End of Darkness is a terrible game, that even fans of the series will have difficulty liking.
User Rating: 4.5 | Arc the Lad: End of Darkness PS2
After Twilight of the Spirits came out, people were wondering how could they continue to make Arc The Lad games? Well, Cattle Call found a way... But unfortunately it wasn't for the better. End of Darkness is a terrible game, that even longtime fans of the series like myself, will have difficulty liking. The game revolves around a really annoying character named Edda. He becomes a hunter after leaving the island that he grew up on. What you do the entire game, is go city to city, asking for quests at a counter and you get them. Once you beat them you come back, and talk to the guy behind the desk, and he gives you points. Then after you have 10, you go to the bulletin board and get quests there. When you finish, you come back and "settle" the quests to gain dignity points. Once you have 10 of each, you go to Rueloon, and take the Hunter Exam. That will get your hunter rank up and allow you to do more difficult quests. The repetition is very long and boring, and there is never really a change. All you do is "Protect object A for a set amount of time," or "Defeat a certain number of enemies in a certain amount of time," which just gets plain boring after a while. The online adds a few extra hours of fun, but all it is are the same quests over and over, until they too, are boring. A thing that seemed cool before the game came out, was the fact that you could meet characters from early Arc the Lad games. Sadly, it doesn't work well. You can only use these characters on certain quests, and it doesn't add up with the storyline. What happens is you get a card with a character on it, and when you materialize it you can use that person in certain quests. But, if you have someone's card, you can still run into them sometimes in the game which makes no sense. Is it a clone? I don't know. The game ends with fighting one big monster, which is such an easy fight. The game just plays out bad. The graphics have not improved. Not to say they are terrible, but ut's been over 2 years, and they haven't changed one bit. Cattle Call could have done a little bit better with that as well. The backgrounds are VERY sloppy though. Just the same forest or same desert for every single mission that you do. Just takes more away from the creativity of the whole game. The sound actually got worse in the new game, over the last PS2 installment. The VA's are virtually gone. Also, some of the familiar voice's like Darc's VA are changed. Making it just not feel right. The music is pretty much the same as the older Arc the Lad's. They changed nothing there, just making it less creative again. You can play this game for only a little over 10 hours total, before it gets really stale. Any RPG fan is definitely better off just going out and buying ANY other Arc the Lad game. Even the previous Playstation 2 installment was much more fun. If you don't want to take my advice then go out and buy the game. You will be disappointed.
