TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
One of my best friends is a huge fighting game otaku. He's much better at them and has much more of an intuitive grasp of them than me. But there is one series which I love very much and want more people to discover the greatness of... as long as they aren't ghey and hate for their games to be full of cute little girls! Let's spread the love of this game but keep it limited to those with cool taste. I should mention, by the way, that I really suck at this game. I'm not good at fighting games in general. But I still think it's very fun. And most importantly: It has one of the best casts of cute girls in ANY piece of media I've ever seen. For that reason alone it must be honored.
My first experience with Arcana Heart was in an arcade in Sapporo called Cat's Eye. It was an awesome arcade, but I don't know if it was a COVID casualty like so many others. I was drawn to a machine with a bunch of different fighting games to pick from and managed to go for Suggoi! Arcana Heart 2 because I had seen clips of it and knew that it was the most moe-tastic fighter I had ever seen. I was not disappointed! When it came to most fighting games I had played, I would do a quick scan for the cutest girl to play... and if there weren't any cute girls, the game immediately failed! But in this case, how could I possibly choose?! EVERY girl was cute as hell! I think the first character I played as was Yoriko, but I hadn't even had a chance to look at the full roster. I played Angelia as well, but then I realized that THE CUTEST GIRL IN THE WHOLE WORLD was one of the characters, and I stuck with her ever since.
I stopped by that arcade several times in the next few days, always playing Arcana Heart. I tried Arcana Heart 3 and soon realized that it was the best in the series (as it had the most girls... and largest breasts on Maori and Mei-Fang's artwork). I have many fond memories of feeding 100-yen coins into that machine and listening to 32 Zel / Planet Shrooms by Denzel Curry on my iPod over and over. Something about the juxtaposition was amusing. I also was listening to a lot of Jamaican dancehall/jungle music. For whatever reason, it really hit the spot, and I associate that music a lot with Sapporo's gray skies and frigid old streets with leftover snowfall instead of the summery mood it's usually supposed to elicit.
One thing was certain: I would have to EARN the ability to play this game with all these cute girls, because Arcana Heart has a fittingly ARCANE set of game mechanics that makes it a hard game to pick up for a neophyte. I've also just never been intuitively good at fighting games, which makes them even harder for me. When I first looked it up, it was a headache of learning all kinds of terms like "homing cancel" and "proration multiplier" and so on. It was the first fighting game I really tried to learn in general, so there was just the general difficulty of getting used to fighting game lingo and notation in general on top of that. But my motivation was high and I got a sense of some of the basic essentials to understand the game.
Arcana Heart is a 2-D fighting game. You can imagine the basics: You attack another character, block and counter their attacks, and string together moves into combos. What makes it unique? Two main things come to mind:
1. Arcanas
When you play Arcana Heart, you pick a girl (no boys in this game, as it
should be!) and then you pick an Arcana. An Arcana is a sort of spirit or summon that
can be used during combat. An Arcana gives you a whole other set of moves to use, sort
of like Marvel vs. Capcom. They often appear as projectiles or objects to place
on the field, but can also be passive. There is an Arcana gauge that fills up over the
course of the fight. Some attacks cost more of it than others (typical fighting game
stuff). Each girl has an Arcana of her own, so you have 26 characters to choose from
and then 26 Arcanas you can match with her. So there's an incredible amount of depth to
experiment with! Of course, some Arcanas work better with certain characters than
others. But for the most part the game is exceptionally well-balanced, so there's tons
of room for experimentation here.
2. Homing
Arcana Heart emphasizes aerial combat. It's very similar to Melty
Blood or the Touhou fighting games in the way that you spend a lot of time evading
and running away from other characters, often while airborne. Characters in Arcana
Heart don't fly, but the game uses a Homing mechanic that makes matches often look
like it at high level! There's a Homing button that you can press and then zoom towards
the other character. You can do this to zoom up into the air or to move towards her on
ground at a faster rate than it would take to just walk over. You can perform a "Homing
Cancel" by canceling many moves into Homing.
There are many more interesting quirks about Arcana Heart's gameplay, but I think that these two are what makes the game most distinctive and feel the most different from other fighting games I've played. I highly recommend consulting the Mizuumi Wiki for more details if you want to get to understand the game on a deeper level and git gud (I've been playing for years and still don't feel like I've really gotten there, but keep in mind that I'm also REALLY bad at fighting games).
Arcana Heart is a fighting game series, so you're not exactly playing it for the most deep and intellectually stimulating storyline. But the background lore of the game is full of the most over-the-top chuuni-tastic anime shit that makes these games great in the first place. It wouldn't be the same without it.
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