Arc the Lad: End of Darkness
Hey, ever wish you could fight the same monsters in the same areas while listening to the same music as Twilight of the Spirits without the somewhat rewarding turn-based battle system? Neither did we.
Published: June 21, 2005
I will give Cattle Call's Final Fantasy X-2-style retelling of the events of the last Arc the Lad game, Twilight of the Spirits, a little credit. It reminded me of how stupid it was for me to trade the game so I could pay bills and rent, mainly because it had some really cool music and a fair, if rather clichéd, music.
The down side to reusing almost the entire slate of music, locations, monsters and characters from the last game is that it's a constant reminder of how decent that game was -- and even more prevalent a reminder of how bad this one is. Stripped of the turn-based combat and strategy it involved but leaning heavily on the same basic frame, End of Darkness has almost nothing original to stand on save for a few new characters and a new storyline that takes place five years after the events of Twilight, and neither are all that good.
Half a decade after brothers Kharg and Darc saved the world from being sucked dry of all its energy and uniting the monsterous Deimos and quarrelsome Humans, the world is... well, it's almost exactly the same. A young exorcist named Edda (the last, exorcist, actually) and his Slothian friend Hemo set out from their home of Craig Island to rid the world of malademons, monsters that can only be destroyed by exorcism, are slowly creeping into the world.
After a visit from the aloof and mysterious Kirika, an odd girl who says she's an archaeologist (that happens to turn up on the island where there are few ruins, hmmmmmmm...), Edda is quickly sped along a path that will take him farther and deeper into the eventual future of the world than he ever thought possible.
His first spot once he leaves the island is a small town where he learns of his exorcist role and becomes a hunter, a class of soldier tasks with helping both the community with pressing tasks and the countryside with various extermination or collection tasks. It's also the way the game's new card system is implemented, thanks to a device all hunters wear called an ARM that lets them wield the cards and their innate magical abilities to moderate success. It also serves as the game's foil for bringing back characters from past games as playable combatants. By finding hidden character cards and then having them materialized, you can switch to the characters while completing missions on your way to upgrading your Hunter class.
It's a nice way to add some variety and recapture some of the cool abilities of past players, but it's also a bit of a cop-out, and doesn't really offer any serious advantages when you learn early on that only Edda can participate in the bulletin board tasks that are really just glorified plot points necessary to move the game along. When playing online, any card you find can be used, which gives incentive to learn how each of the characters work, but offline there isn't too much reason to use them aside from getting a little variety.
The gameplay itself is pretty simple. Combat takes place in real-time, and allows Edda or any of the previous Arc characters to fight and run around freely, dodging attacks and using special moves or spells. You can tap the square button to jump back out of attack range or press forward to dash into an enemy, but this isn't used nearly as much offline as circle strafing is. Before entering missions, you can map up to four spells to a quick select menu hidden under the R2 button.
By hitting L2, you can lock onto a particular foe and then use the L1 and R1 buttons to strafe around them. This becomes the core of any combat, since you have to hit a few times, then dodge any malademons that don't have their animation cycles reset by attacks like normal enemies do. Because normal fights are really just a cycle of hitting enemies a couple times, knocking them down, and then hitting them again as soon as their recovery animation finishes, the combat becomes almost immediately brain-dead. Handling multiple enemies can either be incredibly easy if you catch them all in the range of your strikes or impossibly hard if you get surrounded.
When not fighting, you'll usually while away the time by running from town to town (all reused locations from Twilight and searching for your next bulletin board task. Since the storyline only advances when you're taking on these tasks and after going up in Hunter rank (accomplished by finishing two board tasks and enough outside tasks to earn 10 stars, which can be earned by completing missions with increasing star and monetary payouts as they difficulty rises), there's little outside taking on a couple of simple missions to earn the stars and then finding the next town with a posted board task that corresponds to your Hunter rank. The storyline bits are nearly always fluff that gets you to the next major event (of which there are perhaps a half-dozen or so), and the game just plain feels tired after the first hour or so.
Part of this comes from the fact that you repeatedly do the same thing dozens if not hundreds of times. Enter a level, kill or dash past enemies (there's no experience in the game; you upgrade your attack, defense and HP with items that become available as you complete plot points, so there's little reason to do the combat), notch some stars and then tackle the next board task while visiting the same locations and interacting with the same Deimos races or B-List characters from the last game while listening to the same music. Very, very little of the experience you'll log with End of Darkness feels new.
The down side to reusing almost the entire slate of music, locations, monsters and characters from the last game is that it's a constant reminder of how decent that game was -- and even more prevalent a reminder of how bad this one is. Stripped of the turn-based combat and strategy it involved but leaning heavily on the same basic frame, End of Darkness has almost nothing original to stand on save for a few new characters and a new storyline that takes place five years after the events of Twilight, and neither are all that good.
Half a decade after brothers Kharg and Darc saved the world from being sucked dry of all its energy and uniting the monsterous Deimos and quarrelsome Humans, the world is... well, it's almost exactly the same. A young exorcist named Edda (the last, exorcist, actually) and his Slothian friend Hemo set out from their home of Craig Island to rid the world of malademons, monsters that can only be destroyed by exorcism, are slowly creeping into the world.
After a visit from the aloof and mysterious Kirika, an odd girl who says she's an archaeologist (that happens to turn up on the island where there are few ruins, hmmmmmmm...), Edda is quickly sped along a path that will take him farther and deeper into the eventual future of the world than he ever thought possible.
His first spot once he leaves the island is a small town where he learns of his exorcist role and becomes a hunter, a class of soldier tasks with helping both the community with pressing tasks and the countryside with various extermination or collection tasks. It's also the way the game's new card system is implemented, thanks to a device all hunters wear called an ARM that lets them wield the cards and their innate magical abilities to moderate success. It also serves as the game's foil for bringing back characters from past games as playable combatants. By finding hidden character cards and then having them materialized, you can switch to the characters while completing missions on your way to upgrading your Hunter class.
It's a nice way to add some variety and recapture some of the cool abilities of past players, but it's also a bit of a cop-out, and doesn't really offer any serious advantages when you learn early on that only Edda can participate in the bulletin board tasks that are really just glorified plot points necessary to move the game along. When playing online, any card you find can be used, which gives incentive to learn how each of the characters work, but offline there isn't too much reason to use them aside from getting a little variety.
The gameplay itself is pretty simple. Combat takes place in real-time, and allows Edda or any of the previous Arc characters to fight and run around freely, dodging attacks and using special moves or spells. You can tap the square button to jump back out of attack range or press forward to dash into an enemy, but this isn't used nearly as much offline as circle strafing is. Before entering missions, you can map up to four spells to a quick select menu hidden under the R2 button.
By hitting L2, you can lock onto a particular foe and then use the L1 and R1 buttons to strafe around them. This becomes the core of any combat, since you have to hit a few times, then dodge any malademons that don't have their animation cycles reset by attacks like normal enemies do. Because normal fights are really just a cycle of hitting enemies a couple times, knocking them down, and then hitting them again as soon as their recovery animation finishes, the combat becomes almost immediately brain-dead. Handling multiple enemies can either be incredibly easy if you catch them all in the range of your strikes or impossibly hard if you get surrounded.
When not fighting, you'll usually while away the time by running from town to town (all reused locations from Twilight and searching for your next bulletin board task. Since the storyline only advances when you're taking on these tasks and after going up in Hunter rank (accomplished by finishing two board tasks and enough outside tasks to earn 10 stars, which can be earned by completing missions with increasing star and monetary payouts as they difficulty rises), there's little outside taking on a couple of simple missions to earn the stars and then finding the next town with a posted board task that corresponds to your Hunter rank. The storyline bits are nearly always fluff that gets you to the next major event (of which there are perhaps a half-dozen or so), and the game just plain feels tired after the first hour or so.
Part of this comes from the fact that you repeatedly do the same thing dozens if not hundreds of times. Enter a level, kill or dash past enemies (there's no experience in the game; you upgrade your attack, defense and HP with items that become available as you complete plot points, so there's little reason to do the combat), notch some stars and then tackle the next board task while visiting the same locations and interacting with the same Deimos races or B-List characters from the last game while listening to the same music. Very, very little of the experience you'll log with End of Darkness feels new.
