| Arc Rise Fantasia | 
| From: Ignition Entertainment Ltd
Category: Video Games
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $33.95
as of 9/7/2010 19:38 EDT details
You Save: $6.04 (15%)
New (14) Used (4) from $33.95
Seller: bookie1049
Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 580
Platform: Nintendo Wii
Genre: role_playing_games
ESRB: Teen
Media: Video Game
Edition: Standard
Discs: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Batteries Included: No
Age: 12 - 20 years
Operating System: Nintendo Wii
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: 400047
Model: 400047
UPC: 893384000472
EAN: 0893384000472
ASIN: B001NCARPW
Publication Date: June 30, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | From the developers who created the highly lauded Luminous Arc | | • | Combines high quality 3D graphics and modern gameplay | | • | Classic Japanese high fantasy role-playing | | • | Music by legendary composer Yasunori Mutsuda | | • | Over 20 hours of gameplay |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Arc Rise Fantasia, winner of the Best Wii RPG" from IGN at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2009, is a new turn-based RPG with a beautiful, anime-inspired Japanese art style. Players will jump into the shoes of L'Arc, a calm and composed mercenary, who sets out to defend the Meridian Empire from an impending invasion of ferocious creatures. After assembling a party of friends, each with a unique set of abilities, players will embark on a perilous journey across an overworld filled with deadly enemies and treacherous dungeons. While strategically queuing up attacks, players can summon mystical creatures and work with their party members to execute massive attacks. Arc Rise Fantasia features deep gameplay, top-notch production values, and an unforgettable story line--Wii owners who have been pining for a massive fantasy epic will definitely have their patience rewarded. Normal and Expert game modes ESRB Rated E for Everyone
Amazon.com Product Description
Jump into the shoes of L'Arc, a calm and composed mercenary, who sets out to defend the Meridian Empire from an impending invasion of ferocious creatures. Assemble a party of friends, each with a unique set of abilities, players will embark on a perilous journey across an overworld filled with deadly enemies and treacherous dungeons. While strategically queuing up attacks, players can summon mystical creatures and work with their party members to execute massive attacks. 
Over 20 hours of gameplay!View larger. | 
Classic Japanese high fantasy role-playing action! View larger. | 
Combines high quality 3D graphics and modern gameplay. View larger. | 
An epic role-playing game. View larger. |
Synopsis
Arc Rise Fantasia is set in the Meridian Empire. Creatures called "Contaminant Dragons" are causing a lot of trouble as they pass the Meridian in flocks. If one is killed, the resulting explosion poisons the local area. When the empire receives word that a massive horde has its sights on the capital of Diamant, it immediately sends out an army to fight them, including L'Arc, a cool and collected novice mercenary, and his friend Alf, the beloved prince and second in line for the throne. L'Arc is severely injured during the battle, but is saved by a girl named Ryfia, who has secrets in her past and possesses the power to control "ley squalls," naturally occurring storms of no magic that usually take the form of luminous rain. A young woman named Adele, who has been a friend of L'Arc since childhood, renders assistance to the party through use of her unique form of combat, Luminomancy. Features: - From the developers who created the highly lauded Luminous Arc, comes their next epic role-playing game exclusively for the Nintendo Wii.
- Combines high quality 3D graphics and modern gameplay to push the envelope of the Wii’s capabilities
- Classic Japanese high fantasy role-playing action involving airships, dragons, and a huge cast of characters.
- Music by legendary composer Yasunori Mutsuda (Chrono Trigger, Tobal No.1, Xenogears, and more)
- Progressive scan and true 16:9 widescreen support
- Over 20 hours of gameplay
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
 Very good game for such a low price. August 28, 2010
Jonathan Syrigos (Ada, OH USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Increadibly packed with things to do. Similar to Tales of Symphonia, except turn-based. Is definitely worth $[...]. Should be $50. Plenty of outfits, weapons, and monsters. Very good game.
 Need more Wii games like this August 24, 2010
Max Golding
Rented it, played it for a couple days, then bought it. We need more Wii games in this fashion: good controls, music and plot for a beautiful / epic RPG... like the old consoles used to make. Do play this game if you used to be in love with the FF / Chrono series'.
A truly amazing RPG August 24, 2010
Rogu3 Knigh7
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an excellent RPG for the Wii. Only thing I fault is the voice acting. Its funny but when you look at most of the characters its just not the type of voice you'd envison them having. Then again it might just be me. Other than that great gameplay. A must by for an RPG collector or those who enjoy a good story.
Not as good as the previews. Not as bad as people say it is. August 19, 2010
M.D.C. (San Diego, CA)
After many months of RPG dead zone (if you didn't already know, generally there aren't many RPGs until the tail end of summer. The rest of the year is dominated by first person shooters, sports and "milk" games where they milk a franchise to death, i.e. Halo), we finally got a decent one. Arc Rise Fantasia on the Wii is a mixed bag. It's unique, but it's not unique. The main character is L'Arc, a sergeant in the Imperial army. During an air mission the ships get attacked by a group of dragons; he steps up and tangles with one of the closest dragons, only to get sideswiped by another dragon. He's knocked off the ship and falls to the earth next to the dragon (no, I don't know how he survived such a fall). The dragon begins to glow - a sign of an incoming Felblast which would incinerate everything in range, but just as it's about to go, a beautiful song is heard, and the dragon disappears. A young girl steps out, wondering where she is and how she got there.
So begins the story.
One big positive I must point out about this game is the freedom to choose the control scheme that works for you. Some Wii games force you into one configuration or another; not so here. You can use the Wiimote/Nunchuck or the Classic Controller, whichever is most comfortable. I chose the Classic Controller configuration and while it's not perfect, it was decent enough to allow me to navigate the game effectively. My only real complaint on the control scheme is how fast the camera rotates; the right analog stick is super sensitive, so it gets a little difficult to move the camera gently when trying to rotate the map just a little bit.
As you explore the world, the enemies are visible, so you can choose whether to fight or run from them. Common with other games is the concept of first attack; running into an enemy from behind results in a first attack, if they run into you from behind they will ambush you. What's not common with other games is how it handles this; even if you or the enemy gets the "first attack", it really just means less AP for the one who was ambushed, which are your Action Points. So instead of the other getting first dibs to rip you a new one, you just get less opportunities to do anything to stop it. I actually like this system, as it means that if your party is strong enough, you can knock the enemy out even if you get ambushed, saving yourself a world of hurt.
Some downsides to the AP system have more to do with navigation and control. When selecting your commands, you'll consume AP with each, which is normal; but the game does not automatically move to the next person in line. Depending on the battle and your strategy, you might only have L'Arc attack and the others take no action. This is valuable if he's using a weapon that is strong against the enemy you're attacking, but in practice I found it a bit illogical: the Defend command consumes 2AP (silly, to me), the Wait/Move command consumes 1AP, but if you do nothing at all, they'll often move on their own, so what's the point of having the Wait/Move command? Battle continues with you selecting your commands and then hitting "Start", or using pre-defined templates that determine battle actions. You'll likely find that the template works just fine when out and about on the field; doesn't work nearly as well in boss fights. The "Adaptive" template should force the character to adapt to the situation, for example, but often they don't pay heed to what's going on. For example, Rydia (the singing girl from earlier) will not heal unless a character is in the red, even if they're only 10 HP away from the red, while the enemy you're attacking can kill with the next hit. That's not what I call "adapting" to the situation.
Speaking of move, every battle will start with your characters grouped together, and some enemies can use group magic or group attacks. If you don't move your characters you'll get leveled by the techniques as quite a few bosses have multi-unit attacks. You can initiate a Move and another command, but of course, that will consume a minimum of 3AP just to do it. Early on in the game your AP will be extremely low, as it is calculated based on two factors: how many people are in your active (non-guest) party, and how many AP bonus contributing points each character has. Later, as you gain more AP, this will become less of a problem, and you'll have more room to breathe, but of course, the enemy will always be one step ahead of you.
Arc Rise Fantasia also does not work with the standard concept of "attack power" for weapons. It doesn't really matter what weapon you have equipped, it's your strength that makes the difference. Each weapon, however, comes with positives and negatives of their own. First, weapons work with a grid that holds various stat boosts and abilities. These contribute to the overall effectiveness of the weapon as you use it in battle. There is always one ability that is permanently attached to each weapon, so each weapon has a specialty unique to it, and if you fill the entire grid, the weapon unlocks a secret ability that is good for however long you leave the grid filled. It's somewhat similar to the way the Materia system worked in FF7 in a way, with some slight twists. The neat thing about this system is that as the weapon levels up, using Weapon Points obtained in battle, it will also unlock abilities that then can be attached onto any weapon. This provides incentive for the player to master every single weapon, and no weapon is "useless" as it were. The end result of all of this: Your strength determines how hard you swing the sword, so the sword doesn't have a power rating, but each sword has a strength that can help increase its power in given situations. This makes perfect sense if you think about it, and I hope to see more of this type of system in the future (though I doubt I will).
I want to forewarn you that in the beginning, the story of the game is going to seem rather simplistic and uninteresting - I would go so far as to say it is downright boring. But it gets better. Trust me, it does. There is a "betrayal" that occurs later, and from this point forward, the story gets more and more interesting. I can't even call the events plot twists, but rather an interesting take on the concept of Good vs. Evil that you won't want to miss. Without spoiling things, the game challenges your perception of what's going on around you. Are you doing the right thing? Is your "enemy" really that? Are you being misdirected? Who is the real "hero" and who is the "villain"? All of these questions, and more, start to hit you as you progress through the story. If you ever played Suikoden II, you'll recall some of Jowy's actions later in the story as quite similar to what goes on in Arc Rise Fantasia, and that's not a bad thing. It keeps you wanting to play the game to find out what will happen next, which is the mark of a good RPG.
Graphically, it seems almost a requirement to play this game with Component Video (red/green/blue) cables rather than the standard Composite Video (yellow/red/white). I say this because it's clear that when the game was developed, it was done so in Component. While limited by the Wii hardware, the game looks fairly good on Component Video. Jaggies are present and there's a slight blur effect to everything; some enemies are hard to make out amongst the forests and plains, but this might have been intentional on the developers' part. Disregarding these observations, I found the overall game to be graphically appealing for a Wii game. It's not perfect, but it works.
Audio is lush and rich, bringing you into the experience like such games as Ys The Ark of Napishtim and Star Ocean Till the End of Time. I didn't have a complaint about any of the themes, but I was a little bothered by the repeating of certain ones. While good to hear them again and again, I was hoping to hear unique themes for each town/area. This to me seems a lost art in the RPG world these days, and one I was hoping they would bring back eventually, as it adds personality to each town (ala Star Ocean: The Last Hope).
As with most recent RPGs there are also quests that you can do to earn extra cash and items. You have to be careful on these quests; there is not a "difficulty" ranking like on some other RPGs, so you might do a quest which appears easy, then there's a secondary quest where you're facing a single, powerful enemy somewhere in a dungeon who is going to lay waste to you. There's no warning to this, so my recommendation: if the quest involves a single enemy, instead of the normal "kill XX enemies" type quests, you might want to skip it until the latter half of the game, when you know you can destroy these beasts. Otherwise you might get a rude awakening.
Any negatives? Well, just a few, and they're not that big of a deal, but one thing I really disliked about this game was the way they "unlock" certain things as the game progresses. In the beginning of the game, all you can do is slice and do limited magic. Later, during boss sequences, you'll unlock additional things to do in battle, such as combo attacks (Chain), joint attacks (Team), limit-style attacks (Excel) and combo Excel attacks (Sync). It's like they're learning these things as you go along and that's fine, but it's a bit annoying, only because early on you will face certain enemies where these techniques would have made the battle go a LOT easier. There's one boss in particular where he levels your party with reckless abandon, yet you can barely scratch the guy and will experience many party member KOs before you finally get past it. It's so bad that you wonder if you were actually supposed to lose the battle (you're not).
Which brings me to the other negative; the challenge. It's not extreme like Legacy of Ys: Books I & II or YS: I&II Chronicles or Ys Seven (notice a pattern?), but it is pretty bad. To the point that even with grinding, you'll always be at a point where someone dies in battle. It's extremely frustrating at times, especially when certain bosses will kick off the battle by leveling you with some new tactic that your party then magically "learns" - AFTER the boss has already pummeled you with it. MP is generally low, it doesn't involve a large pool of MP like some other games, but rather, uses the older style of MP allocation like that found in Grandia - that's not good. It's annoying to only be able to use a spell like 3 times before running out of steam, especially against a boss who is strong against physical attacks. Yes, you can buy more MP points, but the prices on equipment are so high that unless you continually grind, you'll never have enough money to do the MP and the equipment. Something has to be sacrificed, and that's why it's a negative. Some might disagree with that stance, and that's fine.
Do I recommend it? Yes. It's a solid game. It's not some big, epic deal like some Final Fantasy games. The story isn't overly deep; it's fairly easy to get into, and it will provide you a good challenge. Don't expect a 10/10 game though.
Great Game, Most have for any Wii RPG fan August 17, 2010
A. Oltean
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
As most have pointed out the voice acting is not the greatest but it grows on you after a while. Overall this is a great game espically for $40. I still haven't beat the game yet and would guess 60 - 70 hours of game play. Currently LVL 50 with 50 hours into the game, and what seems like plently to do still. I recommend this to any RPG strave Wii owner.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
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