Ark’s on hiatus

I’ve tried.

I really tried to get into Ark the Lad. I think I gave it about 4 or 5 hours and I just have no motivation to continue at this point. The game is just not interesting to me: the story is bland and basically nonexistant and the combat is plain vanilla with little promise of anything better in the future. Nothing about Ark inspired me to write. I could be wrong but I suspect I’ve seen all there is to see from Ark the Lad.

Sorry old chap but I’m going to put you on the shelf. I may get you back out again, but for right now it’s time to say goodbye.

I think I’m going to start Suikoden 1 next. It should be interesting as I only have a copy of the disc itself (thank you local pawn shop) and no manual.

 

Hmmm… how to proceed?

I’ve really hit a brick wall with gaming in the last week. Between watching Season One of The Sopranos and reading my newly acquired Ultimate X-Men comics on DVD-ROM, I’ve been pretty busy and just haven’t felt like messing around with Arc and friends.

But I did put some more time into it today. It’s difficult to know how to write about a strategy RPG. Do I spend time talking about how the group met up with Chongara the merchant and he agreed to help them find the Light Guardian because he was once saved by Arc’s father?

I could talk about how we made it through a battle with lots of flying bats and an exploding Stone Golem thing and did actually find the Light Guardian.

I’m thinking none of that is too interesting to either write about or to read. Especially as the story doesn’t seem to be Arc the Lad’s strong point.

I could talk about character development but there really isn’t any outside of what item to equip or pushing my characters through level after level and watching them acquire abilities.

I still need to think about how I want to approach strategy RPG’s. For a regular RPG, battles are a near-constant thing so specific battles tend not to be too important unless a boss is involved. For a game like Arc there are only a limited number of battles so they really become the centerpiece of the game. I’m just not sure I want to spend my time on a blow-by-blow of each battle.

Maybe I should play games like Arc the Lad, Vandal Hearts, Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics on my PSP now that the hackers have figured out how to enable that? I could give a running update as things progress but I might not have as much to say and I’m not sure I could take screenshots.

I’ll have to give this some more thought.

 

Arc, the Ark and Power Stone

I’ve been working on Arc the Lad these last couple of days and I’ve put about two and a half hours into it so far. This means I might be a quarter of the way through the game if the estimates of its length I’ve read about are correct.

I like the game so far but it certainly is different from the other games I’ve played recently. I just finished my seventh battle and this game really reminds me of Shining Force. It takes a strategy RPG approach to battles. You move your characters one at a time and can either attack, use a special power or use an item. It even has the translucent movement grid on the battlefield that I remember so well from my Sega Genesis days.

The story isn’t particularly gripping. A girl named Kukuru agreed to put out an eternal flame to avoid being forcibly wed to someone. This was A Bad Thing as putting out the flame unleashed Badness on the world. A young boy named Arc is following in the footsteps of his missing (and presumed dead) heroic father and meets up with Kukuru and together they try to right the wrongs in the world. Along the way the two acquire a couple of other companions: Poco the timid marching band member, Tosh the noble warrior who seeks to avenge the death of his father and Gogen the powerful wizard from the past who is released from his prison and guides the group.

They also met up with a pretty green Forest Spirit who tells them something of their task ahead.

The graphics in the game aren’t cutting edge but scenes like the one above do look nice and definitely are an improvement on the Genesis-era graphics of Lunar.

Arc returns home only to find that his house has been destroyed and his journey ahead will be difficult.

I think I might have drifted off but apparently Arc needs to find an Ark in order to defeat the Big Bad. We’re not sure who that is at this point but there have been a couple of scenes of a mysterious figure in a mirror putting evil plans in motion so I’m guessing he’s the guy. But first we need to find the Power Stones. Probably not the awesome Dreamcast fighting games but one can only hope.

 

Arc the Lad

Arc the Lad was released in Japan for the PlayStation on June 30, 1995. It and the sequel Arc the Lad 2 were originally intended to be one game but were apparently broken up into two games for some reason. The first installment is generally regarded as a short (~10 hours) game while Arc 2 is a fairly mammoth game.

Arc the Lad was a commercial success in Japan and spawned two sequels on the original PlayStation and two further games on the PlayStation 2 as well as an anime series. One pioneering feature in the PSX games is the ability to save your game after completing Arc 1 and then load this data into Arc 2 to unlock extra content then save your game after completing Arc 2 and load it into Arc 3. I’ll certainly be doing this to see what happens.

Working Designs apparently wanted to bring the Arc the Lad games to the United States for years but were unable. They eventually did acquire the license and released the Arc the Lad Collection on April 18, 2002. You can read more about it at Mobygames or Wikipedia.

The Arc the Lad games are also noteworthy for taking a lite strategy-RPG approach to battles similar to the Shining Force games. While apparently not the deepest of battle systems, this will definitely be a nice change of pace from the last two games I played.

One last thing to comment on is the Arc the Lad Collection packaging by Working Designs. I was fortunate to snag a complete copy off Ebay for around $45 and it’s quite a package. There’s the game discs themselves, a Making of Arc the Lad Collection disc, the hardcover manual and then something called an Omake box with little stand-up figures inside. I have no idea what to do with those. All in all a very lavish set for the three PSX games. I can’t wait to get started.