Million Arthur: Arcana Blood Game Sample - PC
38It's funny what types of games are considered garbage these days... when I was growing up, it was games like "Dark Castle" (Gen/MD) or "Rise of the Robots", but apparently it's games like "Million Arthur: Arcana Blood" nowadays according to the net. To put it simply, MA:AB is brought to us from Examu, the folks who are best known for the "Arcana Heart" fighting series, and it's basically a deeper version of "Nitroplus Blasterz: Heroines Infinite Duel" and a prettier version of "AquaPazza: AquaPlus Dream Match", so if you liked either of those games (or just about any of Examu's fighters as they have tweaks to the same general template), then you'll find a lot to like about this game. If you don't, then... well, you'll probably label the game "kuso".
To go more in-depth, "Million Arthur" is a Japanese media franchise created by Square Enix that consists of several games, an anime, manga, live action series and associated merchandise. It was first conceived in 2012 for mobile platforms as a FTP card battle game written by Kazuma Kamachi (a prolific light novel creator who is best known for his "A Certain Magical Index" series) and it had limited exposure internationally in 2015, but was not popular, causing most of the other games to not get localized. It was heavily speculated that this game wouldn't get localized either (due to lack of interest, licensing issues, etc.) as it was released for Arcades in 2017 and then later ported to the PS4 in 2018 for Japanese gamers, but the game was quietly leaked on Steam in English in June 2019.
In the highly sensitive world we currently find ourselves in, the game was again blasted for "censorship" when released for PCs which caused some people not to buy it (though fans quickly patched the missing content back in) and you'd have to look REALLY hard for it -- one of the characters, Foible Elle, is a young girl who can be summoned and "grabs (and tampers with) the groin area of male or female characters while proclaiming "NICE CHINCHIN!" and sometimes makes a suggestive face after connecting the attack"... I'm not here to teach you about Japanese slang, but you can probably guess what she's referring to and why the animation was edited to her hitting you in the groin instead.
This bit of info garnered more attention than perhaps the game itself (there are Japanese tournaments held where players lose if grabbed by her), which is often cast aside as being slow, shallow (with only thirteen main fighters) and a kusoge with poor net code and lacking competitive elements. It's a little unfortunate too; while the game lacks some of the nuances of current heavyweights like DBFZ, Guilty Gear, BlazBlue or Under Night (scoring, ranking, significant extra content, etc.), it's actually quite a bit of fun and deeper than it appears at a glance. The main criticism I have with it would be the same criticism I have for a lot of games these days: its pricing model. The game released for $40 but it just doesn't have the same content to warrant that price... if it was released a little cheaper, I think it would've been received more warmly. I got the game on sale for under $15 and I'm A-Okay with it.
Let's talk about what the game has going for it: The presentation is in the same vein of Examu's previous titles like Aquapazza and NitroB, but with bigger and more detailed sprites - it's quite pretty in its own right even if it doesn't have the eye-popping quality of the other games on the market and is the current pinnacle of Examu's years making fighters. Similarly to their other games, the game has an assist system (in the form of Knights), but the cool thing is every character specializes in different elements (Fire/Ice/Wind/Special) that carry different traits: Fire deals burn damage, Ice increases stun time, and wind adds health regeneration. While the game only has thirteen characters, there are more than thirty assists, so there are tons of ways to experiment with your characters. Players can also increase damage with elemental chains, elemental boost or utilize limit breaks (which increase the max number of gauges you can have from two to three).
Other traits like throws, evasive steps, double jumps, high jumps and the like make the rounds as well, and assists come in different levels based on their power and "usefulness" (higher level assists aren't necessarily better than cheap assists). Each one has a cost associated with them which replenishes over time. The game's biggest highlight, for me, are these three guest characters: Iori (KoF), Koume Sakiyama (Lord of Vermilion IV) and Riesz/Riese (Seiken Densetsu 3) -- I played the original "Trials or Mana" back in the late 90s and it was a phenomenal game, so seeing Reisz in 2D one more time was a big delight for me.
Overall, I recommend this game on sale as more of a beginners fighter. You can get it at:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/989550/Million_Arthur_Arcana_Blood/
This is a basic video of the game in action. Enjoy.