Charming is the word I could use to describe Ara Fell best. I’ve played my fair share of games that try to tap into the nostalgia of SNES\Playstation Era J-RPG fans. Unfortunately, most of them fail abysmally. Maybe it’s because we’ve grown away from classic J-RPGs, or maybe the art of making a good J-RPG has simply become lost. Whatever the case may be, Ara Fell is the closest thing I’ve found to a satisfying modern day J-RPG experience.
Within moments of starting the game, I could tell a lot of love and effort was put into it. The atmosphere, detailed environments, and beautiful soundtrack culminate to make a rich world that feels very much alive. I was incredibly surprised to learn that this game was made using RPGMaker, a program that I’ve grown to despise due to its level of accessibility allowing people to pump out poorly made games with little to no effort. Luckily, Ara Fell had quite a bit of effort put into it, from what I can tell.
The game takes place on a group of floating islands which share the same name as the game itself, Ara Fell. The story follows the adventures of our young heroine, Lita. It manages to check off the typical RPG tropes. Mainly, the game follows the “young hero leads a normal life until they find that they possess an incredible power, and they must use said power to save the world” setup.
It’s overdone, but I found the events and characters in the story itself to be interesting enough to distract me from that. Even within a few hours, the game throws a few unexpected plot twists at you. As someone who is good at spotting plot twists from a mile away, Ara Fell did a great job taking me by surprise several times.
The story revolves around the inhabitants of Ara Fell and their growing tension with the vampires who have plagued the land for years. During the course of the game, the vampires become bolder, and it’s up to our heroes to stop them and save the land from impending doom.
It’s difficult to explain much more of the plot without spoiling things, so I’ll leave it to you to discover more.
I found the characters who inhabit the world of Ara Fell to be likable and varied — especially Lita and her companions. They share complex and interesting relationships, and the dialogue between them is often humorous and intriguing.
Unfortunately, the story, characters, and world are about the only outstandingly positive things about Ara Fell. It wouldn’t be a J-RPG without combat, obviously, and much to my dismay the combat in Ara Fell holds it back to a substantial degree.
Combat in Ara Fell uses that weird timer mechanic that some Final Fantasy titles utilize, where characters must wait until a timer counts down in order to perform an action. This is in contrast to the usual system, where everyone takes their turns in a specified order. I absolutely hate this timer system. It adds an unnecessary amount of waiting to combat and makes things like grinding far less enjoyable than they already are.
What makes this worse is that common enemies in Ara Fell have a daunting amount of health. Even when all of my party members were about level 10, common foes wandering around the overworld could take up to 3 turns to defeat. That doesn’t sound terrible, but take into account that you also have to wait for an arbitrary timer to run out before you can so much as attack your enemies. It’s true that you can put skill points into making that timer run faster, but it also ends up feeling wasteful when you could be putting the points into something more useful like attack or defense.
All of these points build up to make combat in Ara Fell dreadfully slow and painful. I found myself trying to avoid combat more than anything at a given point. An interesting feature of the game is the ability to play through “Story mode,” which auto-resolves all combat encounters so you can simply enjoy the story. Unfortunately, I would almost encourage people to take this route because the story is simply much more enjoyable than the accompanying gameplay.
Something I do like about Ara Fell‘s combat is how it handles skill points (magic) and health. Health regenerates outside of combat, so you never have to constantly rest or use healing items. Magic points regenerate every combat turn for most characters, though some characters regenerate magic like they do health. It’s a nice amount of streamlining that eliminates the J-RPG annoyance of constantly having to stock up on health items and constantly having to rest.
Another interesting addition that I enjoy is crafting. Minecraft has turned crafting into a toxic gimmick if you ask me, and in my opinion it has killed several otherwise good games with an overemphasis on the idea. Ara Fell, luckily, is not one of those games. You can collect a handful of different resources throughout the game to craft special items or potions that you can’t find anywhere else (to my knowledge). All craft-able items are built using the same handful of ingredients, so it never feels overwhelming or needlessly complicated.
Because of the fact that Ara Fell was built using RPGMaker, it leads to some limitations. Specifically, the user interface and in-game menus are extremely clunky and awkward. Instead of having dedicated menus for things like quests and the map, they appear as items your characters possess. That’s right, quests are items. It’s a very clever albeit confusing and slightly irritating workaround for RPGMaker’s foundation. The only issue I take with this is the fact that sometimes it can be difficult to actually find the quests you’re looking for among the scads of items you’ll collect. This could be entirely alleviated if a separate menu was implemented, though I’m not sure if that’s entirely possible.
This awkwardness is also true of the game’s world map. Instead of having a decently interactive and detailed map, the game opts for a simple .JPEG that shows your approximate location in the world. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that it feels very vague instead of being helpful for navigation. Many times I would open the map to see where I was and say “How on earth did I end up all the way over here?!” to myself. The in-game signs dotted across the world ended up being more helpful to me, and all those do is show you an arrow pointing in the general direction of a specific location.
In the end, Ara Fell is a game that holds a ton of potential both from a narrative and mechanical standpoint. The story is one that kept me invested, and the characters were likable and interesting. Unfortunately, the gameplay itself holds the game back a lot, and I’m not sure I can recommend playing it for anything but the story. If you like story, you’ll be in for a fun time. However, if you want fun J-RPG gameplay to go with it, you might want to look somewhere else. I think if the gameplay issues with Ara Fell were addressed in a subsequent title with a similarly interesting story, it could create a fantastic game. Ara Fell is definitely a decent game but, disappointingly, it doesn’t quite hit the right spot for becoming a memorable J-RPG.