Luminous Arc may simply fit the SRPG mold, but it tastes good while doing it.
The story and characters are enjoyable. There is a nice range of diverse characters and several have interesting back stories and developments of their own. The overall story follows an interesting but mostly predictable path. The story is well told and splashes of voice acting and nice art create a great overall package.
The gameplay truly shines. You will have an overall map with plotted locations to traverse to for battles and story movement. The battles will play out like a standard strategy role-playing game. The battle map will contain enemies and up to 8 of your characters that you select before hand (occasionally being forced to use a certain characters in a few battles). You don't have control over placement of the characters though, while would have been nice. Each character can move a certain distance the battle grid and will have a variety of attacks, skills, or magic to damage the enemy, cause status effects, or to aid the party in healing or stat bonuses. You will also have access to healing items that are rarely needed, but very useful in a few circumstances.
You also will be able to buy and equip different weapons, armor, and accessories to each character. There is also a weapon enhancement system that allows you to pay to have certain items analyzed and then you can attempt to combine two of these items with stat bonus with your equipment. I would have liked to see this aspect over hauled a little as I mostly skipped over it since it was expensive to analyze the items and attempts at enhancing often failed.
For the most part, the touch screen controls worked nicely for making selections during the battles. However, there were a few time it was difficult to see certain squares since the map was always facing in one direction and the terrain often had layers. It would have been nice to be able to rotate the map especially in the very few circumstance where I could not get the game to register the selection for certain squares. It occasionally would select a neighboring square instead as well. This did create a few slight annoyances but did not happen frequently and never became game breaking or a true hindrance to overall gameplay.
Most battles were easily won but several offered a nice challenge and were nice to be able to go back to areas on the map to redo some battles to feel the growth and strength of your party over time.
I clocked in over 51 hours in the main story. After the main story is complete you sent back the beginning to be able to do a New Game+ and also get access to a bonus dungeon; although, I have not spent time battling in the levels of the bonus dungeon.
I highly recommend this game to SRPG fans and even to those interested in trying the genre out. I am certainly looking forward to playing the next game in the series.