Do you like this music theme? I fucking hope so, because you're going to be spending 90% of your playtime listening to it.
Arcana has a gimmick in that everything is a card for some reason. Like, people, monsters, etc. But that's just a gimmick. Let's talk about what the game actually is. I actually did do a recent replay of this game, so this time I know what I'm talking about.
Okay, so what the game actually is is an old style first person perspective dungeon crawler. You will spend hours and hours exploring mazes, fighting an ungodly amount of random encounters, and opening chests. The one saving grace this game has is it actually has an automap!
Some oddities include that if any of your party members die (except for your summoned elemental) it's an instant game over. That sounds worse than it really is because this game isn't really that hard. Enemies simply don't hit hard enough to really "get you" unless you have the strategic thinking of a child. However...
Another weird oddity is that whenever a character joins your party, they are completely naked. This would be... fine, I guess, except characters frequently join you mid-dungeon! So all the sudden you have this naked asshole named Darwin on your team and he's got no armor so he dies in like three or four hits.
You can play around this a bit by keeping old armors and weapons on you, but you'll hate doing it because everything in this game is so expensive that you'll really want to sell your old gear. Man, how hard would it have been to just give new characters some basic gear when they join you!
The thing about calling this game a "slog" is that, well, that's the whole fucking point of first person dungeon crawlers. I can't really list it as a drawback or as bad design when the whole point of games like this is to spend hours and hours slogging through a dungeon. It appeals to a very specific niche in the playerbase and if you are the type of person who enjoys exploring a whole giant maze and filling the automap 100%, then this will probably be a fun game for you. The graphics are fine, good even for the time. The sfx are snappy. Each character and enemy has a nice little animation when they attack. It's a fairly well put together game, it's just... the person who would like this game is rare.
Do I recommend this game:
No. It's a remnant of the old dungeon crawler genre that was going out of style even at the time. But if you're that rare person who loved/loves the old ways, and you haven't played this yet, yeah, give it a whirl. Just be ready for an extreme timesink.
