Luminous Arc: Whatever works

Boy, is it good to be reunited with my beloved DS at long last! It's been nearly a whole year since I played the system last, and the wave of giddy joy that washed over me as I rediscovered the DS' unmistakable graphical style and low-fi touch made me realize that I missed the system a whole lot. Guess I should play DS games more often then — all the more so as my DS library is by a long shot the largest of all my game libraries. But I digress. This post is not about the awesomeness of the DS, but rather about how I broke, twisted and remodeled Luminous Arc's gameplay beyond recognition in an over-enthusiastic attempt to make the game work for me. And work for me it does indeed, o yes precious.

My playthrough started in a fairly normal and unremarkable way: I fought a couple of battles, noticed right away that everybody but Heath and Alph sucked big time on the battlefield, and decided thus to focus the bulk of my level-grinding efforts on the aforementioned pair and to make them my main battle assets. This worked nicely until the game viciously removed Heath from my party after a mere couple of chapters, leaving me stranded with a reasonably strong character and a bunch of under-levelled losers. Why, oh why, game? I was seriously salty after that backstabbing move, not to mention anxious about whether I would manage to progress with such an unbalanced team; fortunately, the game was kind enough to drop a couple of powerful characters into my party, allowing me to move forward without having to level-up my neglected party members. I then decided to play Luminous Arc as it was visibly intended, i.e. by using all characters and choosing the best fitted for the battle du jour.

It worked well enough and I progressed unhindered until chapter 13. However, there was one tiny problem: I was bored. I didn't use most of the characters often enough to master them all in earnest and pull off genuinely satisfying strategies. Most of the time, I used only the top dogs in my team — a.k.a. the "Fab Four" Alph, Saki, Nikolai and Lucia — leaving the rest of the crew in their underlevelled slumber. I could have levelled up that sorry bunch and gotten used to them by abusing free battles, but Luminous Arc is so stingy when it comes to XP granted in said free battles that it would have taken a million years to get decent results. But most importantly, the fighting in Luminous Arc is so unbearably slow that attempting full-party deployment will quickly turn into a complete torture for anyone who isn't a Zen monk. The more characters involved, the snappier the fighting system: this is an unwritten rule that all RPGs should abide to lest they transform into massive snoozefests.

Not only was I bored, but those cursed battles were harder than I expected. My fine quartet was overlevelled to some extent; but that wasn't enough to ensure a smooth ride, and fighting was slowly but surely turning into a chore. And given that Luminous Arc consists solely of battles with fixed screens and a bit of chatting in between, being sick and bored of said battles would have made the whole game pretty pointless. That's when I decided to break the mold and treat myself to a bit of easy grinding by crawling back on the world map until I reached a free battle point where foes where so undelevelled that I could take them down in one hit. And since I wasn't sure how long Saki, Nikolai and Lucia would stick around, I decided that Alph would be the sole beneficiary of my grinding efforts.

At first, I solely wanted to unwind and grind a couple of levels in a relaxing environment; but things took a different turn after I fought a few battles and realized how unbalanced the XP gain dynamics were. To put it simply, defeating strong foes gives too little XP and defeating weak foes gives too much XP. Not only that, but there is actually a minimum amount of XP given for killing a foe, regardless of your character's and the foe's levels. That amount is 6 XP; and it never gets any lower than that, even if your character towers at Lv. 99 and the foe crawls at Lv. 1. Combine this to the fact that the number of XP required to gain a level is precisely 100 and never varies, and you get the perfect set-up for a mammoth grinding marathon and a massive breaking of the game.

Heck, I'm sure you guessed what happened, dear fellow gamers. At first, I grinded a dozen of levels; then I wondered if I could grind a dozen more, just for fun. I did so, and it was so painless and pleasant that I decided to add a couple more to the mix. And then, I was hooked for good, and I just couldn't stop for the life of me. The result of that epic grinding fest can be seen on that picture: MC Alph is now Lv. 99, and I'll probably be able to blast through the rest of the game without breaking a sweat. I'm a hardcore grinding aficionado, as you all know; but I swear I never, ever planned to go that high with Alph. The fact that I got so engrossed into senseless grinding is solely due to the deliciously predictable nature of level-grinding in Luminous Arc. It took exactly the same number of foes and roughly the same amount of time to gain a level, and that regularity put me into a transe of sorts that was both relaxing and stimulating. I didn't need to put always more and more effort into climbing the level ladder, but rather the exact same amount of effort for every rung of that level ladder; and boy, was it deeply satisfying. In fact, Luminous Arc has one of the best level-grinding systems I've ever encountered, despite the imbalance of its XP gain dynamics — or maybe precisely because of them.

After having completed that heavy-duty bout of grinding, I can safely claim that the developers never intended players to take party members all the way to 99. The mere fact that only the freshest foes give decent amounts of XP was probably conceived as an encouragement to forge ever on; and the existence of the XP minimum indicates that Imageepoch didn't think for one second that players would backtrack and engage in crazy level-grinding marathons. On top of that, all characters stop gaining skills and special attacks after Lv. 46, which makes me think that the crew is probably supposed to be around Lv. 45 when the final showdown unrolls. Well, guess I broke the game then. That's your fault, Imageepoch, for making level-grinding in Luminous Arc so deliciously addictive.

I can now go back to the main story, and I'm really curious to see how things will unfold. Will I blast through the rest of the game, leaving a trail of burnt land and dead bodies after me? Will Alph's impossibly high levels be enough to ensure smooth victories over the many foes ahead? Will I manage to pull off a de facto solo run of Luminous Arc' second half? Well, we'll see, and very soon at that. Stay tuned for my next run report, dear fellow gamers! Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!