It looks like anyone wishing to engage in online brutality will need to set up matches ahead of time through forums or whatever - just diving in and finding someone to trade punches with seems near impossible. I checked at various times of day when the game released and never once managed to get into a random match. The biggest problem facing BLADE ARCUS from Shining: Battle Arena isn’t its incredibly unwieldy title - it’s the lack of singleplayer content, coupled with an online mode that was dead on arrival. The animation is slick, the characters look decent in motion, and the backgrounds aren’t badly done. Graphically, most of the game is made up of 3D models instead of 2D sprites, and there’s a certain charm to them that reminds me of a smoother, sharper take on Saturn or Dreamcast era games. It’s very anime with a slight tilt towards moe, though - there’s a martial artist catgirl and a maid that seems to have fox ears and a tail. Tony Taka, character designer and illustrator of many recent Shining games, does excellent work with the cast here. As someone who played Shining Force back on the Genesis and laments the lack of any new entries, it was cool to see just how closely Fenrir resembles crazed wolfman Zylo from the original game - retractable claws and all. It’s fairly easy to perform cool combos even for novices, and there’s additional nuance in the form of EX attacks and the aforementioned support assists. Weak hits can go into mediums, mediums chain into strong attacks, and from there it’s but a short hop-skip-jump to parlay specials into supers. The combo system is good too, allowing most attacks to link smoothly into one another. It’s a cool idea that adds some variety to matches. Players select a main and a backup character before going into battle, and can call on this partner for support mid-battle, or change to them after each round. It’s unfortunate that there’s so little to get stuck into because the gameplay isn’t bad at all. It’s plain to see that BLADE ARCUS was designed for Japanese arcades where the player base would theoretically offer new challengers to offset the lack of this basic, bare-bones content. Then there’s the usual versus mode, a training mode, an online mode and bang - that’s pretty much everything the game has to offer. Players simply choose a character, fight a bunch of enemies plucked from the roster, and get the occasional snippet of Visual Novel-style dialogue to move things along in a confusing, unclear manner. It’s not exactly the freshest script, and the story mode associated with it does little to expand on the motivations of anyone involved. BLADE ARCUS from Shining: Battle Arena is no different, taking a bunch of characters from Sega’s Shining series and having them duke it out in order to get their hands on magical orbs that can grant them whatever prize they wish for. WTF Whatever happened to those excellent Shining Force strategy games, anyway?Īh, fighting game characters… Can’t leave them alone for ten seconds without them grasping at each other’s throats over the thinnest of storyline provocations. LOW A lack of single-player content coupled with an inactive online player base.
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