Lord of Arcana

Lord of Arcana commits the cardinal sin of game design: Beyond being painfully lacking in variety or original ideas, it outright wastes your time, and then punishes you for your determination to not give up.

For gamers that are fascinated by the Monster Hunter Portable phenomenon our advice is to forget the imitator and head straight for the real deal.

Access Games' take on the Monster Hunter formula attempts little beyond a straightforward recreation of that series' structure. [Mar 2011, p.107]

It tries to compete with Monster Hunter, but fails on almost every aspect.

An exercise in tedium. [Spring 2011, p.117]

It's not Monster Hunter, but it's desperately trying to be. If you like RPGs will little story, even less of a battle system and an endless amount of missions, this one's for you.

Even though its game system works, and you're the type of gamer that is patient and motivated, Lord of Arcana doesn't win from the comparison with Monster Hunter, from which it draws most of its design without trying to conceal it. Let's be clear : it doesn't match its model, in terms of fun nor content or variety, nor even in terms of combat or richness. We'd need to completely forget about Capcom's franchise in order to enjoy Lord of Arcana despite its shortcomings.

Arcana, save for a few inventive designs, looks like every other fantasy adventure that didn't go to the trouble, which is the root of its problems. [March 2011, p.79]

A Monster Hunter clone that copies most of the key features but fails to properly balance any of them - or add any proper new ideas of its own.

Lord of Arcana is one of those games where the amount of fun you're having is directly proportional to how many people you play with. But there's the catch: if you're playing by yourself, you'll have little to no fun at all, and the lack of online play makes getting a party together unnecessarily difficult. Online play should be standard for this kind of experience, and the game suffers immensely for it.

Clearly, the guys at Access Games understand that games in the Monster Hunter vein are supposed to be punishingly difficult. What they didn't get was that the soul-crushing challenge should come from the gameplay and not poor design decisions. Throwing down your PSP in anger because a boss has outsmarted you is acceptable. Tossing it aside because a fight revolves more around beating the bad game design than the actual enemy is not.

Lord of Arcana isn't completely broken, but it's just a flop. No ambition, no uniqueness, and little if any appeal even to its target audience.

Ultimately, Lord of Arcana does not succeed as a viable Monster Hunter clone, both because of the broken battle system or the lack of variation in the missions available, there's enough to turn people off from the title.