Mistaking difficulty for complexity

Alright, well... I guess now that I've properly commented on everything Otakon, it's time for a review. Maybe the first of a few (and no, this is not my opinions on OreImo), but I think the tone for this is going to be largely negative. In fact, it's going to be large, and negative.

So, I finally beat Arcanum Knights, which is a doujin game from the same group that made Labyrinth of Touhou. What can I say about the game? Well, for a doujin game, it's pretty complete. It plays well, and feels natural as a game - navigating around overworlds and menus does not feel clunky at all, and there is no graphic which looks out of place. It's all consistent, which is good.

But aside from that, there's only the actual gameplay, which is where things start to fall apart. You see, the game was made to be difficult. It was touted as one of its selling points really, that in order to progress in the game you had to play it well.

... Except there's not much in the way of options. At best, you could describe the abilities as classic. At worst, you can describe them as uninspired and generic. Most every ability in the game comes in variations of area effect, physical/magical elements, status effects, and damage. The rest, just healing and stat bumps or debuffs.

There's precious few that lend themselves to party synergy, and for the most part any attack you do is going to boil down to what sort of area effect you want, and what elements you're shooting to attack... Which if you choose the element that enemy's weak to, then you've just made the right choice. If you're doing status ailments, paralysis and shock will take you through most random encounters. Not very hard decisions.

But that's really the gameplay. Find out enemy weaknesses, then hit weakness. Boss fights, however, are a little different.

See, boss fights usually have one thing of crap you have to deal with, or your entire team just goes down at once. You can be doing really well against the boss, taking nothing you can't heal up... but then the boss drops enough damage to down every character you have in one shot when they're guarding.

A lot of the time, there'll be something about the boss that makes this stupid less bad. One boss, if you destroy his regenerating parts fast enough, his dumb attack will soften up so you can deal with it. Mind you, you still need the numbers to kill them in time, and the attack is thrown out semi-randomly. All this added to the fact that you will lose figuring the boss out. You'll lose multiple times - and every single time it will be only that one thing of utter retardedness that gets you.

In platformer parlance, this is about equivalent to a stupid hard jump. Maybe there are jumps where you have to align the camera just right so you can see what you're doing, then make a pixel-perfect jump with some mid-air maneuvering in order to get right. If one thing goes wrong, well... lose a life, try again. You'll be doing this over and over, not getting past this one cliff until everything lines up. It's the same freaking cliff, it has been for the last hour, and your progress through the game screeches to a halt at this one, specific button press. Is this fun?

No. And this is why this crap is inane. All of you who've seen my previous reviews know just how much I hate insta-kills, and this is instant death in one of its worst possible forms. In fact, for one of these fights, the boss has a full-party attack that will one-shot anyone in the party, but has low accuracy. Now, you might be thinking, "Oh, but it hardly hits, so it's all fine!" But the fact of the matter is, even if there's only a 5% chance it could happen, there is still the possibility that you might be doing nothing wrong, but game over for it regardless. It's like having the game hit you randomly with a game over for just walking around the overworld - you just don't do this. Never, under any circumstances.

So, really, we have difficulty touted as a selling point, when the only gameplay the game has is (a) hit enemy weaknesses, and (b) figure out boss retardedness. This is not called being hardcore. This is called being inane.

I mean, difficulty in games is fine and all, and I always welcome a bit of challenge. However, it's easy to make a game hard, but it's much more difficult to make it fair and hard at the same time. Just because a game is hard does not mean it is complex. Just because a game is hard does not mean it is good.

Devil May Cry 3 is a good example of a game that was hard, but fair (and I did beat it on Very Hard). You'd make the same mistakes over and over until you game over'ed, but that would only happen because you didn't learn for like the sixth time in a row. 7th Dragon is a good example of a game that is complex. There are certain combinations of skills that just work well together, which pushes the gameplay past just how big your stats have gotten. But here, all that really matters is that you figure out just what it is that's responsible for that boss stupidity in front of you, and that you drive up your stats to hit their weak points for massive damage.

But then, there's even stupidity in the way stats are done. I'll highlight the trio that makes my eyes roll - Attack, Dexterity, and Accuracy (all derived stats, your primary stats are different). See, for some reason, most weapon skills rely on both Attack and Dexterity for damage, and of course Accuracy to hit. However there's a catch - Dexterity also affects the quality of the hit, whether you Critical, score a Smash, hit normally, or Chip the opponent, or Fumble on your hit (in decreasing order of bonus damage).

So... let me get this straight: first I have to roll to hit, then I have to roll to determine quality of hit? Why isn't this just part of Accuracy? And besides that, Dexterity is used for quality of hit, AND the resulting damage of hit. Why is it used in two places?

Oh, and by the way, these three are derived stats. Your primary stats are used to calculate these three: Attack comes from Strength and Technique. Dexterity comes with Strength, Technique and Agility. Accuracy comes from Technique. Do you see anything odd about that? That Technique is used in every one of those calculations? That basic damage and quality of hit, two seperate checks that both alter your damage, end up being dependent on the same two primary stats? There is an extra step in here that is totally not needed one bit.

And if waste were a recurring theme, there's the concept of weapon range in the game. See, it's not just front line/back line. Nope... range has a value. The first person in your front line is in position 1. The second, position 2, and so on. Your back row starts at 4, and goes to 6.

Now... how do I explain this? Okay, so the guy in position 1 is range 1 from the enemy front line, range 3 from the back line. Every position down, you add one to these numbers, so whoever's in position 3 is range 3 from the enemy front line, and range 5 from the enemy back line.

Different weapons have differing reaches - hammers, short swords, and knuckles have range 1. Swords have range 2. Spears have range 3 or 4. If the range from you to your enemy is more than your weapon will reach, the damage you do is reduced by some proportionate amount. Further, certain skills will modify your weapon's range, so you might have a long-range attack up your sleeve even when your weapon can't reach past your toes. Sounds needlessly complex? That's because it is. Why they just didn't leave it at front row/back row is beyond me.

Then there's the skills. Let's take sword skills as an example. You have: do damage to one enemy. Do damage in a line. Do damage in an area-effect. Do damage with X elemental. Moving on to illusion spells, we have: decrease enemy attack. Decrease enemy defense. Decrease enemy magic defense. All of the previous except against all enemies.

... If that weren't any indication this is game is essentially a stat-bumping arms race, I don't know what is. Sword skills are utterly broken besides: the elemental damage skills (which are unique to swords, no other weapon can attack any elemental at will) do more damage than the equivalent spells and cost vastly less MP. The full party wind attack can do much more damage with 12 MP, than a wind spell you get around the same time that costs 46 MP and doesn't hit all enemies.

So, let me catch my breath for a bit before I sum everything up...

As a doujin game, this game shows that it does have a level of polish on it, and it really seems like a game. However, while the game advertises itself as a hard game by design, it's really a hard game by design flaws. The gameplay is nothing complex, and when the difficulty kicks in, it doesn't matter how much you were rocking before, if you can't deal with that one attack, you will lose instantly.

Honestly, you can see most everything the game can offer around seven dungeons in, which is when the game should have ended. It went on to thirteen dungeons, which further drove in the fact that this game is a throw back to bygone years when console RPGs quite simply didn't have the horsepower to do anything better.

As always, though, my party makeup. I did a Cinderella Girls themed party for this. From front position to back position...
Yuki Himekawa - Tank, equipped with hammers. Did a really good job of not taking much damage and attracting enemy attention.
Cael (Me) - Magic swordsman with short swords. Probably the best damage dealer as I went for elemental sword skills. Also did arcane magic and curse magic for extra elemental damage when sword skills were in cooldown.
Riina Tada - Rogue-like swordsman. Highest agility, highest attack, highest dexterity... did physical damage like nothing else, and elemental damage really well.
Uzuki Shimamura - Really quick healer and stat-buffer with a spear. Was in the back row right behind Yuki, so her defense was pretty good too, since she sometimes got caught up in whatever was targeted at Yuki. Damage was decent, can be described as an all-rounder with emphasis towards healing.
Kumiko Matsuyama - Lockdown character. Mainly used bows, curses for status effects, and illusion magic for debuffs. Basically aimed to paralyze or silence random enemies, and debuff bosses.
Kotoka Saionji - Full-time magic user. Great protective magic and good elemental damage, served as backup healer as well. I thought she'd turn out to be more damage-oriented, but since Riina and I had that down so well, she turned out to be something closer to what I believe fit her personality better.