The world is in danger. There’s an evil continent on the rise. Only L’Arc can save mankind! And he will, because he’s the hero. But first, he’s got to feed these puppies…
And chase these choirboys, and bug these maids for their autographs, and all the other hundred little tasks a hero can only do when the world is on the verge of destruction.
Of course no one’s forcing me to do any of these things, but I can’t help but marvel at the timing. I went for long stretches of Arc Rise Fantasia without a single sidequest appearing and then suddenly twenty at once when the world needs me most.
I’ve done most of them now anyway. Fed all the puppies, harassed all the maids, delivered all the stupid packages, upgraded my lightship. Now I’m chasing down a flying griffon thingy in the sky for the EXP and WP. It’s a Rogress, so it’ll probably be added to my collection afterwards, but the Rogress gauge fills so slowly and is so limited that I don’t expect to get much use out of it. So why am I still doing it? Because for all its many, many flaws, I quite like Arc Rise Fantasia and I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet. It’s not a game I’m likely to replay (in fact I almost never replay RPGs) so I’m going to milk it to the last drop.
There should be only one or two dungeons left after I finish fighting Marshmallow. He gave me a good walloping just now, but that’s because I went in with my ‘B’ team (Ryfia, Leslie, Serge) instead of my ‘A’ team (Rastan, Cecille, L’Arc). I’ll probably use a L’Arc/Ryfia/Rastan combo for this fight because he likes to spam magical attacks. Once he’s in the bag I’ll see about hunting down Kudoan and Allul before the end.
Story-wise I don’t expect any more twists or reveals, another reason why I’m not in an hurry to finish. It’s mostly cleaning up lose ends and killing people I should have killed a long, long time ago. Speaking of which, around the 50-hour mark the writers suddenly declared “This story isn’t emotional enough!” and killed off two characters just for excrement and guffaws. What might have been moving events in the hands of a more skillful craftsman was, as usual, ruined by stiff dialogue, melodramatic overacting and the terrible, terrible voice-acting. It didn’t help that those characters hadn’t been seen in a while and clearly showed up only to die.
No matter, we can discuss these issues further once I’m done. I think I’ve done enough blogging about this game, now it’s time to finish and round everything up so I can move on.
after you finish the game there is more content to do in the form of a special arena battle and a bunch of super powered monsters that appear around the world (one for character and each one of them drops the best weapon for one of your character) so you shouldn’t worry too much about running out of stuff to do
The arena! I knew I was forgetting something! Normally I ignore post-game content, but I rather like the prospect of super-bosses to take out my wrath on. Thanks for letting me know.
err sort of unrelated but let me ask while i’m here… are you going to do SMT4? i guess not since you don’t own a 3DS to begin with and had to ask for FE… right?
I don’t own a 3DS, but nothing stops me from buying the game and borrowing the system. Thing is, I’m not that interested in SMT4 or SMT: Soul Hackers or SMT anything any more. Maybe if there’s a price reduction that puts it under $25 I might think about it.