Sexually repressed.
Story : A rich, Dennis Rodman-like figure buys an island and invites all of the female fighters together to contests of bikini-clad volleyball and relax in the sun while the player watches and…okay not quite. There's something about inter-dimensional disturbances and gods and evils and school girls fighting to stop it and I'm not really sure whatsoever what the story behind Arcana Heart really is. Usually, the more a fighting game tries to indulge in a storyline, the more spectacularly it flops (see King of Fighters), and fortunately, Arcana Heart doesn't try to be serious most of the time. However, there's a lot of dialogue and little of value spoken. The game has a story mode and an arcade mode, but the only discernable difference is that the former serves up large chunks of text in bulk.
To the best of my abilities, there isn't a single male within Arcana Heart; the cast is an all-lady ensemble, with the only hint of masculinity being one character that fights with a giant ball that I assume is made of gelatinous testosterone for it forms giant arms and piledrives enemies Zangief-style. Otherwise, all the characters are skinny, young, promiscuous school-girl types…but while one would assume that the instruction manual editors bumped up the collective ages in the character bios to something more legal in the United States, credit should be given for to the game for never feeling sleazy. There's little in the way of gratuitous boob or ass shots like in a Dead or Alive game and the characters are actually kind of creative. Yes you have your schoolgirls, but you also have schoolgirl samurais, schoolgirl bat thingys, schoolgirl roller-blading ninjas, schoolgirl Goth zombies and…well they're manga clichés for all I know, but I thought they were more interesting than what you see in most fighting games.
Between the characterization and the prevalence of cheery music and many shades of pink, I'm lead to believe that this may be a fighting game aimed at the female audience. I can't help but wonder if you can get anymore niche than aiming for female 2D fighting game fans.
Especially since this game is on a different level of sophistication than, say, Street Fighter 2. It bears closest resemblance to Guilty Gear on the fighting game spectrum, or at least Guilty Gear without the urge to wake the neighbours with 80s underground metal. You run, double-jump, have assorted attacks, special moves and super special moves. But you also choose a god-character before the fight. By pressing the L1 button, you activate what I assume to be GOD MODE, and in GOD MODE, you have access to the GOD's super attacks. On top of all of this, you have what I can also assume is called the "Bum Rush Button", where your character uses up some of her bum rush meter to charge up in front of your opponent, regardless of where they might be. I can speculate (and only speculate) that this opens up potential for new strategies and possible combination attacks.
The key word being "speculate" as the game does a less than stellar job of explaining itself to me. The Training Mode merely lets you beat up a drone character to practice moves, and with no in-game tutorials, I had no way of knowing if I was playing the game properly. Truth be told, either Arcana Heart is broken or I wasn't playing it the way the game was the developers intended it to be played, and I'd like to believe the latter. Most of my AI fights lasted a considerably long time, with what I thought to be powerful super attacks doing little to chip away at my opponent's health. Many of my victories wound up resulting from time limit expirations. There's a feeling of lethargy that comes with using these screen-filling attacks that knock my enemy 20 feet into the wall doing miniscule damage to her health bar, leaving me to believe that the game assumes the player has some kind of knowledge of advanced combinations to put the enemy away. Which in of itself is a terrible assumption for the developers to make being that there are about as many arcades in America that imported the original version of Arcana Heart as there are Toronto Maple Leaf Stanley Cup victories in the last 50 years.
Fighting games depend on multiplayer to thrive, so I tend to think that any fighting game either needs to be; 1. Already popular enough that one can find others to play, like a Street Fighter or Soul Calibur or Smash Bros (as I risk my neck out there by calling Smash Bros a fighting game), 2. Accessible enough that anyone can pick up and play immediately ala Fight Night, or 3. have online play. Arcana Heart has the audacity of thinking it can get away with having none of the above.
Now I know you can't have number 3 without an established fanbase (try setting up an online game of Battle Fantasia or Castlevania: Judgement and see how long it takes to find one person to play with. Or even better, tell me with a straight face you've heard of Battle Fantasia) but the game's unwillingness to explain itself makes it extremely difficult for anyone to overcome its enigmatically large learning curve. Not to mention, Arcana Heart being a limited-release Playstation 2 game is doing little to endear itself to any possible new fans.
If Arcana Heart is a great fighting game, I don't know it, nor do I know how to figure out if it is. Partly because the game is either broken or complex and doesn't want to explain itself. Partly because I've got no one to play against. But both are faults that the developers should've dealt with. I can't help but feel that the potential for a fan base to grow could've been achieved had the game been released on the Xbox 360 or PS3 as a downloadable title with online support rather than a semi-rare PS2 game. But in its current form, Arcana Heart is nothing but pent-up frustration waiting to explode.
3 stars. It's a game that needs to get laid and bad.