E3 2003: Arc the Lad Hands-On

Sony's Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits is a quaint little turns-based RPG - here are our impressions plus screens and video from the show.

How I stumbled onto Arc The Lad is quite a brief and uninteresting story. I was actually walking right past Arc the Lad in Sony's booth when its beautifully orchestrated soundtrack just drew me right to the game. The great music just wouldn't leave me alone so I grabbed ahold of the Dual Shocks and tried the game out. I was quite pleased with the visual and audio quality of the game, it had some high production values - which has to be a good start.

The storyline of Arc The Lad takes place in the world of Deimos and involves Darc and Kharg, two brothers who were separated at birth and grew into brave and skillful men before reuniting and embarking on a quest to gain control of the Great Spirit Stones to restore the world to a tranquil state.

The game has some very nice detailed graphics with characters that animate as smooth as silk. Even simple standing animations looked great with characters breathing and moving around quite realistically. Maybe it's just me but I just loved the animations in the game and found them to be quite impressive for some reason. The animations along with the glorious soundtrack were what stood out the most to me in this game.

Some of the characters were modeled very nicely and looked great for RPG characters. The characters are modeled with great humanoid proportions, which makes a nice change for an RPG like this. The lead character and one of the female characters in the game had to be some of the best in-game models I've seen in an RPG. Not all characters recieved that treatment though, as some of the unimportant characters didn't look so great when viewed up close in a first person view.

Along with the above mentioned goodies in the visual department, there were also some pretty cool real-time cut-scenes and impressive looking spell attacks to round off the visuals of this impressive RPG. I also liked the pace of the game, unlike most of the other RPGs I've played in my lifetime, the character of Twilight of the Spirits actually moves at a brisk pace and controls very nicely.

As I mentioned earlier, the most impressive part of the game to me was the great sounding orchestral soundtrack. There's some highly energetic and sometimes epic sounding stuff coming from the game. At times the music sounded like a real symphony orchestra and according to someone I spoke to about the game, it was, but I took that with a grain of salt.

The sound effects are also of a pretty good variety and implemented quite well. Simple things like the sounds of characters walking on wooded floors and then walking out onto grassy terrain sound pretty convincing. The limited amount of voice acting in the game is used sparingly, and is good, though not great.

The gameplay was your standard RPG fare, as you maneuver you character around towns to talk to people and traverse the lands and battle monsters. Arc The Lad had its fair share of turns-based battles. I took part in a few of them and tried to enjoy it but it just wasn't happening. Give me some real-time battles any day - turns are just too slow and boring to me. But that's just me.

With the Arc the Lad series finally making the jump to the PS2 and this being the fourth in the series, I thought it did quite an admirable job with its next-gen entry. Although the game's definitely not for me, I feel RPG fans will surely be missing out by passing this one up.

Joseph Jackson
Staff Writer, Kikizo Games