Backlog Beatdown: Being Arcane with Arcania

First, let me say that these notes refer to the PlayStation 4 version of Arcania. If you’re considering playing this game on a different platform, you may have a different experience to me, which is just as well really, because my experience of this game wasn’t great.

This is quite early on in the game when you're fighting
your enemies off with a... what is that? A stick?

Arcania is part of a series of games called Gothic, a collection of fantasy-themed Roleplaying games with perhaps a darker tone in terms of its design than the usual affair. You play as a nameless hero, who after having his village destroyed by a horde of enemies, vows to take revenge. This takes him on a quest across the lands to find the truth behind the attack, and the malevolent forces controlling it all. Nothing, of course, that we haven’t seen before.

One thing unique to this version of Arcania I certainly haven’t seen in any RPG since the 5^th generation of consoles is a game with no cutscenes. I thought this was deliberate at first, and quite liked it – a game that drops you straight into the action without faffing about with exposition, in medias res, and what appeared to be a nightmare sequence, no less? That was a great way to get into the game, and I was looking forward to seeing where it was going. Alarm bells started to ring, however, when I’d got past the first area of the game (basically a 1-2 hour tutorial,) to find the hero in a different area entirely with some hints that his home had been destroyed with nothing in between. I finished the set of caves that formed the dungeon and found the hero on a different island altogether. Nothing set this up; nothing explained what exactly happened and why. I surmised that there probably were cutscenes in the game at some point but for some reason hadn’t got as far as the PS4 port. A quick glance on Youtube confirmed my theory – I have an incomplete game here.

These wasp-like creatures are a
pain in the bum...

Nonetheless, I kept going, wanting to at least get to the end of the game and finish what I started. The game is… OK. It’s a pretty standard role-playing game that reminded me of a grim-dark version of Fable more than anything else. You can develop your character in fighting, ranged combat and magic, and while there is some overlap in how your invested skill points develop your character’s attributes, you’ll have to stick to one build or another if you want to maximise your stats; spreading them out across the board makes for a balanced but less-than-spectacular character! The quests are one fetch quest after another, or kill a certain monster, or number of monsters. The combat is functional at best but not at the standard you might expect for a 7^th generation game; there’s very little feedback so you don’t always know you’ve been hit until your health bar is ticking down, the enemies barely react to being hit either, and the game has an odd habit of glitching enemies behind you – presumably as an error macro to being caught in the scenery. It’s the jankiest game I think I’ve ever played.

The set-up to this quest is absolutely ridiculous,
but the beast provides an interesting challenge.

I did enjoy some of what Arcania had to offer – the game is quite linear, so there was no wandering around becoming hopelessly lost and confused, and while the combat was a bit wonky in places, at least the challenge of the game was at the right level. The graphics are OK, if a little, er, “Bioware” in terms of the faces, and some of the monsters were fresh designs on a western RPG setting that can get quite stale. The sound was alright, even if the nameless hero sounded like an absolute wazzock and the voice acting for the rest of the cast is only marginally better than PS1-era games. The music score was suitably epic, and one of the better parts of the game’s presentation.

Ultimately though, I played Arcania to its story conclusion and found very little to recommend. If you like RPGs there are far better ones than this, and if you don’t, then this certainly won’t change your mind – even overlooking all the faff that comes with the PS4 version. A very poor game.

Final Score: 1/5. Nah.