the earlier games and didn't know the events therein. The ending is non-commital, but doesn't end with a group hug and everyone being friends now, which was refreshing.
All in all, defintely worth my $5, and while it would probably be much more enjoyable if I'd played the entire series, I still found it clever and entertaining.
The game is sort-of in the Final Fantasy Tactics/Nippon Ichi tactical genre, though there's no movement grid and the character customization choices are very limited. You also can't tell the upcoming battle order, which makes strategic fighting problematic, at best. The game isn't terribly difficult and requires little grinding if you fight every battle you naturally encounter (I'm not sure I remember how to run from battles, I never bothered to do it). A number of the best character-specific accessories are Guide Dang Its, in that they're dropped by enemies or hidden in crates in a specific battle, and if you miss them, they're gone.
And the final boss deserves special mention: He's immobile, but has a shield that protects him from damage as he spits mooks at you. If you kill five mooks, the shield goes away. On his next turn, he'll use a mega-attack that blasts the entire center of the screen and restores the shield until you kill another five mooks. Remember what I said about not knowing the upcoming battle order? It means that you rarely get a chance to attack him between killing the mook and getting blasted. What you really need to do it hide your characters in safe spots on both sides of the screen, where one or two of them will be able to hit the boss, but because he can't target anyone with the mega-attack, he can't use it to restore his shield. When you finally find the safe spots and get this set up, it takes another 20 minutes to whittle down his HP, which is about five times more than any other enemy. Yes, he's an evil god, but still, this is rediculous.
The plot is very clever, though it falls flat at the end. There are dual protagonists, who semi-unite against a common foe, the evil Darkham Empire. Kharg and Darc are brothers, half-human and half-Deimos (uplifted monster, essentially), and each chapter the perspective switches between them. (They were raised seperately, Kharg doesn't know about his heritage, and they've lived very different lives. They don't actually meet until the 4th chapter.) Kharg's human party has a bunch of very good reasons to hate the Deimos (they killed one character's father and another's best friend, etc), while Darc's Deimos party has reasons that are just as justifiable to hate the humans. And despite the cultural differences, the game does a good job of not making the Deimos the sterotypical "bad guys". Not good or bad, just different.
The ending is a bit problematic, though, as the attempts to foreshadow the boss were lost on me because I didn't play the earlier games and didn't know the events therein. The ending is non-commital, but doesn't end with a group hug and everyone being friends now, which was refreshing.
All in all, defintely worth my $5, and while it would probably be much more enjoyable if I'd played the entire series, I still found it clever and entertaining.
