Arc the Lad: End of Darkness Preview

Currently scheduled for release in North America next month, Arc the Lad: End of Darkness is the latest in a series of role-playing games that first appeared on the PlayStation almost 10 years ago. The game will see you assuming the role of a young man named Edda, who has inherited the ability to exorcise "malademons" from his parents and, if the first several hours of the game are any indication, has an unusual talent for getting shipwrecked in strange lands.

You'll begin your adventure on a small and peaceful island inhabited by slothians--vertically challenged, lethargic humanoids with large heads, wide smiles, and the kind of wonderfully naïve outlook on life that you could only get living on an island miles from the rest of civilization. The island isn't quite as idyllic as it seems, though, and once you've got all of the requisite (and occasionally lengthy) conversations with other characters out of the way, you'll be asked to accompany a group of hunters who have come to the island to hunt a demon. The hunters think that they're above accepting the help of a whelp like you, of course, and when you make your way to the demon's cave you'll find that they paid for their arrogance with their lives.

Many of the non-player characters that you meet and converse with early in Arc the Lad: End of Darkness serve no purpose other than to explain game features to you, and your trip to the demon's cave will actually be the first time that you get to try out the all-new real-time combat system. That's right, the combat in End of Darkness is played exclusively in real time, and although there's no shortage of opportunities for you to make strategic decisions during a battle, you'll be making them on the fly, and your success will ultimately depend as much on your reflexes as it does on anything else.

Fortunately the combat controls are uncomplicated--some basic attack moves, a "step" button that can be used to back away from or charge into combat, and shoulder button commands that let you lock onto and circle around individual enemies. Locking onto an individual enemy sees the camera zooming in for a better view of the action and makes it a lot easier to hit the target you're after. We wouldn't recommend using it when you're outnumbered, though, since you're better off keeping the camera zoomed out and swinging your weapon around wildly in the hope that it'll hit multiple targets. If you hit the basic attack button repeatedly, you can perform some pretty powerful combos, and as you progress through the game you'll be able to augment your existing techniques with ability cards.

Ability cards, like character cards (which let you fight as other characters with very different skills) and parts cards (which basically improve your equipment), can be equipped only after you become a hunter like the ones that were killed in the cave, and to do that you'll need to make a point of talking to all of the right people and then prove your skills in a number of trial missions and in a duel against a hunter's guild master. Each of the five different regions that we've been able to instantly travel between in End of Darkness boasts its own city, and in each city there's a guild hall where you'll go to take on and subsequently claim your rewards for missions.

Although many of the mission briefings we've been given are quite varied, many of the actual missions have amounted to little more than destroying objects or killing dangerous creatures in a field somewhere. There have been some amusing exceptions, though, such as herding sheep away from dangerous wolves and exploring an underground laboratory full of monsters for a missing worker. The rewards that you get for your missions will largely depend on whether you got the missions from the guild hall notice board or from the counter. Notice-board missions are invariably posted by local residents who can offer you nothing but their admiration and respect, which equates to an improvement in your dignity rating. Missions from the guild hall counter, on the other hand, don't vary from region to region, and they reward you with both experience points and currency. To "level up" and improve your hunter ranking you'll need both experience and dignity points.

As your hunter level improves, you'll be able to take on much more challenging and rewarding missions and, if you're interested in online play, team up with other players to tackle the most difficult cooperative missions. We've not had a chance to check out any of the online play for ourselves, but according to a character we met in-game, the dangerous cooperative missions will offer great rewards and, crucially, will be the only way to add some of the game's rarest cards to your deck. Competitive online options will also feature in End of Darkness, incidentally, but we're not sure what form those will take at this time.

After playing through the first several hours of Arc the Lad: End of Darkness, we can report that it's something of a slow starter but that the action is definitely picking up as we spend more time with it. Whether or not the action-oriented real-time combat system will win over RPG fans more accustomed to turn-based systems remains to be seen, but we've had no problems with it ourselves, and we're looking forward to finding out just how Edda fulfills his destiny of saving the world.