Luminous Arc - hands-on

We recently got our first hands-on look at Luminous Arc, a strategy-RPG with an anime-style flair. Our journey begins with an impressive (if generic-looking) intro movie complete with Japanese language theme song. The production values continue to skyrocket with the pleasant surprise of full voice acting in the opening dialogue, as well as all the dialogue sections between battles. There were some instances of the voiceovers not being synched up with the text onscreen, which were minor, but still distracting.

The story, from what we've seen so far, is just about as generic as it gets. Members of the Luminous Church are charged with vanquishing the witches who are supposedly wreaking havoc on the community. The main character, Alph (no relation toALF) soon befriends a young witch, and begins to question whether the witches are the real enemy.

While the general premise of the story seems to have some promise, the dialogue is bland, and tends to go on forever between each battle, with no way of skipping ahead or saving your game. The voice acting is great, but when the writing is so uninteresting, it really doesn't help much. We really hope some of these needlessly talky sequences are edited down in the final version, or at the very least, an option to skip the dialogue should be included (although it would be nice if the dialogue was good enough that we didn't want to skip it).