It's over, thank GOD it's over. Am I mad? Yes. Is this a bad game? NO. But I'm quite mad it took so darn long. Maybe it's cause I have annoying work schedules that make me not play this game for some weeks in time, but that's just how it ends up going. Arc the Lad II, you're expected to siphon around 60+ hours with it, which is six times the length of the previous game. At least I came in expecting that, and expecting the gameplay to be largely similar to the first, with more QoL things like finally having actual equipment, elements to deal with, and actually making the sidequests seem like they are worth a lot.
And that's just the crux of it. You know how sequels in RPG franchises are really fledged out by the SECOND game? Arc the Lad II is just like Breath of Fire II, Lufia II, maybe even Paper Mario: TTYD...okay you can see where I'm going here. Things improve. Almost every character you play as has some sort of tragic moment going on, we've already seen this with the first game's characters like Arc and Iga. All of those guys return (though Chongara is an NPC and Kukuru is only a guest character for real specific moments), and things are slightly more fledged out. We get to finally see how Tosh's past occurs, for instance, and Arc, despite his brand name as a wanted guy, still being a hero but also wanted. As for our new characters, many tragic moments play out. Shante loses her brother, Lieza her village and grandfather, Sania her ENTIRE KINGDOM, Gruga having to deal with adopting a daughter and realizing the main father is a douche monster, and Shu watching the resistance movements to those dictators in Romalia fall. And Elc gets it worst, considering his fire abilities, he would have been converted to a terrible monster, he escapes, tries to find his girlfriend, and she seems fine only to be turned into a bomb. It don't stop there when you realize the villains are manipulative bastards, not just for what they do to ACTUAL CHILDREN, but creating doppelgangers, actively trying to enslave or even brainwashingly sacrifice populations, they do everything. They're already monsters, and they feed off of the misery that humanity has.
And amazingly, these villains actually SUCCEED. Granted, the main villains all die when you beat the game, but like the second-to-last bad guy, the Romalian king? He ends up actually destroying the world, even if it costs him his life. The Dark One has to be sealed again, with Arc having to do it alongside the already-swallowed Kukuru, but then we are left with ten surviving heroes who really only felt like they just survived the end of the world, instead of prevented it. Yeesh.
But enough story stuff. Arguably it and the music are highlights, we don't need that happily ever after stuff all the time, the music by comparison is just amazing and I'm so glad they brought back previous tracks. The main deal with the game's original fast-paced battle system has slowed down somewhat. You can kill a lot of enemies with one spell, but you'll watch as each one has a death animation, going one by one, and those gold coins spill out and the thing takes really long to go by. That's not even getting to the idea that spell animations take longer than they used to. Even simple status buff spells! My gosh, the enemies with these will stand on their spot, use the spell, and you just have to wait, since in every battle, all enemies have the same speed when they are the same class of monster. I do like how you can use Lieza to catch these Poke...I mean monsters though. Oh, and check out those levels, the cap in the previous game was 60, but now you can go up higher, much higher than Level 100, and I think the boss and super enemies go up to 128 or something. The level jumps are a problem and entail grinding (or using a special machine to siphon experience from Diekbeck, the actual faster method honestly). Before getting the Silver Noah, the game makes you use multiple characters in side stories, this is arguably the best thing about the game's plot overall, though after everyone is congregated into one large party, many of the other plot stuff they do with certain characters also is quite fun.
Navigation-wise, since you can now do typical RPG navigation, things are more open, but there were moments where I was pulling my hair. Seriously, how would I know that to get to Heap Cave-In I had to go UNDER THE BRIDGE? I just couldn't figure that out. When the Silver Noah crashed into the final dungeon I though there was no way out of the ship, which was so strange until I had to go out the cockpit window. Come on. And the jobs can have time frames to them, which means that another hunter can take your job and it's permanently gone. I ended up missing the "Super job" as some call it cause I accidentally sold a key item (yes you can sell those, yes your inventory is quite limited which gives you incentive to free lots of space but you may end up losing a key item doing what I just did). I also somehow got the secret character Choko not once, but TWICE, even though I never got her in the first game, I got her in Forbidden Ruins in this game, went through the game after her leaving the ruins, somehow she was in my party during the last few moments, and I "recruited" her again. Weird. The dungeons do require a lot of time to beat them, and there were many, many moments where I just felt the game just did not want me to progress to beat it.
It certainly is an improved sequel, but the many times the game annoyed me prevented me from truly loving it. It lasted a LONG time and it was exhausting.
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