Battle Princess of Arcadias (PS3)
In many fantasy role-playing games, it’s not uncommon to see royalty step in and join the fight to save the world as part of the main adventuring party. However, what all these kings and princesses fail to realize is how much more they could contribute to such efforts if they mobilized their kingdom’s army, and Battle Princess of Arcadias actually chooses to follow this route for many of its battle. Sure, the titular princess is still fighting alongside her troops, but the battle to protect the kingdom from its possible end isn’t just on the shoulders of twelve gifted individuals like it is in many RPGs.
In the kingdom of Schwert, monsters have begun to attack the citizenry suddenly and ancient weapons meant to help repel such threats are being turned against the kingdom instead. With the king somehow turned into a goose and confusion over how such monsters have begun to appear, the people need hope, so the princess of the kingdom decides to become a Battle Princess instead, Plume charging in to fight foes and lead her troops along with the other gifted warriors of the Princess Brigade. For the first half of the game you are essentially just repelling the monsters and getting acquainted with the cast, additional warriors introduced in the more lighthearted fantasy adventure portion of the plot. However, even during these segment filled with plenty of humor and characters interacting more like classmates than fellow soldiers in a powerful army, you do start to get hints at a darker story underneath the typical fantasy trappings. The later half of the game starts to lean into these more, but Battle Princess for Arcadias seems to be unsure of how deeply it wants to explore its underbelly as in the same scene where a villain questions whether a princess like Plume should have been sheltered from the realities of death and moral ambiguity so she can be a better tool of war, that same villain suddenly shifts gear to fawn over a pretty boy in your party and desperately request he run away with her to get married.
It can definitely be a little hard to explore the hidden depths the game tantalizes you with when it also so readily reverts to tomfoolery. Characters might hint at something unfortunate in their past but then shift back to overexaggerated character traits. Between battles though you can speak with the other members of the Princess Brigade to learn more about their lives, and there are enough of these that you can start to understand certain party members or at least find their personal tales more interesting even if they don’t follow through on some of the more intriguing aspects they only hint at. Yuni, for example, seems like a small and frail young girl but is a powerful magic user and gifted artisan, her no-nonsense attitude and willingness to use magic to get people to stop fooling around key to keep certain conversations from diving too far off the deep end. However, there are hints of some failure in her past that haunts her, and even the idea that she had the potential to be a Battle Princess herself. Characters who are around a long time like the princess’s earnest squire Raltz have a lot of time to show their personality and relationships, but then some characters like Marianne never grow out of being a constant stream of jokes about her ogling the female members of the cast, something that was already the source of humor for a different character.
The Princess Brigade can eventually reach a full group of 10 who participate in the battles themselves, and most of them have strong but unique character traits to help diversify the interactions you witness. Rudolph is an older warrior who brings a more mature voice to the group even though he’s prone to easy irritation, Kilios is a military man from another kingdom who provides an outsider perspective on the group, and Elias is a mischievous young man the others struggle to get a read on. Even though it dips into predictable conversation paths rather often, it’s still fun to see the group talking between missions, Plume’s own naive but energetic personality helping to guide things towards comedic outcomes or questions that help the player learn the world. If the game had fully committed to exploring the depths the characters clearly have it could have mustered up a compelling story, but the plot doesn’t go the distance with them or the main story, so mostly it becomes a somewhat funny journey with a cast of mostly likeable characters who all have colorful designs and live in a beautifully drawn world.
When it comes time to fight with the Princess Brigade though, there are three battle types, all of them utilizing certain role-playing systems like leveling up characters or equipping new weapons and accessories as well as having different party members excel in different areas like those focused on close range brute strength or long range harassing attacks. The most basic mode is combat where the player selects three of their warriors to go out and fight monsters in an area on their own, the player able to swap between the three as they wish during the stage. The side-scrolling action levels involve the player doing combos to handle different monster types, the creatures appearing in small groups and usually dealing decent damage if the player isn’t able to handle enemy control very well. Flying creatures may keep firing on you if you don’t bring them down to earth, certain creatures can defend and will strike after your combo if you don’t break their guard, and others can inflict status effects or knock you about if they aren’t being stunned by the attacks you’re dishing out. These fights aren’t too difficult unless you let them get out of control, but they’re certainly not the main attraction.
Battle Princess of Arcadias has two modes where your warriors will be backed up by the kingdom’s army. In Siege and Skirmish, groups of girls armed with various weapon types will participate in the battle as well, the two modes differing in how they contribute. Siege is essentially a boss battle where the player and army fight side-by-side to take down the ancient weapons which happen to look like big monsters such as a dragon, spider, or mechanical knight. The player is still actively participating by dealing damage to the boss with their attacks, but the troops will be contribute as well, the goal being to wear down the boss’s regenerating shield and then hit them hard when they’re left vulnerable. While the player can defend and dodge to avoid being killed by the boss themselves, the army is a little harder to manage, the player needing to order them to switch tactics when appropriate. Focusing on defending, attacking, and making temporary retreats are among the strategies you can choose for them, and having them in the right mode can lead to an earlier win or loss depending on how the boss fights.
Siege is a more involved version of the game’s regular combat system, but the real break away from the norm is when you get involved in a Skirmish. Here, your warriors will be fighting in the foreground against the leaders of the other army. Even if you beat these leaders, they’ll be replaced, meaning you can’t actually win the battle with your fighting alone. However, your troops get a huge surge of moral from your efforts that can be used for special attacks, a useful tool for the fight they’re having in the background. The enemy will be bringing an army of their own to the fight as well, the battle ending when one army has been wiped out completely. You can still command your troops, although the way for doing so is a little cumbersome and that matters more here than against the bosses. You need to hold down a button to scroll between options in a small horizontal menu to pick the tactics, and the shifting tides of army vs. army battles means doing these quickly is far more important, especially since your troops attack in specific waves in Skirmish instead of all at once like in Siege.
The troops you use in Skirmish are split into attack types based on their weapons of choice, so you might have a group of archers, magicians, axe-wielders, spearwomen, and so on. You can only bring a predetermined number of platoons into a fight and the weapon system actually means you’ll want to pick the ones that best counter the enemy forces while also making sure to watch the background battle to respond to any swaps your opponent tries to gain the edge against you. While fighting the leaders keeps you active and rewards you with those important morale boosts, the military skirmish asks for more strategy with its need to select troops well and adjust your plans on the fly, this mode really being where Battle Princess of Arcadias finds its unique identity and most satisfying gameplay.
Unfortunately, there is a small issue hanging over much of this game, and that’s the leveling system. Participating in battles will let your Princess Brigade warriors grow in strength, their stats increasing and bonds with other warriors they fought alongside growing stronger so they can do support moves or group special attacks more often. New warriors that join your group of ten playable characters are often underleveled for when you acquire them though, the whole team not growing in step and thus leading to it being fairly likely certain members will fall out of use entirely as you get deeper into the game. It is a shame because almost every member does have a unique set of combos and attacks, and while some repeat the same weapon type, they do fight differently enough that it could have been interesting to more freely explore every character’s move set. Still, you can at least find a set of four fighters or so who you can keep up to speed, but this does loop to a more pressing issue in that pretty quickly, the missions you can access start taking abrupt leaps in difficulty.
While you are usually given a batch of missions at once so you can work your way up to the tougher ones, sometimes the new batch will have high leveled monsters or armies you can’t hope to hold your own against if you are playing through the normal story path. Even if you complete side quests it is still inevitable that soon you’ll be too underpowered with even your best warrior to win some of the Skirmishes in your path, especially since each platoon must be leveled up with cash and can only get as strong as the character who uses the same weapon as them. This means if you want your swordswomen to be competent soldiers, Plume is going to have to keep her level high so they can be leveled up to match. This essentially means, when you hit a certain impenetrable level roadblock, you will have to replay older levels to grind out experience and cash. Combat levels are thankfully quick enough that you can do them repeatedly to strengthen your Princess Brigade and troops without too much trouble, but the time taken does interrupt the game’s flow and leaves you doing busywork instead of progressing to new exciting battles.
There was a point where the enemies in a Skirmish were at level 25 when my best warrior was only at 19, but after the grinding session to get them up to that same level it did at least mean they were always fit for any battle after, but this section where everything came to a halt and required replaying old stages strained the battle system. The regular Combat is fine in small doses but must be revisited to stay up to par with the more interesting battle types, and the grinding session to reach Level 25 was unfortunately not the first one, although thankfully the others were shorter. Squeaking by early on in a hard battle I wasn’t quite equipped for did feel like a tense but well-earned victory at least, but the forced repetition and general issues with power scaling basically ensure that Battle Princess of Arcadias will reach a point where the action is interrupted by artificial limiters that devalue the strategy and instead prioritize time investment over maintaining the player’s interest. These required grinding sessions do knock down the enjoyment of the game a fair bit sadly, especially since overgrinding can become a problem as well since the game’s plot doesn’t follow a power curve the player can fluidly follow, but there’s still enough in Battle Princess of Arcadias that it can be enjoyed if you accept you need to set aside small chunks of time to make more of it accessible.
THE VERDICT: Battle Princess of Arcadias has three combat modes that rise in quality as they rise in complexity. Combat is decent but a little too straightforward despite the varied combos and monsters, and the required grinding to be able to participate in the other modes means you’ll see Combat a bit too often unfortunately. Siege and Skirmish both spice up the fighting with the military management angle, the strategy and action intermingling well but level barriers do mean sometimes you just have to be strong enough to win. The story follows this conditional evaluation of quality as well, since many characters have fun interactions and personalities but they keep turning away from revealing hidden depths to tell jokes that aren’t often too different from ones you heard previously in the plot. There’s definitely a fair bit to like in this action RPG and the backgrounds and some character designs are quite lovely, but the need to grind undermines a little too much that this game can’t quite earn greater commendations.
And so, I give Battle Princess of Arcadias for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. The Skirmish system really had the potential to serve as the highlight moments of the game’s strategic side while Sieges could serve as the dramatic boss battles, but both moments are hampered when being able to reasonably participate in them requires you to go kill a bunch of pandas in a forest or cacti in a desert over and over to be strong enough. If it was just grinding to overcome a gap in your own skills versus what is expected of you that would be different, but needing to have your army up to snuff requires having their associated warrior strong enough, enough money to upgrade them, and enough warriors and their platoons at that strength level to reasonably serve as backup when it’s time to switch your active troops to keep pace with the enemy. Perhaps if the game did delve deeper into the things it only teases narratively than it might be easier to accept the repetition, perhaps if there were more combat areas so you don’t keep repeating an easy one to grow in strength when required, and perhaps if the game made keeping the Princess Brigade comparable in power easier so you can make things more varied by picking different warriors then Princess of Arcadias wouldn’t be harmed by those progression speed bumps. Still, a lot of the inherent systems work when you’re passing through them as intended. Monsters have varied enough concepts, Skirmishes draw out more intelligent fighting from a game whose combo system otherwise could grow stale, and Siege sits at a nice middle ground between the two where active participation and troop orders intermingle nicely.
It is the structure that does Battle Princess of Arcadias a disservice, the content and mechanics all having the potential to be good but the story and mission structure won’t quite let it get there fully. If you can stomach the required grinding then there is still enough for this to be a fun little action RPG experience, but by shirking away from greater narrative and gameplay depth in favor of padding its runtime out with required replaying of missions, the game avoids being compelling and settles for being acceptable.