Arcana

"There was no effect on admtanaka (by this game)"

Arcana is an early Super Nintendo RPG/Dungeon Crawler released in the United States by Capcom. As a player, you control the hero Rooks, the last surviving card master in the entire land. The game follows almost to the letter to generic RPG storyline: an evil wizard is terrorizing the world and trying to unseal some ancient evil - the only thing that can possibly stop him, of course, is Rooks the cardmaster. Overall, I was not very impressed with this game.

Story

As I alluded to earlier, the story is far from this game's strong point. Very rarely does the game deviate really at all from typical RPG cliches. A variety of different characters join you from time to time on your journey, but for the most part they end up coming and going for no real good reasons. The game almost never departs from the "two seconds of story, two hours of dungeon, two seconds of story" loop. So little time is spent developing any of the characters that it is almost impossible to really care one way or another about any of the "heroes." In all honesty, after playing I can barely say I even understand exactly what the antagonist character is trying to accomplish by unsealing the "ancient evil" or whatever. What really ruins any chance for developing anything as far as a storyline is the fact that there is no one to talk to in towns to provide any background information. As a result, the storyline basically becomes "go to this dungeon, and kill all the monsters, then go to the next."

Gameplay

In the category of gameplay, Arcana at least attempts to be a little innovative. The game relies fairly heavily on the motif of cards - all of the monsters and allies in the game are represented as pictures on a deck of cards. In battle, the hero can throw various cards in order to damage the enemies or protect his party. This is at least an interesting idea, but it is executed poorly. All the cards, with the exception of the "death" card, have the same exact effect as spells that other characters can use. This leaves you with little to no reason to actually bother using the cards at all. The game also has a somewhat different elemental system than is common in other RPGs that works in a circular, rather than linear fashion - fire hurts wind which hurts earth which hurts water which hurts fire. This is of course in contrast to the more traditional method whereby fire hurts ice and ice hurts fire. Again, however, poor execution makes this difference almost negligible. For whatever reason the game designers decided to check magic by making it miss its target frustratingly frequently. There will be numerous times during the course of the game where you will feel like throwing your controller at the screen due to the "there was no effect on x enemy" message.

As long as you are not playing with a guide, you will probably not have to spend much time in the game leveling, since the encounter rate is quite high and most of the dungeons have plenty of ways to get lost. The drawback to this is that the randoms encounters are not very balanced. I would liken the average enemy in this game to a kamikaze pilot - no defense but frightening offense. There will always be at least one enemy per dungeon that can absolutely devastate your team by using a very high level spell. Fortunately for the gamer, however, almost every single enemy can be dispatched with a single blow from the hero. The only problem is encountering large groups of the dungeon's "powerful" enemy, which presents essentially the only instance in gameplay where using magic and/or cards is actually necessary. Your spirits also have the ability to change the other party member's elemental status, but since most enemies can be killed with one slash, the only reason to do this is for defense purposes. On the other hand, it is generally better to just use attack magic to try and kill the enemies before they get the chance to pummel you with magic.

My final problem with the game is that it is quite short (at least in terms of distance traveled by the hero). There are only five dungeons in the game, of which the third is by far the longest. On top of this, the game limits all the towns to a series of doors from which you can choose to enter. This limits what you can do in towns to resting at the inn or buying equipment.

Overall, the gameplay had some interesting innovations, but poor execution limited how much they impressed me. This game is essentially is a hack and slash for its entirety.

Graphics

The graphics of this game have their ups and downs. What was quite good, especially for the time, is the fact that all of the enemies are animated in some way and have separate animations for their attacks. This goes likewise for all the heroes. Unfortunately, there is also very little diversity between enemies, since the same enemy portraits are recycled just about every dungeon (and sometimes several times in a single dungeon). Conversely, the animations used for magic are only fair, and each spell hits multiple targets individually., which is quite annoying when you are getting blasted with magic from six enemies and have to sit through all the crummy animations.

Inside dungeons, expect nothing except bare functionality. Bare walls, iron doors, and staircases are all there is to see. For a dungeon crawler, this isn't necessarily bad, but people used to the more colorful caves of other RPGs will probably get tired of the levels' blandness.

Sound

Oof. The music in this game is very bad, which takes a lot from the game since you are spending such a large amount of time in the dungeons. The music wandering around in each level is terrible, repeats very often, and will probably have you hitting mute on your tv and turning on a cd. The music in battles is a little better, but it also repeats quite frequently.

Controls

Menu commands are quite clunky, and selecting allies in battle is also annoying, since it is hard sometime to tell who exactly you are picking. Very often I accidentally picked wrong commands in my haste and general frustration with the game. Even controlling yourself walking around in dungeons is not very smooth. These problems probably could have been fixed with a tweak here or there, but since Capcom didn't bother, the only thing to do is get used to them.

Challenge/Replay Value

This game is more frustrating than it is challenging, particularly the super long third dungeon. Again, since there is usually only one or two enemies that can really hurt your party per dungeon avoiding these guys really becomes paramount. Unfortunately, sometimes you will be ambushed by six of them, and they will pummel you. Leveling really doesn't fix this problem, since building levels barely affects your attack or defense, whereas buying a new sword will usually double the amount of damage you will do. I guess I would have rather seen a more balanced threat from enemies.

If you really like RPGs or are very bored you might pick this game up again a few years after beating it. In my case, I had played the game a few times, but could never bother completing the third dungeon until very recently. Basically, the game can annoy you to the point where you don't want to play it anymore, but later down the road you might remember some of the unique ideas in the game and might pick it up again.

Overall

This game is so much wasted potential. Everything innovative or different about it is pretty much wasted by poor implementation. There is also almost no real storyline or plot to keep you interested. Couple this with the sometimes frustrating length of dungeons and the bland, repetitive graphics and sound outside of battle and you are left with a game that really is not much fun at all. Still, it may be worth giving it a chance if you are a big fan of RPGs. Just don't go in expecting too much. 4/10

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/08/04