Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii, 2010)

Combat systems are, of course, a huge deal in any JRPG, and Arc Rise's is just complex enough to make it interesting during the more intense fights. The members of your party all draw upon the same pool of Action Points (AP) to do anything and everything (fight, use spells, move, etc.) during their turn. This means that you have to strategically decide which characters are going to participate in the battle, sometimes choosing to have one character use up all the points while the others just stand there. The finite AP resource also makes for hard choices: at times making you choose to simply defend or do nothing for a turn, in order to save up the points you need to enact more powerful moves in subsequent turns.

On top of AP, combat is made deeper still by giving you several other things to manage on the fly. For instance, physical positioning of your party members is important, as standing spread out might allow you to avoid damage to multiple characters from a single spell, while having them standing next to one another could allow them to assist each other's attacks. Additionally, casting spells costs MP, and each level of spells has its own MP. Then you're special powers are spent using SP, which builds up during the course of battle (all other stats outside of AP are for each individual, not in a collective pool).

In few words, a very complicated, yet nice looking battle system.

The only problem is that battles are hardly ever challenging. Besides the boss battles -- which are often so difficult that you have to go back and grind for an hour just to get past them -- combat is so easy you can pretty much put your party on autopilot and do something else.

The oddest thing about my time with Arc Rise, was that I actually kind of enjoyed my time with it despite the terrible story and boring stretches. Something about maxing out my characters' abilities, equipping them with the right armor, and manipulating how they cast spells really appealed to me.

If you search its grade on a review page it would get like 6.5-8 out of 10.

If you enjoy JRPGs I would say, get it.
But If you wouldnt like an boring story, with AWFUL voiceovers. Then DO NOT buy it.

From what I found, the game was pretty decent, Graphics were really nice especially for the cinematic and the game had some great colour to it and seemed to be over all well drawn out. The Battle system was well put done, pretty much use your AP to attack the monster that are trying to eat.....or kill you.....whatever their attack you for. The story I really enjoyed, It was thought out quite well and shown in the game.

The only problems I found was that some of the voice active was kind of weak especially during the battles and kind of took away from the battle, I also didn't really like the Heath meter the enemies had, I'd prefer to fight an enemy that i didn't know when it was going to die. The Other thing I didn't like was there wasn't much to go for other then the main story so if you beat the game once, there was not going to be much more you could do for a second run though but over all, it is a good game, Worth the money and if you enjoy these types of game, you will enjoy this

This is an excellent RPG game. The battle system is easy to learn and the game play is easy to follow. I would recommend this game.