Luminous Arc

I guess it's about that time to give out some first impressions on L Arc. The cover and the packaging itself looks very nice. Overall, you can pretty much see the target audience is for them otakus or something. This game falls into the old "strategy RPG" category, and really is played like a traditional sRPG.

As you start the game, you are asked a question and 6 choices. I have no idea what each of these do, personally, so I'm just going to assume it's something random that has little impact in the game. This game is "special" in it that you can use the stylus to move your characters, which take turns FFTA style - that is, characters get turns, rather than players getting turns - and you control where characters move and whether or not they attack, use a skill, wait, or anything else. The stylus feature is very nice, but I find it not good at detecting my targets very well, so it does have some problems with it, which caused me to switch back to normal cursor movement. There are some other things about the gameplay overall. You can choose talk with different characters after battle, and depending on your choices, you can increase or decrease their affection towards you. Sounds fair to me, but since you can continue to do that over and over with a single character after random battles, it may be a way to exploit the system. One beef I have is the lack of a job system. Strategy RPGs almost always have a job system in which you can customize characters and what not. It seems rather strange that this is missing, and it would be very probable that there would not be any recruiting of generic characters either, considering that there are only 15 character slots in the dispatch screen. Overall, the gameplay is nothing special, and is closer to weak than it is strong.

The storyline itself sounds like it has some potential, as you're seeing two sides of a single story from two different characters, though this early in the game you can already see who the good guys and bad guys are. Nobody would be surprised either, considering that this game looks to be built on a fairly shakey storyline and potentially weak character development would happen as well. I mean, anything that starts with "witches are evil, destroy them all" as a plot is not quite a masterpiece. But then again, we're not looking for an Oscar-winning plot, but rather one that isn't too bad. In that aspect, Luminous Arc passes.

The music is good, but not memorable at the moment. I'm not quite sure what else to talk about with this.

Overall, Luminous Arc has the potential to be good, but failed to do so in favour of cute anime people graphics (main hero is bishounen, main heroine is bishoujo, etc.).