Review: Lord of Arcana

OH MY GOD LOOK IT’S A MONSTER HUNTER!! HEY, WAIT A MINUTE…

Action RPG’s - aka ‘Looting’ games — Square Enix decides to take on established titles in the genre (Monster Hunter, Diablo) with Lord of Arcana. While these types of games have always catered to a fairly small audience (at least Stateside), the games that exist have been around for quite a while now, proving some stiff competition for a newcomer. Does Arcana hold its own against the big boys, or will it get viciously pummeled in the schoolyard like that kid that brags too much about his parents’ matching Beamers? Keep reading and keep an eye out for the playground monitors…

Let’s take any previous knowledge of the Action RPG genre as a given, yeah? Customization is the key to fun and Lord of Arcana has plenty of that. Outside of the usual items, weapon crafting has been done pretty well here thanks to the new ‘Core’ system. Bosses that you fight drop a core when defeated. That core can be used along with various gathered items to forge weapons, armor and the like. There are a ton of combinations that will provide much of the fun here. Combat is decent enough with a good amount of enemy types. Becoming more powerful and wielding more advanced gear is always satisfying, and while surrounding graphics are only OK, there are some great character models to be seen here. All in all, a decent basic foundation for a game.

Too bad the rest of the structure is made of balsa wood. Overly repetitive gameplay has always been a downfall of action RPG’s and Lord of Arcana is no different. Knowing this, I expected Square Enix to offset the tedium with a solid storyline (something theses games aren’t know for). But sadly this wasn’t the case. Alright, so a weak storyline isn’t the end of the world. The combat seemed interesting, but the long tedious battles - even with low-level enemies - make you not care. Alright, enough messing around. The quests are boring, the same combos over and over again suck, the lock on system has no toggle function and makes targeting within large groups unnecessarily difficult, Bosses can cancel your lock-on making you rely on the crappy radar, fighting in the separate battle areas is odd an annoying, the ‘Core’ system makes you fight the same handful of battles repeatedly, the multiplayer has no infrastructure and relies on the ad-hoc local setup, and finally when I opened the game case it smelled like old people.

But seriously, the game has more flaws then it should in an established genre.

As a first entry, Lord of Arcana clocks in at below average. With so much to build on with regards to other entries from other developers, Square Enix should have found a more interesting direction to take. There’s repetition that’s fun, and then there’s this. The potential is enough so I am interested to see what happens in a sequel (lets learn from our mistakes people), but this effort fails on enough levels that fans of the genre should keep on walking. Come on Square Enix, pull your shit together.