Ara Fell: Enhanced Edition

This little indie game aims right. Classic yet well written story, with excellent characters. Beautiful, medium sized world, with lots of shiny things catching the eye, exploration is worth it. Combats are satisfying and dynamic, but I would recommand to play in hard mode which is not too difficult. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I bought their next game, without a discount. Says a lot.

Ara Fell badly wants to capture the spirit of classic JRPGs and in that regard, it mostly succeeds. You'll get some retro feelings while having some quality of life improvements : for example, HP and MP are refilled after each combat, streamlining exploration and XP grind (which is not too required on standard difficulty). You won't get tons of items : equipment is set for each character, instead you will have to scour the land to get crafting material, which is an alright motivation for doing so. Atmosphere is generally quite light-hearted, it's an easy game to pick up and play. Graphics are OK too, full of retro charm. So, why only two stars ? As far as I am concerned, the story was quite lackluster. Paying homage to older games shouldn't mean sticking to a generic plot without much depth. The Big Bad is bland and incompetent, unable to obtain what he needed after 500 years of searching in such a small world, what's more, he could have stopped the heroes several times but fails to do so, without any good reason. It defaults to a chosen one gathering artifacts of power, sometimes found in silly locations, while the world is supposedly dying- but nothing in the environment shows that. Expect plotholes and and an absence of surprises, with average characters. I might be demanding but didn't feel motivated to pursue this quest in such a shallow world. However, if you don't care too much about the plot and some padding puzzles, Ara Fell might feel like a blast from the past, comfortable to play, competently programmed but quite forgettable.

This game deserves 5 stars. It ticks all the boxes an RPG should: character design, story, combat system, soundtrack. The pixel art style may not appeals everybody, but if you can get past it it's a rewarding experience. It's not so long to discourage people who don't want to invest 50+ hours in a single game. I played it on Linux (Arch Linux) using the platform specific-port and I never got i single hiccup. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who loves turn-based JRPG and/or loved the great classics of the '90s.

I thought the turn based combat was fantastic. It was simple to get used to but had enough complexity and variety to keep me learning. I also loved the crafting system to upgrade your gear. There is a good variety of levels; enemies; characters. I think the range of difficulties will make sure that anyone can be satisfied. I thought the game kept a good management screen for listing your quests. The story was pretty good overall although it did drag a bit at parts. I also liked how there didn’t seem to be a level cap and how if you wanted to grind up your level the option was there. The enemies were also somewhat easy to avoid if you don’t like grinding. On the flip side I thought that the game could have done a better job detailing your quest locations. There is no quest marker and some times not even detailed objectives. For instance one quest I have to gain access to an area. In order to do that I have to find an unnamed amount of stone figures to help. I know this now but on the quest entry it just gain entry and leaves out how to do so or where they may be located. I also found the difficulty curve to be all over the place. Sometimes the mini bosses were easier to defeat than the random enemies outside of where they were. The game also does a poor job of giving you an idea of how ready for a quest you are. Some games flat out suggest certain levels you should be at to attempt it but Ara Fell does not and several times I found that my party could be one hit killed. One could say that I needed to grind more and wouldn’t be wrong but when you’re obliterating the local enemies it makes me think I am ready for the local mini boss or quest boss. Graphically Ara Fell is a pixel game so you either enjoy that or don’t. I will say that sometimes the game did a bad time outlying where you could jump or what can be climbed making me take longer than normal to navigate. I also didn’t like how you had to quit to the main menu in order to load a previous save.

This has lots of exploration, upgrades for equipment and skills, and sidequests. It checks all the boxes for me.