Arcana

"Disappointing in the same way Zelda V was"

I tore through Arcana in recent lazy weekend in my quest to beat all the games I couldn't as a kid. The other reviews cover most of the highs and lows of this game, so I'd like to address some of the unmentioned aspects. First, there's a number of nice touches that make Arcana memorable:

The enemy animations are relatively well-drawn; not only are they randomized, but each of the four or so frames are done in such a way that it looks pretty natural as they shift around. The attack animations are stylized and at least aim towards the fright of battle without being embarrassing. Compare to Lufia II, a far better game in most respects: enemies bob up and down one pixel and flip over twice to attack.

The elemental system goes in a circle instead of simply back and forth: water hurts fire, but fire doesn't hurt water, it hurts wind, which hurts earth, which in turn hurts water. It's underimplemented and the results aren't dramatic enough if strategically used, but still a thought-provoking change from the usual.

This might have been just due to my weird aversion to using up items, but healing is so expensive MP-wise that it becomes a strategically challenging consideration of how to deploy your time in the dungeons and battle tactics. Compare to the Final Fantasy series: I'm pretty sure most players stayed at an inn about twice in the entire game because any character with a Cure spell could fix your whole party up for peanuts.

The final boss is satisfyingly cool-looking, and when she laughs as she attacks you, it's kind of creepy in a good way.

So here's my big complaint: it blows the whole advantage of having a stripped-down dungeon interface by making the mazes so few and so linear. Interestingly enough, just like Zelda V, the only complex, three-dimensional, and enjoyably mind-twisting dungeon is the third, ice-themed one. There's no item interaction, no hidden pits, not even any graphical flourishes like torches on the walls or being able to see treasure chests until you're standing right on top of them. Counting the towns and one-screen overworld map, there can't be more than 50 unique background scenes; I'm sure the vast majority of 8-bit NES games have orders of magnitude more. All of which would be fine if the designers took the utter simplicity of the format and cranked out 20 dungeons that each took an hour of serious, thoughtful play to get through. The Ice Maze is so tantalizing that it makes every other maze -- all dumb tower formats in which you clear a simple, linear level, then go up to the next one and never need to go back -- painfully disappointing. Even with the low-tech, first generation SNES space and computational power, this easily could have been a vehicle for extremely confounding and demanding mazes. The upshot would be the strategic consideration of when to warp out, and you'd have to think long and hard about it.

Playing this game actually shed a lot of light for me on why I found Zelda V such a step down from the previous two games in that series. Think about the last half of the dungeons in Zelda III, in particular about how the multiple, three-dimensional levels in each dungeon, often on each screen, made your automap practically useless. You had to mentally record your path, and it was quite twisting and spatially complicated. For me, this was the most enjoyable part of the game, and the thing I think back on fondly when remembering it. The hair-puller about both Arcana and Zelda V is that the flourishes and absolute size (meaning total amount of space your character can stand on; in both it's actually pretty big) are completely betrayed by the lack of complexity and play-length. Both leave you wishing for more, but in the vaguely heartbroken way, not the sated, well-played way.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/12/02, Updated 12/12/02