First Impressions: Arc Rise Fantasia
Sat, August 7, 2010 at 4:01 PM First impressions are important. They let you know what you’re in for. They’re even more vital when you’ve just blown $60 on a game and you need to know whether or not to mourn the loss of your poor cash. In the First Impressions series of articles, I’ll spend an hour with a new game and document my experience. One hour is hardly enough to fully judge a game, but to partially judge it? It’ll do just fine.
-------------------------
;)
Not all beginnings are easily deciphered. Some experiences exude a mysterious aura that leaves one’s thoughts clouded. Not all things show their true selves immediately upon first viewing. Not every facet of an experience is always displayed at first glance, leaving more to be discovered with the passage of time.
Final Fantasy XIII, for instance, hides the fact that it apparently becomes a competently constructed game if only you sink 30 hours into it first. Limbo, without uttering so much as a word, captivates you while leaving you totally on your own to figure out what kind of experience you’re actually in for.
Other beginnings are more obvious. The first time a character uttered a single sentence in Arc Rise Fantasia I knew exactly what I was in for. Every cutscene, battle, town, and dialog afterward simply reinforced my initial impression. This isn’t a game that will perplex your poor brain as you desperately struggle with the quandary of whether to spend more time with it or not. I can guarantee that within five minutes of picking up a controller you’ll know whether this game is for you.
By the second sentence of dialog, I, for instance, had discovered that I was not one of the small percentage of gamers who could tolerate Arc Rise Fantasia.
This game seems to be made for a mysterious type of gamer who may or may not actually exist. It is carefully constructed to be of maximum appeal to those whose enjoyment of a game is directly proportional to the number of terrible cliches it contains. A game consisting of nothing but a series of these cliches must, by way of logical conclusion, be aiming to sell itself to those who love a nice trite line of dialog and favor predictability above all else.
At the least, one has to credit Arc Rise Fantasia for not limiting its mastery of cliches simply to overdone plot constructions or familiar gameplay elements. It extends its reach to a far more, shall we say, “meta” level; all the way to the quality of the experience itself.