"Don't Expect Too Much, and You Will Be Pleased"

Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits is a good game. I thought I would start with that. No matter how I write this review, nothing can detract from that fact. In this review I am going to compare it to some other well known RPGs and focus on the things that are wrong. But I did enjoy most of the time I spent playing this game, so don’t be fooled by any ranting I may come up with.
For those of you who are lazy, skip to the bottom for a summary.

Graphics 7

I always start with graphics in an RPG because I consider them to be the least important factor in deciding how good a game is. I still think my favorite RPGs are the Final Fantasy games from the PS1 era. Great games, crappy graphics when compared to new stuff. But people still play those games all the time. That means the graphics don’t truly bother them. I would much rather have a good game than an ok game that looks great.
That said, the graphics in this game are not bad. They reflect the theme of the game. One thing I missed was a world map travel through on your own. You can move between areas a la Final Fantasy Tactics, but there is no air travel to speak of. You get access to a “ship” of some sort, but it is always landed at a designated spot, and once you are there you are automatically transported to another landing spot. Not that great, but it does serve a purpose.
I now compare PS2 graphics to Final Fantasy X. I think that is fair. FFX came out I believe at Christmas 2002. That is a year and a half ago. There is no reason for new RPGs to not be at least as good as FFX. Still, Arc has graphics that don’t detract from the gameplay, but they don’t really help it in any way, so a 7.

Sound 9

I like music a lot. I don’t really have any problems with music in a game as long as it fits the style. Arc the Lad has a fun score. It is mostly calm electronic sounds with a cool almost-electric guitar sound playing the melody. At least, that is the only track I remember, it is the track from the starting city. That is the one I remember and I liked it. If any of it had been bad, I would have remembered, so sound gets a 9.

Documentation 9

The game is fairly simple as RPGs go. There are no curve-balls in there, so it is nothing new. It is explained fairly well in the manual as well as the game.

Gameplay

Gameplay will be broken into three sections: Battle, Travel/Exploration, and Story

Battle 7

At first I liked the battle system a whole lot. It reminds me of other tactical RPGs. Yes, this is a tactical RPG. It is not in the style of Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior. You actually move your characters around and position them where you want them. Characters have different ranges of attack, some being a long but thin attack, some having a wide but fairly short distance attack. This has a lot of potential and is fun in the beginning. But towards the middle of the game, the focus shifted from killing things as you wanted to making sure your weaker characters got xp. This is tedious, and really destroyed the fun of the entire game for me. See, only characters who successfully perform actions get experience, and the character who actually finishes an enemy gets the most experience. So, your lower damage range characters usually go first because of their speed, so they attack once with a low damage because of their longer range. Then your stronger characters get in and finish the enemies off. The stronger melee characters get the extra xp from finishing off the enemy, and the ranged characters get nothing. This completely unbalanced my party, and ruined my experience. The only reason I wanted to finish the game was to see the ending.
Also included in this section will be the skill system. Your characters have two kinds of experience, XP and AP. XP gains levels, and AP is used to gain skills and spells. This is a common system and works well. Usually works well. There is usually no point in getting your skills because the only ones that are useful are the ones at the end of the game. Very few characters will still have useful skills unless you battle constantly to get the new skills their higher levels unlock. To use skills, characters have to have special stones called Spirit Stones. There is supposed to be a world shortage of these Stones that are now used for fuel, but I found them pretty common. But it creates a problem. Eventually I had some characters who were so weak they could only kill enemies and get XP by using their skills, so they were always out of Stones, and therefor couldn’t get any more experience. The system is a bit flawed. Battle gets a 7. It was fun to start with but eventually became a tedious excursive, and that shouldn’t be.

Travel/Exploration 6

This was already discussed a little bit, in that I complained about the lack of a world map. Travel is pretty standard, you move from one dot on the map to another just by clicking on it. At the various dots you will encounter battles, mostly just random monster attacks, but also the story is progressed by battles at the various locations. You can’t get into most the areas to look around, they are just a random point on a map. I wish there was more exploration outside of the very very few towns there were in the world. Speaking of which, I am now going to complain about the lack of people in the world. Each country in the world seems to be either controlling an entire continent, or one section of a continent that is separated from the rest by a natural barrier. And this entire area will have only one city. I realize that there are probably supposed to be other cities that you just cannot visit, but the lack of areas could have been compensated by new cities to explore. Travel was not exactly fun, but I don’t really expect that from an RPG. Exploration was virtually nil from what I saw. There are two collection quests, but that is really the only reason I found to look around. Travel/Exploration gets a 6.

Story 9

This game has a good story. I will try not to reveal too much, as it is really the only thing that kept me going at the end of the game.
The story centers around two characters of different races. Kharg is the a human who lives in the town of Yewbell. His family used to be royalty before the country became a democracy, so the people treat him with respect. Darc is a Deimos. Deimos are considered by humans to be monsters who can talk, but they have their own culture and species just like humans. They hate the humans and much as the humans hate them. But Darc is not a true Deimos, he is quite obviously half-human. You figure out pretty quickly in the game that Darc and Kharg are brothers. Their mother fell in love with a Deimos, and they decided that they wanted the world to be a place in which humans and Deimos could live together. This is the central theme of the game. Sure there is a quest to save the world from an evil empire, and the necessary magic stones are also there, and so is the traditional “ultimate power”, but the meat of the story is about the hate between humans and Deimos, the relationship between Darc and Kharg, and thinking about how humans and Deimos could live together. Its an interesting story, and is only marked down because it is repeated so much throughout the game. The same conflict between Darc and Kharg is repeated at least 3 times within an hour of playing time. Also, I felt the game was too short. I know, I just complained the story dragged on too long. Yes, that is true, too. My game time going in to the final chapter is 28 hours. But I would say at least 9 hours of that is me leaving the PS2 on overnight when I can’t find a save point. When I play an RPG I want it to last long enough for me to get really in to the story. So, the story is good but drags on too much, and the game is too short, so this section gets a 9.

Overall 8

Graphics 7

Sound 9

Documentation 9

Battle 7

Travel/Exploration 6

Story 9

This game has many flaws. It is not perfect, and I don’t think we should expect that from it. But it is a good diversion while we wait for the perfect PS2 RPG to appear. I don’t know where that is coming from, no, so please don’t ask. You will enjoy this game if you don’t expect too much from it, and that is enough to keep me happy.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/13/03, Updated 07/13/03