Title: Arc Rise Fantasia アークライズファンタジア
Console: Wii
Genre: RPG
Language: Japanese
Company: Marvelous
Summary: Subtle spoilers in the review.
Story:
Characters: 7. Some of the characters I actually liked ended up dead and junk. :|
Graphics: 8. For a Wii game, the graphics are fairly good, but nothing exceptional.
Sound: 9. Strong music from Mitsuda Yasunori and various other composers, as shared in the Luminous Arc series. There are very few tracks I find particularly gripping or catchy however, but all-in-all it’s all pleasant music.
Gameplay: 8. The innovative elements make battles interesting, but my lowering on the score is the difficulty barrier between field enemies and then bosses. All of the bosses tend to be insanely overpowered and without a clearly planned strategy, a LOT of item wasting, a LOT of time and a LOT of grinding, there’s no hope in proceeding in the game and it just consumes too much effort for what it’s worth in the end.
Replay Value: Personally I’m not bothering with any of it. I even forgot to save after going through the last boss, lol. But WTF it took forever.
Overall: 6. I’m being GENEROUS with this score, seriously. It’s mostly because I was in the mood for challenging bosses and I do like the battle system quite a bit. It’s just that there are just so many PROBLEMS with this game. It consumes too much time to get anywhere worthwhile, and characters you might end up liking might end up dead or gone from your party at the end of the game because the storyline dominates over the gaming experience, which shouldn’t be what a game does, especially when the storyline isn’t so magnificient in the first place. >___>; Backtracking and repetition in this game was excessive and a chore. Fail. I really had to pull myself to finish this one and I only did because of the extra free time to myself.
And now I actually regret it. All that time could’ve been spent playing a more worthwhile game or something more productive in general. But oh, it had Nakamura Yuuichi and Hatano Wataru. Without that, I likely would not have made it that far…

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