TGS 2006: Luminous Arc Preview

September 24th, 2006, 02:16 Posted By: wraggster

Via IGN

After playing the PSP strategy game Jeanne d'Arc, we were eager for even more portable strategy play here on the TGS floor. Marvelous Interactive's promising Luminous Arc for the Nintendo DS looked to fit the bill, particularly because it promises Nintendo WiFi Connection features.

In play with the TGS demo, however, we were let down. Most immediately, we were disappointed in the control in Luminous Arc, which was entirely D-Pad-driven in the demo. Screenshots in the TGS flyer show the stylus being used on the screen (but not in controlling the character, instead depicted just sort of lying there with the indication that it could be used), so we're hoping that there's no way that this development team ignored the single biggest feature of this system in making this game, but there were no option menus to configure control in the demo. Moving characters around on the grid was thus awkward -- more so than GBA strategy-RPGs without the benefit of a stylus, we should add -- and not ideal.
There was also little unique or interesting about the visual style. Character designs were decent in an anime kind of way, but nobody in the cast of characters stood out from any other anime-styled character to be seen at any given booth at TGS (perhaps with the exception of one cute brown-haired nerd girl with eyeglasses who popped up in Luminous Arc's interminably long opening dialog tree. Dialog sequences use the Fire Emblem talking head poses, and at least feature full voice acting for each character. The screen-filling heads in dialog sequences were nice the first few times we saw them, but after seeing the same few expressions on plain backgrounds over and over again, the appeal was quickly gone, and we found ourselves skipping through the dialog as fast as possible despite the production values in having voice acting. The game itself used a standard 2D isometric game board grid like that seen in countless other strategy-RPGs, not displaying any more detail or vibrancy than countless other competitors on GBA. The game board could not be rotated to show other views, and the stage was small in the battles we played. (OK, so there we're nitpicking, since these were the very first introductory battles in the game, so we'll give them the assumption that things will get better later on.) Enemy designs weren't all that fabulous to us either after we had finished our fights with mutant chickens and bull-headed thugs.

Luminous Arc may be hiding something that we're just not seeing yet, and online features are certainly reason enough to show interest. That said, we saw nothing yet to distinguish this game on DS over alternatives on GBA, and other big-name strategy-RPGs are on the way. Luminous Arc is 70% complete in its TGS form, so we'll take another look and see what a deeper playthrough reveals when the import version is released sometime next year.

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