In the past few years a company I have never heard of before have delivered some truly great games on several different platforms; that company being Atlus. Atlus have worked in Japan for many years and now are bringing over some great games to the European shores; they’ve amazed me with titles such as Persona 3 on the PS2, Trauma Center on the Wii and now Luminous Arc on the DS. Now before I go into how much I love Atlus’s back catalog of awesomeness, why don’t we look at Luminous Arc.

Luminous Arc is a Strategy Role Playing game, following the footsteps of the SRPG’s before it such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Vandal Hearts. The game boots to a beautiful fully rendered FMV backed by a great music track. You can tell the moment you turn the game on that the developers liked making this game, if I didn’t know any better I would say the FMV was ripped from the opening of an anime.

From the moment you start the game you are greeted with 2D snapshot dialog one character on the left and right with text at the bottom. The difference from the standard DS game and somewhat of a surprise is the amount of the conversations that are voiced. The voice acting in the game isn’t fantastic but it isn’t terrible, it does its job and it’s nice that I recognize some of the voice actors from animes I’ve watched in the past. I know several ‘otakus’ will be upset to hear that Japanese voice acting wasn’t included. I feel your pain.

The game is based around ‘the Garden Children’, a group of specially trained orphan warriors, who follow the ways of the church and god, trained to hunt down monsters and fight Witches that have started to reappear in the world after a 1000 year absence. each one of the Garden Children are trained in a special area, whether it be Knight, Archer, Ninja or Church Mage (your standard character class types) with a few interesting types being made available later on in the game.

These Garden Children are quested with hunting down Witches and killing them as they go against god (naughty Witches). Although this sounds very bland and stale the story mixes things up quickly and never takes itself too seriously so the story isn’t a bore.

Combat in the game is just like any other SRPG out there for people who have never played a SRPG its all about turn based, grid combat. You choose up to 8 of the characters you currently have in your party and go into battle, moving each unit one by one as their turn is made available. Characters gain EXP not through killing an enemy, but only by attacking and they level every 100 points of EXP they receive. The system works quite well for the game with skills rationed for you as well as magic given every few levels, it just clicks and because of its light approach I feel it would be good for a beginner in SRPG’s.

The touch screen comes into use here, but the perspective of the battle makes it somewhat hard to choose what you want to do, I would recommend switching to standard D-pad controls to avoid frustration. this is quite a shame as that I pretty much the only time the touch screen use is used, apart from skipping text or picking choices from a menu, the DS’s features almost go untouched. In battles the top screen displays current character stats as well as enemy stats with damage amounts and hit percentages etc, but that’s all of the dual screen use really. It’s a shame but it doesn’t take away from the game itself.

Outside of combat its very linear unfortunately, traveling is done by warping from place to place, having a chat with someone, battling and moving on. It’s not exactly great, but the story and combat manage to keep it together. Old Skool SRPG fans won’t care too much about those problems but for a gamer new to SRPG it could be a very big disappointment.

The game soundtrack is definitely one of its strongest points, the instrumental music is fantastic and very fitting as well as the main opening theme being sung by a female Japanese vocalist, it all fits together in a great package, just wish there was Japanese voice acting. Graphics are every bit as good as the music, each character has great design and stands out well, although in game conversations aren’t animated, just with the usual static image with a different facial expression. It’s nothing out the norm.

For all of this games production value and effort they certainly did miss a few key things, the biggest of which is a good frame rate. The game runs smoothly in battles, between 50 to 60 frames without issues until about half way through the game, when you have more characters and enemies on screen at one time, the game chugs like an old train. It’s unavoidable unfortunately and as much as I tried to get round it, it’s just not possible to avoid and is a really unfortunate part of the game.

Multiplayer is a great part of the game with local multi-card play and online play also. They do suffer the same slow down in single player, but not to the same extent. player will have to play quite a lot of single player before they can attempt multiplayer however, as the game forces you to play up to chapter 13 before it lets you access the multiplayer menu. I think this is to make sure gamers have a good level party before hand as well as more than 8 players to choose from.

Closing Comments

Luminous Arc oozes Japanese fanboy gifts, it has good depth but is shallow enough for SRPG beginners to jump in and not be overwhelmed. the game takes around 24 hours to complete and is a joy all the way through with enjoyable story and lovable characters, even though it suffers from bad points I still heartily recommend it to RPG fans, old and new alike.

Score 8.8

+ Great visuals

+ Enjoyable combat

+ Likable characters

- Bad case of lag both in single and multiplayer variants

- Not too wonderful English voice acting, would have liked Japanese as a option

- Not enough freedom