Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1. Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii)
I'd never heard all that much about this game until looking through the games written by one of my favorite authors, Takumi Miyajmia. He's the writer either wholly or partially responsible for several of my favorite RPGs (like Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World), so I was naturally very curious about the other things he'd done since that stuff. The few things I *had* heard about this game were that it was both tough as heck as well as possessed an infamously terrible (particularly for 2009) English localization, so I went in optimistic at least given that I was playing the Japanese version ^^;. It took me around 80 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game doing nearly every sidequest (save for the last super boss) on real hardware playing with a GameCube controller.
Arc Rise Fantasia is the story of L'Arc, a young mercenary in the Meridian Imperial Army. Falling off of their airship fighting off a horde of dragons, he's saved from the dragon's final death explosion (which they just do in this world) by the magical singing of a mysterious maiden, Ryfia. Upon questioning her, he finds Ryfia knows virtually nothing about the world other than where she apparently wants to go to an Imperial town at the bequest of her late mother. With the help of L'Arc's best friend, the Meridian prince Alfonse, the three of them set out on a world changing and world saving adventure.
There is so, so much I could talk about with the story of this game, but it basically all comes down to "it's excellent! Just only in Japanese!" XD. The English script may be terrible, but the Japanese original is genuinely one of the best RPG stories I've ever had the pleasure of going through, and it's probably the closest I'll ever get to experiencing a magnum opus by one of my favorite authors. ARF deftly weds the best political narrative and character arc narratives from Miyajima's previous best works into something truly great. A thoughtful and contemplative tale about how morality is something you leave up to others at your own peril. Making your own choices is difficult, but doing the work to decide things for yourself is ultimately the only way things are going to get any better. The choices presented to you are rarely the only ones truly available, but it also lies on you to own up to your mistakes when you make them (even if others led you into making those mistakes), because living life trying to outrun your mistakes will only lead to your own destruction. L'Arc, Ryfia, and everyone else are a delightful cast that bring a masterfully woven story to life. I just wish it had an English script worthy of translating what a well considered story it is! XD
Thankfully, the gameplay translates just fine. As far as games from the PS2-generation and onward, this is easily one of the hardest RPGs I've beaten that isn't a Megami Tensei game. I'd heard that this game was not just hard, but very grindy, and I'd quite firmly dispute that. If anything, the EXP drop off is so relatively steep once you start fighting enemies close to you in level that grinding is mostly just a waste of time. ARF has a lot of systems at your disposal that you can use in tandem to take down baddies, and managing your resources as well as those systems well is the real key to victory. I could easily dump 1000+ words just detailing the specifics of the mechanics (like I often do ^^; ), but I'll try to keep it as brief as I can to give a rundown of the most interesting parts XD
First up is a magic system. Like a lot of older games, magic spells are expensive to cast, but in this game that goes double as you don't have normal MP: You have Final Fantasy 1-style spell charges. Unlike FF1, however, anyone can have any spells, as spells are determined by which magic gems you've slotted into each character's spell cage. Then, how many slots each person's cage has as well as how many charges of each magic level are upgraded at certain shops in most towns. It gives a lot of flexibility while also being relatively simple once you get the hang of it. Similarly, weapons don't actually have stats unto themselves the way armor does (e.g. a shirt can give you +4 armor as an intrinsic aspect of it, but weapons don't work that way). Instead, all weapons have Arm Force gems: Black ones that can't be moved, and colored ones that can be moved once you level up the weapon highly enough. Leveling up weapons to unlock Arm Force gems and then mixing and matching different gems in different weapon grids is a more minor part of your toolset, but it's ultimately super important, and is often the difference between victory and defeat if you tool your loadout the right way.
The last aspect I think is important to talk about is the SP system. As magic is so expensive to cast (and can generally only be healed at inns or specific special healing save points), your more typical strong attacks are Excel Art attacks, which cost a certain amount of SP to use. SP is maintained between battles, and you get more of it by dealing and taking damage. Characters can even unleash super attacks if you all use an Excel Act on the same enemy (which you're gonna wanna be doing a LOT, since these bosses are *tough*). As a whole, the game's systems (even down to its position-based combat not unlike a game like Shadow Hearts Covenant uses) are a lot to take in at once, but it thankfully deals them out to you slowly over time, and even as someone who generally really dislikes very complicated turn-based RPGs, this was at a fine pace even for me, so I reckon most other folks will deal with it just fine~.
My biggest criticisms of the combat system and game design largely lie in regards to its difficulty. As I mentioned a few times earlier, this is easily one of the hardest RPGs I've played (and I've played no small amount of them), and that comes largely from being tuned quite difficult rather than being unfair, at least. That said, while I don't mind a hard game (and the tuning in this game is generally very solid and well done), and learning the tricks to take down a boss generally only takes a try or two, there are a few things that certain dungeons do that make life more annoying for the player than they need to be. It's often for reasons to prevent you from messing up time-dependent plot events and/or to keep you from soft-locking yourself beyond a temporary door of no return, but there is a weirdly high amount of dungeons with no save points beyond the one right at the front door. There were a fair few times that I got ganked by a mean boss and then had to go all the way back through a 10~20 minute dungeon to get back to the bastard. It's not a super consistent problem, and the game's hardest fights mercifully don't have this issue. It's also very nice that the game's difficulty only really extends to boss fights and not normal enemies (no random enemies to snipe you with instant death bullshit like in SMT or anything, thankfully). That said, it's still quite annoying and pretty difficult to excuse in a game made by veterans in the industry in a pretty high budget game made as recently as 2009.
Aesthetically, the game is super pretty! It's got a few rough edges and uncanny designs, being a Wii game, but generally the game looks very nice from the animations to the character designs, and this is easily one of the best looking games on the Wii (or, at the very least, certainly one of the nicest looking games not published by Nintendo). The music is also very solid, and it makes an excellent soundtrack for your adventure. The English VA is infamously awful, as I've said before (and the script attached to it is hardly great either), but the Japanese voice work is really well done! They got a lot of big names attached to this project, and it helps the story come to life magnificently.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an excellent game, one I enjoyed a ton, and one of my new favorite games ever, but all of that praise comes with a pretty heavy asterisk ^^;. The English version's script is *so* bad that I really cannot in good conscience recommend that version nearly as highly as I can the Japanese version. If you're very bold, I understand there's a fan patch out there that at least replaces the English VA with the Japanese VA, so at the very least you're not stuck with the bad English VA, but there's only so much it can be fixed. In Japanese, at least, while this game may've been a victim of the platform it was on (it's not like people were exactly buying Wiis to play RPGs on, after all), they really missed out. This is one of the best RPGs of that console generation, as far as I'm concerned, and it's a spectacular hidden gem on the platform. I probably never would've played it had my poking around online not led me into it, and, needless to say, I'm super glad I ended up picking it up~. I just wish I could say the same is likely true for most of the people potentially reading this review (who presumably don't know Japanese ^^; ).
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
