Snes - Arcana Review

Arcana is a light first person dungeon crawl where you fight enemies and gain experience. There doesn't seem to be a sequel or anything else. It's a fairly short RPG with only six locations although the locations get bigger and bigger.

Gameplay and interface: 7/10

Like any other first person dungeon crawl, you view the action from your eyes and wander around using the arrow keys. You can have up to four members in your party. You, your spirit and up to two other human members. The story however dictates who joins you and who doesn't. You can't choose these members which is a shame. Combat involves you fighting monsters which are displayed as cards in keeping with the card theme. The borders of the card dictate what element the opponent is. Green is Earth, blue is Water, yellow is Wind, Red is Fire and grey or white indicates its neutral. Of course, each element is strong against another and weak against another. Earth is strong against Water, Wind against Earth, Fire against Wind, Water against Fire. It's fairly straight forward and simple. You can cast spells, use weapons and so on and so forth as in most RPG's. You can also run away. Having one of your human characters die is really bad and your quests immediately ends and you must reload the game which is annoying.

Perhaps the only thing of note are your spirits. You start off with the wind spirit and gradually get more until you have all four elemental spirits. All of them have the ability to heal and regain magic points as you walk around the dungeon and increase in ability as you increase in level. Although they are extremely weak in attacking, they have fair defense and more important have spells which can greatly help you. The most useful is probably the first spell of each which turns all the humans in the party from their neutral 'man' element into its corresponding element. This is useful for combating monsters which are weak against . However, the spell automactically affects everyone in your party which can be annoying when there are monsters from various elements. For example, you might encounter Earth monsters and Fire monsters and if you turn your party into say a Wind element then the Fire monsters will do substantial damage to you while if you turn into a Water Element then the Earth monsters will deal a large amount of damage to you. Still, despite this problem the spirits are usually quite useful and when one of them is destroyed you don't have to reload the game.

One more problem with the game is the names of the spells. Some of them are named Attribute and then a number which tells you nothing about what it can do. You have to look at the description at the spells menu to figure out what it does and what elements its good against. This is particularly frustrating in battle when you don't have these descriptions and have to guess what they are.

In a dungeon or town you can access the usual options like equipment, inventory and so on from the menu. When you're in a town, all you have to do is turn left or right to select the various places and press up to Fairly easy and simple. You generally do little except stock up on new items and equipment in towns although there is some interaction.

Storyline: 2.5/5

The storyline involves you Rooks, the last card master having to stop the evil empress Rimsala from being resurrected by the evil sorcerer Galneon. You'll have to find the three enchanted items to help you defeat her as well as all the spirits. Too cliche really. There are a few plot twists which are nice but even those just don't raise the plot of the game very high at all.

Graphics: 4/5

The graphics for the time are top-notch. Scrolling is smooth and the game reacts quickly to your commands. No pauses and waiting.

Level design: 3/5

Most of the dungeons or locations are fairly well planned out and there was minimal wandering except for the Ice Mines which were meant to be a maze. Enemies became progressively harder as the game progressed. The enemies in the beginning while at the end they were fairly respectable so I feel the difficulty level was appropriate. Once again, there were only six locations so the game so the game was shop. Nothing outstanding but neither anything too annoying.

Music and Sound: 4/5

I have to say the music tracks were actually quite good and varied although sound left much to be desired.

For: Satisfyingly short and simple. Good music. Good graphics for its time.

Against: Cliche plot. Nothing really amazing.