What is GamerDad?
Why do Kids Love Games? Are Games Harmful? You'll find the answers here. At GamerDad, we believe in Gaming with Children.
Email Us, Visit our FAQ, learn About Us, Bookmark us now and join our message board. We update daily!
|
Donate to help Hurricane Surivivors
Buy something from Amazon using this link, and GamerDad gets a percentage!
|
|
Home >
Review Archive >
Video Games
> Results: Arc the Lad: End of Darkness
|
by Dr. Matt J. Carlson
July 18, 2005
Like its name, the newest Arc the Lad has a story-arc that could use some more aging.
Reviewed for PS2.
|
Format For Printing | Tell A Friend
Scroll down for our Kid Factor.
Arc the Lad: End of Darkness adopts a real-time combat system in Namco's newest role-playing game for the PlayStation 2. You control the main character, Edda, a typical orphaned boy on an isolated island who displays strange powers. With your friend, Hemo, you dispatch a monster who has been frightening islanders for a long time. After defeating the monster, Edda vows to continue fighting monsters on the mainland after becoming a Hunter. The story continues from there, with a mediocre plot that develops far too slowly.
The game play is good, but not great. After performing a task to become a Hunter, Edda begins to take on jobs to earn some cash and improve himself. There are two types of tasks. Standard Hunter Guild tasks come in a variety of difficulties but earn you appropriate levels of cash rewards and experience. Other tasks are undertaken for free, but reward you with notoriety in the form of Dignity Points. Obtain enough experience and Dignity Points and Edda can stand for a Hunter test. Pass the test and you increase a level in experience. Hunter Guild quests vary and any number of them can be found and undertaken at almost any guild in the game. However, quests that give Dignity Points are only found in specific locations. It takes two quests to gain enough dignity points to be eligible for the next level, so the Dignity Point quests are the main vehicle to advance the story line.
Unfortunately, the story line is the weakest part of the entire game. Despite the game existing within the role-playing genre, there is very little motivation for your character. He leaves the island because he wants to fight other monsters and become a hunter. Once he becomes a hunter, it is basically going through the motions of solving whatever quests appear. Thankfully, it is always obvious what should be done to further the story (take on the next Dignity Point quest) but there isn't a central thread linking the story progress throughout the game. One of the few central characters is an enigmatic woman named Kirika who is first met on the home island. She then reappears in about every other Dignity Point quest, but rarely contributes or says more than mumbled grunts and short conversations. It is clear that she is on some important quest, but it takes a long time and many encounters before Edda is drawn into that part of the main plot.
Combat is based on a few basic attacks and four spell slots that are filled by placing special cards into the slot. Cards can also grant a player access to additional characters (24 in all) that can be used instead of Edda when attempting standard Hunter quests for cash rewards. Each character also has a special card, only usable by that character. However, quite a few available characters and special cards are quite rare, so it is fairly difficult to get very many appropriate matches. Cards found in your journeys can be combined in a store to create more powerful cards but combinations require recipes. A few recipes are given to you through special discoveries, but the majority must be found by trial and error. The rarest cards can be found by collecting sets of 10 mystery cards and turning them in for a random card in one of the towns. These mystery cards are fairly rare, but can be obtained more readily in online games, making the online version of the game useful even for the solo story mode players.
Individual quests are fun, but can occasionally be drawn out. Combat occurs in real time, but with only a few default choices, gets monotonous by the middle of the game. Failing a quest causes you to lose all of your equipped cards, which is a fairly harsh punishment if some of the cards equipped are rare ones. Since hunter quests can be performed at varying difficulty levels, you can bite off more than you can chew at times, but at least it is your own fault. The Dignity Point quests that advance the plot are typically more involved and longer. This can make them more interesting but at times they are so long as to be problematic. Some of them, such as rescue quests, require you to enter an area, fight through it to the person to be rescued and then escort them back out through another set of monsters. This can be difficult as resources will begin to run thin on the journey back out and failure requires restarting the entire quest. Players who haven't equipped any healing abilities will be hard pressed to complete the quest at all.
The online modes are varied and are a nice value-add but aren't enough to save the game from mediocrity. Players can go online and play in four player deathmatch or cooperative play. Online games are particularly useful since mystery cards are more common online. Players can also bring any found characters into the online game. USB headset chatting is enabled, to make coordinated game play much easier. Unfortunately, there are no offline multiplayer modes.
The game itself has no nagging problems, but the plot and presentation fails to entertain and pull you into the story. Fans of the Arc the Lad series will find plenty of references to past games and familiar unlockable characters to make the game a worthy purchase. For someone looking for a good PS2 RPG, earlier games in this series might be a better choice.
Arc the Lad: End of Darkness has a fairly harmless setting. There is some mention of demons here and there, and plenty of combat violence. However, no blood is spilt, bodies disappear when defeated, and there is little or no gore. Language is fairly clean, with the only difficult issues in the somewhat enigmatic dialogue that doesn't always seem to translate to US culture. The only caution, other than the combat action, would be for a few monsters and characters that have slightly less than appropriate amounts of clothing. The largest culprits are females clad in skimpy leather outfits bearing whips.
Format For Printing | Tell A Friend
Home >
Review Archive >
Video Games
> Results: Arc the Lad: End of Darkness
|
Best Games of 2005!
Read the GamerDad 2005 Holiday Guide!
Visit the GamerDad Store and Buy Stuff!
|
|
