Its saxophone-driven melody sounded like sped-up “porno funk.” That is not the sonic vibe I look for in a game about civil war and political unrest.Īrcadian Atlas‘ story begins in the Dantalion kingdom. On the other hand, I wasn’t keen on the main battle theme. For example, lounge jazz fit the taverns perfectly. Jazz-influenced music is not what I’d expect for a game like this, but the pieces are nicely composed and generally work within the game’s context. War can make even the stoutest allies turn on you. The default gamepad mapping worked for me, but I would have liked the option to fully remap those buttons too. Thankfully, you can fully remap the keyboard controls, but gamepad users have to choose from several pre-configured schemes. On the other hand, while the keyboard/mouse control response was tighter, the default button mapping was not to my liking. I played with a gamepad and felt that button response could have been a little tighter. Be sure to save often as well, because Arcadian Atlas does not auto-save.Īrcadian Atlas supports both gamepads and a keyboard/mouse combination. Be warned, though, that Arcadian Atlas has some late-game difficulty spikes with a couple of battles that border on cheap, even on the lowest difficulty settings. You can change the difficulty any time the main menu is accessible. Regarding difficulty, there are four levels to choose from: Story, Relaxed, Standard, and Harder. So, part of the strategy is keeping your troops out of harm’s way. Another danger is that area attacks damage everyone within their blast radius, be they friend or foe. These cannon-fodder troops can permanently die, but important plot-relevant characters live to fight another day. You can hire additional troops at towns’ recruitment offices to march into battle alongside plot-relevant party members. My only nitpick here is that when deploying my troops at the start of a battle, I couldn’t see where enemy units were located, making troop selection and placement a roll of the dice. The areas themselves are manageably sized, so I never felt like I was spending a bazillion turns simply moving my troops across the battlefield. A turn-order meter at the bottom of the screen shows who’s up to bat next.īattles feel more like skirmishes because most battles only have you deploy around five units at a time. Units take their turns based on overall speed, so there are no alternating player and enemy phases. Basically, it plays like a game of chess with the added elements of terrain height and type.

If you’ve played an SRPG before, jumping into Arcadian Atlas is easy. I prefer Arcadian Atlas‘ style since I’m not the most patient or meticulous platoon manager, but I still like to casually experiment with different character classes and the branching skillsets therein. The only other quibble I have with the presentation is that load times throughout the game are noticeable.Īrcadian Atlas is more story-driven than gameplay-driven, so the character class and troop management systems are simpler than in SRPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics, which feature more robust job/class systems and complex troop management. The chosen camera angles for battlefields are generally good, but sometimes units were difficult to see behind pillars or trees. These environments look terrific, but because they’re not polygonal, you can’t rotate the camera to see all around. The sprites sit atop lovely, tile-based 2D isometric environments. The sprites had impressive beards, though. Those portraits are nicely drawn, though some men looked like their beards were pasted on. This contrasts with the neutral expressions in the portrait art accompanying dialogue. The detailed sprites have tons of great animations, most notably in their vividly expressive faces. So is Arcadian Atlas any good? Let’s find out.Īrcadian Atlas‘ visuals undoubtedly stir up nostalgic vibes, and the game looks better in motion than in screenshots. Well, that day has come and Arcadian Atlas is here, courtesy of publisher Serenity Forge. It’s faced a long hard road to get here, and many fans thought it would never see the light of day. Arcadian Atlas is a Final Fantasy Tactics-inspired SRPG by Twin Otter Studios that first came to our attention six or seven years ago.

Queen serenity fan art