'Budget price' review: Arc the Lad 3 (PSX)

Here's another 'budget price' review, this time of an old release, rather than an indie game. Since it's an old game, the scoring is quite forgiving, and concentrates on the fun factor and playability, rather than visuals or audio, as those are obviously outdated by today's standards. Anyhow, here goes.

Arc the Lad 3
Arc the Lad series has always piqued my interest with the fact that it's a TRPG (Tactical Role-Playing Game), in other words, the battles are done on square/grid -based fields, where position and approach matters, unlike in most other Japan -originating RPG's, where the party and enemies are in rows and exchange attacks. Not that I have anything against the traditional setup, but adding a tactical aspect to it is always a bonus in my books.

Arc the Lad games 1-3 were released on the original Playstation, while the next two were released on Playstation2. At the time of typing this review, I'm already working on the next Arc the Lad title, Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits.

Let's start with the story...
The story in Arc the Lad series continues, and at least in case of the first three games, some characters appear in multiple games. The main adversary most of the time seems to be the Evil One, who is about to be resurrected. The classic way of banishing the Evil One seems to be sealing it inside a magical ark, but other methods have been applied as well. To not spoil everything, I'll let you speculate what the case is this time.

In this part of the Arc the Lad story, the world is recovering from The Great Disaster that happened in the previous title. Much of the world is in ruin, but a handful of towns on various continents have survived, and are trying to rebuild the society again. Some groups are researching the lost technologies, others getting rid of monsters and bandits that are still plentiful in all areas.

Alec, the main protagonist, along with his extremely annoying friend Lutz are living a peaceful life in a village on a relatively small island. However, one day bandits raid the village, and while the villagers are being helf captive while the bandits loot the village, Alec and Lutz manage to sneak out to call for help. In this case, the only help they could rely on is the international Hunter Guild. Hunters are people that take on almost any kind of work, mostly specializing in monster extermination and bandit bashing. Our duo finds their way to a nearby guild, and hires a hunter to take down the bandits, which he does in matter of seconds upon reaching the village. Alec, impressed by the hunter, now wants to be one too. He decides to leave the village and become a hunter. Lutz insists to tag along, and off they go. To become a hunter, one must pass a test at the guild, which is basically the first task ahead.

On a mission
Once Alec receives his hunter's crest and is officially in business, he starts to take on jobs at the guild. Unfortunately for all you battle enthusiasts, half the jobs are basically about running errands to people and attempting to complete mini-games. While not all of these need to be accepted, some of them may have unexpected rewards in form of items or weapons.

In addition to jobs, each guild has six 'wanted monster' posters up, and these monsters can be hunted down in nearby locations for extra cash and experience. These are completely optional, and I personally think that they should be skipped, should you want future battles to be challenging. You'll level up plenty while searching for these monsters.

Once enough missions have been completed on a continent, special guild jobs become available. These jobs, upon completion, or for the job itself, grant transportation to a new continent. Along the way new people tag along Alec's group, up to a total of 7 characters, of which one is optional. Occasionally you get special guest characters, from previous Arc the Lad games to temporarily join. I was delighted to see Tosh and Shu again, who I liked a lot before. Sadly, the main characters in this game are mostly quite boring folk. Arguing teens and clueless youths. Alec is also way too optimistic about everything. Goes too easily with the flow, I'd say.

Eventually the party encounters a special group, that is bent on restoring some old technology by any means necessary. Even with the 'Warning: Evil Energy' sign plastered all over everything, they still just have to do the same mistake as other people before. With no real motivation, other than blind ambition, this group is hard to take seriously. I wasn't really very interested in the story, and that's a shame, as I liked the story in the previous game a lot. It's like everything has been simplified and made compact this time around. It's just too small in every aspect to be really compelling.

Swing and Bang
Battles are, unfortunately, short and easy. What makes them easy is the area in which the characters can inflict damage upon. Quite soon on the first continent already, both Alec and Lutz have a special skill that does damage to an area of 13 squares in size. Take into account that the battle fields are usually less than 20 squares in each dimension, usually closer to 10, and there are only 3-7 enemies per battle, these skills are overkill. And if that's not enough, you have two characters that can equip guns. A machinegun does damage to 4 squares and shotgun to 8 squares, just to name two common weapons. Add to that a spell caster with 13 square spells aplenty, standard attacks, other than guns, become obsolete very quickly. One character has the ability to capture and then summon monsters to do damage or inflict status penalties or bonuses. Quite often capturing a tougher than average monster means that when you unleash it, it takes out all the enemies on the field. They're just that weak and unchallenging. Only boss battles have some challenge to them, though even so, I don't think I ever lost one.

In towns, after you reach a certain point in the game, you can start synthesizing items and weapons, by combining two or more items with each other. You can learn recipes for this in special Society offices scattered in towns, or you can just experiment by yourself. Experimenting is pretty useless in the early parts of the game though. You don't have much materials, and when you fail at an experiment (which you WILL, 99% of the time), you lose the items you used. All useful synthesizable items require expensive or rare ingredient to be made, so you're better off saving that one special ingredient for a recipe that will actually work. Synthesizing does provide access to some weapons, like shotguns and special swords and amulets, but other than that, it's not necessary, and not really worth the time and effort to be casually explored.

Old is gold?
The game looks old. Even for being a PSX title, and even for being a third title on the same console, the graphics aren't really impressive at all. Enviroments have been mostly updated to 3D, but with the camera looking at everything in a fixed angle, the 3d apect is quite pointless, and I liked the environments in previous titles better. Characters are still 2d, but somehow I think they don't look as good as before either. Some CG movies are included, and they're ok. Just not impressive or anything.

Music is... mediocre at best. I've heard tons of better soundtracks on even older games. The music gets repetitive and is simple, and there's very limited selection of it. To me, music can sometimes make a game. In this case, it doesn't. It's way too forgettable.

The conclusion
The game lasts for a solid 50-60 hours if you explore most of the jobs in guilds, and hunt down most of the wanted monsters. Usually I like it when an RPG is long, but the scale in which the story is presented, as well as the simple and overkill battles, could've been better in form of 20-30 hours of playtime. The story simply drags on for too long, and is accompanied by too many jobs that include running and talking to people for very limited rewards. It's not a bad game, just average at most. If you just like RPG's for their stories, and can ignore overly simplified battles and cliché story, this is a very playable game. To someone like me, looking for a purpose or goal in a game, this was a chore to complete.

Scoring
Visuals: 7/10
For a game of its age, the graphics are rather unimpressive. The 2d style of characters can be appealing, but in this case even that lacks fine-tuning. 3d graphics are pointless in a game like this, on PSX.

Audio: 7/10
Repetitive music, poor selection of tracks. Everything's forgettable.

Gameplay: 7/10
Battle skills are overkill, and battles require very little planning. It's fun at times, but there's hardly a challenge at any point in the game.

Lasting Value: 6/10
It does last, but for too long. I'm quite sure that very few would play this game twice, and I'm sure many people never finished it at all.

Overall: 6/10
I like Arc the Lad games, but this one just didn't feel much fun. Even though the previous title had some tedious jobs to do as well, this time it felt like completing them took ages, and they were not as interesting. It's playable, just not very interesting game.