Arcanion (Old)

Arcanion is J-Man's latest attempt at an RM game. He is notably known for his various phantasia games that he has completed, but rushed. Has he changed? A little.

Right off the bat the writing is a huge joke. I start to wonder if J-Man takes any care of his writing. I get the feeling he just wants to get it over with and just half assedly writes something down. For instance, the intro, there is zero information and zero presentation going on. I have no idea what Arcanion is or why this king is important or why I should care. Then it just has some girl babble nonsense out of nowhere and the game finally begins. You are Irwin a guy who's fashion sense can be summed up in 5 words (brown shirt and blue pants), he is wandering in the forest for absolutely no reason and comes across an orb that he picks up. Afterwards he finds a girl in trouble, however his without a weapon to fend off these monsters (why would he not have a weapon if he's in a forest full of monsters?). Conveniently, a girl appears out of nowhere and gets you to sign a 'contract' allowing the orb to turn into a sword for Irwin to pick up. So the girl explains that you have a... role. Theres no explanation beyond that, but it's a good thing I am an RPG Game psychic.

UMMMMummmmmm ayyummmmmmmm my RTP crystal ball saysssss

The main characters will become chosen ones to defeat some evil and save the world! WOAH!! Is my prediction true? Probably.

So what about the girl you saved? Well she is a mage with zero personality. That's it. Which is another thing, there's absolutely no good care of the characters, none of them have pasts or anything, they just come out of nowhere. The game's story relies heavily on it's dry plot. I think J-Man has to understand that the characters should drive the plot, not this generic anime SIGN THE CONTRACT TO WEILD ULTRA COOL WEAPONS AND STUFF drivel. Another thing I noticed about this game's story, the characters are eager to find out what exactly happened to them as if they have some kind of negative curse? So um, what exactly is so bad about having shiny weapons at your disposal? I guess there's a lot of suffering involved!

So anyway you're off on your own to take sidequests from the job system. It's not terribly implemented but the actual sidequests themselves are. I recall from Tardis's review where he got stuck in the forest. Well Tardis, it's not entirely your fault that you ran into that problem. You were vaguely told that you had to go into the forest to deliver something. However what you actually had to do was go to an old woman's house, pick up something, and then go to the forest, but since the game allows you to the forest beforehand you will fight a shitload of monsters all for nothing. Tardis assumes that he already got the parcel for the quest. See this wouldn't have happened if there was some sort of side quest log to inform him on where to go, or the access to the forest was cut off OR if there was an indicator telling him that "oh before I spend like 10 minutes in this forest I have to go back to the town to get Momo's parcel!" Suffice to say this is the first big game progression problem.

There's really not much to get into when it comes to the battles. All the enemies do the same things over and over and the ATB wait times are absolutely terrible. There's an 'overlimit' system (which I think is a limit break?) but I never really bothered using it because it never fills up nor do I care because spamming my strongest skill seems to do the job done. The boss in the cave didn't have any strategy whatsoever he just had a lot of health, all you had to do was spam dmg attacks over and over. Also I like how the girl supposedly saves the main character by receiving an orb to help him when she easily dies in almost 3 turns. I think the huge problem with battles is this, they need strategy, there needs to more than just "that skill that does more damage than the others" there needs to be skills that operate Another thing I noticed about the battles are the graphics: The battle backgrounds do not fit with the actual tilesets at all, you'll have some dark forest and then go into battle in a nice pretty forest.

Speaking of graphics, many people say that the custom graphics that J-Man produces are shining star of this game, but I have some C&C. First of all the charsets he make are mixed in with some 'tales of' sprites. He has the template down but the coloring and shading just doesn't match with the actual tales of sprites. This leads to a very goofy inconsistency with the graphics and bothers me. Second, theres not much detail in the character design, Irwin just has a brown shirt and blue pants, um? Shouldn't he be wearing something a little more fitting in a fantasy setting? As for the battle graphics, they are OKAY, but Irwin's idle looks like he has his arms crossed over the sword, and the way the sword moves looks like he is wiggling it <insert boner joke here for the people who aren't even old enough to be on this site>. Also some of the characters have forks for hands, which just weirds me out.

Passability error faeries have also found their way in this game. The biggest one I noticed was the cave one where you could actually GO ANYWHERE YOU WANT if you enter the ceiling tile from above. Theres also a part where you can get into the outskirts of town like this:


oh and lets not forget

oh and


Overall it's not as bad as the last time (I recall the walls in houses climbable in some old Phantasia game). But I think the main thing J-Man needs to do is get some real beta testers and tell them to explore every single tile of the map, check for grammar mistakes (oh and get RMtext please, I see a lot of messages just off the message box border). Tell them to be honest, tell them to nitpick at everything they see is wrong, tell them that you do not want to hear praise, you just want to know what the game's flaws are, and what it needs to improve on. I'm not sure if J-Man has beta testers, but if he does, he sure isn't asking them what I just said. Another thing is the writing, try to like, write about the characters rather than some generic anime plot (hell its fine if you're into cliches). The characters need to be able to relate to the player in order to make him give a rat's ass about what happens to them. Let the characters drive the story.

That's all I really have to say, I just noticed that this game is canceled in the middle of writing this review, I just hope J-Man can still take something from this for his next project.