Lord of Arcana

I’m so conflicted. When you write a game review, you often want to either praise it passionately or get right into ripping it to shreds. Something that falls squarely in-between is problematic for one reason: potential. This is exactly how I feel about Access Games’ Lord of Arcana.

Another in the long line of dungeon-crawling action-RPGs available on the PSP, Lord of Arcana has the standard features: randomly-generated dungeon rooms, a long list of hunting quests to undertake, and lots and lots (and lots!) of item crafting. After an introductory tutorial which teases you with the full repertoire of combat abilities and all five weapon types (before naturally proceeding to strip them away), you’ll spend the majority of your time in a small town, handily inhabited by big game hunters and weapon-smiths. Your first item of business is to join the local guild, who’ll point you in the direction of some beasts to take down – and even hook you up with some real-life mates for ad-hoc multiplayer, should you so choose. Unfortunately, online-play isn’t available.

Like Chrono Trigger or the Tales games, enemies appear on the battlefield before you initiate combat, allowing you to pick and choose which monsters to fight. Once contact has been made, the game breaks into a separate field with only your prey. Here, the game becomes a 3D brawler, with light, heavy and magic attacks, as well as the usual dodge mechanics. There’s an enemy lock-on feature that, although initially clunky, works fine once you get used to how it looks for brawlers. While it all feels a little vanilla at first, there’s a twist in the combat in the form of God of War-style finishing-moves, complete with unique animations for each enemy type. After a monster drops down to critical health, maintaining lock-on focus on it will present button prompts for the coup de grâce. Nailing the button prompts is almost always satisfying and it comes into greater focus in boss fights, where pulling these off successfully is essential to taking the boss down – usually because it involves lopping off some important weak spot or body part with your giant sword.

It’s addictive. Even if the quests aren’t always that exciting, it still evokes that “one more go” mentality, primarily due to the crafting system. Here, classic RPG min-maxing is in full force; “with just one run in the forest”, you’ll think, “I can get enough monster cores to add +10 strength to my Gladius”. Unfortunately, some of the material requirements for crafting can be a little excessive, leaving you to repeat some quests more times than you’d care to. Despite being a title from the studio behind the wonderfully-mad Deadly Premonition, the storyline isn’t really a major element to Lord of Arcana. Sure, there’s some requisite stuff about warriors vying for the power of Arcana stones, but it’s all an excuse for you to go kill a bunch of local wildlife, loot their corpses and upgrade your equipment. And that’s fine, really. Coupled with some occasionally sharp NPC dialogue, it does the job, even if there’s not that much incentive to push forward.

The presentation is a bit all over the place. Environments can be a tad bland, with blurry ground textures and a lack of detail evident. However, there are some nice character models and particle effects present, particularly in boss battles, where you can expect plenty of pretty glowing light-sources. On the audio-side of things, there are some catchy musical tracks on offer, especially if you enjoy rock or orchestra – it’s no surprise that the game features contributions from Final Fantasy-veteran composer, Nobou Uematsu.