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I finished luminous arc last night. It was kind of a chore, sadly. It had a forgettable 2007 jrpg story (“what if le church was….le evil???”) was clunky to control, you couldn’t turn the camera so targeting was often a pain when maps got chaotic, it had bad slowdown in later maps, and didn’t escape the perennial isometric srpg problem where after only a few maps you’ll get a feel for what the best units and skills are and then you’ll be doing the same exact thing every battle till the credits roll. And it doesn’t have a fun enough progression system to offset that tedium. Stella Glow, which is a spiritual sequel to the luminous arc games, is one of my favorite games ever so I’m glad to have finally started playing the originals (the most fun I had was going “oh that’s something they did again with Stella glow” as I played) I will probably eventually play luminous arc 2 as well to see how it’s improved and come closer to stella glow but after this experience I’m not exactly rushing to jump in.

I also have to make a separate note here about the localization: it’s outrageously bad. Ghost stories tier where multiple characters have very obviously been completely rewritten to be pure comedy characters and no it wasn’t ever funny here either. It would have been impressive that a DS game had so much voice acting but unfortunately it’s English dub only and of course all these cute girls have voices of middle aged women who are half assing it completely. Everything bad I said about the game in the first paragraph I believe would be true even were I a Japanese speaker playing the original game, but the localization created a further wall between me and the game making the player experience that much worse.

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