Luminous Arc

"A complete and utter failure as an SRPG, but that's nothing new, right?"

There aren't very many Strategy-based Role Playing Games out there, and an alarming percentage of this already too-small number of games is downright bad. The SRPG is apparently a difficult game to do well, so maybe it's a little unfair to be too critical of Luminous Arc. But I'm not a fair man.

Many SRPGs suffer from poor menus or move too slowly, both of which are true of Luminous Arc. All menus require too many button presses to accomplish anything, and the equipment menus in particular are so badly put together that it can take maybe 10 minutes just to re-equip your characters at a store in some late-game areas. Furthermore, weapons cannot be removed and armor/helmets/accessories can only be removed if there is not another inventory item to switch into their place, which not only makes equipment trading obnoxious but makes it so that you cannot enchant your items later in the game unless you have another item to temporarily switch into their place - that is, you have to carry around an extra weapon so that you can unequip your primary weapon in order to upgrade it, then switch back. And I haven't even gotten to the "move too slowly" part I mentioned above; the game not only suffers from dropped frames (lag) at many parts, but it pauses after every action taken and at the beginning of each character's turn so that they can speak. And if you turn off voice acting? You still get the pause, you just don't hear any speech. The same is true of the main storyline. Fortunately, SRPGs are made for people who are necessarily patient. If I were writing this review for action game fans, I could just end it right here. But there's more to say.

The graphics and sound are lackluster. Music is forgettable and sometimes inappropriate, battle sounds are generic, and in-game graphics look like they were intended for the GBA. Not only are the graphics somewhat dated, but battles can actually get quite confusing at many points if too many units are grouped together, to the extent that you can't immediately determine where your cursor is in many cases. Pretty bad on all fronts. As for the storyline graphics, the characters are well-drawn and their voice-acting is par for an anime-based game, which will make some people happy and will make others simply turn off voice acting after the first scene. I was glad at least to see that the option to disable voices was there, although still having to wait for characters to finish speaking even after disabling their voices is quite frustrating.

The story is yet another in the once-novel vein of evil churches bent on world domination/destruction. However, aside from what you discover during the first four minutes of playing (after the extremely lengthy opening sequence), there are no plot twists in the game. In other words, you already know the entire storyline of the game once you beat the first battle. Now sometimes it's the journey that matters, right? As in, the plotline itself is sometimes less important than the way the story's told? Not so in this case. The story is delivered to you by ridiculous anime stereotypes: the clueless main character who does whatever he's told, the"cool" guy who always talks about girls, the whiningly dependent younger brother, and the naive and persistently reluctant girl, with the creepily obsessed fanboy thrown in for good measure. Chances are, if you've played many other video games with voice acting or seen an anime or two, you already know what every character's voice sounds like based on the description I've just given.

So far I've described a below-average game, but I haven't gotten to the most important part: the battle system. Strategy RPGs revolve around the battles and the strategic options available during them. Unfortunately, you won't find any such options here. Essentially the entire game can be beaten by charging forward with the incredibly overpowered warrior character and just wiping out everything in your path while healing periodically with your other characters. The final boss even dies in two hits from this powerhouse, without any 'power leveling.' And anyway, you're pretty much restricted to this mode of play, since battlefields are often too small to really flank your enemy and even if you do, archers and spellcasters are not allowed to attack from the high ground because you can only attack people who are close to you in elevation. In the end, every battle is fought and won in the exact same way, making the game extremely tedious after a while. You can try to mix it up with poison, charm and sleep spells, but for some reason even though the game told me I had a 25% chance of hitting with them, I missed every single one of the 20 or so times I tried to use them. Furthermore, there is almost no customization of characters aside from the enchantments you choose to put on their weapons and armor, which in most cases do very little anyway.

I really wanted to like this game since there aren't really any other SRPG options for the DS, and I even succeeded in liking it for the first hour or so. But in the end the game just isn't very good, and there's definitely no real strategy to it, so calling it an -S-RPG seems like kind of a stretch. I end most of my negative reviews by suggesting that the reader rent the game to see if they like it, but in this case I'd suggest skipping the game altogether. I don't think it's worth a rental.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/30/07