Arcadia Fallen

As someone who played the second game first, I was pretty curious to see how the first game compared. I do think both games have abrupt endings, but they more than earn the emotional climaxes they set up. The worldbuilding, art, and music that I liked in the second game is just as strong here, and so are the characters. Beyond just having interesting backstories or serving as loredumps, you actually feel like you want to get to know these people. You feel bad when they do, and you're happy when they succeed. The foundations that Arcadia Fallen built were strong, and I really appreciated seeing the strengths of this game return in its sequel. I can't wait to see what the developers cook up next!

this was SO GOOD! i left it running on my PC and completed it over the course of a few days. i love visual novels with some gameplay elements. if you've tried I Was A Teenage Exocolonist or Dispatch, you'll love this. fantastic voice acting really lends to the experience. i wish the romance was explored more heavily, but the story is deep and sososo good, you can tell where the focus was and it pays off.

Good enough VN with many choices to enable proper role play, but certainly isn’t anything groundbreaking. It ends right after it starts getting interesting, the story isn’t particularly deep nor does it have much to say - aside from the usual stuff of doing an allegory to show that bad things in our society are bad. Like sure it explores complex topics, but every other piece of media explores those same complex topics and some of them do it just plainly better. Same goes for word building - it’s largely mashing concepts we have already seen hundreds of times and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. And even the cast of characters falls into classical tropes - the law ignoring mage, the state sanctioned warrior conflicted about state, mysterious guy from far off land and so on. It works - no doubt helped by the voice acting, but it doesn’t push the genre forward and won’t leave a lasting impact. Last;y the romantic subplots are a token inclusion at best. Haven’t played any dating sim for a significant amount of time to know how it’s supposed to be done, but having like 5 “romantic” interactions (the quotes are doing some heavy lifting here) and finally getting a kiss just is off. And aside from those, the rest of the dialogue stays the same. Lastly the puzzle mechanics seem to be there just to have some change to the VN gameplay. I’ve never found them engaging, I would prefer if the devs just added an option to skip them, instead of forcing us to play this mobile game-esque puzzle game glued to an otherwise OK visual novel. I’ve enjoyed my time with it, and it does what it promised to do. Still if they cut the number of choices in half and made the game twice as long I think it would have been a better fit. Since as of now I’ve done my role play, but wasn’t that captivated to try different routes.

(spoilers) its great, i loved the story, loved the romance chars, butttt the actual romance part is a bit underwhelming, like i want to be able to kiss them more, one scene is not enough for me. AND the last fight was so so so underwhelming ! what do u mean i dont actually fight anything! the little puzzle was my fav part wtf. anyway, its fun, but like could have been much better. 3,5/5

Replayed after playing through the 2nd game and it's still great.

Great game, would recommend

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