All You Need is Love

Wow, this game really takes me back. Arcana Heart, a game developed by Examu, then brought over to the US by the wonderful Atlus, is a 2-D fighting game, and a pretty good one at that. Don’t let the pink cover art and the girly looking aesthetic fool you, for this is a game that I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun with. That is, if you stay in the Arcade mode or if you play with friends. Everything else is kinda “meh,” but hold on, let’s not get of ourselves; we’ll get to that in a moment.

I guess the best place to begin is from the most notable aspect, which is the fact that this fighting game is composed of an entirely female cast of characters. That’s right, no guys anywhere to be seen. The closest this game ever gets to a male character is just a small mention of a character’s father and a weird demon thing that acts as another character’s weapon. That’s it. Having this kind of cast was obviously a selling point for this game, because I don’t see this grabbing anyone’s attention otherwise. Thanks to this, I can just imagine a 14 year-old boy making his way to the store to buy the big pink box as their parents sigh, face palm and start to wonder where they went wrong. But enough about me, let’s talk about the game itself.

I have actually played this game, specifically the original for quite a long time now, the reason being that the gameplay is really good. You can choose 1 out of 11 characters, then choose a companion, spirit, helper thing called an Arcana, which opens up an array of special moves you can use in addition to the ones that your character alone already has. Why are these girls able to communicate with these spirits? I don’t know. They never explain that in the game. The only way to know more would be to consult the manual, and even then it still provides an underwhelming amount of information.

The Good Part

Unlike many fighting games out there, this one doesn’t have much in terms of gauges or meters. You only have three, which is the health bar, a Super Meter that keeps accumulating as you fight, which then let’s you pull off Super moves, hence the name. Lastly, you have the homing meter that allows to home in on your opponent and dash at them from anywhere, whether they’re on ground or up in the air. This meter in particular is what sets the game apart from any old generic fighter, for I haven’t seen this kind of thing done before. It makes fighting flow well and it gives a lot of opportunity for new kinds of combos, especially with things like Homing Cancels and being able to throw your opponent into the air and beat them up some more.

That’s another really cool thing about this game: the enormous focus on vertical, or better said, aerial combat. Never have I seen a game where launching people into the air and racking up combos was almost key to winning fights; and it really works. It makes things really intense and exciting. Combine that with unique characters and the different girl/Arcana combinations, it becomes quite the experience.

The Bad Part

So up until now, I have spoken pretty highly of this game, but what about everything else? Well…that’s the part I almost don’t want to talk about, because of how disappointing it is. There aren’t a lot of features in the game, carrying only the most basic of things like an Arcade Mode, Versus Mode, Training, Options, and a Gallery where you can see pictures and art that you unlock as you keep playing. As you’d expect, the Gallery Mode does indeed have fan service.

The biggest, and by far worst part of the game has to be the story mode. Now, I know that it’s kind of the norm to have fighting games without a particularly compelling story. But this one…my god. This is the most shallow, poorly executed excuse to have girls punch each other that I have ever seen. For starters, there are no voices during the dialogue scenes, neither English nor Japanese, so that’s a huge thing going against it.

I’m going to try to explain the plot to the best of my abilities, not because the story is complicated, but because it’s just plain boring and it’ll take me some hard work to remember what happened and why it happened.

So basically, there are two worlds, the elemental world and the normal world that used to live together as one a long time ago, but now they’re not, and now for some reason the two are going to fuse back together again which will cause destruction everywhere. Why that is, I have no idea. So knowing this, each character has their own storyline that eventually leads them to fighting against the big boss, that, of course, wants to take over the world; nothing to write home about. This boss lady has the same amount of complexity as a piece of paper with the word “boobs” written on it.

Most of the things established in the story are never explained, they’re just kind of there, like the character’s abilities to communicate with different Arcana or why fusing both worlds would kill everyone. Now I do admit, each character is really unique and almost likeable in their own way, but they’re never really fleshed out, as you’d expect them to. They sort of just hint at certain things or show a tiny shred of depth before it gets completely ignored and you go back to fighting again.

One last thing I would like to say is that I really recommend you listen to some music on your mobile device while you play, either that or shut off the music from the options menu, because the soundtrack is terrible. It sounds like someone just took a load of girly sounding loops, put them together in one track, sped them up and said, “There you go! You have a soundtrack!” And I’m just saying that because I paid attention. If I was playing this game casually, without really thinking about it, It would just feel like an audible blur that I wouldn’t even notice.

In Spite Of All The Dangers…

So to summarize, the story is bland and generic, no voice acting during dialogue scenes, the game lacks in features and the fan service is really tacked on. However, when you actually start playing the game, I can guarantee you will have a lot of fun with it. The pure gameplay completely rescues the entire thing.The fighting system is well designed, the visual style is nice and colorful, the homing system, the uniqueness of the characters and the arcana system allow for a lot of strategy and replayablility throughout, and it’s simply solid as a rock.

If you are looking for a new fighting game that’s not just another Street Fighter or Guilty Gear, go get it. It really is a good game when you get down to it, especially when you play with friends; and that’s coming from a guy that is not a real fan of playing with other people. As long as you ignore the story mode, this is a good, well-designed game that you’ll definitely enjoy and will keep on enjoying as the sequels improve upon what they had with the original.

Arcana Heart! Coming at ya with the power of love…and fan service.

FINAL SCORE: 4/5 (Good)