"They'll call anything Arc the Lad these days."

Now, I loved the Arc the Lad Collection that Working Designs brought to North American gamers, and it set the stage for further releases on the next generation of systems. So I looked forward to Twilight of the Spirits quite a bit, especially after playing the demo version, probably from OPM. The portion of the game presented therein impressed me with its bright and rich colour palette, voice acting, music, and introduction of the guardians. The one battle I played was pretty tame, but trying out the new battle system intrigued me enough to want to get the full version eventually, and eventually I did. And now, having played through the game in entirety, well let's just say that I'm glad I waited a good while and picked up a cheap used copy, because I would have been awfully upset with myself had I spent any more on this ultimately lame piece of software.

If I had to describe Twilight of the Spirits in one word, it would be: plodding. Everything about this game just drags on. The storyline, the battles, the character development all advance at a frustratingly slow pace. The plotline suffers from a fatal flaw, namely that the characters spend 2/3 of the game in ignorance of a major piece of information that is clearly known to the player from the very start of the game (I don't like to give stuff away, just in case, but if you've played that game at all you'll know it involves the relationship between the 2 main characters). Even after the truth is discovered, the characters still go on with their original motivations and intentions, essentially choosing to ignore the biggest event in their lives. The way this largely non-story plays out is in alternating chapters starring two main characters, one from each of the major races on the planet: Humans and Deimos. Deimos are essentially humanoid animal/demon beings. This story mechanic seems interesting at first, but really you can only stand it so many times when each chapter essentially contains the same material. In the human chapters, the main character goes on about how he'll destroy all of the Deimos. In the Deimos chapters, the main character goes on about how he'll unite the Deimos and destroy the humans. Rinse and repeat.

While you're waiting for anything to happen storywise, you get to take part in a lot of battles. Unfortunately, these too drag out unnecessarily. Your characters move and attack slowly, and actions are also delayed by battle speech (e.g. “I'll stop you!”), though at least you can turn that off. Aside from the speed, attacks are terribly underwhelming. Normal attacks are boring stabs and slashes, and magic effects are plain and dull, even the most powerful ones, which in any other game would be accompanied by fantastic animations and lighting effects. The battle system hardly calls for any strategy either. On each turn, you just position each character and activate their attack range indicator, a circle of varying size with a yellow cone that you have to move over an enemy to strike him. If you can get more than 1 enemy in your cone, you can hit them all at once, but this mechanic just makes you spend time every turn painstakingly adjusting your position and your aiming direction to hit more than one target. As you fight you build up a kind of spirit meter, and when full, you can do a combination attack with an ally against an enemy that is in range of both of you. Even this, your strongest attack, is executed poorly, animated only by a shot of each character slashing at the air against a black background, followed by a shot of the target reeling with damage numbers over him, the same as if you had just hit him normally. This demonstrates an unusually low amount of effort and/or imagination in battle design.

Character development, along with story, is practically non-existent. Characters go forth holding basic prejudice against the other race, and this hardly ever wavers despite story revelations that make it clear that this prejudice is unwarranted. In addition, each character's background is never explored in any kind of depth. Visual character design is fairly poor too. If you were to draw a humanoid demon, would you ever in a million years have its tail coming out of the top of its back, between the shoulders, as opposed to out of its butt where it belongs? This feature makes most of the Deimos look ridiculous. At least the costumes on the humans are decent. The voice acting for most the characters is pretty awful, too, especially with the Deimos, who tend to have shrieking and/or gruff voices that get pretty annoying.

Other features of the game, while ostensibly trying to be innovative, are generally pretty uninteresting. Special attacks and magic is powered by Spirit Stones, which is also a substance necessary to both Humans and Deimos to maintain their current modes of living, providing the incentive for each side to want to off the other and gain control of all Spirit Stone resources. Performing these special moves in combat uses up stones, which are replenished by buying them or picking them up off fallen enemies in battles. On that note, gaining items, money and Spirit Stones in combat requires that you move a character over top of the item after it is dropped by a fallen foe, essentially using up a turn and slowing down combat even further. This also encourages you to spend time destroying crates and barrels in combat in the hopes of finding good items, which again takes up more time without ever yielding anything truly special.

As for side areas, the cream cheese on the bagel that is pretty much every RPG, Twilight of the Spirits provides you with several battle arenas, where you can win fairly decent items by succeeding in a series of solo fights. The fights each consume a fair amount of time, and to get the really good items you need to do 20 or 30 of them in a row, an event that would test anyone's patience. Overall, the lack of an expandable game experience gives Twilight of the Spirits very low replay value.

This game doesn't do much for the Arc the Lad series name. It is only very loosely tied to other games in the series. References to characters and events from previous Arc the Lad games can be found only late in the game and are really just an aside included for fans, or maybe to convince people that it actually is an Arc the Lad game. The world and history in Twilight of the Spirits is so far removed from the previous entries in the series as to be almost unrecognizable. Really, only the concepts of the Spirits and the Dark One keep it part of the franchise, and without the Arc the Lad name I doubt that Twilight of the Spirits would have sold a tenth as well as it did. Part of what made the Arc the Lad Collection so great was the continuity between the 3 games. Even there, though, the third game seemed a little tacked on at times, since the story was perfectly wound up in part II, and Twilight of the Spirits demonstrates that the license holders are willing to just keep resurrecting the Dark One over and over again as long as they can keep milking the franchise. The latest Arc the Lad game, End of Darkness, certainly proves that the series is on a consistent downward slide.

I really can't recommend this game to anyone. RPG fans will find the game's lack of depth disappointing, strategy fans won't find any here, action fans will quickly be put off by the game's slow pace, and any serious gamer should recognize the lack of effort and imagination put into the battle system and animations. Even Arc the Lad fans can take a pass at this iteration, as it really doesn't add anything to the Arc universe. I'd rather re-play Arc the Lad II any day over this disappointment.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/06/05