Arc the Lad Retrospective #1

Back in the day, it seemed that every gaming juggernaut had one or two flagship strategy RPG series under its name. Nintendo had Fire Emblem, Wars and, at least initially, Tactics Ogre, while Sega had its own Shining Force. When Sony decided to enter the console business, it made sense that they would introduce their own rival into the ring, and thus came Arc the Lad, a series with five installments that, originally, was slated to be both a PS1 launch title and one, massive game. Unfortunately, due to time and resource constraints, and perhaps as a way to shill the new memory card save system, the story of the first game ended up being split in two parts, which left the initial game as something of an obscure oddity among the fray, mainly because it both establishes the general formula but also feels rather different. It also didn't make the launch date, instead coming out in 1995, and it would take until 2002, two years into the PS2's lifespan, for it to come overseas, and then another ten years until it finally hit Europe via digital means!

Arc the Lad focuses on the titular Arc, a young lad who lives with his mother in a snowy mountain village. He sets out to find his lost father, donning his armor and sword and sharing a tearful goodbye with his mother Polta. This happens concurrently to a princess named Kukuru opposing an arranged marriage, a tradition of the village. In protest, she puts out the flame cyon, an ancient flame that has been burning for well over a 1000 years - and which also happened to seal a really nasty monster called the Ark Demon, the same one who supposedly killed Arc's father. Arc sets out to relight the cyon, but is defeated by the demon and left near the brink of death. However, due to several past events that aren't made clear until the second game, the world's elemental spirits grant him another chance and revive him, tasking him with visiting them all in their designated spots and obtaining the Ark with a "k", an ancient artifact that the evil Romalian kingdom is likewise seeking out to bring about world dominance - or so they think, at least.

While it's not immediately obvious, the game's plot is actually set in something of a weird mixture of medieval fantasy (with a sprinkle of pan-Asian culture) and bizarre 90s technology - there are big TV screens, some cities have realistic skyscrapers, there are radios, telephones, but at the same time there are ancient tribes that cling to traditions or even isolated islands with only native population. This is underscored by a plot that is fairly political in nature; while Arc himself is initially backed up by the king of Seirya, the evil minister Gallarno secretly pulls strings behind their backs to hinder his party's progress, and eventually leads the gang, despite their noble intentions, to be branded as terrorists, complete with wanted posters everywhere.

At first, the plot more or less just coasts along before it gets to the meat of things - it takes a lot of buildup, but once the party is finally framed for terrorism, all hell breaks loose. The game is also notable for its lack of anime tropes in the storytelling - in fact, the entire atmosphere evokes a sense of melancholy, from the weirdly desaturated environments to the rather somber soundtrack, the atmosphere is very clearly set: the game is dead serious, and beyond a few lines of comic relief from certain characters, it remains that way throughout the entire romp. It does make sense, given how it's basically a political drama, but it's also a stark contrast to contemporary games, which often had strong themes of idealism and heroism. This is not the case here, and in fact even the ending - while obviously being a lead up to the sequel, is deeply on the bitter side of bittersweet - a recurring theme throughout the series, but it's perhaps most pronounced here. One thing the first game definitely does better than the second is also the characterization - due to the smaller cast, there's much more focus on each individual party member, and they're able to grow and develop much more organically as a result. And even beyond that, the party actually has some really good chemistry, with their interactions being pretty fun to watch, even little details as the save screen animation being them resting at a campfire. The spritework also helps inject a healthy dose of personality, but more on that later.

Gameplay-wise, the title combines aspects of several previous household names. In its essence, it is perhaps closest to the original Shining Force, with speed-based individual turns where you control the characters directly and move them around on the battlefield. Unlike most of its kin, however, verticality and jumping play a big role - mainly, characters cannot just pass through each other, even amongst allies, they instead need to jump. This plays an important role early on, as most characters do not start with the jumping skill, and it needs to be leveled up accordingly to bypass more obstacles - you start with slopes, allies and then finally enemies. This generally means that spreading out the party should be a good idea, but for many other reasons it actually isn't. As far as actual attack range goes, the default physical hit can only hit spaces right next to you, there are no bows, guns, spears or the like. While the game does advise you to attack enemies from behind, it rarely makes a difference, as they almost always counter your attacks anyway, and it doesn't seem to deal that much more damage - or at all, depending on how far the damage variable itself goes. Spells with area of effect are a different matter entirely - unlike, say, Tactics Ogre, you cannot select an empty space between enemies or allies to successfully cast one, one target always has to be in the center for it to work - this actually makes several spells somewhat impractical to use, at least their base versions, as they often only cover a measly cross shape, which is rarely useful because enemies often spread out themselves. On the plus side, though, there is no splash damage for allies or accidentally healing enemies, so that's a bonus.

Items also play a role. Rocks are extremely important, because they're a very useful long-range solution any character can use, and they remain useful pretty much the entire game. Due to a lack of a currency systems, items are either obtained as random drops, through treasure chests, or rarely on explorable maps - however, most healing items become less and less useful as the game goes on, mainly because your magic users will have a metric ton of MP by the end of the game that lasts through all enemies, and physical attackers can just tear anything to shreds before they even get an action.

Unfortunately, despite the battles' fast nature, there are several flaws that bog the experience down. For one, the enemy AI is insanely stupid. Whenever a character isn't within two turns of attack range, they will simply move at random, sometimes going in a circle and stopping where they started. This is compounded by the map design, which often consists of large maps that, unfortunately, offer very little actual walking space - the game absolutely loves to put enemies at the other end of the map in a one-tile hallway, which not only takes forever to get to, but then has you picking the enemies apart one by one, which turns even the simplest maps into 20-30 minute affairs. This is compounded by very elaborate, but unfortunately also extremely long battle animations. While the second game was undeniably worse about it, it already had its origins here and before long many of these spell animations get very old, especially when they're cast multiple times in a row.

Worse, the game's difficulty is insanely unbalanced, likely a result of the rushed development cycle. You can do extremely well on one map, and then suddenly get utterly destroyed in two hits by enemies on the next - it's a very good thing the game asks you to save before every skirmish, as otherwise you'd lose tons of progress quite fast. In general, it's recommended to level up every character by one to two levels between major story battles. Thankfully, there are plenty of "free" grinding maps, and many of the classic SRPG grinding tricks work - abusing healing skills, items, counterattacks - these are all things you can exploit to raise your levels quickly. But it's still odd just how vicious the game can get without warning!

As far as progression goes, things are extremely linear. Your characters gain levels and new skills as they level up, including higher spell tiers that replace the previous ones. There is no traditional equipment system either, instead each character has four different accessory slots, and most gear within the surprisingly large pool can be equipped by anyone - there are a few character-specific accessories, but they're rare. Some that seem useless in this title will be more relevant in two. Beyond that, there is zero character customization or anything in the way of builds, you work with what the game gives you instead. The level cap is also a rather paltry 60, but that is once again related to the sequel.

Now, if you thought the arena was a commitment, enter the arena: part of it is plot-relevant, but the actual meat of it is optional: fighting a total of 1000 battles. Now: these battles are 1vs1 fights, the enemies have no special properties beyond being strong relative to where the story is at that point, and your characters will one-shot each of them long before the halfway mark. The "real" battle is actually working up the determination to stick through 1000 battles. You always have to walk up to the front desk, sign yourself up for the fight,, watch an intro and outro before and after the battle and keep doing that a 1000 times. Manage that, and you will be rewarded with some extremely powerful gear that you can transfer to the second game. But still, due to the hours it takes to slog through, very few people have bothered. There's even a currently unconfirmed rumor that the MC will have different dialogue if you do the whole thing a second time - nobody has bothered to confirm this yet, and I'm not planning on doing so either, regardless of how much I love doing research.

The game itself clocks in at about ten hours. Beyond the main quest, there is quite a bit of side content to sink your teeth into, mainly the ancient ruins and the arena, both of which are relevant for the second game and likewise the most elaborate quests contained within. The ancient ruins is a 50 floor dungeon with plenty of enemies, optional treasure and a superboss and optional summon at the end. The tricky part about the ruins is that you have to navigate each floor via the battle movement system while dealing with swarms of enemies, slowly, slooowly climbing down one floor at a time, without any chance to save or heal in-between. And then once you're done, you have to go all the way back up again - thankfully, all enemies stay defeated, but you'll still be exhausted and any enemies you didn't kill will gleefully attack your weakened party. Getting out successfully, though, means that your characters will likely be at the level cap, you'll have gathered some extremely useful items and you'll have unlocked a special side quest in Arc 2 that skips the need to do this dungeon again there.

Now, one of the coolest things about Arc the Lad was that it uses the new memory card feature to allow you to transfer clear data to the second game - this will unlock additional scenes, side quests, allows your characters to retain their levels in the new game (hence the comparatively low level cap of 60) and even carry over most accessories. This makes sense, given how both games were originally supposed to be one, and it also explain the rather deliberately restrained ambition of this first game, which is basic and pretty much every way.

Graphics-wise, the game is often criticized for looking antiquated relative to what the PS1 could do. Indeed, when looking at screenshots, you would be forgiven for mistaking it for a late SNES game, what with its 2D sprites and backgrounds. However, there is far more to it than initially meets the eye! Most importantly, the sprites have many more frames of animation than what would've been possible on 16-bit machines, being incredibly fluid and smooth. There's also tons of details that are easy to miss but nice touches regardless - for example characters have different animations for critical hits instead of just flashing the screen, and if you cast sleep on Choko, she goes through her entire bedtime routine: putting on pajamas, brushing her teeth and then finally knocking out. No, really!

The battlefields and parallax backgrounds also look sufficiently nice. There is nothing too impressive, but everything works within the context of the game, mainly using muted, more moody colors, which fits the atmosphere of the game. Certain things, like many of the spell animations, do get old, but the worst offender has got to be boarding and leaving the airship, because it's the same 30-second animation every single time you go somewhere, and you travel around a lot.

The CGI cutscenes, however, didn't age so well. Thankfully, the game made the wise decision of avoiding showing the characters in these, instead opting to only use them for things like airships flying around or stuff blowing up, but the low, mid-90s quality is still rather obvious. And then, oddly enough, both the game's opening and ending, which consists only of sprite animations ostensibly done in the in-game engine, are still pre-rendered cutscenes, with compression artifacts and all, for no discernible reason - games like Legend of Mana showed that you could blend CGI cutscenes with backgrounds and sprites, but at least it's only this game that does this.

The soundtrack, like the plot itself, consists mainly of moody, foreboding and suspenseful themes, with the entire package coming across as quite melancholic. In fact, the only track that seems to exude any sort of hope is the one that plays when conversing with spirits, beyond that the atmosphere is more or less slapped directly in your face: this is a dangerous world, and you gotta fight to survive. At least there's decent variety, given the game's short length, no song really overstayed its welcome. The sund effects do what they're supposed to - there's nothing particularly outstanding or distracting about them, they just work. While there is no notable voiceover for cutscenes, the characters still talk plenty in battle, all of which was entirely kept in Japanese.

Now, the game was localized by Working Designs, who were well-known for their very lose localizations of Japanese properties. Thankfully, Arc had the benefit of coming out at a time where they opted to be more faithful to their sources, although that doesn't mean it's entirely free of changes. Most notably, the character portraits were completely redrawn, likely to maintain consistency with the official artwork. However, this change wasn't applied universally; the revive menu still uses the Japanese portraits. Certain things were also sped up, mainly level up and stat gain messages, which are now lightning-fast popups instead, and they also added rumble support. Beyond that, the company has abstained from its worst policies, there are no Bill Clinton or other pop-cultural references to be found. While I'm not a big fan of the font they used, it's still a decent effort.

In Japan, Arc 1 came out in 1995, close to the console's launch. In North America, this wouldn't happen until 2002, when the PS2 was already out for two years. Working Designs reportedly pushed to have the game localized, and Sony wouldn't relent until much later - but in return, all three games and the arena spinoff were bundled into one large collection, including a making of disc, that had enormous value. As usual, it quickly went out of print, but in 2011, Monkey Paw Games, who reacquired several PS1 classics, re-released all games individually on the PSN, with a European release following later the same year. Unfortunately, the deal seems to have expired, as the game can no longer be purchased digitally, once again leaving the series in limbo, despite being a Sony property.