I'm playing as many Steam games as possible in alphabetical order, and you can watch my review here: https://youtu.be/SRMGZRdObVU

tl;dr
This game is a disgrace to the JRPG genre. You'll grind through 4 themed zones to earn enough xp and money to level up and buy gear to beat the singular boss fight in the game. There's no plot, no character development, only 1 "town" to explore. The character with the most interesting backstory is never seen again after the tutorial, and the tutorial shows mechanics (different modes of transport) that don't exist in the actual game.
And yet, this game somehow has DLC character which cost more than the game itself, and they also have no personality or background, nor do they add in any new classes or mechanics to play with.
The one positive thing I can say about Arcane Raise is that it let me equip my mage with a gun.
Don't bother with this one.

Arcane Raise is, without a doubt, one of the absolute worst JRPGs on Steam. Much more effort went into devising obscure forms of monetization for this game (DLC characters! A Compile Heart-style cheat item pack! Tradeable Steam marketplace items that look to have been made from stock art which do absolutely nothing!) than the game, which has no original assets, almost no story, a bare minimum of mechanics (3 characters in fixed classes, all items available from the shop at the beginning of the game), and is less than an hour long when using the "Booster Pack."

Basically, since I can sum up the entire game easily: after a tutorial featuring mechanics that don't actually exist in the game (e.g. potential punishment for retreating from fights, vehicles), you are dumped in town, with a glitchy-appearance NPC you can talk to in order to fight the final boss at any point, shops selling all of the items in the game, and four portals to one-map dungeons full of obnoxiously-high-rate random encounters and treasure chests full of potions and gold. Go grab all the chests, then buy +attack items at 200 a pop / 99 for 19800, enjoy the sound of consuming items 99 times in a row. Then hit the final boss for 11000 damage in one hit. Now you are not a Shade, but a Shade Alpha, a term that might be explained in the lorebook, but which there's no reason to care about what it means. Also you can uninstall the game now.

Oh and you get 37 achievements, probably also all stock art, for starting the game. Just make sure you start the game normally if you want that, instead of loading one of the "DLC character" savegames.

In conclusion, no. Irredeemable.

Another 5 minutes of Gaming for 100% achievements received from this game.

YES like the other 2 game in this series you just have to go through the tutorial part to the exit. Then choose achievement unlock and walk from left side of the screen to the right side of the screen to get them all. Really that’s the only up side of this game.

The game itself? You start the real game on a screen with a shop, the final boss and 4 portals.
All you got to do is use the 4 portal that have different level difficulty to grind and get level and gold to upgrade your character enough to be strong enough to beat the final boss to win. Each the map is quite easy to navigate and there are really not much point to go through them as there are not even mid boss in them. All you can do is grind, grind and grind. 2-3 hours later your level 70ish character will have the best possible gears. Before you fight the final boss u can should go to the shop and spend all your gold to buy power up to upgrade your character’s defense and resistance.

Every character sprite, NPC, Enemy, Boss are exactly same as the other 2 games. Same weak music, same not existent story. Even every item and shop are same!

1/10 same exact RPG maker trash game for achievement hunter only.

After a pretty scathing review of the demo of this game, I recieved a free Steam Key to do a proper playthrough of this game.

My opinion hasn't changed very much of this game. There's no story involved, no connection to the characters, no real dialogue about the world other then the fact that you should go over there and grind and come back and kill that thing. And then you talk to another NPC and find out that you need to kill him, and when you try, he makes a mudhole out of you for the attempt. Out of the hour attempt I made at the game I did one of three things, Fight, grind, and buy things.

I have no real connection to this story, the players, and for about a half an hour -- didn't even really realize one of my sprites was a female. The only thing I found particularly clever was the fact that there are chests in the shop keeper's shops that you can steal and they will call you out on trying to rob them. What effect that has on the game, I will never know, because I uninstalled the game before I left the initial starting area... Which is your entire life for 1+ hour of the game.

I have made a video of my playthrough, but due to Steam's policies... will not connect it to this site as it violates the profanity and the flammatory rules.

I only bought it for the black background.

Surprisenly this version of Arcane has a tad bit more effort put into it. Instead of 3 maps to go through, you got 7. Same rule applies as the rest; get money, buy stat books, beat final boss. No mini bosses for the 4 stages and no need to go through them. They are just training grounds for getting levels, which are needed due to the final boss doing flat damage that cannot be negated and no way to increase hp. This is the closest to a scam I've ever seen. 3/10 for making a playable game that still sucks and ain't worth the time.

P.S. There is no ending. Only worth getting through a bundle for the achievement fonts. Took less than 40 minutes to beat the boss.

Get a black background. That's all x_+

If you want Black Background, play the game for 2 hours and buy it from Point Shop (500 Points)

The obvious positive side here is that it lets you unlock all the 100% achievements just by making a small choice at the very beginning after tutorial & its icons set contains some cool typographical figures.

Other than that the prog is nothing special: you get some generic 3 men party without any background or story - just go into some portal, beat baddies and collect valuables in some fantasy land, when you clear 4 zones - come back and defeat some demon. Everything works as you may expect - making right menu choices in battles makes you a winner. It runs in a small window (640x480) and has no options at all, even the music can't be turned off. I don't recommend if only you aren't looking especially to get involved into some RPG-maker grinding process.

Disclosure: Game was received for free from the developer


http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1233639528

Now, for this, I'm going to try and maintain as much of a calm demeanor as possible for a game that has angered me so much in so many ways and not in a good way. Arcane Raise is nothing more than a shoddy, low effort waste of time and money.

I'm going to structure things slightly differently in this review of mine since there are aspects of this game that I want to talk about that I wouldn't normally cover and so I'm adapting a more freeform writing layout for this one as I don't really think my usual one will really effectively get across the main issues with the game, and I'll instead be giving a list of what is wrong with the game and then further elaborating off of it, and I'll only be focusing on the cons as frankly, I can only see cons in this game and there are no pros and nothing working for the game.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1233645657

Before I get onto doing that, let me just first describe the premise of the game, just so you can get a better picture. In Arcane Raise, you play as three RPG Maker VX Ace assets, who play through a world made out of RPG Maker VX Ace assets where you need to enter random encounters to level up enough to face off against the boss.

With that premise being set, let's get into what I greatly hate about the game.


The gameplay, to put it simply, is boring and repetitive. With the whole goal being set on just leveling up enough times to face off against a boss, the game is literally just a grind. Usually, when there's just a small portion of the game that is grinding where you have to level up enough to get to a specific goal, this game bases it's self around grinding to simply reach that goal.


As I said earlier, the game is built up entirely out of stock RPG Maker VX Ace assets and includes no original work, and I'll be frank with this, the RPG Maker VX Ace asset environment and just design overall (at least the way it's used in this game) is completely bland, messy and plays in a stretched 4:3 screen, which may be where the problem lies.


Now, as I stated earlier, the game is nothing more than a grind, but I was additionally at a later date upon receiving a copy of the game from the developer able to get a hold of a couple of the game's DLC, these DLC packages being the booster pack and the Male #2 DLC.

The DLC greatly reduce the amount of time you spend grinding and just overall playing the game, as the booster pack spawns in a chest in the starting area, and when you open it, it automatically levels your characters up to level 15 and the Male 1 & 2 DLC and Female 1 & 2 add a new slave slot to your game that includes that character in your party and adds another guy/gal to deal extra blows to your enemies. You can't play with 7 characters if that's what you were wondering, you can only play with a maximum of 4 which means if for some reason you end up getting this game, don't buy all the character DLC as you won't get them all at once, you can instead simply choose between them before you start a new playthrough, and all characters are literally given no personality so there isn't even differentiation there. All I really saw the characters as were a bunch of stats and attacks in battles. The DLC overall is you paying for a head start in the game, and is basically the embodiment of an admittance that the game is just one big grind, as you can cut down on the amount you can do by coughing up extra cash. I'll give you a different recommendation, if you don't buy the game, then you won't have to grind at all.


So, if the whole game is building up to one boss fight, you might be wondering how is the boss battle? I'm going to say that after facing this boss around twenty times, I have never beaten him. Now, with me saying that, you might think the boss battle is deep, intricate and complex and requires a lot of figuring out, but no, I'd rather go with the fight being unfair. Now, before people start screaming at me to "git gud", there are a few things that I want to say about why the boss battle is unfair and has been made I'm willing to throw out and say almost impossible to beat.

1) Unlike a lot of other RPGs, you only have one form of attack that deals a predetermined range of damage on the boss, and regardless of level, every hit will be minuscule to the boss' overall health (which you don't see the total amount/remaining health of an enemy.) As a result, if you want to deal damage, you can only carry out this one default movement or a magic move called life drain that deals even less damage for little actual result overall besides you losing MP.

2) Magic is useless. By the time you reach the boss, you'll need to have stacked up on potions, herbs etc. and since the whole game overall is a grind, you won't really be caring too much about getting your character's health too much if the goal is just to go out and level up when you can just take a short walk back to the haven area where you can rest at no cost. Additionally, magic is useless, to begin with as very little health or anything at all is regenerated, to begin with, and barely any damage is dealt with either.

3) The boss is defaulted to attack twice, whereas your team can only attack once. Even with any of the character DLC, the boss will thrash your team up quickly in a few swings because for some reason he can attack you twice, whereas each team member of yours only gets one hit in each. Meaning the boss can enter a state of paralyzing all of your team and attacking them, paralyzing and attacking, rendering them useless right from the beginning of the fight regardless of level and then going on to take away all of their health, killing all of them before they can even lay an attack in.

4) The potions will torment you more than help you. As I said in my previous point, the boss can end up putting you in that kind of endless loop but in the few occasions where you are able to reverse the effects of this through herbs to getting rid of your paralysis and potions to regain back lost health, there will be at least two teammates dead as a result of this, which makes it more complicated if you had no DLC. You will b drinking potions which allow your team to be resurrected, but then when you've drunk that your turn it up without you having landed a hit in and no matter what you do your allies always come back to life with the only 1HP. This means that on the next turn there's a good 80% chance your boss will have an attack ready and the only times he doesn't is if he's trying to blind your team to make the likelihood of hitting him lower or he paralyzing you again, requiring more herbs still with downed teammates. So if the boss lands another hit in then your resurrected teammate will go down again. So then, you're stuck in an endless cycle of trying to resurrect your teammates, getting lucky enough for the boss to not lay an attack on you the turn after and then filling that teammate up with a full health potion....but then you have to do it again for the other characters.


Essentially, Arcane Raise is nothing more than a huge grind with no pay off except a boss that is way too hard for you to actually beat, meaning there isn't even a pay off for your incessant grinding. I would make this longer but this is what happens when a game gives you nothing more to really talk about besides grinding and a boss fight. Oh, but there is the fact that the rat enemies are misspelled as "Rate."

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1233643075

Final verdict: 1/10

Curator: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/MellowReviews