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Arc the Lad II
Elc's village was destroyed by Imperial soldiers looking to take their Fire Guardian, and when he channeled that guardian's power against them, he was taken as well. Fast-forward many years, Elc is making his living as a Hunter, and a job on a Romalian airship gets him tangled in a deep conspiracy that was a full game in the making.
I actually played half of this years ago, but stopped shortly after the party gets separated (after the Chimera Research Lab) because I couldn't handle the grinding. As I didn't take particularly good notes and I've forgotten everything except the broad strokes, I busted out some cheat codes for another try.
And boy, that grinding. There are a dozen human characters, half of them imported from Arc I, and you can also recruit monsters. Weapons and armor all have levels that you need to grind by attacking or getting hit in order to use those items to their full effectiveness. And there's no friendly fire liked in most tactical rpgs, so you can't beat up your friends for XP, either. (Though you still get XP from casting buff spells.) Interesting factoid about the game's experience system: You can get experience from being hit! And monsters can get experience (and even go up levels) from being hit by someone at a much higher level than they are.
It has a "cast of thousands" problem (bringing in the full party from Arc I, a whole new party, and a huge assortment of tamed monsters), but at least tries to use them all. You have restricted parties from a number of areas, places where you need to assemble multiple strike teams, and (probably too many) character-specific subplots that at least try to flesh out the characters. I don't think the full new team was really needed, as a bunch of the Arc I imports could have had bigger roles and a smaller cast would have both reduced grinding and allowed more time to flesh out personalities and backstories. But whatever.
I don't really see a benefit to using recruited monsters, incidentally. They seem to be strictly inferior to the human characters, having shorter skill lists and only being able to use one piece of equipment rather than three. Also, a flying monster is no indication that it can actually pass over obstacles! I recruited a gargoyle (which, to its credit, could use the extremely powerful Double Moon scythe, which none of my other characters could), but despite his flying animation, he couldn't even hop over party members, much less cross floor gaps.
Looking back over my review of Arc I, it occurs to me that the party and battle systems were really polished between games: This and the later sequels have proper inventory systems, a proper economy, some amount of customization (though not much), and generally more tactical options to work with in battle.
The Hunter's Guild jobs had their start in this game before becoming the entirety of Arc 3. Though here they're more "mercenary work" than "general do-gooding." The game is pretty packed full of sidequests, including the aforementioned monster recruiting, a series of optional dungeons that power up your pet robot, the guild missions, weapon combining, and the ability to export characters to the Arc Arena disc that comes with the game collection.
And credit to the translators where it's due: The dialogue is clever and generally has just the right amount of humor. Not too silly, but not so serious as to be boring, either.
Noteworthy Spoilers
The plot is far more serious than Arc 3--Arc 3 actually feels kinda shallow and goofy, especially by comparison. Here, the main characters of the last game have been branded as terrorists and aren't really that far off, given that many of the world's governments have been compromised by a massive conspiracy that they're using guerilla tactics against. The body count ends up fairly high, including a lot of the main casts' friends and loved ones. I don't think they spend enough time on the repercussions of it, but the villains' plan includes kidnapping children, drugging and brainwashing them, and eventually transforming them into monsters. There is some nasty shit going down.
The existence of the "deimos" (uplifted monster / monstrous humans) in Arc 4 makes a lot more sense with the "new human" antagonists introduced here--human/monster hybrids made via genetic engineering, who have no reason to vanish when the game ends. It stands to reason that those who survived would be scorned by humans, so the separate society they've build a millennium later makes perfect sense.
The late-game time travel bit feels wasted: It's not the far past, just the recent (between the two games) past; and it's just a series of battles and fetch quests that re-use existing maps. (And it's unclear, but it seems like it just adjusted the timeline slightly, so that Kukuru puts a new seal on the Dark One a little sooner and that it's stronger, so that it doesn't break until the emperor pushes the button. If you could travel through time, why not go back and stop Andel from stealing the Ark? Why not stop Kukuru from being stupid at the Flame Cion in the first place? Heck, why not go back 20 years and make the game's events impossible, so the Dark One is never at risk of being freed?
The enemy is constantly updated to Arc and company's exact whereabouts in cutscenes, but yet constantly underestimates their ability to escape ambushes and traps, and only sends small groups after them. They repeatedly pull the, "Ha ha, you're no match for me, go ahead and run!" nonsense. If their intelligence is actually that good--that they know Arc's moves basically as he makes them--then they need to be grossly incompetent (not just overconfident) to constantly let him escape or defeat them. Heck, they know his home base! Why isn't it being sieged by airships and warships throughout the whole game?
The bittersweet note that the game ends on (the Dark One is re-sealed, but massive damage was done to the world and Arc and Kukuru are dead) would actually have worked better had there not been a sequel, or at least if the next sequel had been Twilight of the Spirits, which takes place 1,000 years later. Arc III takes place in a world that, a decade later, is battered but not broken; and in itself that's fine. The problem is that Arc and Kukuru's sacrifice manages to seal the Dark One for only that long until some idiot releases it, and Alec and company have to build a new Ark to properly re-seal it, which given the tone of that game, comes off as entirely anticlimactic.
The FMVs: They clearly liked animating two things, airships and buildings being destroyed. That's pretty much the entirety of the pre-rendered stuff. And I don't want to be too hard on it given that it's a PS1 game, but the destroyed buildings all look like they're made out of cheap plastic and barely cause any damage when chunks of them land.
Overall: This is a fairly solid game, though a bit long and grindy, so you've got to love the combat system. Arc I is a prologue that got released separately for some reason (and should be played first to understand everything that's going on); Arc III is crappy sequel fodder. My assessment in my review of Arc III stands.
I actually played half of this years ago, but stopped shortly after the party gets separated (after the Chimera Research Lab) because I couldn't handle the grinding. As I didn't take particularly good notes and I've forgotten everything except the broad strokes, I busted out some cheat codes for another try.
And boy, that grinding. There are a dozen human characters, half of them imported from Arc I, and you can also recruit monsters. Weapons and armor all have levels that you need to grind by attacking or getting hit in order to use those items to their full effectiveness. And there's no friendly fire liked in most tactical rpgs, so you can't beat up your friends for XP, either. (Though you still get XP from casting buff spells.) Interesting factoid about the game's experience system: You can get experience from being hit! And monsters can get experience (and even go up levels) from being hit by someone at a much higher level than they are.
It has a "cast of thousands" problem (bringing in the full party from Arc I, a whole new party, and a huge assortment of tamed monsters), but at least tries to use them all. You have restricted parties from a number of areas, places where you need to assemble multiple strike teams, and (probably too many) character-specific subplots that at least try to flesh out the characters. I don't think the full new team was really needed, as a bunch of the Arc I imports could have had bigger roles and a smaller cast would have both reduced grinding and allowed more time to flesh out personalities and backstories. But whatever.
I don't really see a benefit to using recruited monsters, incidentally. They seem to be strictly inferior to the human characters, having shorter skill lists and only being able to use one piece of equipment rather than three. Also, a flying monster is no indication that it can actually pass over obstacles! I recruited a gargoyle (which, to its credit, could use the extremely powerful Double Moon scythe, which none of my other characters could), but despite his flying animation, he couldn't even hop over party members, much less cross floor gaps.
Looking back over my review of Arc I, it occurs to me that the party and battle systems were really polished between games: This and the later sequels have proper inventory systems, a proper economy, some amount of customization (though not much), and generally more tactical options to work with in battle.
The Hunter's Guild jobs had their start in this game before becoming the entirety of Arc 3. Though here they're more "mercenary work" than "general do-gooding." The game is pretty packed full of sidequests, including the aforementioned monster recruiting, a series of optional dungeons that power up your pet robot, the guild missions, weapon combining, and the ability to export characters to the Arc Arena disc that comes with the game collection.
And credit to the translators where it's due: The dialogue is clever and generally has just the right amount of humor. Not too silly, but not so serious as to be boring, either.
Noteworthy Spoilers
The plot is far more serious than Arc 3--Arc 3 actually feels kinda shallow and goofy, especially by comparison. Here, the main characters of the last game have been branded as terrorists and aren't really that far off, given that many of the world's governments have been compromised by a massive conspiracy that they're using guerilla tactics against. The body count ends up fairly high, including a lot of the main casts' friends and loved ones. I don't think they spend enough time on the repercussions of it, but the villains' plan includes kidnapping children, drugging and brainwashing them, and eventually transforming them into monsters. There is some nasty shit going down.
The existence of the "deimos" (uplifted monster / monstrous humans) in Arc 4 makes a lot more sense with the "new human" antagonists introduced here--human/monster hybrids made via genetic engineering, who have no reason to vanish when the game ends. It stands to reason that those who survived would be scorned by humans, so the separate society they've build a millennium later makes perfect sense.
The late-game time travel bit feels wasted: It's not the far past, just the recent (between the two games) past; and it's just a series of battles and fetch quests that re-use existing maps. (And it's unclear, but it seems like it just adjusted the timeline slightly, so that Kukuru puts a new seal on the Dark One a little sooner and that it's stronger, so that it doesn't break until the emperor pushes the button. If you could travel through time, why not go back and stop Andel from stealing the Ark? Why not stop Kukuru from being stupid at the Flame Cion in the first place? Heck, why not go back 20 years and make the game's events impossible, so the Dark One is never at risk of being freed?
The enemy is constantly updated to Arc and company's exact whereabouts in cutscenes, but yet constantly underestimates their ability to escape ambushes and traps, and only sends small groups after them. They repeatedly pull the, "Ha ha, you're no match for me, go ahead and run!" nonsense. If their intelligence is actually that good--that they know Arc's moves basically as he makes them--then they need to be grossly incompetent (not just overconfident) to constantly let him escape or defeat them. Heck, they know his home base! Why isn't it being sieged by airships and warships throughout the whole game?
The bittersweet note that the game ends on (the Dark One is re-sealed, but massive damage was done to the world and Arc and Kukuru are dead) would actually have worked better had there not been a sequel, or at least if the next sequel had been Twilight of the Spirits, which takes place 1,000 years later. Arc III takes place in a world that, a decade later, is battered but not broken; and in itself that's fine. The problem is that Arc and Kukuru's sacrifice manages to seal the Dark One for only that long until some idiot releases it, and Alec and company have to build a new Ark to properly re-seal it, which given the tone of that game, comes off as entirely anticlimactic.
The FMVs: They clearly liked animating two things, airships and buildings being destroyed. That's pretty much the entirety of the pre-rendered stuff. And I don't want to be too hard on it given that it's a PS1 game, but the destroyed buildings all look like they're made out of cheap plastic and barely cause any damage when chunks of them land.
Overall: This is a fairly solid game, though a bit long and grindy, so you've got to love the combat system. Arc I is a prologue that got released separately for some reason (and should be played first to understand everything that's going on); Arc III is crappy sequel fodder. My assessment in my review of Arc III stands.