"I wonder how it tastes?"

After having a great time playing Arc the Lad Collection, I couldn't wait to buy the next installment. And, after letting it sit in its case for about a year, I decided to finally play it. I must say that while it's a different experience from what I was expecting coming into it, I still had quite a lot of fun traversing the world of Twilight of the Spirits.

This game doesn't use the same old strategy type of battles the earlier titles in the series had. Instead of moving your characters around on a grid, each character has a blue circle surrounding them to which they can roam around freely in. Once settled down, a smaller, red circle that shows your attack range will surround the character. A yellow wedge can be rotated around this circle completely, which is what you use to target actual enemies. As you get used to it, you can completely bypass targeting through the use of the red circle and just go by what direction you're facing, seeing as whenever an enemy is selected to be attacked a message will appear above them, telling you that they are indeed in your attack range. Just like the previous titles in the series, the strategy battles, regardless of whether or not they're random battles or story battles, are easily finished in a short amount of time, even quicker when you get past the previous targeting method. Random battles can sometimes take only a minute or two to finish if you're using your built up characters. This really helps keep the game going, as a lot of games that utilize a strategy battle system stick you in 20+ minute battles, which is particularly annoying when the rewards you'll be receiving from the battle aren't worth the time you're spending.

Magic is handled differently in this game from most rpgs. Instead of characters having an MP stat, each character can hold an amount of Spirit Stones. Spirit Stones are treated exactly the same as the MP stat, except that they don't regenerate by staying at the inn nor by using an item. In fact, they pretty much are items. There are accessories you can equip that will increase the total amount of Spirit Stones a character can carry into battle with him, and extra Spirit Stones will transfer over to the Party Items section, where you can hold an additional 999 of them. Throughout most of the game you'll find yourself getting more Spirit Stones than you'll ever need. You'll probably fill that up quite quickly, because there's no real use for them in random battles and you get a lot more than you'd ever use, unless you're someone who likes to have every character use a special attack every possible turn.

There's also another meter in battle other than HP and Spirit Stones, and that's your Tension Meter. As you take damage, your Tension Meter will rise. Once filled, that character will have a sparkly mist surrounding them. What this does is the next time that character attacks, if there's another party member in reach of the selected enemy they'll join in on the attack as well. The damage rivals even the stronger spells in the game, and unlike normal attacks they're guaranteed to connect. Tension attacks are, for the most part, useless, because you'll rarely ever be in a situation where they'll come in handy. For the most part I'll find myself ready to unleash a combination attack once the enemy is down to single-digit HP.

When you defeat all of the enemies, a screen will pop up showing how much experience and SP your characters accumulated throughout the fight. Each character has their own individual set of skills, with Special Skills going to humans and Magic going to their counterparts, the Deimos. Each skill has an initial SP cost you need to achieve to unlock it. Some skills are cheap, only taking a very small amount of SP, where others rocket up past 2,000 SP to unlock. Although each character has their own individual set of skills, there are duplicates within these sets. A large chunk of the characters will receive status boosting effects for battle, ones that temporarily raise your Attack, Defense or some other stat, but no one has the exact same set of moves overall. There's also skills that can restore HP, which will be your primary source of healing. With no end to your spirit stones, healing is basically free while you're out leveling.

Another part of the battles is the special “Airship” attack each party will acquire during the game. These attacks use a large quantity of Spirit Stones, but have an enormous range and do great damage. Or so the game tells you. With the exception of the single battle where the story wanted me to use the attack, I never bothered with them. The amount of Spirit Stones they take up is way too steep, and skills will serve you better, but the option is available to you if you want to mix things up a little bit.

Outside of battle, you'll get to roam around on the point and click style of maps that are common place these days in rpgs. In towns, there's almost always a save point, a healer, and access to all the different types of items. In addition to normal items such as Herbs and Elixirs, you can buy Spirit Stones, weapon parts, accessories, and eventually things to upgrade your two airship attacks.

Each character has three slots to equip weapon parts, and three slots for accessories. Whenever you reach a new chapter, staple equipment will be available in upgraded forms, such as Steel Armbands becoming Titanium Armbands or Amethyst Coating becoming Diamond Coating, as well as other, less useful ones. You can add elements or status effects to your normal attacks, although buying something to increase your attack is usually more pertinent, and you can buy things to resist certain elements or add extra spirit stones to your character specific totals. As you progress through the game, you'll wind up acquiring numerous pieces of equipment better than what the current stores offer, and because your money isn't as plentiful as spirit stones in the game, it's generally a good idea to not buy new equipment the second it's available.

The story is easily the weakest aspect of the game. You switch between two characters throughout the game, namely Kharg and Darc. The game spins a tale around these two that's not only cliche, has been done better innumerable times before. They're brothers, although they don't know it, and they're fighting on opposite sides of a war that threatens to tear the whole world apart, all the while an evil madman strives to resurrect the “dark power”. The game plays right into your expectations. If you're thinking something is going to happen, it's bound to happen. The death of a loved one? Check. Betrayal? Check. Jealousy? Check. Originality? A big, red X.

I enjoyed the music in the game for the most part, with my least favorite piece being, of course, the most common. The random battle music, which doesn't do much for pulling you into the battles, is the only track in the game that doesn't have ninja skills available to it. The rest hide in the background, unnoticed, unless you stop and actually try to locate it. The voice acting is some of the best I've heard on the Playstation 2, possibly the best. I literally squealed from laughter the first time I heard a certain returning character talk during battle. Getting smacked by a giant skeleton warrior, and then hearing “Didn't hurt!” in a voice most likely found on Rugrats is just the greatest thing one can experience in life. I was fully expecting the skeleton to respond with "Did too!", but alas, it was not to be. The greatest thing one can experience in life is quickly outdone when said character picks an item up. “I wonder how it tastes?” has become my favorite line from the game. The voice work in the game is just fantastic as far as rpgs go.

The game looks impressive. The background and the scenery are very well done, and the characters themselves are all uniquely drawn. Whoever made the concept art for the Deimos might have had a little too wild an imagination however, as some of the Deimos look like the entire purpose behind them existing is not to further the story or aid Darc, but only to look completely different in comparison to all of the other characters in the group. It's sometimes a little hard to believe that the different Deimos races all evolved at the same pace, yet look so drastically different.

The spells and skills are done well and surprisingly short. There's none you'll have to twiddle your thumbs for because you've long since grown tired of holding the controller. You won't really use them in random battles, so you'll never be sitting through the same explosion time after time.

The controls are pretty simple and respond quite well. Once you get the hang of things, most fights are just moving your character around with the left analog stick or the D-pad and hitting X when you get close to an enemy. You may want to stick with targeting using the red/yellow circle, and in that case, you'll need to use R1 in addition to X. Everything else is basic rpg fare. A menu button, an action button, a cancel button, a pause button, and this isn't one of those strange games that use completely different schemes than every other game in the genre. Quick and simple.

As I've mentioned once or twice so far, Twilight of Spirits offers very little challenge. There's only two fights in the game I could possibly see someone losing aside from the optional Arena battles, and one of those two gave me little difficulty. The other was the final battle of the game. It caught me off guard, as I was fully expecting the game to remain just as easy as it had been, but the sheer time you'll spend in the final battle is what could possibly do you in. The four arenas you can find throughout the game provide the only solid challenge, as enemies you'll encounter are higher leveled than the ones you're currently fighting, and you're restricted to using one, sometimes two, party members, and sometimes banned from using skills. The arenas differ in their rule structures. However, after every round in the arena, you're given the option to quit. If you do, you get an item associated with whatever battle you gave up on. If you make it all the way to the end, you'll get a pretty nice prize, regardless of which arena you're at. If you lose, you get nothing. Well, you get a bar of Soap, which is an item you can use to cure the status effect known as Stickiness.

The game offers a New Game + option, although I don't really see any reason to go through the game a second time. Other than the arenas, there's only one other optional quest available to each main character, and I accomplished both of those throughout the normal progress I made during the game. As far as I know, the enemies don't receive increased levels, stats or a better artificial intelligence, and there's no extra story needing to be unlocked, so don't expect to get more than the average 40 hours out of the game.

I enjoyed Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits. Although by the time I first played the game, most of the magic I felt when purchasing it had wore off, it was still fun to play through. The battles all go along at a smooth pace, and the story, which has it's occasional moments that are a bit too long, are spread out nicely across the multiple chapters the game offers. I wouldn't really place this game as high on my list as I would Arc the Lad 2, but it's still a great addition to the series as a whole. Don't go out of your way to pick it up, but if you see it lying around, give it a try.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/06/04, Updated 04/03/06