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help but begin to
feel attached to them because they come off as being so real.
A lot was put into their personalities that allows them to sink
their claws into players’ psyche and make them actually care about
their party members. Despite
some very noticeable clichés in the games overall narrative, the story
in TotS is very good; easily the strongest facet of the game.
But
while the storyline manages to side-step cliché, or at least make
players overlook it, the gameplay doesn’t fair so well.
Players go to different points in the world via a world map,
selecting their destinations and they visit new towns to stock up on
weapons and armor, while chatting it up with the town folk to dig up
some juicy clues too. It’s
the same thing we’ve seen in RPGs for decades now.
Thankfully
the battles help to save TotS’ gameplay from being totally mediocre.
Fights are your standard turn-based strategy experience, where
combatants take their turns to do their thing in order of their speed.
The way many of the fields are setup, players can take advantage
of obstacles and elevation to try and give themselves a tactical
advantage. What will be the
most difficult thing for many players to manage during combat is their
spirit stones. These are
essentially your magic points in the game.
In a fight it can be very tempting to use up your magic and
special moves quite quickly, as they are quite varied and can prove very
handy in a number of instances. Players
really need to learn to use these skills wisely, or else they’ll find
themselves in a pickle good and quick.
The true fun often comes in trying to find the quickest way to
dispatch a squad of enemies, if only for the personal challenge
involved. Overall, the
battles are very well paced, not flying by, but not dragging on either.
The only major problems that they suffer from is that animations
for casting spells run a little too long, and if an enemy drops items,
but you don’t pick them up before the battle ends, tough luck, you
don’t get them.
The
presentation in TotS is definitely not going to turn many heads though.
The detail and TLC just isn’t there, with a serious lack of
textures a lot of the time. Playing
the game, the presentation looks very much like an early PS2 title, most
notably Orphen: Scion of Sorcery. There
are a few levels that look very nice, but the bulk of the game’s
visuals are underwhelming. The
audio side of the coin fairs much better with some top notch voice
acting, and a generally catchy musical score (though there are some
guitar driven pieces that feel out of place next to the rest of the
tunes).
Arc
the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits doesn’t try to turn its genre on its
head. The game is simply
trying to be an entertaining outing in a familiar setting, and it
accomplishes this admirably. If
you’ve played all of your current PS2 role-playing games to death and
are looking for a new title in the genre to add to your library, this is
a title to seriously consider.
Mr.
Nash
July
20, 2003
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