Arc the Lad III (アークザラッドIII), released 10/28/1999, developed by Arc Entertainment, released by Sony

Originally Arc the Lad was only planned as one game, which was split into two for reasons I mentioned in my first Arc the Lad post. The popularity of the game encouraged Sony to release another game in the series, although the development team had changed. This is really on the edge of what I consider to be a SRPG — although it technically qualifies by my rules it feels more like a regular RPG with grid battles.

The story takes place 3 years after II, and deals with the rebuilding of the world after the “Great Disaster” that happened at the end of that game. The main character Alc becomes a Hunter and does various jobs around the world before tackling the main antagonists of the game — a mysterious group call the “Academy” that has its own plans for rebuilding the shattered world.

A good chunk of the ATL1 and ATL2 characters make appearances as well, and in a few cases they can temporarily join your party.

The battle system is more or less the same as the previous games. The only big difference I noticed is that the “jump” stat is gone; instead, everyone has the same ability to jump over most enemies (minus a flying enemies and maybe a few others).

There is a big difference in the balance, though. My number one complaint about the first two games was how worthless characters became if they were even a few levels below the enemies, and in AtL II especially how enemies kept getting these huge leaps in levels. Both of these elements are gone in the third game. The downside is that the game on the whole is quite easy.

With the exception of the very beginning and very end, the entire game takes place through Hunter quests at the guild. There are 102 of these questions — a relatively small number of them are the core story-advancing quests, and the rest are optional (although at certain points the story quests will not appear until you do a few of the optional quests).

The optional quests have a lot of variety. Some of them have dungeons or battles, others have minigames, and a few are essentially just story sequences. Although some of the quests are one-offs, there are recurrent characters in some of the quests, like the Rainbow Thieves’ Guild, the merchant family, and Spicy the lovelorn ninja.

I had a few issues with the quests. First off, a good portion of them are humorous, but the humor wears thin — the rainbow thieves’ guild is mildly amusing the first time it appears, but by the 4th or 5th time it gets stale. The minigames can be frustrating because you often have to sit through a fairly long story sequence before the minigame comes up, and then you might only have one chance to do it or you fail the job. Of course save states can help with this.

Another issue is that you get guild points and raise your guild rank, but this has no effect at all on the game. There are no rewards for moving up guild ranks, except for this when you do them all:

If I had to do this again, I would go for minimum rather than maximum guild jobs; it would (maybe) make the main quests a bit more challenging.

The only reason the game is two discs is because of these CG animated scenes that occur every so often. The graphics on the whole are serviceable — they don’t blow you away but they aren’t offensive like the bad polygon 3D stuff that other companies are using.

There are other yarikomi aspects to the game such as the weapon and item crafting (which isn’t very useful), and collecting Monster Cards. This is a new feature that one character has where enemies can be turned into cards which then can be used in battle (by that character) to have effects on all enemies or all allies. The cards are pretty useful.

Overall I enjoyed this game more than ATL2, but objectively speaking it’s probably not as good a game. I spent over 60 hours on it and I really shouldn’t have done so.

Arc the Lad will have one more appearance in the PS2 game “Twilight of the Spirits”.