Rise Fantasia

Arc Rise Fantasia Review

Confession: Until Arc Rise Fantasia I've never played more than an hour of any Japanese RPG. It's not that I hate them, but rather that I've never been that intrigued by their art-style and what appeared, to me, to be a very slow style of play.

Now, after having dedicated innumerable hours of my life to playing Arc Rise for review, I've discovered something about myself -- I actually don't mind JRPGs after all. In fact, I think I might enjoy them. Especially if, as so many people tell me, there are JRPGs that are much more intriguing than the relatively dull grind of this, my first adventure.

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Arc Rise has all the pieces of JRPGs that I'd come to fear over the years. From an utterly predictable, cliched story involving typical things like magic, dragons, and teenage love, to a complex, garish menu system that's hard for a newcomer like me to navigate, this game is clearly designed for a very RPG-literate audience. I think fans of these games are more inclined to forgive the awful localization (misspellings in subtitles, for instance) and quirky, kiddy moments the characters share in the game, but for me they just made the story something to laugh at, as opposed to laugh with. I mean you don't have to tell a completely new story to make it interesting -- see any game BioWare does, for example -- but this story feels like they hardly even tried. Still, despite eye-roll inducing narrative, I found that I mostly enjoyed what I had previous assumed would be tedious turn-based combat.

Combat systems are, of course, a huge deal in any JRPG, and Arc Rise's is just complex enough to make it interesting during the more intense fights. The four members of your party all draw upon the same pool of Action Points (AP) to do anything and everything (fight, use spells, move, etc.) during their turn. This means that you have to strategically decide which characters are going to participate in the battle, sometimes choosing to have one character use up all the points while the others just stand there. The finite AP resource also makes for hard choices: at times making you choose to simply defend or do nothing for a turn, in order to save up the points you need to enact more powerful moves in subsequent turns.

On top of AP, combat is made deeper still by giving you several other things to manage on the fly. For instance, physical positioning of your party members is important, as standing spread out might allow you to avoid damage to multiple characters from a single spell, while having them standing next to one another could allow them to assist each other's attacks. Additionally, casting spells costs MP, and each level of spells has its own MP. Then you're special powers are spent using SP, which builds up during the course of battle (all other stats outside of AP are for each individual, not in a collective pool). I'll admit, as a newcomer, having to manage so many stats and variables -- as well as just focus on keeping my party alive -- can be overwhelming, but it also makes a hard-won victory all the sweeter.

Arc Rise Fantasia at IGN.com

The only problem is that battles are hardly ever challenging. Besides the boss battles -- which are often so difficult that you have to go back and grind for an hour just to get past them -- combat is so easy you can pretty much put your party on autopilot and do something else. Maybe that sounds appealing to some people out there, but for me it's problematic when a large portion of how I spend my game time is mundane enough that I find myself searching the Internet or chatting while it goes on. And please don't confuse my complaint for some strange desire to have each battle be an epic struggle, I just wish that combat could have been better balanced overall instead of a series of far-too-easy fights followed up by a sometimes frustratingly difficult boss battle.

Closing Comments

The oddest thing about my time with Arc Rise, though, was that I actually kind of enjoyed my time with it despite the terrible story and boring stretches. Something about maxing out my characters' abilities, equipping them with the right armor, and manipulating how they cast spells really appealed to me, and I find myself genuinely interested in trying out more of a genre I’ve missed out on for more than 25 years. Who knows, perhaps this is the start of something new for me, and, if nothing else, I can thank this mediocre game for helping me jump into a number of worlds I’ve previously avoided.