Luminous Arc

At first, the game might seem to be unforgiving--especially if you're one of those people who decided to skip the 19 available tutorials (also available at the start menu accessible through the world map)--because the enemies seem to attack without any mercy. Right off the bat, your characters already might be in possession of some stat-enhancing abilities, and those really become really useful once you get into the game. Those who pay close attention to what they're doing will also be smart to know that every time your characters level up, they regain all of their health and cure any status effects that may have occurred. Leveling up is pretty easy in the game, especially when ganging up on other units.

One of the cool things as you progress through the game is the meaning of friendship. After every battle, there's an intermission in which you can choose one of the people you battled alongside with and have a small chat with that person. Provided you say the right things, you'll get a helpful item and that character's unidentified statistics, such as dodging ability, will raise, giving them more of an advantage in combat. There's also an ugly or cute, depending on what you think, little thing that says a lot of useless statements after intermission is over.

As with most of Atlus' RPG's, Luminous Arc is extremely colorful with terrific artwork. While it's obviously mostly reliant on its images of scantily clad women with three quarters of their breasts revealed, the mix between cute and ugly really takes its stance with this one. In battle, the sprites are detailed enough to know who you're in control of every single time--unless of course you still can't tell the difference between Alph and his brother. The few live-action anime scenes are just icing on the cake on this nice-looking DS title.

Probably the first thing you'll notice when playing Luminous Arc is that the game actually has a fair share of voice acting. While not every piece of text is accompanied with spoken dialog, it's a very welcome addition and really makes you wonder how much juice the DS can provide. Along with that, the music isn't bad--it fits the tone and everything, but nothing about it sounds great. Nonetheless, the sound is definitely not a problem.

Luminous Arc is a good game by all accounts, but quite frankly, this isn't the big DS RPG gamers have been waiting for. That honor still belongs to Final Fantasy III, which still isn't a great original as the Golden Sun games were on the GBA. Unlike many of the other strategy games on the DS, Luminous Arc finds itself to be pretty presentable, and it's not one of those games that is actually hard just for the sake of being hard. The system is nearly identical to that of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but there are still some rough edges here and there. One thing this game could've really used was the ability to adjust the isometric view of the battlefield, but the lack of such a feature really brings up a question about the game's actual polish. All that said, Luminous Arc is a fine game with an enjoyable battle system and interesting story to go along with it; it's just not a defining title.

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