Played Arcus by Wolf Team for PC88 (1988).
Wolf Team has an interesting history.
This Telenet Japan subsidiary was founded in 1987, and initially headed by Masahiro Akishino. It went independent for 2 years, then got folded back in. It is known for its work with Japanese PCs, the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis), and the Super Famicom (SNES). They developed Zan, Arcus, and Hiōden games.
In 1993, it was restructured, as part of a Telenet Japan initiative to reduce costs. Some staff resisted the change, including Wolf Team head, Masahiro Akishino, producer Masaaki Uno (went to Camelot Software), Sega Genesis programmers Toshio Toyota and Yukihiko Tani (aka bugtaro) (both co-founded Gau Entertainment ).
Wolf Team producer Joe Asanuma took the helm at this time. Due to the poor sales of their games, they needed to seek an outside financier to publish and market their next game, based on the novel Tale Phantasia, written by Yoshiharu Gotanda. After seeing bids from some companies, such as Enix and Namco, they signed on with the agreement made by Namco. Namco made many marketing changes to the game, which struck a protest from Yoshiharu Gotanda, and Masaki Norimoto. Many people on the team supported them, and these protests saw Joe Asanuma get ousted for his lack of ability to solve these protests, so they brought in Eiji Kikuchi to direct the game. This brought up the idea for the protesters to start up their own company.
After Tales of Phantasia was released, most of the development staff left Wolf Team. Most of this development staff went to participate in the founding of Tri-Ace. Only Motoi Sakuraba, Shinji Tamura and Eiji Kikuchi remained with Wolf Team after this breakup. Wolf Team kept developing the Tales games for Namco, and did some sports games on the side for Telenet Japan.
In 2003, the remains of Wolf Team were dissolved, and the remaining staff were transferred into a new subsidiary known as Namco Tales Studio, and develops the series for its financier and publisher, Namco.
Arcus is an old first person dungeon crawler. There’s a yuge 100x100 grid desert and ice area where you need find chit, but at least in PC88 version the locations are not randomized which would truly be hell.
Like Slayers, your characters’ stats and equipment don’t change throughout the game. You also don’t gain gold from fighting monsters so it’s pointless to fight at all. Enemies only serve as an irritant when mapping a dungeon. In Slayers at least it was fun to roflstomp the enemies in various ways, here it’s more of a run-from-combat simulator.
It is a low magic setting, the entire game comes down to finding artifacts so you can cast magic.
Regardless of the lack of leveling at the end awaits a black dragon with instagib flame breath if you’re unlucky. You need to use the acquired magic to beat the dragon but it still mostly comes down to dumb luck.
Played Arcus II by Wolf Team (1989).
This is the game with the hilarious intro.
It takes place ten years after the first with Pikto the half-elf as protagonist, who was only a boy in the first game. You meet the other characters from the first game.
It is no longer a first person dungeon crawler. You can now see the enemies roaming on the map, but still no leveling and no reason to fight much at all. In combat you can target body parts as most enemies have a weak point. But this time you can only have two party members.
At the end awaits another dumb luck boss. He has to be beaten by casting a spell that is literally called “Fin”. It takes some turns to be able to cast the spell as combat always starts with low willpower and it can only be raised by having your party members use the encourage command on main character – but if the boss takes them out…
Played Arcus 3 by Wolf Team (1991).
It takes place two years after Arcus 2.
Finally there’s leveling! And you revisit some dungeons of the first game.
The Elven bowgurl from second game is now slutty blue-haired waifu, but no clue what happened to the Dorf and thief gurl.
I ran into a game breaking bug at the end of a dungeon: an event didn’t trigger. I read later that you aren’t allowed to leave this dungeon after entering or the bug triggers.
Serves me right for playing something with phagot elf protagonist.
Arcus I.II.III for Mega CD (1993) remake features the three Arcus games in one (with the second one a first person dungeon crawler as well) and has leveling up from the very beginning but the dungeons are extremely simplified and the combat is slow and boring compared to the originals. Not really worth playing even for the cinematics.
This is a p. weird series as a whole. There’s also an action popamole featuring the four adult characters of the first game in a completely unrelated story.
