26/04/2017

Luminous Arc: That's a wrap


So, did I manage to pull off an Alph solo run of Luminous Arc? Well, sort of. I sure blazed through the second half of the game, polishing off twelve chapters in a mere four hours; and Alph was pretty much my sole asset on the battlefield. I occasionally took a couple of extra party members along for the ride; but being the under-levelled wimps they were, they usually died in a couple of turns, leaving Alph alone to finish the job. Not that it was a problem, mind you; my Lv. 99 Alph was more than strong enough to take care of any foe, and so I managed to reach the final boss without hassle. It was smooth, it was nice, and it was definitely fun.

The final boss battle, on the other hand, is none of these things. It's a nasty difficulty spike of Eiger proportions; and for the first time since my insane grinding marathon, I found myself in a genuine bind. Not only do the boss and his six minions hit harder than any foe before them, but they are also hell-bent on healing and buffing themselves. And since I cannot take them down in one clean hit, even with Alph's most powerful attack, I got stuck in a vicious circle of hitting them only to see them replenish their health, ruining all my efforts in the process. Add to this the necessity to heal myself on a regular basis and you get a perfect recipe for Final Fight Failure. The rest of my crew is virtually useless because of their low levels; and since I got my fill of grinding already, there is no way I'm investing a single extra minute of my time in levelling them up. And thus I'm officially giving up on Luminous Arc after 20 hours of genuinely satisfying play.

That game is not perfect, obviously. Controls are infuriatingly clunky and imprecise (I actually switched to stylus controls after a couple of minutes because they were less frustrating than button controls, which speaks volumes about the poor quality of said button controls), battles are ridiculously slow, and the story is so asinine that the game would have been better off without it. I wish the options to skip all story segments had been available, because watching said story segments felt like a complete waste of time. Heck, I didn't even bother reading the text anymore after a couple of hours. I could elaborate a lot more about how characters accept new circumstances way too fast, how they are so pure and pristine while all church officials are evil and rotten to the core and how the big baddie's ultimate goal hardly makes any sense; but I'll abstain. I've already given that story much more attention than it deserves simply by enduring its unskippable cutscenes.

Still, there's no denying that I had tons of fun playing Luminous Arc. This is the second SRPG in which I resort to over-levelling to break the game and enjoy myself; and I must admit that there is some kind of genuine thrill in subverting a game's rules and playing it in a way that was not intended by developers or by the genre itself. Relying on a single overlevelled character didn't fully work in Luminous Arc, but it sure took me far into the game; and had I been ready to pour a few extra hours into the game to level up a couple of units, I'm sure I could have beaten that cheated final boss and his minions without breaking a sweat. In the end, we always get back to the same point: the RPGs I love the most are the ones that give me the opportunity to play them my way, and Luminous Arc was definitely one of those. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!

2 comments:

  1. Yeah, Imagepooch games really aren't know for good stories, or good characters, or good setting, etc. And yet, I can't stand to play their Japanese only games anymore even if I know the story is crap.

    I guess if I do play this game, I'll make it a dual run instead. I bet just having one more character would have saved you in the last fight. As long as the second character is a hard hitter, you could take out a healer every turn and once that problem is out of the way, you can just beat the boss normally. Unless the boss can revive fallen units that is...

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    1. Yes, a dual run would probably do the trick. If I ever replay that game, I'll perform a dual run with Saki and Alph, raising them to lv. 65-70 as soon as possible. If a third unit is needed, I'll go for Heath (when he joins the party again, that is) or Cecille (after her transformation in the late stages of the game). If two overpowered units cannot get rid of the final boss and his crew, three should definitely manage to do the job. :p

      To be honest, I've only had great experiences with Imageepoch games, so my rant about the story is to be taken with a pinch of salt. :p I really have no problem with RPG stories being piles of horse manure; but if this is indeed the case, I prefer them to be unobstrusive and let the gameplay talk. Like, give me a random goal at the beginning of the game and let me play to my heart's content without interrupting me with bits of mediocre storytelling. ^^

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