First, a confession: I don’t like Monster Hunter. I did spend some time with Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, but issues with the battle system along with obscurity regarding what I needed to do to advance made the game tedious and difficult to enjoy. My feelings about the Monster Hunter franchise made me understandably cynical when first entering the world of Lord of Arcana, but I found myself having a surprising amount of fun with the game, despite its shortcomings.
Game: Lord of Arcana 
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Access Games
Genre: Dungeon-crawler/Monster-hunt
Price: $29.99
Verdict: An interesting take on the popular Monster Hunter formula
Pros: Unique visual style and fresh battle mechanics
Cons: Little variety in quests, not balanced for single-player, camera controls
Acquired Via Publisher
Lord of Arcana has the player in control of a Slayer, a hero destined to restore balance to the world of Horodyn by seeking out the legendary power of the Arcana. From the peaceful town hub (which contains player amenities such as a blacksmith, an alchemist, an item merchant, some NPCs, component storage, and a portal for system link), players can accept quests from the Slayers Guild in order to advance their guild ranking. A higher guild ranking leads to more quests, and eventually to the story-advancing Arcana boss quests. Once any quest is accepted, players are immediately tossed into the field to complete the task requested of them. Quests always have a time limit, and almost always consist of either “slay a certain number of monsters” or “collect a certain number of items.” During the hunt for a specific monster or item, players can scavenge the ground for item components or pick them up from monsters following a battle. The battle system itself is somewhat different from Monster Hunter‘s in several ways – the most obvious of which is the battlefield screen. When a monster is touched in the field, your character is transported to a separate battle arena where the fight will take place. In one sense, this is convenient because it means that other monsters can’t aggro and overwhelm the player, but it also becomes a problem when taking on quests with multiple players because another player cannot assist during a battle if something goes awry. The addition of QTE button presses to battles is actually welcome in Lord of Arcana, as it keeps players on their toes during the final stages of a tough fight.
The upgrading process is slow and tedious, requiring hours of grinding for monster components before each (minuscule) upgrade. It also doesn’t help that upgrades are not even available to the player until after the first boss quest, which is a frustrating challenge at worst, and a tedious time-sink at best. All the grinding you do for monster components doesn’t seem to make your character any stronger at first, either. After 3 hours of running repeatable quests prior to defeating the first Arcana boss, my own avatar was still doing pitiful damage to the weakest mobs in the game. Admittedly, I got better at the game mechanics and this made the fights go faster, but leveling up seems to have little to no effect on the actual strength of a player character. Over time, this does change, but the game could have done a better job of balancing effort and reward. The relative weakness of a player character versus any mob in the game makes sense when realizing that Lord of Arcana is not designed as a single-player game. Many of the quests are meant to be tackled with a team of players and are nearly impossible to complete solo. This would be more acceptable if online play was built into the game (rather than just system link), but sadly, this is not the case. Ad Hoc Party through the PS3 is an option, but one that isn’t available for everyone.
Adding insult to injury is the tutorial of the game, which starts the player off in a fully-equipped and leveled-up state. The tutorial level itself is a lot of fun, which makes it all the more painful when the avatar is immediately “Samus-ed” and stripped of all his/her powers immediately after slaying the tutorial’s boss monster. Re-earning those powers is incredibly tedious, and the weakness of a new avatar and the lack of flexibility in the mechanics at the start of the game is intimidating. The game’s camera controls in the town and field are unorthodox, with no option to make the camera automatically center behind the player. The player has to center the camera manually, by tapping the lock-on button (L in the default control scheme). Eventually, I got used to the control scheme, but the decisions made during development regarding the camera don’t make a lot of sense to me.
Visually, the game is refreshing, and far more reminiscent of Final Fantasy than Monster Hunter. The town is well detailed, spell and weapon effects during battle are nice, and the boss monsters are just as intimidating as they should be. If I had any complaints about the graphics, I’d have to say that the field maps are sparse at times, and there are no 32-bit color or added performance options (Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep spoiled me on this).
Overall, I’d say that Lord of Arcana has its share of problems, but shows a lot of promise in how the monster hunting genre can evolve. The camera controls, quest structure, and grind requirements will most certainly drive some players away. However, the battles are fast and fun, and the rush from obtaining a much-needed item for crafting a new piece of gear or taking down a tough boss monster solo with only a few HP left is one that’s difficult to ignore. To the Monster Hunter fans in the West who are looking enviously at Japan-exclusive Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, try entering the world of Lord of Arcana; you won’t be disappointed. For everyone else, Lord of Arcana is an interesting world of monster hunting, but one that is best visited with friends.
GrE Grade: C
Popularity: unranked [?]
