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Showing reviews 6-10 of 14
 A very good, but underated tactical rpg. November 23, 2007
the invader zim (Tupelo, MS USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
First off, let's get this out of the way: this is not Final Fantasy Tactics or its Advance counterpart. I do not understand why people like to compare these two titles. Final Fantasy Tactics did not event the tactical rpg genre; I believe that belongs to the Fire Emblem series (they've been around in Japan since the late 80's). Also, I had more of a fun time playing this game than I did with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Another thing is, when this game was released back in August, the only tactical rpg for the ds at the time was Hoshigami Remix (which isn't too bad either). It's not going to be sometime till next year before we get a hold of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 here in the US. Now with that out of the way, let's talk about Luminous Arc.
Like I said before, this game is great. Not the best, but great nonetheless. Let's talk about the story first. Don't worry, I'm not giving away spoilers, but this isn't the best or most original story in the genre (then again, most stories in the rpg genre aren't, so that's not saying much). It comes off hilarious, though not necessarily in a good way. Even though, the characters, their development, and their dialogs are all pretty good, and can be funny a lot of the times. In fact, I found this to be more of the reason to keep going on in the game, just to see what would become of them. Though one thing about the dialoges I don't like is the redundent speaches they give. In fact, I don't think I've ever played the game with so much talking, with alot of it pointless and repetitive.
Anyway, then there is the gameplay. I like it a lot. It's easy to learn and use (especially if you love these types of games). Even though their is no class system in the game, it doesn't really hurt the game, as it gives the characters a more distinct personallity. Even though it's an easy game to control for the most part, using the stylus can be a problem every now and again because for some strang reason you can't select certian targets that are within range. This isn't a bad problem as it doesn't happen often. But when it does come up, just switch to the directional pad controls (which is cool, because you can do this on the fly, even during battle).
Finally, there are the graphics and music/sound. This is some of the best 2-D graphics that I've seen, and it's also a bright game too. My only complaint is why the designers didn't make the battle stages in rotatable 3-D. This isn't real bad, because the 2-D stages never affect the gameplay. Also, their is a cool animated intro to the game. As for the music, it's great, and one of the best things of the game. Another cool thing is the voice acting. The acting can be a tad melodramatic at times, but it does add personality to the characters. I was suprised that VO was even in the game.
So, is this game for you? Well, if you want to get into the tactical rpg genre, then yes. If you are a veteran of the aforementioned genre, yes again. If you think that Final Fantasy Tactics and it's Advance counterpart are the be all and end all of the genre, and nothing can even come close to them, then no, you won't like this game at all. It's not the most original or the best in the genre, but it's good, darn good. Definitely the money it's worth.
 Atlus once again provides us with a great SRPG February 4, 2008
Dan (Carmen, San Diego)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I bought this game on a whim; all I knew was that it was a Final Fantasy Tactics-style game, and a little about the storyline. Knowing that Atlus and Nippon-Ichi (who used to have Atlus publish many of their games) tend to produce the BEST SRPGs, I decided to give it a shot. I was not at all disappointed. For me, it came the closest to capturing the feel of the original Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT) of any game in the genre since FFT's release. Granted, you can't really customize your characters (each one serves basically one purpose), but the game play style, coupled with the story line, really brought me back to that first play through FFT, which is what turned me onto this genre of games in the first place. With a storyline focusing on religion and political intrigue, the story is phenomenal. My only issue with the game is with the controls. There are a few options (left-handed stylus use, right-handed stylus use, and D-pad use), but I think if they would have just allowed you to use a combination of stylus and D-pad it could have been great. Otherwise, fantastic game with a great story, that I think deserves more credit than it normally gets.
Fun story, aggravating controls September 20, 2008
Lee G. Gilman (Charlotte, NC, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Luminous Arc is one of those otherwise good games that gets dragged down by a couple major flaws. I'll get the bad points out of the way first.
The first major problem is gameplay. It's a grid-based strategy/tactical RPG, but that by itself isn't the problem. The stylus control should have been intuitive: Touch the square that you want the character to move to or tap the foe you want to attack/ally you want to heal. The problem lies in the fact that the controls are very imprecise. Often, you'll want to select a villain to attack but the game registers that you've selected an ally to attack instead, and sometimes it'll select the wrong target five times before it gets it right. This is one case where you'll be glad it asks you to confirm your action first. Even more often though, it won't register your taps AT ALL, leaving you mashing the touch screen repeatedly and yelling out in frustration.
The second problem is the imbalance of characters. One character in particular, Leon, stands above the rest as far as dealing damage is concerned. The game tries to balance this by making it harder to level him up (by not giving him any skills to buff/heal others), but this can be overcome by level grinding and using him to kill all the enemies. Once Leon gains a specific skill, he can mow down all but the strongest bosses in at most two hits, taking the "strategy" out of the equation.
Which is a shame, because this is a charming little game otherwise. The graphics look nice, the voice acting is well done, and the story, though a bit cliche, has its own charms. There's a good bit of comedy relief too, usually delivered through one liners or the story's more eccentric characters. The game took special care to give each of its characters their own style and personality.
Luminous Arc isn't for the hardcore gamer, or anyone who becomes frustrated easily by unresponsive and imprecise controls. However, it's well-presented and is a good title to pick up and play, if you don't mind the rather broken controls. A sequel is coming out in time for the holidays this year, and I hope they address the controls. I'm a bit hesitant to preorder it for that reason alone.
 Too simple February 21, 2008
Nels Lindberg (Seattle, WA United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this tactical RPG from ALTUS in the hope that it would be "Disgaea" for the DS. It turned out to be Disgaea's cute pre-school age cousin. Sure, you maneuver characters on a grid of squares, do physical and magical attacks for damage, level characters, and can do special combination moves with multiple characters. However, the game lacks any sort of flexibility or depth. The number of available characters in your party is constrained by the story. The number and type of special moves are few, and the combination attacks are both underpowered, and inconvenient enough to not be worthwhile. The story was cutesy, and a bit confused: what you'd expect from a mediocre Japanese RPG. One thing I did like was that every time you leveled up a character, their HP and SP were reset to full strength. This both added a bit of interest to the gameplay, and made the game ridiculously easy to beat.
 I thought Atlus was better than this... October 4, 2008
Morgan J. Rodgers (Denver, CO USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was really disappointed with this game. I am a big fan of tactical rpgs; I bought my DS when I heard they were making a Fire Emblem for the system, and wanted to buy a srpg to hold me over until it came out. There were some good reviews for this game, and I know Atlus has put out some really good ones so I thought it would be the way to go.
First things first; I do not like jpop. So after hearing the opening music, I went straight into the settings and turned the game music off (a nice option). There is a good amount of voice acting, which I guess it cool to have, but the dialogue was sort of cheesy and some of the voices were really annoying (Nickolai, I'm looking at you) so that got turned off too.
Now the game. The graphics are sort of lacking, even by gba standards. The sprites are going for a FFT look, but they just don't hold up (even to gba fft). When units are on neighboring squares, for example, they tend to look like a big blob and you can't really distinguish between them. The animations are really basic "swing a sword". Spell graphics are nothing special. What really annoyed me are the "Flash drive" animations; these are your characters special attacks. Not only are they really simple, they didn't even make them orientable. So you see this animation that is totally unrelated to which direction your character is facing or attacking. kind of lame.
I guess for a game like this, the graphics are kind of secondary so I'll go on to the gameplay. For a strategy rpg, there is not much strategy involved. The maps are tiny (about 20x20 it mostly seemed). The enemy AI is dumb as dirt. I've actually had enemy bosses kill themselves by casting a spell with an area radius on one of my characters that was standing right next to them. There were a couple of hard missions, mostly the optional ones you can unlock (which you get basically nothing for completing), which were only difficult because you are outnumbered and outleveled. So you go and level up a bit, and come back. The fact that you regain all hp/mp when you level up also takes a lot of challenge out of the game; your healers basically never run out of mp, because the gain 30 xp for healing and then regain all their mp when they gain a level at 100xp.
I will also mention that leveling is kind of a pain for anyone but spellcasters. There are squares you can step on and it will sometimes let you choose to fight, sometimes it will force you to fight. But the enemies on these levels never change, even in their levels. So they will quickly start dying in a single blow, giving 1 or 2 xp to whoever kills them. Casting a healing or status affecting spell, however, gives 30 xp to a spell caster always. So they quickly outlevel everyone.
I could go on and on about problems with this game(I guess I already have), but I'll just say find something better. I put it down and went with my GBA Fire emblem (which has MUCH better graphics, and FE isn't really known for its graphics). I'll leave you with my final complaint: the enemies have no equipment in their inventory screen. So their are thieves you will fight, none of them holding any equipment, yet some of them swing imaginary swords at you and some shoot imaginary crossbows at you. wtf?!?
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