Zircon's review of Lord of Arcana

Well my PSP-RPGer's, Lord of Arcana, a multiplayer guild, fetch, dungeon crawling RPG has been released on the gaming masses. Can it live up to the reputation of awesome RPG's that have come before it? We shall see.

Lord of Arcana is a Dungeon crawler that starts out with the typical story of a land in chaos that was saved when a legendary warrior fought an evil and powerful dragon, saved Mankind, and then passed into myth. You start your journey as the intrepid warrior-savior of old, going on to defeat the dragon. The story then advances a generation and reincarnates you into the present world as the true heir of Legendary Hero, leaving you soon to realize your current vocation.

Monster Hunter! Before I go any further, lets talk about the presentation of this game from our beloved Squeenix. (Square Enix, get it?) The graphics are truly amazing, looking like developers really loved making this title, while taking the time to appease us all, so big thumbs up, way up. Character animation is detailed and clean, not like the pixels on a paper plate effect that many DS RPG's give us. The artistic style behind this title, provides the player are so pretty that you may find yourself just looking around once in a while.

The story continues to release bit after bit as you continue on and guess what? The game gets better! A dear friend of mine a few weeks ago was describing a game he was playing as, "The first hour was painful and I immediately started to hate the game, but hours 2 through 18 have been AWESOME!". Well, I don't know if "awesome" should be the description about Lord of Arcana, but I will say, a job well done. The game had me engrossed for many hours and I am happy that Square has released it.

The PSP has been the portable go to system for these lost and overlooked RPG's so being that I love them, I will always have uber respect for the developers who take the risk and release these for us to enjoy. Lord of Arcana also hails its multiplayer chops with a robust multiplayer aspect, which I tried and it was very fluid with no lag issues so far. Square has also just announced that they are prepping Final Fantasy 4 and 5 for release on the PSP, possibly in time for the release of the NGP (PSP 2), so lets hope they polish them up a bit and not just provide the Playstation One Chronicles or Anthology versions, amazing as they may have been.

Thank you Square-Enix, next up, Mindjack!