#55: Arcana

Hal America with a non-sports game?

Arcana is a first person dungeon crawling RPG game that I vaguely remember renting a few times as a kid. All of the characters and enemies are represented by cards which have different elemental associations and which have cute two-step animations in combat. Guy standing in a ready stance -> guy swinging a sword. That sort of thing.

No Teefa, the pleasure is _mine_.

The game actually has a text intro with some plot backstory which is really nice! I live on an island that's been at war for a really long time. The biggest city had an evil advisor perform a coup and become king and things are looking grim. A long lost friend shows up and tells me I need to go seal some cave. Only I can do it as I am the last living Card Master! I definitely can see being a Card Master! My character seems a little leery of my long lost friend since his father is an advisor to the evil advisor. My friend assures me he's nothing like his father, honest, and tells me to take his pretty assistant along for the adventure. Deal!

Intense music? Must be a boss fight!

I cleared out most of the first level of the dungeon (it reminds of of Wizardry V with the stone walls and the rudimentary map) and picked up some treasure chests and such. While trying to figure out what the stuff I found did I discovered that Rooks and Teefa have no equipment on, which explains why they attack for very small numbers. I should have checked before I left town. But really, which starting the main character off with no gear is an annoying buy standard situation I'm a little surprised that the tag-along assistant who knew she was going into a dungeon has no gear of her own. "Hi, I want to come on an adventure with you. Oh, and I'm naked. Is that going to be a problem?" No problem here, ma'am!

At any rate I went back to town, bought some gear, and started swinging for 7 times as much damage. I killed the boss of the first floor and went up to the second floor. Explored around there a bunch, found the boss of that floor, and fought him a bit. By this point I'd run out of mana so I couldn't heal anymore. But Rooks was full so I didn't see the need to drink my ether. Teefa was low health and her name was flashing red but what could go wrong? Even if she went down Rooks and Sylph would win the fight and I could go on or go back to town. WRONG!

Turns out this game actually doesn't abstract away death behind some 'swoon' condition. If one of your party members dies, that's it. Game over.

I actually think this is a pretty good game mechanic assuming the fights aren't so rough that people get gibbed, and that certainly wasn't the case here. I could have healed her to full at the cost of a consumable. I just didn't think I'd need to. But since I hadn't saved state I would have to go back to when I went back to town and buy weapons. Which would be fine, but I had enough to get a feel for this game again.

That said, the music was good. I like the layout even with the combat seeming pretty trivial thus far. I remember there being a whole elemental system that mattered. Sylph could turn my party into air elemental if that became relevant. Pretty sure in the plot my long lost friend backstabs us as soon as I seal the thingy. I am actually interested to reload and play some more to see what happens.

Rating: A