Arcana Heart

Rating Teen Genre action Publisher Atlus External Links Official Arcana Heart Website

Title: With a cornucopia of titles coming out early on in 2008, Arcana Heart is definitely pulling the rear of this chuck wagon. A bunch of fighting anime females is best left to the grips of adolescent television, not adolescent gaming. Chances are I wouldn’t be making this comment if the women were nude. Chances are equally as good that even if they were, this is one of the most asinine control systems I have ever seen in a fighting game. Four attack buttons, with one of them apparently activating jet boots installed in the ankles of every fighter. It’s great that button mashing is now severely limited, but so is everything else.

Having a second billing as a customizable fighting experience, each fighter can be paired with an Arcana. All this really does, as far as I can see, is add to the list of fighting moves. There are no noticeable advantages of pairing up any Arcana with any particular person, except that they are all paired during the story arc. Make a reason for me to try out various fighter/Arcana combinations, other than a moves list, and you have a workable deal. Otherwise, it’s a game full of tack-ons.

Speaking of tack-ons, there are tons of extra pictures to unlock. No characters, no stages, no music, no videos, no nude vidoes, just pictures. How do you collect some of these pictures? Finish the story mode, finish the arcade mode, and my personal favorite, select each character at the selection screen in each mode, including Training, at least ten times. Insert head through controller. This isn’t incentive! All this does is force you to waste time in the hopes that you are getting something extra to warrant that “Partial Nudity” disclaimer on the box.

Load times, load times, load times. Half, HALF, of my gaming experience was full of VS. screens and intro speeches that I couldn’t skip. No, staring at it a hundred times is not going to make me like it any better that I already don’t. This isn’t the Street Fighter days. I already know who’s going to be matched up because we’ve picked them on the selection screen. I don’t need a reminder, I don’t need a ten-second intro song, I just need to kick someone’s face in. Is that too much to ask?

Regardless of how clean the graphics are, and how decent the game soundtrack is, If there were only one rule in the gaming world, that rule should be: “Atlus should never make fighting games.”

Ever.