Arcania – The Complete Tale

Game Info

Remakes and remastered editions are a popular release for companies, and it makes sense.  An already-present fanbase, the ability to reuse the same press assets, the ever-present-in-games-industry nostalgia pull.  Silent Hill had how many reimaginings?  It’s like printing money.  People clamor to get 1080p versions of their favorite games from systems past, even if it was just a few years previous.

Arcania (nee Gothic 4) is one of these re-releases, and the textbook example of when to let a sleeping dog lie.

The world of Arcania has a problem.  A victorious king had a darkness descend on his mind, so it’s up to you, as some nameless chump shepard, to set the land aright.  After your girlfriend is murdered and village torched while you’re out graverobbing (more on that in a moment), you take up your shepard’s crook and walk very slowly towards glory.

A revenge plot, you say?  From a game over five years old?  This actually isn’t a terrible idea, as 2009 had one of the greatest revenge-plot games ever released.  But where Kane & Lynch 2 had functional controls and interesting characters, here we have some idiot with a silly haircut complaining.  Why this was re-released (multiple times, across many platforms!) is very confusing.

Arcania is a derivation from the Gothic series, but without any of those games’ deep, dense role-playing systems.  It functions as an action-RPG lite, closer to the original Fable than anything else – although lacking Fable’s charm and ability to get fat by eating pies.  Three attacks, jump, and crouch are your means of conveyance, and being in combat mode slows your already casual walking speed to a damn-near crawl.  Those three attacks – melee, ranged, and spells – can be upgraded through a rote skill system that gives you incremental bonuses to damage and whatnot.

Enemies and the AI in general are terrible.  Most will wait patiently for you to bonk them on the head, since ranged is a joke and the spells are weak compared to a sword.  Pounding on the attack button resets the enemy animations, allowing you to basically stunlock nearly every opponent in a vicious torrent of whacks and stabs.  Of course, this is if they can get to you – pathfinding is awful, and you can easily line-of-sight opponents into death traps and easy corners for victory.

The quests are silly, as well.  The aforementioned graverobbing adventure is kicked off by wanting a kiss from your girlfriend.  So you go to her father for permission (uhh…), and he tells you he’ll grant his blessing if you steal a ring from a corpse (umm…).  To get to the crypt, though, you need to go through a small field (okay…), but the farmer who owns the field won’t let you cross a bridge (this is a joke, right?  They want how much for this? THIRTY DOLLARS?!).  So you need to kill some moles (sorry I lost interest.  Does Redbox have Witcher 3?) to cross the bridge to get through the field to enter the crypt to steal a ring to bring to a bald guy to kiss his daughter.  But, spoiler alert on a five year old game, when you get back, your town is burned to the ground and your girlfriend has been killed.  Most of the quest chains are like this.  Fetch an item to give to a guy to cross a thing to complete an objective to bring it back to someone else for the permission to move along in the story.  It’s downright tiresome.

There are technical and localization issues, as well.  The game doesn’t run particularly optimally, leading to clunky slowdowns at times.  The game is 1080p, but retreading a five-year-old game with the same graphics means everything looks last-gen.  Tracking map objectives can be exhausting, since the mini-map is virtually useless.  Instead of a stylized overlay, its colors mimic the colors and textures of the background, lending to ill-defined edges that gets all muddled together with the game itself.  Translation accuracy is dodgy, with sentence structures and phrases not quite right.  Odd word-choices abound, and the voices all seem to be acted by ESL dropouts.  It’s like a Two Worlds that takes itself way too seriously – a parody of a parody of a western RPG.

The Recommendation

Why a fourth-rate action RPG was remade this many times, and upconverted, and then uploaded to servers for people to buy and play, is baffling.  The only conceivable reason I can see this being remade now is for people who want Witcher 3, but were somehow voodoo cursed into buying this tripe.  Pass.  Pass this game on all counts and go play Witcher 3.