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E3 Impression

Arc the Lad: End of Darkness

05.19.2005

HEATH HINDMAN
STAFF COLUMNIST
PHILIP BLOOM
E3 CORRESPONDANT

SCREENSHOT
RAGE

Wrapping up the Namco booth, I got a chance to take a look at the latest in the Arc the Lad series, formerly of tactical RPG fame. Picking up the controller I found myself in control of Edda, a young hunter looking to go up in the world. Shades of Arc the Lad 3, to be sure. Edda though is an exorcist who, among many other nifty things, can summon spirits of the dead to help Edda out. In fact, Edda starts, in the demo, with the mighty Elc from Arc the Lad 2. This, naturally, required me to ask for a few characters if they were back in, which got quick confirmation that the game would have Shu, ninja gunsman extradoinaire, and Choco in the playable character set.

Moving around the village, I found myself a quest to kill things and like any good hunter went to go ahead and do this. Traveling onto the world map, I checked out the quest option, selected elc as my character and found myself in a real time battle environment, similar to the recent Ys VI, but not quite as fluid. That's right, no strategy setup to the new Arc the Lad. I found that I could do a few physical attack combos, dash around, lock on, roll around, and even had a spot for messing with spells that didn't really have anything to mess with in the demo. It was fun, but still had notable room for growth to really get out there as an action-RPG.

SCREENSHOT
RAGE

I didn't really mess around too much with the menus, though there seemed to be quite a bit of information there. I'm not really sure how far along this version is, but at the least, it's looking to be a reasonable bit of good times for Arc the Lad fans that can make the transition to action RPG gameplay with a simple enough system that's reasonably fun in its own right.


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Console:
· PlayStation 2

Release:
· June, 2005

Publisher:
· Namco

Developer:
· Sony


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