Arisa no Bouken ki - Review

Arisa no Bouken Ki (アリサの冒険記), Soleil

2006, PC

Originally released for the 2nd Kouhaku RPG Festival, one of Japanese RPG Maker community VIPRPG's yearly game jams, Arisa no Bouken Ki is a turn-based JRPG, the first (and to my knowledge only) by its developer, Soleil. You may not have heard his name before, but you've likely heard his work: a prolific composer, he distributes free BGM for use in other games. Unsurprisingly, his game boasts a completely original soundtrack (a rarity in freeware), and a solid one at that. Though "completely original" doesn't mean you won't have heard any of it before—these tracks, too, were made available for others' use. I recognized a couple from One Way Heroics.

The eponymous Arisa is an aspiring novelist in search of material who feels somewhat smothered by small-town Nisan Village. Coincidentally, the Kingdom of Nisen is holding a Hero Exam to select a successor to the missing current hero; sensing an opportunity to grow Nisan's name, and finding no better candidates, the mayor sends Arisa to take the exam. The party is joined almost immediately by Mia, a tough archer whose residence in Nisan is frequently empty, and completed a bit later by Mao, an amnesiac martial artist who knows she must go, conveniently enough, to Nisen.

This journey to Nisen makes up the bulk of the game and, like many JRPGs, can be divided into a linear series of local episodes. The formula is simple and mostly unbroken: the party arrives in a town; some local issue interrupts their stay there or prevents their travel onward; they venture into a short dungeon, confront the source of the problem in the form of a boss, and defeat it; they are free to carry on. A cute eyecatch marks the formal end of the episode, and the party is once again on the road—usually for only a couple of screens before they arrive in the next town; no world map here!

What makes these episodes charming is their novel elaboration on basic premises. Consider the first village on the road: Arisa's Hero Exam permit is stolen in the night by a mystery thief who, she learns the next day, indiscriminately poaches any and all forms of writing; upon confronting him in his cavern lair, she learns that he's a talking cat trying to become literate in order to write to a woman who was left in despair when she suddenly stopped receiving letters from her lover. The cat is summarily defeated, made to return everything, and invited to borrow books from the mayor's library. The basic concept of the episode—the protagonist having an essential item stolen and pursuing the thief to get it back—has been done a thousand times, but the layers of elaboration are original and, just as importantly, plural: if the cat wanted to read simply so could become more human, or read a book he found in the woods, or something, the episode would lose much of its charm. Similarly, a later episode in which the party saves a lake goddess from being drank dry by a gigantic frog stands out less for its basic premise than for the personality of the frog in question.

Combat, while turn-based, is fairly different from the stock RPG Maker 2000 system. Rather than a persistent MP pool, characters have Charge Points (CP), which don't carry over between battles. Instead, each character enters battle with about a quarter of their maximum CP, enough to use a skill or two, and can build up more by performing basic attacks (for a small amount) or using the Charge command (for quite a lot). This system functions perfectly and feels more or less balanced, but it trivializes most random encounters: the party starts the battle with more than enough CP to quickly kill all the enemies with special moves and attack spells, and, given that there's no penalty for using it besides the loss of a small EXP bonus, there's no reason not to do that, and therefore no need to strategize around addition. Theoretically, Focus, an invisible value that decreases with each battle fought without resting and determines the efficacy of the Charge command, should create a feeling of attrition; but in practice its effect is too slow and weak to matter much (though I did notice it on Mao), and the game provides an item that fully restores the whole party's Focus—an item I ended the game with nine copies of, having used one.

Boss fights are less breezy but hardly more difficult; I ended up not upgrading my armor once all game, and struggled only with a single lategame boss (and one normal monster which combined a huge pile of HP with nasty physical attacks). Still, it's enjoyable: the basic charge-attack-charge rhythm is enjoyable and creates interesting decisions sometimes, especially around how much CP to keep in reserve for healing if things go south; and the two most basic game plans (unloading all your CP as soon as you get it to kill as fast as possible, and charging up until your CP is full so you never get caught empty) are appropriately messed with (by a charge-preventing status ailment and lategame attacks which reduce your CP to 0, respectively). It felt a bit like Bravely Default. 

Continuing the trend, the average dungeon is a walk in the park: as linear as the larger journey, lacking any attritive factor with bite, and pleasantly short. Really, if you don't stick around to grind you'll be through in five minutes. They're about as far from challenging as you can get (even if a handful of lategame dungeons raise the complexity level from 0 to 1), This isn't a knock on the game—they never overstay their welcome, and they match the brief, laid-back episodes—but don't expect anything crazy.

The penultimate act, however, threw a startlingly brutal curveball that I resorted to cheating to overcome. Its nature is a spoiler, so I've put this section in white text; skip if you intend to play the game yourself:

The first stage of the Hero Exam is a written exam that asks you, the player, 20 questions, of which you must get (I believe) 18 correct. Only a couple are gimmies; most of them are extremely specific questions on everything from skill effects (which status ailments does Heal II cure?) to equipment traits (does this item reduce physical damage taken or give you a chance to avoid it?). A couple question you on extremely specific properties of random encounters from multiple zones ago, namely elemental weaknesses and which of four skills an enemy didn't use -- things that you very likely didn't notice given how quickly enemies die, and likely forgot if you did. Failing the exam simply gives you a Game Over without telling you which questions, or how many, you got wrong. Now, this isn't a playthrough-killer = I believe the answer to every question lies somewhere after the early-game Point of No Return - but it is an awful pain. Once you've figured out all the easy-to-check questions, you're left with the spectre of going back to old areas. And that was where I threw in the towel and peeked at the quiz answers in RPG Maker. Believe it or not, I already had ~16/20 right.

I imagine this was very entertaining when this game was first released and a whole community was playing the game and encountering the quiz - maybe you'd forgotten if the Beauty was weak to Physical or Lightning, but surely someone knew. That's speculation on my part, though, and the game seems to want you to figure it out yourself.

Otherwise, the biggest challenge was deciding what to buy at shops. I'm not kidding: even ignoring armor entirely, there's a lot there—weapons for all three characters; loads of accessories with different effects like increasing initial CP and applying status effects on attacks; even magic comes from equipping Attack Magic Lv# and Healing Magic Lv# items, each level of which costs several times as much as the last—and, unless you go out of your way to grind (which would be absurd given the difficulty level), you won't be able to afford all of it. Even when I beat the game, I only had Attack Magic Lv3 on one character. It's refreshing: too many games let me walk into town and buy literally everything I want, often with gold left over; here, I had to choose.

The custom battle system comes with a stylish custom UI; the way your party members' expressions change based on the situation may not be the innovation of the century, but it adds a lot of personality. My only gripe is that the separate submenus for character skills, attack magic, and healing magic add a lot of extra button presses. Exploration, too, is rather pretty; the 3D-rendered backgrounds are used in concert with 2D tiles to create some rather striking vistas (above). I wish there'd been more than one (non-town) outdoor tileset, given the many outdoor areas, but the maps do a lot with what they have. The cutscene direction is also good, with excellent use of small facial animations.

Arisa is an RPG in miniature, but reduced scope doesn't mean reduced quality. Charm and deliberation permeate the work, and there's more joy in this 6~12-hour game than in many longer titles.

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Links:

- Soleil's site
- Game's page (archive)
- Festival page (geoblocked)
- VIPRPG @Wiki page
- Nepchan
- EasyRPG (RPGMaker emulator; boots Japanese RPGMaker2000 games without a locale change, among many other features)

P.S. A Japanese review mentioned that the desperation attacks (0-CP skills available only at low HP) were hard to use because the enemies would just kill the character before they could go. I have to concur—I think I got three off all game, and one of them was with a +SPD accessory. And of course, even if they do get to go, dying later in the turn isn't much better; and if you heal them before they go, that also cancels the move. In other words, to get the desired outcome (the character using the move and surviving), you have to either have them go, then the healer, then the enemy, in that order; or get lucky with enemy targeting. I guess a powerful 0-CP skill would be pretty broken if you could reliably fire it off, but...