By 1992, Final Fantasy IV was already two years old. While it was definitely far from perfect, it to me represents an important step forwards for the JRPG genre, with more attempts to properly tell stories through combat, innovations in turn-based gameplay and more.
With this in mind, Arcana is dated, somewhat off-balance, and honestly? It's a bit tedious. With navigation in a tile-based first-person perspective with awful draw distance and framerate, and Return Rings and the Home spell having so little consequence, dungeon crawling becomes a matter of trial-and-error, warping back to town when resources run low, naturally Getting Stronger in the process, and trying again until you happen to find the right path forward and survive on your way there.
It gets even more trivial once money becomes less of a concern and you can just stockpile Tents from the shop, which fully restores the party's HP and MP.
But... I don't know! It's really not particularly more compelling than something like the NES Final Fantasies, but... it's a HAL Laboratories JRPG. It's got a Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando soundtrack! You know those more JRPG-ish tracks that Ishikawa did for Kirby Triple Deluxe? He's got some serious chops for this kind of genre! I would have loved to see more of this!
To me specifically, Arcana is just such an aesthetic game. It's brilliant to see and hear and experience, to keep wondering "was this song written by Ishikawa or Ando?", to listen to little motifs and melodic fragments come in and out in a way that foreshadows how Ando would handle future Kirby soundtracks, to finally get to the credits and see Masahiro Sakurai and Satoru Iwata's names.
And it's wonderful to experience these things that lead up to the legacy of that pink puff that means so much to me.
With this in mind, Arcana is dated, somewhat off-balance, and honestly? It's a bit tedious. With navigation in a tile-based first-person perspective with awful draw distance and framerate, and Return Rings and the Home spell having so little consequence, dungeon crawling becomes a matter of trial-and-error, warping back to town when resources run low, naturally Getting Stronger in the process, and trying again until you happen to find the right path forward and survive on your way there.
It gets even more trivial once money becomes less of a concern and you can just stockpile Tents from the shop, which fully restores the party's HP and MP.
But... I don't know! It's really not particularly more compelling than something like the NES Final Fantasies, but... it's a HAL Laboratories JRPG. It's got a Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando soundtrack! You know those more JRPG-ish tracks that Ishikawa did for Kirby Triple Deluxe? He's got some serious chops for this kind of genre! I would have loved to see more of this!
To me specifically, Arcana is just such an aesthetic game. It's brilliant to see and hear and experience, to keep wondering "was this song written by Ishikawa or Ando?", to listen to little motifs and melodic fragments come in and out in a way that foreshadows how Ando would handle future Kirby soundtracks, to finally get to the credits and see Masahiro Sakurai and Satoru Iwata's names.
And it's wonderful to experience these things that lead up to the legacy of that pink puff that means so much to me.