Arc Rise Fantasia - Nintendo Wii

I had very high hopes for Arc Rise, not to say I'm disappointed by it, just that there are a few annoyances I had to overlook before really getting into the game. After nearly a year delay from it's original US release, Arc rise comes at a time when there arent any Wii rpgs in play, so its a nice diversion from my party games and platformers. It has great graphics, a cool battle system, and likeable characters. If anything its very reminiscent of the Tales series, right down to the enemy encounters and skits. Though the production is great, it seems their budget ran short when came time to do the englisg voiceovers. HORRIBLE. I stayed with it a while, and when I found it unbearable, I looked for a Japanese option, which there isnt. I would even have settled for an option to turn the sound off and just read subtitles. There are slight hiccups n the framerate, as well. Honestly even with the crappy voices these aren't dealbreakers. If youre looking for a good RPG until Last Story hits, or if Xenoblade makes an american release, this is a good choice.

Arc Rise Fantasia (ARF) is yet another JRPG that has been boggled down by western media. ARF currently holds a whopping 64 score on metacritic. It just baffles me that a gem like this can slip through the cracks but yet a WRPG that is utterly broken in so many different ways can score a 92-96. Anyhow sorry for that mini rant, but let me explain why ARF is that gem I described. ARF is a return to the more classical PS1/PS2 era of JRPGs. There is lots of exploration, a decent story to be told, fantastic OST, solid round of characters, and the best of all DIFFICULTY! ARF is possibly one of the toughest classical style JRPGs I have played this generation outside of The Last Remnant (another gem that fell through the cracks). The game does not hold your hand, and it forces you to learn how to fight better, similarly to the Demon/Dark Souls games. This difficulty may be a turn off for new gamers who are just jumping in, but as a person who has been gaming for well over the last decade now, it was a joy to be had. I am absolutely tired of mind numbing games that hold no challenge. So I was overcome with joy when I died to that first boss battle, and the many that came after it. Hell even the final boss fight took me quite a few hrs to take out, after multiple deaths! I clocked out of ARF at 54ish hours. That involved me doing pretty much all of the side quests PRE-End Game. I still have not yet went back in to tackle the even more challenging bosses after the main game. So there are dozens of hours one could find themselves playing this game. If anyone elses review on here didn't make it clear enough. There is one glaring flaw with this game, and it is the voice acting. Half of the characters sound absolutely lifeless, while the other half do a decent job, but they aren't Ali Hillis, or Laura Bailey. If you are a fan of classical style JRPGs, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give this game a shot. We want more of this, support the developers who actually bring this stuff over. On a whole scale, I would actually rate ARF better than Xenoblade (Yes, I did import. Great game as well). ARF is a mix of Final Fantasy and Tales of. If you are a fan of either of those series then you will definitely enjoy this. 9/10 Quick Review: Postives: Deep story Solid Characters Fantastic OST Difficulty ~ YAYAYAYAYAY (Seriously, stop force feeding me easy games!!!!) Length of the game Negatives: Voice-Acting is fairly weak That Deep Story has quite a few terms that may get the player confused as hell. Luckily they added a dictionary to the game.

I do have to say that there were some nice plot twists to the game. However, the characters sometime came off as a little flat or just plain annoying. If there's nothing else its a solid game that should pass the time.

The Wii has very few RPGs as it is in its inventory and any new addition is a welcome one to the library of games for the system. Arc Rise Fantasia is a traditional JRPG that is similar in vein to the Tales of 'xxx' games that are popular recently, even down to the individual skits characters have with each other over the course of the game. Before my review, I want to get out of the way the two major gripes I have with this game: the voice acting is terrible and completely experience ruining. Its a good thing they included the option to turn off voices completely, so it honestly doesn't affect the game's score any. The second gripe is the completely predictable plot. Other than a early (within 2 hours) story twist that wasn't expecting, every other plot turn was quite visible a few hours out before it happened and you could just see the ending of the game half way through. Not to say it isn't a bad story, it is just cliched and overly predictable, but it keeps the game moving and the player moving through. The battle system is honestly where the game shines the most and where my biggest attention will be directed to. It is turned based with a order timeline of both player and enemy actions to give you a better sense of how each round will play out once you hit 'action.' You will utilize this bar immensely to decide how best to use your characters to acheive the desired results before the enemy can hop in and ruin your carefully laid plans. To understand what you can do, you must first understand AP, (action points), every action you do including just standing and waiting requires AP which is shared among the team. So this can limit and further strategize your overall gameplan for each round. Magic, Excel Acts, Attacking, Defending all require AP and you must carefully balance each character's action to get the most out of each round of battle. Magic is a bit more involved and revolves around a specific orb each character possesses. You can upgrade to add more magic slots to fill in different types of magic spheres to get magic spells. Depending on where you put magic in those slots, you can combine elements to form new ones/spells. Using like-minded spheres and placing them next to each other can improve your spell levels and enable you to cast higher level spells. Combine your magic casting with special arm forces that strengthen or improve your spells puts an even more dynamic wrinkle in the strategy of utilizing this asset. Speaking of Arm Forces, every weapon has an Arm Force you can unlock after using it for a certain amount of time that you can then take off and equip onto another weapon for any character. These abilities range from simple stat/element resistances, to special abilities like steal or master mage that increase magic effectiveness. By customizing your weapons as you see fit, you can basically 'define' a character in battle by the arm forces they have equipped. Its a very effective way of customizing a character to your specific preferences. This becomes very important when bosses start utilizing arm forces of their own, including ones that nullify yours. Excel Acts and Rogress summoning are simply icing on the battle system cake when it comes to choices on the battlefield. The Excel acts are specific to each individual character and can range from attack to healing to buffing and are typically quite good. You can combine excel acts on a single enemy if timed right to unlock a third, more powerful final finishing excel act involving all three characters. The same goes for magic, you can sync up similar spells on one enemy (or character) and create a more powerful spell with boosted results. Add in summoning and the ability to team attack, and sync up multiple hits for combos and you got yourself a excellent tactical battle system to have fun in. So what does this all boil down to? The enemy battles are nothing to really get worried over and indeed complete understanding of the battle system will make short work of most enemy parties. It is the boss battles that truly demand your full strategic attention and what will most likely get you killed. The bosses in this game will eat you up, and spit you out without giving you much of a chance to realize what happened! The battle system was basically designed around the bosses and this isn't more true than when going up against the final bosses or the myriad of optional bosses that populate the final areas of the game. If you're look for a deep battle system, you can't go too wrong with the one found in Arc Rise Fantasia. Now that I've finished gushing about the battle system, the rest of the game presentation is actually quite good. The dungeon areas are amazingly short and this is actually a good thing. It keeps the flow going and speeds along the game faster. It can also be bad because of the boss battles which can stop your progress short. If you are unable to fully utilize the system to your advantage to beat the boss, you're probably left to grind a bit before trying again which can be annoying after grinding for the 15th boss in a row. (each boss doesn't give you a break, there are no true 'easy' bosses) Graphics are nice and do their job well as does the sound. Music is very vague and there are only a few times where I actively noticed that there was any playing at all. So as far as soundtrack goes, its quite unremarkable. After 80+ hours and all quests and bosses finished, I dare say I really enjoyed this game, not so much for the overall story, presentation of it, but for the truly immersive battle system. It starts off simple, I'll admit, but once all aspects are fully unlocked (about 4-5 hours in), it really starts getting interesting and quite fun to play. I'd honestly say it was the battle system alone that tugged me through the entire game from beginning to finish rather than story or characters. So despite all this good praise, the game can only get 4 stars, because a battle system alone shouldn't be the sole defining feature of a game. The rest has to match too, but it gets a solid 4 for being a worthy entry in the Wii RPG library.

This is the best RPG for Wii that I've played so far (and I've played most of them). It feels like a classic and I found the overall game play rather fun. The plot is linear most of the game, but you can freely explore the world once you get the plane(?) thing (it been a while since I played, so I can't really remember what it is haha) There are side quests and you can collect different outfits which usually trigger additional events (kind of like Tales of games). The outfits are only visible in the menu screen though; they don't change your appearance during gameplay. The characters were good and surprisingly not too cliche (A little, but I've definitely seen a lot worse). I enjoyed the plot as well. The only problem I had with the game was the voice acting. In the beginning I wanted to mute my TV, but it eventually got better toward the middle of the game or so (or maybe I just got used to it lol). Bottom line: if you are looking for a RPG for the Wii, give this one a shot.

So I start the game and then there is a nice introduction and the story looks interesting but the voices are a bit annoying so I turn them off and then the gameplay is good so I play a little more but then I'm annoyed by the lack of voices so I turn them back on for like 15 min but then they annoy me again so I close the game. That is basically what happens to me every time I try to play this game . Each time I start at the beginning because I don't remember clearly the story and each time I play for about 2-3h and then I get bored by the silence or annoyed by the voices. If I didn't have a backlog of games so big this could be a good game but with the boring silence or the awful voices it's at the end of my list.