Arc the lad game review

Unfortunately, she desperately wants to escape a life that has already been decided for her. The most loathsome part? To escape her fate, she decides to follow the advice of the mayor to extinguish the Flame Coin, which has burned on the mountain for over 3, years. But almost immediately after doing so, she has a feeling of impending doom and soon realizes her mistake.

The mayor, indeed, has tricked her for his own selfish reasons. Soon after, the first blizzard in ten years hits the village. The game then cuts to Arc, who is desperate to look for his father who disappeared on the mountain ten years ago.

Arc still has faith he is alive and later meets Kukuru on the mountain for the first time. Arc attempts to relight the Flame Coin and soon finds out that his father made a pact with the spirits to prevent the death of the human race. Arc is a part of this destiny and receives the power to defeat all monsters. Do you understand the concept of destiny? Then you have all you really need to know to get into Arc the Lad II. As it stands, all you have is characters on a screen who mean nothing to you and a barebones story beating into your head notions about fate.

Arc the Lad is a typical strategy RPG. Characters have access to the typical attack, magic, item commands. There are new characters that surface throughout the game, all having their strengths and weaknesses. The problem lies in the fact that Arc is really the one character who is a powerhouse, especially later in the game when battles become tougher.

The player can totally abuse Arc and annihilate almost everyone in battle with just him. Too many times my strategy revolved around killing every enemy with Arc and having a large group of characters supporting him.

Probably, this was done intentionally as Arc was blessed with the powers to kill any monster that comes his way, but it still makes the other characters almost useless for anything other than healing or buffing Arc. Regrettably, these lose meaning in the game as some of the skills are completely pointless. For instance, never once did I get poisoned while I played the game, even without the use of poison resistance. Arc the lad is a game and it looks like such.

Not much effort went into the graphics, and even though there is a small variety of 2-D locales, the environments look bland and basic. The Character sprites themselves are very average looking, and when you take into account that this is the first chapter of an epic trilogy, G-Craft really slacked on their graphic designing duties.

In the end there is nothing redeeming about the graphical package presented here, however, RPG purists and enthusiasts like me will tolerate the simple 2-D graphics because it brings back some of the nostalgia of playing the classic pre Bit era golden days. The Japanese voice clips that can be heard during battles are a disaster, and can get annoying after a few hours of battling, but the music presented here is a decent effort by composer Masahiro Andoh.

The first game in the long running series is also one of the simplest and easiest RPGs ever made. Exploration is basically non existent. You can discover treasures and items but only on the battlefields, and aside from a few pointless quests, there is very little to do in the game, but to follow the main plot. There is no world map to explore, and you travel from one point to the next or from battle to battle in order to advance the story forward.

The game plays more like a tactical RPG than a traditional one, and the battles are tactical affairs in which your characters level up depending on the amount of damage that they dish out.

This leveling up system made my Arc protagonist character a god in the game, as I only used him during the encounters. This tactic rendered all my other characters obsolete. This a good game for newcomers to the genre.

Beautiful 2D overhead maps make up the majority of the backgrounds in Arc The Lad II, and the onscreen characters are superdeformed and well drawn. The spell effects are unimpressive but serviceable. In addition, the ugly character portraits that popped up whenever major characters in Arc The Lad spoke are gone now. The sound effects are excellent, and characters give off clear-sounding and well-acted battle cries when they attack or are attacked.

Like in Arc The Lad, there is no spoken dialogue in the game other than these battle cries. The soundtrack of Arc The Lad II is similarly excellent, and, like everything else in the game, borrows heavily from its prequel. Composed by Masahiro Ando, much of the soundtrack is dark and moody, fitting the game perfectly, yet holds some extremely compelling melodies. Because Arc The Lad II is so much longer than Arc The Lad, the writers have much more of an opportunity to flesh out the storyline more fully, and they take full advantage of it.

The ending is also much better resolved, though it is more tragic than your average RPG ending. As the tragic ending would suggest, there are plenty of poignant moments throughout the game. RPGFan is a gaming website focused on roleplaying games and related genres such as graphic adventures, visual novels, and roguelikes. We cover franchises, creators, fandom, and everything inbetween.

Dark Mode. Arc the Lad II. Go to Game Overview. Note: This review is based on the Japanese version of the game. Overall Score For information on our scoring systems, see our scoring systems overview.