Games to play while seeking party #1: Luminous Arc
Since we all know FFXI isn’t all constant action, I thought I’d start putting up some of the games I play while I’m in this downtime. I myself am a huge fan of the Nintendo DS, and that’s how I spend my party seeking time. I have a few games on the go at the moment after the massive wave of awesome these last few weeks, but my favourite first.
Luminous Arc is a strategy role playing game (S-RPG from now on) made by Marvelous Interactive and bought elsewhere by the awesome Atlus. The game has your standard fantasy setting, with knights from the church fighting against witches who they deem to be evildoers (and I’ll leave the story at that).
Luminous Arc has a nice Anime feel to it with character design by Kaito Shibano which is what drew me to the game in the first place. The characters are your standard Japanese RPG bunch. Protagonist with big sword and rifle, protagonists younger brother who is weaker and wants to impress him, priest girl who brings the cures, guy with spiky hair and big sword trying to impress priest girl, etc, but their artwork makes them all stand out. There is also a fair bit of voice acting, some of which is better than others, but it never gets too irritating (Theo and Nikolai do spring to mind though…).
There are a few nice touches to make this different to standard S-RPGs, like the flash drives (powerful attacks that require FP to use) and synergy attacks (team up attacks that are performed by certain combinations of characters) as well as the intermission sections where you chat to your party after battle for the chance to gain items.
Overall, Luminous Arc is a good, solid S-RPG and fans of the genre should get hold of it. The only problems with it being some of the voice acting and the fact that it’s not Final Fantasy Tactics A-2!
