Romanticizing the pre-internet age of games criticism is common amongst those of us born before 1990. With the presses stopped on Electronic Gaming Monthly, the last survivors of gaming print’s heyday are Gamepro and Nintendo Power. Those magazines still cater to the adolescent audience they always have, but they’ve lost all of their old schlocky appeal. It’s a good thing. Gaming print isn’t dead, and games criticism is slowly but surely emerging from its fandom-based larval form. Yeah the internet’s glutted with drivel, but there’s a lot of substantive, well-written study of the medium happening. *cough*
One thing certainly hasn’t changed. Gamefan may be long dead at this point, but Dave Halverson is still publishing monthly volumes of unabashed fandom in Play. Play, like Gamefan and Gamer’s Republic before it, isn’t really criticism. The magazine doesn’t engage in heady intellectualism like Edge, but it also doesn’t fall into Consumer Reports-style, reviews-and-previews tradition of Gamepro. Halverson’s publications are professionally made ‘zines, literal love letters to the industry they cover. The furor surrounding Halverson’s praise for Golden Axe: Beast Rider a few months back was surprising. The man isn’t a critic. He’s a lover. He publishes The Girls of Gaming, for crying out loud. Despite his flighty editorial mandate, Halverson’s pubs have had a surprisingly lasting impact on North American gaming culture. Today, Treasure is an iconic development studio beloved the world over. Gunstar Heroes wasn’t responsible for that notoriety. It was Gamefan’s constant lionization of the company that birthed the cult of Treasure.
Gamefan was, for me, a message in a bottle. Every single month, I would open an issue and be overwhelmed by bizarre foreign games I would never have a chance to play. And at the back of every issue waited the most cryptic and vexing passages of all: the advertisements for Halverson’s import games shop Game Cave. The ads were four-pages long and littered with miniscule pictures of games accompanied by nothing more than a title. That was where I saw this:
“Arc the Lad – PSX”. What in the hell was Arc the Lad? It had that JRPG look about it, but other than the stumpy characters and the vivid color, there was no way of figuring out what the game even was. It fascinated me. I always kept an eye out for Arc after that. It wasn’t until a few years later, as the JRPG boom took hold in the States that I learned that Arc the Lad was indeed a role-playing series. Since it was a first-party Sony game, and Sony refused to publish most 2D games outside of Japan, I had more than a language barrier standing between me and Arc.
Arc the Lad did eventually come here in 2002. When it did, it represented both the end of the Playstation era and the beginning of Working Designs downfall. It was a lavishly packaged set; cloth map, hard-bound instruction manual, the whole Working Designs shebang. It included the entire Playstation Arc trilogy and a side-game called Arc Arena. I couldn’t have cared less. In 2002, the PS2 library was finally heating up, the Xbox was proving its mettle, and the Gamecube was promising glossy, traditional Nintendo goodness. Sucks to the weird JRPG from 1995! Have you seen this game Maximo? That looks crazy! Eventually the Arc the Lad Collection disappeared from shelves and finding it in decent condition used proved problematic. Over the past seven years, I’ve regretted not picking it up. Arc the Lad, the one that got away.
I finally sat down with Arc in January. As tends to happen with the ones that get away, Arc turned out to not be what I imagined. I expected a traditional JRPG, the usual morass of clichés coated in a typical Working Designs translation (a mix of pop-culture references, glib humor, and stoicism.) What I got was a simple, brief tactical RPG, sort of Duplo blocks to Tactics Ogre’s Lego. The colorful world implied by that night time screenshot wasn’t there. There’s no exploration whatsoever in Arc actually. The world spanning adventure takes place almost entirely on a map as you’re shuffled between single-screen locales for dialogue and dungeons. (The dungeons, in fairness, do have multiple levels.)
I haven’t delved into Arc 2 or 3, yet. My understanding is that they’re far deeper, more interesting games than their progenitor. I may try them out at some point. If nothing else, my long lasting saga with Arc the Lad exemplifies the biggest difference between following videogames during the print and internet eras. Today, Googling a game title will get you billions of words detailing just how the game plays, how long it is, and how it stacks up to every other game ever made. Back when I saw that screen, a whole lot was left to the imagination. It’s a strange thing, following videogames. Sometimes, you like them even more when you don’t play them.
Next time, I’ll close out the White Whale/One That Got Away triptych with The Second Chance: Vagrant Story. See you then, y’all.
Related links:
The White Whale: Terranigma and Ahab Gaming
Where is Victor Ireland?
FMV Hell: Lunar, The Silver Star
Sega CD on iPhone: I Like Where This Is Going
