Arc System Works, known for Guilty Gear and Blazblue as well as their spiffy Contra update Hard Corps Uprising released earlier this year, also have their hand in the Arcana Heart series, a niche 2D fighting series with an all-female cast. Arcana Heart 3 comes to us via Aksys games exclusively on PSN as a downloadable title. Once Sony’s troubled service is finally back up, fighting game fans who want to travel off the beaten path may want to check this puzzling fighter out.
Puzzling, because the game offers very little information on how to actually play it. Sure, there’s a training mode, but there’s no tutorial or instructions included. This is a downloadable title, so there’s no full-color manual with movelists or explanations of the various gauges, abilities, and other minutiae required to know how to be any good at the game. It’s annoying the game itself doesn’t clue you in on anything, but luckily we live in an Internet age, where tutorials like the one at Siliconera (written by James Xie of Aksys Games) and a Wiki page help out a lot. That’s a lot of careful study, which means Arcana Heart 3‘s got a steep, steep, steep learning curve.
Consider this: There are 23 characters, who range from prepubescent girl with a sketchbook drawing come to life, to a killer nun, to a busty android, to a little girl riding a wolf and more. Then an Arcana must be chosen, a Pokemon-like assist creature with names like Fire, Sin, Time and Lightning that augments that character’s fighting style in a variety of ways. Improved offensive power, mobility, defense and combos, as well as additional attacks, are just a few of the ways the various Arcana can potentially cover that character’s weaknesses. Selecting an Arcana is usually a trial-and-error affair since there are as many of them as there are fighters (!!!), and there’s no real info on what exactly they change unless you consult the aforementioned web tutorials. Kind of a failing on the game’s part. Why can’t it just tell me what everything does?
Yet, for patient gamers willing to read up and experiment with a plethora of options and combinations, there’s a ton of content to cover in Arcana Heart 3. Similar to Street Fighter and other modern fighters, you can charge up a gauge at the bottom of the screen — the Arcana Gauge — which you can then use to unleash special attacks and other abilities, like cancels. A Focus Gauge, right near the character’s portrait up top, allows a brief power-up period that can also summon a Arcana attack. Levels are large, horizontally and vertically, allowing fighters a lot of opportunity to play zone games, which can be complicated what is perhaps Arcana Heart 3′s defining feature (besides the creatures and the girls anyway), the dedicated Homing button, which sends your character flying into your opponent. With all those options, it’s a good, fast, frighteningly deep fighting game that ought to satisfy the hardest of the hardcore fighter, so long as they’re willing to put up with a gigaton of embarrassing moe-flavored character designs, incessant yappy Japanese dialogue and several other caveats that keep it from standing up to its street fighting peers.
Story mode’s reserved only for the most curious otaku. Six or seven battles against the computer punctuated by incomprehensible scenes of boring dialogue, each character-specific tale it tells is of no consequence to any human being. Best left skipped, the story is a good way to practice with a chosen character, though one can just play Score Attack or Training for that, and they wouldn’t need to skip through such embarrassing nonsense. Of course, character personality is an important part of the fighting game experience, in which case maybe you do want to get a taste for the story.
Too bad Arcana Heart 3‘s characters are mostly bland, annoying otaku fetish fuel. With as much bounce as the Dead or Alive girls, they all kind of blend together into one messy, doe-eyed moeblob. And though the personalities may grate on the nerves, it is nice to see 2D sprite artwork in a new fighting game, even if the 2D sprites themselves aren’t properly upscaled. There’s a big disparity between the animated super-crisp character portraits that serve as borders for the screen (since the game isn’t widescreen) and the actual lower-res game. It’s nothing game-breaking or eye-searing, but it is obvious.
Unusual for this day and age, there’s no two player training mode. Though that’s very annoying for people playing in the same room it benefits lone gamers who want to learn two characters (and Arcanas) at the same time since it’s possible to switch between two on the fly. Still, two-player training is an odd absence.
The music’s catchy (that menu music just won’t leave my brain at times), the menus are easily navigable and online play is a cinch to connect to, no Kombat Pass required. Too bad there are so few players online, probably because it’s impossible to buy Arcana Heart 3 off the PSN store at the moment. The few players on are murderous psychopaths who wouldn’t let me get a hit in. Either I’m terrible (very possible), or they’re just that good. From what I can see, there’s no way the online mode matches players of equal skill up together like Super Street Fighter IV (sort of) does. Even if it did, the extremely niche, almost impenetrable nature of this title pretty much confirms only the hardest of the hardcore will play.
While it obviously won’t replace the Street Fighters, Marvels and Mortal Kombats out there, Arcana Heart 3 is an interesting, competent fighter. For those who tire of fatalities and hadoukens, or just want something very different to complement their chosen A-list fighter, look past the otaku-pandering exterior and you’ll find a game deep with mind games, possibilities and surprises.
Senior Reviews Editor Tim Torres loves video games and loves to write about them. He also loves movies, comics, animation and acting. He does not hate Final Fantasy VII.
