Arcana

"This game is boring, tedious, and repetitive."

Arcana is a rather tedious first-person RPG. You play a generic hero out to stop a generic villain from summoning a generic all-powerful evil entity, and to do so, you trudge through first-person mazes and kill a lot of monsters.

The game has five ''chapters'' consisting of a town and a dungeon. Every town has pretty much the same few buildings, and dialogue with townspeople is practically non-existent, so you never get any kind of feel for the world you are supposed to be trying to save.

You'll spend most of your time in the dungeons. Every wall in a dungeon floor looks exactly the same; there's no graphical variety within a dungeon, and I got tired of staring at the same colored bricks over and over. The music is reasonably pleasant to listen to, but it too gets repetitive after a while.

You'll get frequent breaks from staring at the walls, however, because the game has a fairly high encounter rate. I was often attacked on the first step after finishing a previous battle. The battle system has some interesting touches, but since you keep fighting the same darn monsters over and over with little variation, battles quickly become a chore. You have many different characters join you and leave you throughout the game, but, sadly enough, there's nothing much that makes them different or unique in any way once you get into a battle; I just used the spellcaster characters as weaker fighters because I needed to save as much MP as possible for healing.

What's really annoying is that the battles and dungeons tend to be more time-consuming than challenging. If you want to base your game on dungeon crawling instead of story, you need to make that combat fun, which means that you actually need to have dungeons that are hard to get through. The only time I found things becoming even remotely difficult is when your hero has to fight by himself, with only a summoned ''spirit'' character for support. Suddenly going from a four-character party to a two-character party where one of your party members is the weakest of the four just isn't fun.

I might as well explain ''spirits'' now. Throughout the course of the game, you find one spirit for each element, but you can only use one at a time in battle. Their physical attacks are so weak as to be mostly useless, but they recover one HP and one MP with every step, so you can actually use their offensive magic without running out of MP. Your main character can change what spirit is currently active when it is his turn during a battle (as well as between battles), so I switched often to take advantage of elemental weaknesses and resistances. It's an interesting concept, but once you get used to it, it really doesn't add anything.

As I said earlier, the game's story is very weak, and, well, generic. As a firm believer in the importance of story in an RPG, this game ends up disappointing me. It TRIED to have a story, but I just didn't care about the evil of the evil villain or the heroics of the hero and his companions. I'm not a fan of hack-and-slash RPGs; something about fighting the same monsters with the same spells in the same generic dungeons just doesn't appeal to me. If you're a dedicated fan of RPG combat, you might like this game, but I just found it dreary, tedious, and boring. Because of its complete and utter failure to entertain me, Arcana rates a 2 out of 10.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/11/03, Updated 03/11/03