by Shane Lewis
Having cut my teeth on anime fighters (“airdashers”, if you’re hip to that sort of lingo) like the original Guilty Gear X and its sequels for well over a decade now, it would border on impossible for me to have not at least heard of Arcana Heart. Rest assured, I certainly had heard of it, but for one reason or another I had never gotten around to trying (much less really playing) the series until now. As for how that experience went, we’ll get to it.
Arcana Heart 3 LOVE MAX!!!!! is the 2013 update to 2009’s Arcana Heart 3, itself the second sequel to 2006’s Arcana Heart. In true fighting game expansion fashion, LOVE MAX!!!!! comes packed with plenty of balance tweaks and changes for the entire cast of characters, as well as numerous small changes to the gameplay system that will barely matter to casual players, yet is a HUGE DEAL to diehard fans and competitors. I’ve read that developer Examu has also ported over stages from previous Arcana games...so there’s that, too.
Players take control of one of twenty-three surprisingly distinct young girls...and I do mean young. The average age of characters has to be around 12 or 13, with the delightful Eko (and her cartoon companion Kaz) being a mere four years old and some of the potentially older cast members topping out at a mysterious unknown age. This is standard fighting-game fare, of course, but what helps to set AH3 apart is your selection of one of 23 available Arcana, supporting spirits who provide the fighting girls with a variety of passive benefits and active abilities. Arcana selection is a big deal, as the new stats or abilities granted by a certain Arcana can wildly change the way a character is played, allowing for new methods of offense and defense, and even creating opportunities for new, more damaging combos. It sounds small, but it’s a welcome idea for a genre that can sometimes feel a bit restrictive on how characters should be played.
The cast of characters is surprisingly refreshing as well, something you might never expect from the game at first glance. Indeed, while all the characters are young, attractive girls; the archetypal personalities and themes behind them, as well as rather diverse playstyles, help each girl to really stand out from her companions. Characters like cheery fist-fighting protagonist Heart Aino or sullen swordswoman Kamui Tokinomiya feel comfortably expected, while mad scientists Catherine Kyohbashi and Kira Daidohji spice things up with giant robots and monstrous slime monsters, respectively. If a schoolgirl stereotype (or dare I say fetish) exists, there’s bound to be a character built around that idea. Ninjas, angels, magicians, demons, maids with giant swords...they’re really just about all in here somewhere, and all with varying degrees of accessibility: Heart, as the heroine, is very easy to pick up and hit buttons with to have fun, but a character like the deadly puppeteer Lieselotte Achenbach can prove significantly more challenging to figure out, much less master.
While advertised to me by the internet as fast and furious, the gameplay can initially feel somewhat slow and bogged down, occasionally dancing dangerously close to outright sluggish. Unlike most anime fighters, characters cannot cover much ground through normal movement options. Instead of having a run, characters perform a short hop/dash forward a la Capcom’s Street Fighter series. Advanced movement is primarily accomplished through the use of the “Homing” button, one of the series’ flagship mechanics. Simply press the button (often abbreviated as “D”) and your femme fatale will rocket forward towards your opponent, regardless of where either fighter is on screen. If you aren’t busy doing something else, you’ll GO IN! There are other uses for the button, but this unique movement is the primary one. It took me some time to adjust to using Homing, but once I did I was able to fly about the screen freely and bring the fight to my opponent, pressuring with pathetically short blockstrings into just as pathetically short combinations of attacks. Don’t take that the wrong way, though: the game can be very offensive, and combos can be very long, very fancy, and very damaging. Sadly, I lacked the time to grind out training sessions and really learn how anything really cool was done. It’s fortunate though that my lack of knowledge hardly prevented me from having several fun, close matches with friends of a similarly paltry skill level, so if you’re a beginner and think these schoolgirls look like a good time, don’t be afraid to start playing without diving into training mode first.
Speaking of training mode, that’s totally available, along with several other modes for when you lack a friend or your internet connection is down. Story mode is a rather flat coat of paint over a traditional Arcade mode. Select your character and fight through different opponents on your way to a final boss, stopping only briefly to have short conversations with your friends and enemies. The story, what little there is, is nothing special: something about crystals and dimensional rifts and the annihilation of Japan that makes little sense and is scarcely elaborated on. On the plus side, an entertaining battle with a giant robot awaits you at the end, so there’s that to look forward to!
Supplementing Story Mode are the usual Time Attack and Survival/Score Attack modes, and they don’t really bring much new to the table. Fight really fast and try to survive on a single life bar. The End. There’s also an After Story mode, one I thought might shed a little more light on just what the hell was happening in the main “campaign”. Sadly, this is not the case, as After Story is little more than a long series of conversations between still drawings of the characters, and the only point of it all seems to be getting everyone together at a mysterious hot spring in the mountains. It feels blatantly fan-servicey, but I guess if you’re into that kind of thing it might be fun.
Gallery Mode brings all the lovely art of the lovely cast together in one place, letting you look at all the pretty pictures and voice clips you’ve collected while playing. Interestingly enough, there’s even MORE side story content to be found here, but I couldn’t tell what any of it had to do with the main story, so it seems to be more for diehard fanboys than anything.
Netplay is available, but the mode is very bare-bones and scarcely populated at the time of this writing. Gameplay was relatively stable in all of my matches, but there was significant downtime while searching for new opponents, and though I was able to play around a dozen matches they were all against the same three players every time. It was at least satisfying to know that my terribly scrubby Kamui could eke out a couple wins against competition around my level.
While the rest of the game is perfectly serviceable or at the very least interesting, I find that I take no small bit of offense to the actual character art and animation. LOVE MAX!!!!! is the sixth version of Arcana Heart in eight years (the original debuted in 2006) and still Examu is using the same exact character models and animations. While this might be alright if the game was even as pretty as Guilty Gear X (which debuted in Arcades way way back in July of 2000), it is most definitely not. The sprites have only gotten worse over the years, appearing ever more sloppy and pixelated as newer, ever-more-gorgeous 2D fighters are released. While this doesn’t really take anything away from the core gameplay, it does remove some aesthetic value from the finished product, knowing those pretty anime girls could be so much more. The soundtrack is similarly lacking, comprising mostly of forgettable synthesizers and rejected Mega Man themes. At a glance or a listen, the game can come off feeling lazy and cheap, sometimes barely more impressive than a solid online flash game.
For all its awkward subject matter, dodgy presentation, and lack of anything resembling a rewarding single-player experience, Arcana Heart 3 LOVE MAX!!!!! has its...er...heart in the right place. The cutesy graphics mask an almost intimidatingly deep fighting engine, full of intelligently designed and exciting mechanics to study and master.
REVIEW ROUNDUP
+ Deep, interesting fighting engine built on solid mechanics that only gets better as you grow and learn
+ Loads of story and side-story content available for fans of the Arcana Heart mythos
+/- Large, varied cast is sure to have a character that suits every player, provided you can get past the lot of them being young girls
+/- Netplay is mostly lag-free, but lacks options, with online players few and far-between
- Single-player modes are largely uninteresting or forgettable; you'd better have a friend or a local scene ready if you really want to play
- Dated visuals/animations and a mostly-forgettable soundtrack can take away from the overall experience
No comments:
Post a Comment