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Average in every sense of the word.

Arc Rise Fantasia is a new Japanese RPG coming from the developers of Image Epoch to the Nintendo Wii, a system that to date isn't exactly known for its strong JRPG presence here in the States. That said, while gamers might be clamoring for some RPG love on the system, Arc Rise Fantasia isn't what I'd call a great representative of that genre. It definitely grew on me more and more as I played it, but the presentation side of things has some definite flaws, and overall a lot of the mechanics felt pretty derivative of other RPG's, most notably the Tales series from Namco Bandai (the team behind this game has had previous experience there as well).

The main protagonist of the game is a man named L'Arc, a young mercenary working with his friend Alf, the Prince of the local ruling kingdom that L'Arc resides in. A battle against Feldragons causes L'Arc to encounter a mysterious young girl called Ryfia, a Diva or Priestess of a religious sect known as North Noireism. A few story events occur shortly into the game that pit these two as companions for the remainder of the adventure, and along the way you'll gain access to other characters like you'd expect in any standard RPG title. The cast of characters presented here are pretty generic, you've got the wandering mercenary, Pirate with a heart of gold, spunky sorceress, and so on, so the game manages to hit all the right buttons but fails to do anything exemplary with the formula. It's also not helped by some lackluster voice acting that is often devoid of emotion and gravitas, and the game probably reflects some of the worst voice acting I've heard in recent years outside of the atrocious PS2 title called Chaos Wars.

If you're able to get past the awful voice acting (there's no option for a Japanese voice / English sub combo here unfortunately), then you'll probably grow to enjoy Arc Rise Fantasia, but I don't think you'll really fall in love with the title. It does have some interesting things going for it, most notably in the combat system, but even that feels a bit like a mash up of things that have come before it. When you're in combat, you have a certain number of Action Points, or AP, that you can spend on moves and activities. Everything you do in a turn involves using AP, whether that's attacking, using magic, or simply using a curative item. Depending on how helpful that particular action is, the AP will be higher or lower. For instance, a basic attack will cost you 2 AP, but a summoning spell referred to as a Rogress in the game, will generally cost you almost all of your current AP points. What this means is that it is possible to have characters attack or do some other action more than once per turn, but there is a turn meter at the bottom of the screen to show you how those actions will stack up in relation to your current opponent.

Magic is a bit different in Arc Rise Fantasia as well. The game gives each character a number of orb slots, starting at one, with a particular orb to use that correspond to one of four elements. Opening up more slots and placing more gems of the same type will unlock higher levels of your basic magic attack, but placing gems from different fields can lower your level (but give you some more diversity in battle). Magic attacks don't correspond to MP like in most RPG's, instead you need to spend money at vendors to unlock uses, which dictates how many times you can use a magic attack before needing to recharge. When you start off you can only perform one magic attack at a time, but you can quickly buy more levels along the way. I honestly thought the system was needlessly convoluted, and while I grew to understand the system I felt like it was being a little more involved just for the sake of being something new.

However, one of the highlights of the game is the way it approaches weapons. You can buy or find new weapons for your characters, but equipping them does nothing to your stats. Instead, each weapon has three levels which earn points as you level up your character. As you level up with the weapon, you'll unlock skills within that weapon, and you'll gain access to a grid for each weapon that lets you mix and match skills from other weapons across all your characters, allowing you to slot these skills in and give some diversity to your cast. It's a neat system that allowed for some cool customization, and it's definitely one of the better thought out things about Arc Rise Fantasia.

Additionally, combat is pretty quick in the game, which is great considering the number of encounters you'll get into. The game doesn't have random encounters, but the overworld that you'll explore is pretty densely populated with monsters. It is possible to avoid them for the most part, but the boss fights end up being so challenging (which I think is a good thing) that you'll quickly realize that you're better off not avoiding the basic encounters whenever possible. Yes, this does mean that the game benefits from a bit of grinding, but the load times are short and the actual fights are quick enough that grinding rarely felt like a chore here. That and the battles are usually pretty flashy affairs to watch, so at least they're not hard on the eyes either.

The rest of the game is pretty decent looking as well, but I think the overworld is pretty plain in comparison to the city design. The dungeons kind of fall into a bland description as well, oftentimes consisting of small corridors with a few enemy encounters spread out, and not a lot of exploration involved. There's the occasional treasure chest tucked away into a dead end or two, but outside of that the game dungeons are linear paths to the boss encounter. Like I mentioned, I found the boss fights to be a lot of fun though, and definitely challenging providing a fair number of game over screens for me along the way, so that was nice to see for a change.

Also, like I mentioned earlier, the game does feel an awful lot like a Tales game from Namco Bandai. The game director of Arc Rise Fantasia did have some experience working with a Tales title at Namco Bandai at one point, and a lot of that shows here. The overworld set-up reminds me a great deal of something like Tales of Vesperia or Legendia, and the way character dialogue and scenes will consist of a single character image with a bunch of dialogue text is definitely reminiscent of that series. There's even the optional dialogue that'll pop up on occasion requiring you to hit a button to view it, which is 100 percent taken from the Tales series. Combat isn't quite the same though, it is still menu based and not direct input commands, so there are some differences present.

Overall, I think if you're a Wii only owner and you enjoy JRPG's, you'll probably find Arc Rise Fantasia to be a breath of fresh air. There's not a great deal that can compete with this particular style of game on the system right now, and it certainly has some highlights to it. If you're coming to this after playing a number of RPG's on other systems though, I think you'll be painfully more aware of the shortcomings here than the things it does well, and like I said, that awful VO work is definitely a large hurdle to get over. I do think it's worth checking out for RPG fans in general though, but I can't suggest that you rush out and buy it right away, there's nothing here that I found exemplary or genre defining to say the least.