Going on a bit of an early schedule because I'll be away tonight. So last one for today will be up in a few hours. In the meantime

62. Luminous Arc 2 (Nintendo DS)
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Luminous Arc 2 is about the Knights and the Witches putting aside their age old racism and feuding in order to join together and stop a rogue witch and her posse who is setting out to do something very dangerous. Our young hero also manages to get a magical device stuck on him by accident which gives him great powers.

This is a Strategy RPG, so every turn you can move your characters a certain number of squares on the battle map, and then act by attacking or using a skill. This game does have some unique features. When you land a hit, you have a bar that will increase. There are 3 total bars you can fill. These bars can be spent on either special attacks or on making regular skills stronger. The main character can also “engage” with certain witches, which will give him access to their skills and special attacks. This game also has relationship meters, and bringing specifically indicated characters in to battles will allow you to have extra scenes with them after the fight is over. The game is divided in to chapters, with each chapter taking a break from the main story to show you a short about “Kopin” (see picture below).



General impressions:
I'd heard good things about Luminous Arc 2 so I decided to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised, overall. It had a good sense of humour, interesting large cast of characters (I'm a big fan of large casts of characters), and while the story wasn't anything special, it did keep me interested. The game could get a bit difficult if you didn't do a bunch of level grinding so that could get tedious, but overall it was pretty fun.

Story:
While the story wasn't anything special, it wasn't bad either. I'm not sure if it would have had more impact if I'd played the first game, although I don't think they are direct sequels. More like the Suikoden games where you can play them out of order but they are still related? I could be wrong about that so its better to look it up. What was good about the story was the way it was told. The dialogue flowed well and it had some good down time and a really good sense of humour, making it pretty lighthearted. It was kind of refreshing because a lot of strategy RPG's like this one have such heavy stories.


Gameplay:
It could be a bit difficult at times, but overall it was easy to pick up on. Really the difficult part just came from all of the grinding needed. But I enjoyed having character scenes at the end of it if you brought the right character in to battle, and there was a good range of characters to use for different strategies.


World:
Being the type of game it is, the world isn't really explorable in the traditional sense. All you really have is like a background image except for the battle maps. But the map was pretty large and there were some pretty areas. Just not a lot of exploration to it.


Characters:
I'd say this is the strong point of the game. The characters are all pretty interesting, I like their interactions, and they're mostly pretty funny. There's a certain charm to them that I really enjoyed and watching the character scenes was my favourite part of the game.

Favourite character: Dia LmfiwlH.jpg
Honourable mention: Althea a84yhi4.jpg

I wasn't expecting to like Miss Dia that much (it's weird to just hear her called Dia) because she's not my usual type of preferred character. But she grew on me a lot and actually has a surprising amount of depth for this game. She's snarky and self-assured and headstrong, but she's also a bit immature for who she's supposed to be and you can see her confidence wane from time to time. Althea is just a sweet girl and she sticks to her goals and she works hard, which is very admirable.

Overall this game doesn't have the most depth and it has more than enough cliche's, but overall it was a fun, lighthearted experience with some great and funny character interactions and simple, fun gameplay.