Luminous Arc (NDS)
2007 Atlus/Marvelous

In a Nutshell: A shallow, but adequate strategy RPG. Spoiler alert! The Church is actually kinda evil!

Ever since I started sampling strategy games, FFTactics and its ilk, I’ve had a hard time going back to old-fashioned ones due to the tendency for the combatants standing in neat rows and taking turns hitting each other. Especially since said games usually feature ‘rag tag guerilla fighters’ battling wild animals, and not say, the British Army of the 1800’s. But, I digress.

Save the copy of Super Robot Wars W I’ve been playing on a flash cart for some time, there’s a lack of strategy RPG for the DS, for the most part. At least ones without a horribly intrusive touchscreen gimmick. Luminous Arc takes a page straight out of FFTA’s book, presenting a mainly-cheery isometric-view SRPG with a touch of that psyuedo-moe-game art style as seen in… everything else Atlus has released since about 2003.

Luminous Arc is a Japanese RPG which features a band of witch hunters from the Luminous Church on a quest to save the kingdom from an ancient evil. Please take five minutes and base a plot around those facts in your head.

….

Back?

So, Alph, a spiky-haired young warrior and his band of childhood friends embark on a journey to rid the kingdom of Witches, only to meet one and discover through a series of betrayals that their superiors in the Church have sinister ulterior motives, and it is the Witches who actually maintain the balance of nature and order!

So, it isn’t exactly the most original plot line as these things go. Alph meets the terminally contrary, grey haired Lucia, and they fall into a sort of passive-aggressive interpretation of a relationship. (One of the more realistic ones I’ve seen, come to think of it. She acts like she owns him and he pledges to protect/serve her about every five minutes.) But it’s presented in an attractive way, with gobs of CG scenes and numerous portraits for the dialogue and interlude scenes. The battle system is pretty straightforward (though turning the stylus controls off is virtually a MUST, due to iffy sensitivity selecting specific squares.) There are a few rough spots here and there that feel like they should have been caught in play testing- for example, you can only control what way you face at the end of a turn if you attacked/acted BEFORE moving- if you move then attack, you’re stuck facing the direction you attacked in last, which often leaves your attacker with their back to the main hordes.

The experience system is fairly broken as well; your characters all need a mere 100 XP to advance, regardless of level. Fighters’ earnings in battle seem to scale with experience (in that wailing on level 1 foes at level 20 gives them jack shit), but healers and anyone with a support skill will earn 30 experience for every use provided it’s on someone other than themself alone. (Self-healing and buffs gives you a paltry 3 exp.) The result of all this though is in the later portions of the game, support characters like Nikolai, who I used heavily for his Atk/Def/Res-up skills out-leveling your warriors pretty steadily. Oh, and that’s not the best part. Every time you level up, you also get a full HP/MP refill. As any seasoned veteran of the genre might tell you, that’s fucked up.
Each character also has a set of “Flash Drive” skills, which are earned in battle by storing up FP. These are basically supercharged versions of their usual skills, normally with some kind of status impairment attached. FP can also be used for “Synergy” attacks late in the game between multiple characters- but the Synergies seem to be pretty useless since all members in the attack need a full gauge, and unloading three level 1 Flash Drives per character usually does more than one Synergy move. They do at least come with more CG portraits, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The other thing making this game differ from the usual is the Intermission system where you get to win items and such by talking with your troops. The dialog choices bring to mind the infamous Japanese Dating Sim genre, though they’re fair enough to let you cheer up the male team members as well. They just act less blushy and enamored.

And to pad things out further, there’s something of a crafting system using rune stones called Vitae, which can add attack power and elemental abilities to your weapons, seemingly at random (two Thunder runes on the weapon of a Thunder elemental character produced a Nature-elemental weapon?) At any rate I have to confess I haven’t messed with it much as there hasn’t been any maps that I haven’t been able clear without a detour to raise a few levels. It’s not an especially hard or intricate game. In fact the only real challenge comes from the story battles that try to utterly pound you with superior numbers of overpowered foes. The aforementioned broken experience system even makes that easy, as recklessly using MP-burning special skills will level you up quickly for a full HP/MP refill, basically breaking the ‘strategy’ of the game down to:

Get behind a guy and let fly with everything you got in hopes of leveling with the experience earned performing the action
If a healer can’t make it into the fray fast enough, heal/buff someone within range to keep their own experience rising

The game does have a few nice touches, though. All of the voice is a nice touch, particularly characters calling out when it’s their turn (I’d love to see that more often, it lends more personality than the normal ‘cursor is forced towards next guy’ animation.) The overall presentation is pretty nice, even if the sprite attack animations are rather limited. And even if the plot is pretty much a rehash of nearly every Japanese RPG with a vaguely Catholic organization within it, it’s pulled off with the same bizarre, nearly hypnotic flair of… every other Japanese RPG. There’s a largely-absentee mentor figure, a shy healer, a terminally contrary love interest, a boastful swordsman, a sheepish younger brother, and an effeminate intellectual with a perverted streak that earns him HI-LARIOUS (unseen) thrashings at the hands of the female cast. Hell, there’s even an anachronistic ninja and samurai to make sure the bases are covered. So it’s no Shakespeare, but at the same time, within the DS’s little pond it’s also about the only Generic Japanese SRPG of quality I can think of. So, if you don’t mind it being eerily similar to something else you’ve likely played before, Luminous is worth a play through.

Oh yeah, and there’s wi-fi play too. So think of it as a somewhat femmey Final Fantasy Tactics Advance you can play online.

Well, back to trying to convince myself that earning a heart icon with an arrow through it for a dashing Arc Knight isn’t totally gay!

Addendum: I just found out the online play has no level-matching, making it possible- nay, likely, to find yourself impossibly outleveled and outgunned.