The 2011 Wishlist Marathon #6 and #7: Luminous Arc 1 and 2

In 2011, I already considered strategy RPGs my favorite genre. I was insistent that they be called "tactical RPGs" at the time, although these days I'm not too concerned about the distinction. I like RPGs with grid-based movement. I like to level up and make strategic choices in combat and I like to have some control over character builds. Fast forward to 2026 and I've played dozens of these games, very few of which live up to the first one I ever played—you guessed it—Final Fantasy Tactics. My story isn't an uncommon one. This unassuming PS1 RPG must surely have been an awakening for all sorts of game-enjoyers in 1998, even though I probably only played it for the first time in the early 2000s. After all, my  copy of the game sitting on my shelf at this moment is enclosed in its Greatest Hits jewel case prison, cover art missing in action.  

In the years since, I've played just about every strategy RPG I can get my hands on, but I'll be the first to admit I missed a few. I've liked all of these games, even if most of them don't reach the same heights I felt when playing FFT for the first time. Along the way, I became a fan of many long-running series that stand out as examples of divergent evolution. Games like Fire Emblem and Super Robot Wars absolutely rule, but despite featuring grid-based movement and strategy, their scope and gameplay is so different that it almost feels like they don't belong in the same genre. Final Fantasy Tactics is about individual characters in small-scale skirmish encounters. Much attention must be paid to positioning not only in terms of ability and attack ranges, but for ensuring accuracy as well. This positioning element is often omitted from these games that tackle combat on a larger scale of warfare, but FFT's focus on the small-scale is part of what makes it special.

This won't be the first time I've spent a great deal of time talking about Final Fantasy Tactics when it's not the topic at hand.

Luminous Arc wears its influence on its sleeve

There's a legitimate reason to bring it up, though, because Luminous Arc is very clearly inspired by that venerable title. Broadly, the mechanics are all very similar. You control a group of characters in small-scale encounters. Accuracy and damage are both affected by your position relative to your target. As you might expect, getting in behind an opponent is going to get you the best results, but you'll need to take care not to expose your flank while you're doing so. This basic structure of game is always going to work for me, no matter what extra bells and whistles you add into the format. Obviously, more depth is always appreciated, but even a straightforward execution of this formula is likely to lead to a good time.

The biggest departure from Final Fantasy Tactics comes in customization—which is to say, there isn't any. Much like Fire Emblem, there's no such thing as a generic character in Luminous Arc. Each playable character is a character within the narrative, all with their own unique skillsets. To be honest, I don't mind this at all. While I'm a sucker for the crunchiness of building a character, I also have a lot of appreciation for games that commit to a cast and focus on emphasizing their differences and how each can function as part of a toolkit at your disposal. 

Imageepoch did well in fleshing out these individual skillsets to eliminate redundancy and open up interesting gameplay choices. For instance, your protagonist, Alph, starts out as a Rifleman. Instead of just getting a set of progressively stronger rifle skills, he gets skills that have an interesting balance of strengths and weaknesses so that none of them were ever truly outclassed. You can do damage in an area in melee range, for instance, but most of your long-range options are going to be single-target. You can do big damage with a sniper shot, but you need to make sure you maintain the appropriate distance or you'll have to fall back on something else. As you progress further and further, you'll find you have a skill that's useful for almost any range, which feels very satisfying.

The importance of experience

Not all elements of gameplay design in Luminous Arc work for me as well as these skillsets, but I do want to talk about another interesting adaptation. Final Fantasy Tactics had a very simple experience system in which most actions awarded you experience proportional to the level of your target. When an ability was used on one's self, that action awarded 10 experience. The higher the level of a target, the more experience you get—but of course the opposite was true as well. Once you hit 100 experience, you gain a level, no exceptions. It's a very simple and readable way to do experience that I find works very well, despite how easy it us to spam self-cast abilities to level extremely quickly. Luminous Arc more or less copies this system, but adds its own tweaks presumably to make it less exploitable. In so doing, they added some interesting wrinkles.

It might not seem super relevant just to talk about how you gain experience in Luminous Arc, but the changes they make radically transform the experience for me. One very important and simple change to the formula here is that Imageepoch made it so that leveling up heals characters to full and perhaps more importantly, completely restores their MP. Given that MP is a very limiting factor in this game, this is a really important thing to keep track of. Although at first I felt this element trivialized the game's difficulty, I really ended up coming around on it. Having to always think about when I was going to level up added an interesting layer to my strategy and allowed me to take on tougher challenges before I might have been ready under other circumstances.

The side quest incident

There's one particularly tough encounter in a side quest available quite early in the game. For your level, the monsters in this quest are ridiculously overtuned. You'll be forced to fight a group of cockatrices and a behemoth (which seems literally to have been lifted wholesale from Final Fantasy) with only Alph and Cecile, a frail healer who absolutely will not have come into her own by this point. Based on the level I was at the time of embarking on the side quest, it would have been utterly impossible to complete the mission without leveraging the fact that HP and MP are restored on level up. With that knowledge, I was able to carefully position my units (while sacrificing Cecile) to just barely eke out a victory, using the terrain to my advantage to very slowly funnel units into the path of Alph's rifle. 

It was at this point that I learned that the enemy AI was actually kind of smart. My plan was to slowly whittle down enemies as they came to attack, using healing items when I reached a one-shot threshold. What I found out later was that enemies would retreat just out of my range when I reduced them to critical HP, while the other enemies carefully kept me trapped in the corner where only one enemy could get to me per turn. If I ever ended my turn at roughly half HP, the behemoth would hit me from the spot he’d ended the last turn and then retreat, while one of the other wounded enemies moved in to finish me off, now knowing they would be safe to Alph’s counterattack. At first glance, this seemed like a checkmate scenario. The behemoth could reduce Alph to roughly half health in one shot, but didn’t have quite enough damage to kill on the second. Because the enemies moved exactly the right distance to be able to swoop in for the kill (but crucially be out of range of Alph’s ranged attacks), it was simple for them to work together to take Alph out. 

I had a stockpile of healing items saved up. Each item you use on yourself gives you 5 experience and I learned through trial and error that a kill on one of the annoying roosters gave Alph 54 experience. I engaged with the stalemate for some time, healing myself every single turn until I had 50 experience, and then used my biggest AoE skill to critically injure the behemoth and kill the rooster in one action. I had to wait until they were lined up perfectly for this to work, but taking out this enemy and reducing the behemoth to critical HP simultaneously meant that not only did I level up and regain my resources, but that the behemoth AI no longer saw a potential kill, so it simply retreated instead. Because every enemy had already been reduced to critical status, it was really just a matter of wiping them out with ranged attacks at that point. It's little moments like these that make me love strategy RPGs, even if it's quite likely this was not the intended gameplay experience.

Even more mechanics

It might seem like a spent a lot of time talking about one specific encounter, and that's because I did. Really, that encounter perfectly encapsulates what is interesting about this game for me, because for most of the rest of the game, it never really deepens. There is one other gameplay element to consider and another that you might as well not consider at all. The first is a series of moves called Flash Drives, an amusing name for what is essentially just an ultimate attack. Instead of using MP, these attacks use FP and generally do a whole lot of damage and a bonus effect, like lowering defense or inflicting a status ailment. These are powerful skills, but the rate at which you gain FP is painfully slow. You'll need to already be effective at taking down enemies to meaningfully generate FP, so it feels a bit like a way to win more than an additional resource to leverage. Each character also has three unique Flash Drives associated with the amount of FP they've accumulated, but I frequently finished fights before Level 2 abilities were even on the table. I would have enjoyed if these skills could have been used more frequently.

The other notable mechanic is the ability to imbue your gear with runes to increase their power and add bonus effects. This a really half-baked mechanic that is maybe useful if you invested time and resources into it, but I mostly completely ignored it and got through the game just fine. 

What about the setting?

This has been a very gameplay-centric overview, which absolutely corresponds to my sensibilities, but also speaks to a general lack of interest in the other components of the game. We're not necessarily dealing with a plot with the gravitas of a Final Fantasy Tactics here. The story and setting of this game is essentially of a kind with an early 2000s anime with a 4Kids localization. And these voice actors are really hamming it up. I'm sure they had a great time. It's ostensibly about a group of knights in employ of the church and they are tasked with exterminating witches. You'll soon find that the witches are a bunch of cute anime girls and that becomes a recurring theme for this series. Also, is the church evil? Who can say.

Graphically, the game is a little busy. It can be difficult to see what's going on in crowded combat encounters and before I knew I could disable the touch screen controls, it was virtually impossible to get my characters to do what I wanted them to do. I'm very grateful you can switch to more traditional controls, because I can't imagine I would have finished the game otherwise. On the plus side, the artwork is charming in a nostalgic kind of way. Character portraits update with cute new expressions based on the situation in that classic JRPG tradition.

Luminous Arc 2

Most of what I've discussed about the first game applies to the sequel as well, but if you've read my Izuna writeup, I can tell you that in this case, the sequel isn't as clear cut an improvement over its predecessor. On the plus side, the game looks a little nicer visually and it's easier to see what's going on due to the presentation. Part of this transition means the number of characters you can deploy in combat was reduced to 6 from the 8 you can field in the first game. Having a full roster of 8 in the first game is a big selling point for me since there's very little in the way of customization. Having a diverse array of characters to deploy into battle was a fun way of expressing my preferences. This is obviously still an option in the sequel, but reducing that number by two makes a surprisingly big impact. It felt difficult to incorporate anyone new at all after you recruit your first set of characters. I'd already invested time into leveling them up and became invested in their progression—I didn't want to abandon the characters that were working for me in favor of someone else. I kept thinking Luminous Arc 2 would eventually expand the number of characters you can deploy, but it never happened.

Changes from the first game

In terms of readability, the sequel mostly improves, aside from one notable exclusion. I made very liberal use of the option to press X to display health bars on enemies in the field to get a good overview of the battle situation—but this option has been completely removed in the sequel. If you want to know how much HP each enemy and ally has, you either need to remember or you need to go manually select each one and inspect them individually. This is a really puzzling change. I have to assume it was done to reduce visual clutter, but it actually really harms readability as far as I'm concerned. It also just makes figuring out your best plays more time-consuming, since you're having to constantly check to see how much health any particular target has. 

Despite these gripes, the game does make some really nice improvements in other areas. Luckily, the thought Imageepoch put into skillsets is still here in the sequel. I found myself using characters' entire toolkit on a regular basis. Nothing ever felt like it was completely overwritten in terms of usefulness. Flash Drives have been totally overhauled though, and absolutely for the better. First of all, your resource generates much more quickly now. The term Flash Drive simply wasn't funny enough so they decided to call the resource you generate for them DP (presumably for Drive Points), but more importantly, each segment that designates the level of Flash Drive available is broken into 100 DP, so you have much more feedback on exactly how much you're generating at a given time. These points are much more easy to generate compared to the first game; in general, if you get a kill, you probably have enough for a Level 1 Flash Drive.

The enhanced accessibility of Flash Drives is doubly important in Luminous Arc 2 because you no longer restore HP and MP on a level up! This is also a really massive change and one I have mixed feelings about. I do think these two changes really go hand in hand and I enjoy that managing your resources is more important than before, but I have to admit it felt like a bummer at first since I'd become so accustomed to really paying attention to when one of my characters was ready to level up. It felt like an interesting layer of strategy just didn't exist anymore, but I felt a bit better about it when I learned a little more about the Lapis system.

Customization

Yes, yet another mechanic! Instead of the forgettable rune system from the first game, Lapis is a pretty simple and better implemented customization mechanic. Each character has three Lapis slot that you can slot in with various different magical doodads with different abilities and stat buffs. These are effects that can increase various elemental damage types, resist ailments, increase stats, and perhaps most crucially, provide passive MP regen. The very fact that these exist seems to be quite an intentional step away from the healing on level up mechanic. The Lapis that regenerate MP aren't common or accessible very early in the game either, so their limited use also seems intentional. Even so, pretty much all of my casters (witches all) were decked out with MP regen lapis as well as increased MP as well. This made things a lot smoother, especially in some of the tougher fights in the end game.

Luminous Arc 2 also seems quite a bit more stingy with experience. Both of these games are heavily weighted toward awarding experience to the unit that lands a killing blow, but this sequel is tuned even more in favor of kills. It's not always trivial to gift kills to lower level allies either, since accuracy becomes a pretty critical factor when level gaps come into play. This isn't really a gripe, to be fair, more of an observation—but I did have to babysit characters like Rina and Rasche to get caught up, and Luna, my healer, was frequently behind in level since she used most of her actions to heal allies instead of take down enemies. 

Slice-of-life

I started this writeup with the thought "I'm not sure how much I have to say about these games" but in writing it, I've realized maybe I have a lot to say. Did you know there's a whole bonding and pseudo-dating system in these games I haven't even touched on? You even get unique items for maxing out bonds with your party members, as well as unique pieces of art when you reach a pivotal level of companionship. This wasn't a system I found myself too engaged by, but I can imagine it being fun if that's your thing. These characters are ultimately not as interesting to me as your average Fire Emblem fare and it leans on the tropes a little too heavily for my liking, so I just don't think I have a ton to discuss about the more slice-of-life elements of these games. Don't get me wrong, though. There's a lot of it. If my intensely gameplay-focused overview has given you the wrong impression, it can't  be overstated just how much inane dialogue there is in these games. These scenes go on for days and I'm confident no one is talking about anything.

To close, I just want to talk about the very last fight of Luminous Arc 2. I won't get too specific here in case you're concerned about the plot details of a 17-year old Nintendo DS game. The last several missions of the game really ramp up in terms of enemy level and I'm not exactly sure why. I was level 30 and caught up and then all of a sudden enemies were level 40 and then suddenly level 50. I finished the game at about an average level of 35, due to an abject refusal to grind. This turned the final fight into a unique and memorable experience that echoed how I felt in that side quest from the first game.

The final difficulty spike 

The first thing to note about the final boss is that almost everything it did one-shotted me. Keeping characters in close proximity to each other was absolutely not allowed because it prompted the AI to use a devastating area spell that killed multiple units at once. I ended up relying on a strategy of constantly healing with Luna and resurrecting with Althea to win a war of attrition. I just needed to make sure I did more than 350 damage per turn to out damage the boss’s healing—except sometimes it got a double turn for no discernible reason, which made things take a lot longer. Meanwhile, I would be baiting out certain attacks and trying to ensure only one or two units got hit by it so I'd have enough gas to resurrect and do enough damage to not lose progress.

It was a very time-consuming fight, but it felt rewarding to find a way through without having to just overwhelm it with raw stats. I felt rewarded for my positioning in a way that I didn’t have to think about quite as much earlier in the game. I gained a ton of experience in the fight due to having to take so many actions, but had to rely on relatively meager MP regen from my Lapis since leveling up never gave me anything back. It became a fight of careful resource management but I couldn't 100% cheese it because I had to keep doing enough damage to make sure I was making progress on depleting the massive health pool of the boss.

In the end, I was left with a decent impression of both of these games. There are things to enjoy here if just want to focus on the gameplay, but it's hard to call them exceptional. It's probably more worth it if you're into the setting and art style, but their charm was somewhat lost on me.