There used to be a bunch of games like this. Back in the heyday of Street Fighter II, the “chick fighter” was a recognizable sub-genre in Japan – Asuka 120%, Variable Geo, the venerable classic Strip Fighter. (Yes, there really was a Strip Fighter for the PC-Engine. The “classic” part is sarcasm, though.) Take cute cartoon character designs, toss them in a simple Street Fighter knockoff, and you didn’t exactly have an A-list game, but you had something that would reliably sell to the hardcore fanboy market.

Arcana Heart follows the same basic formula, but it’s made with a good deal more creativity and care. Actually, “creative” doesn’t quite describe some of its weirder character concepts – a few of them belong under a heading like “products of a deranged imagination.” While it’s not going to drive the die-hard fighting set away from Guilty Gear XX and Street Fighter III, it’s a better game than its fan-pandering presentation might suggest.

Arcane Lore

Arcana’s main gimmick – besides the all-girl cast – involves the way you pick your character. Each fighter has a basic set of moves that never change, but you also select one of 11 “Arcana” to go with her, adding another handful of special attacks. With more than a hundred potential combinations altogether, it goes a long way towards keeping match-ups unpredictable.

Though the pace isn’t quite so fast, the game feels a lot like Guilty Gear (with maybe a touch of King of Fighters in the background). Arcana borrows a bunch of different movement and attack mechanics from Arc System Works -- Dust Attacks and air combo follow-ups, the same kind of double jumping and air dashing. It can get a little juggle-happy from time to time, but there’s a fairly simple mechanic to recover from a fall and defend against repetitive air combos.

While it’s obviously best played with an arcade-style joystick, Arcana is pretty easy to control with an ordinary PS2 game pad. The input recognition for circular motions and simultaneous button presses is fairly forgiving, so you can still play the game at a good level of skill without shelling out for an expensive specialty controller.

Many of the Arcana Force attacks are ridiculously powerful – as in one-third of a life bar gone as fast as it takes to say – but you get a pretty short window in which to use them.  They usually take some setting up to get through an opponent’s defenses. If you just try to use them as one-shot artillery, they’re comparatively easy to block, so against a skilled player they have to be part of a more well-thought-out strategy.

Central Casting

If you watch a lot of Japanese cartoons, several of the character types are going to seem hauntingly familiar. There’s the cute, perky schoolgirl, the quiet, aloof schoolgirl, the Shinto shrine maiden, the Gothic Lolita (who plays like a weird mix of Testament and Zappa from Guilty Gear), and a couple of other obvious fanboy favorites.

Some of the cast members, though, straddle the line between inspired and deranged. The game’s main “heavy” character (a la Zangief in Street Fighter or Guilty Gear’s Potemkin) isn’t some kind of muscle-bound Amazon type; it’s a 10-year-old girl in a swimsuit. She has mental control over a big blob of water that shapes itself into giant arms that clobber her opponents. This is obviously a clever idea. It’s also an obvious sop to the segment of Japanese geek culture that gets off on underage girls in skimpy outfits, which takes a little bit of the fun away. Other characters appeal to a couple of other creepy fetishes – there’s another one aimed squarely opposite the “lolita complex” demographic, with knockers the size of 12-pound bowling balls.

One way or the other, on a purely technical level, the character graphics look good enough. They’re not quite as sharp as Guilty Gear’s, perhaps, but they don’t stick out against the backgrounds like the low-resolution characters in something like Capcom Vs. SNK 2. The game doesn’t have much trouble with load times, either, which is a problem that occasionally plagues RAM-intensive 2D fighters.

Gag Order

There have been complaints from several quarters about the lack of voice acting in the story mode. In the Japanese version, the characters spoke their lines, but for various reasons the original voices are gone from the American release. (No English voices replace them, either.) If the absence of chirpy Japanese dialogue is a deal-breaker for you, feel free to ignore the American version accordingly. From the perspective of the average player, however, it’s probably not any especially great loss. If nothing else, Atlus’ text translation is very good – certainly far better than it ever needed to be for a game like this.

Generally speaking, Arcana Heart is better than it needed to be, and better than you’d expect. It’s a worthwhile pickup for 2D fighter fans, especially at a $30 price point – once again, it’s probably not going to supplant the big hits of the genre, but it makes a fun change of pace from Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, and back to Street Fighter again and again. Creepy though she might be, it’s fun to school your friends with a 10-year-old in a swimsuit.

Review by: D.F. Smith