Japanese role-playing game developer imageepoch, graduating from DS titles “Luminous Arc” and “Sands of Destruction” to its first home-console RPG, threw everything from the RPG textbook into “Arc Rise Fantasia.” And I mean everything.
Take, for instance, the concept of points to represent your characters’ status and abilities. “ARF” has not only hit points (HP), but MP, SP, AP, RP, DP and WP. On top of that, there are summons, guilds, sidequests, elemental magic, customizable costumes, chained attacks, optional “skit” cut-scenes and, heck, a casino.
Or look at “ARF’s” generic names, which smack of the “take regular words and change a couple letters” method of word generation. “ARF” gives us a God named Simmah, a wise elder named Zamuel and something called the Hozone.
Surprisingly, the resulting anthology of RPG elements is not just a resume for inamgeepoch, but a primer on how to make a straightforward, fun RPG. The voice acting is incompetent and the graphics pull the neat trick of resembling a Dreamcast game while slowing down your Wii, but “ARF” is comfort food for those who enjoy turn-based action.
“ARF” innovates only in that it assigns weapons no inherent statistics. Instead, each weapon is accompanied by a grid that you’re to fill with “Tetris”-like pieces that, say, give you 100 extra HP, and can be mixed and matched with other weapons. Each grid contains a piece that can’t be moved, and around which you must arrange auxilliary pieces, transforming the usually boring task of weapon management into a fun puzzle.
“ARF” is not an elegant game, and it’s not the Wii’s best RPG – that distinction still belongs to the overlooked “Chocobo’s Dungeon.” But for Wii owners looking for a genre exercise chock-full of familiar elements, it represents one time the nervous cook threw every spice he had into the soup, and it turned out good.
