Arc the Lad
Aug. 15th, 2011 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA shrine maiden named Kukuru foolishly extinguishes a 3,000-year-old mystic flame, freeing an ancient evil and kicking off a quest for the legendary ark that holds the key to mankind’s salvation. And a lad named Arc just happens to be ready to become the legendary hero who’ll do it.
The system reminds me of Treasure Hunter G, in that it’s a Tactics-type game but with more limitations and a more streamlined, action-y system. You get a specific set of characters and they learn specific abilities as they level up.
It’s a really simple game, when you get right down to it: You can’t even access the status menu except right before each battle, and you don’t really need to. Each character can equip up to four items, and they don’t really correspond to body parts or anything like that. (And if you don’t do the bonus dungeon, there are relatively few items to choose from.) There’s no money, there are no stores. There’s virtually no customization. You can’t even cast lower-level spells once you learn the higher-level versions.
At the same time, it seems like they were trying to do a lot of interesting things, they just focused on odd areas. One of your characters gets a teleportation spell. Some monsters split, others combine into stronger forms. You’ve got a summoner who can summon up to two extra characters to fight for you. One of those monsters can create new floor tiles over gaps! There’s an arena, a training dojo, and a 50-floor optional dungeon. And there’s nowhere near enough game (maybe eight hours of game plus four more of grinding time) to justify all of that. Fortunately, if you grind your characters and do the sidequests for lots of optional items, it doesn’t go to waste: You can transfer your save file to the sequel.
The “Jump” stat really matters, not because there are many higher elevations to jump to, but because it’s what lets you jump over obstacles, enemies and your allies: You can’t normally move through an occupied square. This can be really problematic on some of the maps, because all of your characters are always on the field, but you can easily bottleneck yourself and not be able to use most of them.
I can see how this series evolved into Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits. (You still can’t move through other characters in that, but it’s much easier to go around them when you’re not limited to grid-based movement.) It seems like the kept trying to be innovative as the series went on, they just expanded the games to match the volume of sidequesting.
Graphics are pretty standard early PS1-era: More complex than anything you’d find on a 16-bit console, but still sprite-based. They’re pretty similar in quality to the graphics from Tales of Phantasia, which was late SNES-era. And there are a few cutscenes that I’m sure were jaw-dropping when they came out, but are nothing special nowadays.
The translators did a decent job on most of the dialogue. Very few games are willing to refer to a villain as an “eco-friendly megalomaniac”. But by the same token, the game has an environmental message and they don’t want you to forget it. Every NPC ally will tell you how humanity has lost touch with nature at least once. (The message about man destroying the world would work better if not for the fact that almost everyone trying to advance technology or destroy nature is either a monster or demon in disguise.)
There’s an interested in-world technology mix, even for a jrpg: Fantasy armor and castles co-existing with magic stone-powered airships, big screen public display systems and public broadcasting. And pretty much everyone has magical powers, but there don’t seem to be any cars or guns.
The music’s pretty decent. There’s a little bit of voice acting during battles, in that characters shout when they use attacks or take hits, but it seems like they didn’t redub them from the Japanese. I’m inclined to think that Gogen shouting, “EXPROSION!” is gratuitous English when everyone shouts “Yatta!” upon defeating a monster.
I had actually read the Let’s Play of this a while ago, and it noted that the fastest and easiest way to play the game is just to powerlevel Arc and have him do everything. This is, however, a crappy idea if you’re planning to import your save data into Arc the Lad II (which I am, because I bought the entire collection) because that game is better balanced and would be unpleasant with a wildly-mismatched team.
Overall: Short, fun, makes me want to move on to the sequel. Hopefully it’s a more complex, interesting system to go with the greater length of the game.
The system reminds me of Treasure Hunter G, in that it’s a Tactics-type game but with more limitations and a more streamlined, action-y system. You get a specific set of characters and they learn specific abilities as they level up.
It’s a really simple game, when you get right down to it: You can’t even access the status menu except right before each battle, and you don’t really need to. Each character can equip up to four items, and they don’t really correspond to body parts or anything like that. (And if you don’t do the bonus dungeon, there are relatively few items to choose from.) There’s no money, there are no stores. There’s virtually no customization. You can’t even cast lower-level spells once you learn the higher-level versions.
At the same time, it seems like they were trying to do a lot of interesting things, they just focused on odd areas. One of your characters gets a teleportation spell. Some monsters split, others combine into stronger forms. You’ve got a summoner who can summon up to two extra characters to fight for you. One of those monsters can create new floor tiles over gaps! There’s an arena, a training dojo, and a 50-floor optional dungeon. And there’s nowhere near enough game (maybe eight hours of game plus four more of grinding time) to justify all of that. Fortunately, if you grind your characters and do the sidequests for lots of optional items, it doesn’t go to waste: You can transfer your save file to the sequel.
The “Jump” stat really matters, not because there are many higher elevations to jump to, but because it’s what lets you jump over obstacles, enemies and your allies: You can’t normally move through an occupied square. This can be really problematic on some of the maps, because all of your characters are always on the field, but you can easily bottleneck yourself and not be able to use most of them.
I can see how this series evolved into Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits. (You still can’t move through other characters in that, but it’s much easier to go around them when you’re not limited to grid-based movement.) It seems like the kept trying to be innovative as the series went on, they just expanded the games to match the volume of sidequesting.
Graphics are pretty standard early PS1-era: More complex than anything you’d find on a 16-bit console, but still sprite-based. They’re pretty similar in quality to the graphics from Tales of Phantasia, which was late SNES-era. And there are a few cutscenes that I’m sure were jaw-dropping when they came out, but are nothing special nowadays.
The translators did a decent job on most of the dialogue. Very few games are willing to refer to a villain as an “eco-friendly megalomaniac”. But by the same token, the game has an environmental message and they don’t want you to forget it. Every NPC ally will tell you how humanity has lost touch with nature at least once. (The message about man destroying the world would work better if not for the fact that almost everyone trying to advance technology or destroy nature is either a monster or demon in disguise.)
There’s an interested in-world technology mix, even for a jrpg: Fantasy armor and castles co-existing with magic stone-powered airships, big screen public display systems and public broadcasting. And pretty much everyone has magical powers, but there don’t seem to be any cars or guns.
The music’s pretty decent. There’s a little bit of voice acting during battles, in that characters shout when they use attacks or take hits, but it seems like they didn’t redub them from the Japanese. I’m inclined to think that Gogen shouting, “EXPROSION!” is gratuitous English when everyone shouts “Yatta!” upon defeating a monster.
I had actually read the Let’s Play of this a while ago, and it noted that the fastest and easiest way to play the game is just to powerlevel Arc and have him do everything. This is, however, a crappy idea if you’re planning to import your save data into Arc the Lad II (which I am, because I bought the entire collection) because that game is better balanced and would be unpleasant with a wildly-mismatched team.
Overall: Short, fun, makes me want to move on to the sequel. Hopefully it’s a more complex, interesting system to go with the greater length of the game.
