arc the lad |

Publisher: Namco

Developer: Cattle Call

Release Date: 06/15/2005

Available Exclusively On

Less than a year later, the much-loved Twilight of the Spirits sequel released to little fanfare. I expected a lot of improvements and more of the same, but this game was a huge departure and mostly recycled content. You play as a seemingly generic character named Edda, a young boy from Cragh Island who is the last surviving excorcist. You now have a Slothian Deimos companion, Hemo, who is annoying and tags along for most of the dialogue. The story seems like it would start out as a normal sequel, picking up right where the last one left off. The previous heroes are all in new senior roles or retired now, but that’s not the case—far from it in fact.

The story essentially goes nowhere. The entire battle system is now real-time, but in a detrimental way. You can attack enemies in arenas with a basic attack button, but you can only use magic if your card is equipped. The card system undermines the foundations established in the initial game. There are special “gimmicks” and part cards. You can purchase the part cards for armor and weapons from vendors or find them in the field. You also have the opportunity to play as all the heroes from the previous game, provided you find their cards hidden somewhere in the world. The frustrating part about all of this is your hunter rank. To rank up at the arena, you must complete repetitive quests such as escort missions, kill X amount of enemies, find X items, and so on, earning two different types of stars in the process. You take a test, and after you rank up, more missions unlock. There doesn’t appear to be much of a story in this game. There are a few story-based missions you can take on, but the combat is so atrocious and downright boring that I never made it past the third rank.

When I refer to areas that are recycled, I mean that they are taken directly from the game. While it’s cool to see the old locales and heroes, the removal of their models from the game creates an uneven visual mess. The newer assets appear marginally better than those from the previous game, but when combined with the older ones, the overall aesthetic is unimpressive. End of Darkness, a 2005 game, just looks plain generic and awful. There’s no personality here. One of the only things that held the previous game together was the excellent story and interesting characters, but they just don’t exist here. The dialogue is dry and dull, and there is almost nothing to like here. Combat could have saved this game, but relying on boring real-time combat and repetitive quests in reused areas just doesn’t cut it.

There have been no improvements in the quality of life. Cities contain hidden holes that Hemo can crawl through. You would think that each hidden hole would hold a cool item or a card, but most of the time, all you get is recipe advice and hints. An absolute waste of time. If that wasn’t enough, there’s nothing else to do in this game except complete the hunter missions and do the ranking trials. It’s also a very short game, if you can get through it without dying of boredom. The game is about half the length of the first one.

Overall, End of Darkness feels more like a side experiment rather than a full-fledged reboot or sequel. It feels like Cattle Call didn’t know which one to choose and decided to try to be both. The new combat system is boring, tedious, and awful. The story is almost non-existent, and the visuals haven’t significantly improved. The new card system is unwieldy and uninteresting, and playing as previous heroes feels pointless.

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Cattle Call

Release Date: 06/25/2003

Available Exclusively On

As a child, I remember seeing this game everywhere. Every store had ads for it, BlockBuster always had it rented it out, and TV commercials for it were constant. What turned me off was the turn-based strategy aspect, and the graphics did not look that great even for their time. Arc the Lad was a new IP for the West, as the first three PS1 games never had a localization. I remember everyone raving about the story and characters, but I also knew the game was going to be very long and hard. That part was not incorrect.

You play as two characters in this game. You alternate between Darc, the Deimos, and Kharg, the Human. The plot itself is rather simple, but Cattle Call did a commendable job of trying to enrich the story with lore and fill the world with life. The story revolves around the basic concept of humanity polluting the Earth and never being satisfied with their achievements, always seeking more. It is similar to many Studio Ghibli films of the past, with stories of pollution and the need to love the planet more. There is also a fight over the balance between light and dark, and how one can’t exist without the other. Tribes and groups of species are constantly engaged in conflict with each other. The Deimos, the humans, the Drakyr, and numerous others engage in constant conflict. Everyone wants the five spirit stones, created a millennium ago, to gain the ultimate power. Thankfully, the story involves the characters quite a bit and fleshes them out, and I actually really enjoyed it.

The battle system is a different story. After the first couple of hours, most people may shut the game off. The story doesn’t really pick up until a few hours in which is long past when the combat can get on your nerves. The game is a turn-based strategy, but you move within a radius. Each character has an attack range and can use magic in the form of spirit stones. When a character has an aura surrounding them, you can unleash a combined power attack, but it requires proximity to another character and occurs automatically during an attack. Battles are slow, dull, and rather boring. The attack range never makes sense. Characters equipped with guns are limited to shooting only a few feet ahead of them, and retrieving dropped items consumes your movement turn, thereby limiting your action options. This significantly impedes combat and necessitates constantly grouping your characters together.

I also don’t like that there are auto-battles on the overworld map. This is the only time auto-battles occur, but unless you need to grind, you must wait for the battle to load, wait for the condition message to disappear, select your characters, enter the battle, wait for the camera to sweep, then retreat. There is no retreat option in the pre-battle screen, which makes no sense. Battles are also heavily unbalanced, ranging from dull and easy to a barrage of them with no save point or store in sight. There aren’t many bosses in this game, but most of the battle conditions just require you to kill everything. Given that this is a strategy RPG, this approach seems illogical. It would make more sense to be a traditional turn-based RPG like Final Fantasy. It would help if there were alternate win conditions to easy the difficulty or add more strategy to the game.

The dull and dated visuals also detract from the game. The black voids and incredibly basic visuals clearly mark this game as a previously-in-development-for-the-PS1 game. No lip-syncing, terrible animations, blurry textures, and flat, dull environments plague this game. The towns feel void of life and are super tiny. Additionally, the voice acting is scarce, and what is present is mediocre at best. There is a significant amount of written dialogue and extensive reading. Sometimes I would go 15–20 minutes only reading dialogue in between fights. There is no exploration of the area. Outside of two object hunting quests, there are no side quests, and the armor and weapon system is odd and strange. There is just nothing to do outside of combat and watching cutscenes.

Instead of receiving brand-new weapons as in other RPGs, you receive weapon parts. You can equip up to three parts of armor and weapons to adjust various stats such as health, dexterity, and the usual stuff you find in JRPGs. Winning battles earns you gold, but enemies can also drop them, resulting in a wasted movement turn. Only chests can be found in the levels towards the later fourth of the game. Some dungeons are a little labyrinthine and frustrating to navigate, too.

Overall, the game has a story with a lot of heart and soul, and the characters are great despite the elementary writing and cliche personalities of the main heroes. There were a few plot twists, and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the turns the story took. However, this all comes at a heavy cost. The combat is dull, boring, and slow, and the difficulty is all over the place. The graphics are awful, flat, lifeless, and dated. The voice acting is barely passable, and some may hate the dozens of hours of reading. However, the game does have the world’s lore fleshed out, and you feel a part of it, and it feels alive. There are books to read, characters to get snippets of lore from, and it all feels like a living and breathing world. Visually, the game fails to capture this essence, which is truly disheartening.