I’ve only played an hour, but I’ve played enough of other games to know the signs so I can tell Luminous Arc Infinity is going to suck. Here are the three main signs:
Too much talking. In that one hour I played, I’ve only fought two battles. And they were tutorial battles too, so almost every step was interrupted by a lecture. The rest of the game is just talking, talking, talking.
The story behind Luminous Arc Infinity is that their world is supported by 9 Idols – young ladies who sing and offer magic up to the magna lapis that holds up the world. A shadowy organization named Amadeus is trying to kidnap the idols for unknown reasons, so after a lengthy LENGTHY discussion, the world powers decide to bring all the idols under one roof so they can be better protected. And the person tasked with doing this is the lazy main character, Xird.
See, that didn’t take a whole hour to explain, did it? So when you see a game that uses a lot of characters and scenes to say something very simple, you know it’s going to suck. Especially if they won’t even let you save during a cutscene.
Stupid touching gimmick. In between chapters you have to fondle and paw at a half-naked idol in order to “tune” her properly. These excuses get more and more inventive every time. If you’re skillful enough, she gets bonuses in the next battle. The fanservice isn’t particularly risque, but the minigame is very pointless because you’re just poking and scratching at various spots in the hope of finding something good. Also I hate touching mini-games.
Too many tutorials. You can’t even save without getting a tutorial on saving and loading. This level of over-the-top hand-holding is extremely boring so after a while I started skipping everything. Which means I’ll have to read a FAQ later to get all the nuances but whatevs. More importantly, the wealth of tutorials makes me suspect that either 1) The game is full of obscure mechanics that you won’t understand even after reading all those tutorials or 2) The game is aimed at an audience that doesn’t usually play video games. For Luminous Arc Infinity it seems to be the latter.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to try to draw in new audiences, but the question is “Draw them in to what?” From what I can see, LA Infinity has a very heavy emphasis on whole “anime j-pop idols” and the gameplay aspect is a distant second to ogling and interacting with cute girls. If this game is not aimed at gamers, then I supsect it won’t try to please gamers. It will just throw more girls and more talking scenes at you. After all, that’s what you came for, right?
Still I could be wrong (unlikely, but possible) and now that the worst of the tutorials are over and the basic story has been established, maybe things will get better. But I won’t be finding out any time soon because I really don’t feel like playing any more of this right now. I haven’t had even the slightest bit of fun in the hour I’ve played, the girls are not that cute and the lazy slacker main character kills my motivation stone dead. You can consider Luminous Arc Infinity dropped until I’m done with the other, better games in my backlog.
Update
I decided that dropping Luminous Arc Infinity after just one hour was being too rash, so I played two more hours. There’s still a ton of talking and I still hate that stupid mini-game, but that battle system is starting to open up. More idols have joined my party and they’ve leveled up a few times and gained some more skills. Battles are a bit sluggish and long-drawn out for my liking but the game isn’t so bad any more.
Oh, oh, and check this out: you don’t get a Game Over if you lose a battle. You just get to try again with all the EXP and Aura Points you’ve gained already XD. It’s like the Egress skill in Shining Force 2, but even more exploitable! If you wanted, you could deliberately one battle over and over again (easy enough because friendly fire is a thing in this game) to learn a ton of skills and gain a lot of stats very early in the game. But I won’t do that… or will I? Heh heh heh. Nah, the game isn’t fun enough or hard enough for that so I’ll just keep playing as normal. Proper update next time!
Ah, another self-insert “Even you, lazy Otaku guy, can be surrounded by cute girls” game? How rare these days.
Also, I always love the “The evil bad guys want to get all the [important artifacts/persons/whatever], so clearly the best plan of operation is to gather them all conveniently for them in one place” trope.
I’ve played a number of harem RPGs and don’t mind the “cute girls falling all over MC” trope. Most of those games have MCs who are heavily involved in the story and in the well-being of the characters, even if they don’t fight themselves. This Xird guy just sucks. He just whines and whines and whines all day, it is SO annoying.
(Re: Gathering the Girls) In Luminous Arc Infinity the merits of gathering everyone together are debated (for once) and it makes sense to gather them all because:
1. They’re often ordinary girls who don’t know their powers yet, i.e. sitting ducks for the enemy.
2. If you lose even one, the whole world falls apart.
3. Most nations don’t have the strength to protect them. So it’s better to get them together and have them protect themselves.
4. If they’re scattered, you don’t know where the enemy will strike. If they’re together you can train them and plan their defences better.
5. If the enemy has a team of 1000 and they attack one girl, it’s 1 against 1000. If you get the 9 together, it’s 1 against 111, much better odds.
6. They’re really strong once they realize their powers, so as a team 9 against 1000 is more than doable.
So it’s a lot better thought-out than most other examples of that trope.
To clarify:
My problem isn’t so much the harem trope of having cute girls flock around one guy in general. Rather the more modern trend of said guy not only having no merrit on his own, but being outright a lazy bum or even mean shitheel.
I confess I haven’t been keeping up with modern harem anime/visual novel trends, so having a harem lead who is this apathetic and indifferent is a shock to the system. I’m often left wondering “What do they see in this guy?” when I play such games, but this time I’m completely at a loss for an answer.
Felistella doesn’t seems to be doing a great job after the Summon Night 3&4 PSP ports…all the new games they’ve made since then were all between varying degree of meh to bleh…the fact they’ve also seem to be focused on fan service games just make me completely lose interest in them after the disappointment that was SN6.
I’ve played Agarest Senki: Mariage, Summon Night 5 and Luminous Arc Infinity from them. All very pretty games, but all missing one crucial thing: fun. They tick all the right boxes on paper, but their games just aren’t fun to play. I don’t know what they can do to solve that, but until they do I’m not trying any more games made by Felistella.