Arcadia Fallen Review
“A novel and visual delight.” Written by: Hunter (ReaperHunter23)
It was the summer of 2020 when Galdra Studios released the kickstarter trailer for their game Arcadia Fallen: A Visual novel RPG, where your choices effect your character’s personality. I can’t really remember how or why I came across it but a few things stood out to me when I watched the trailer. First off, the art style seemed unique compared to the style that a lot of other visual novels I’ve played, second the theme tune they had playing was quite the earworm, and third: for being a relatively small, kickstarted indie game, they sure did pull in a pretty dynamite voice cast. Names such as Allegra Clark, Laura Post, and Joe Zieja were all attention grabbers. Suffice to say that I liked what I was seeing and put some money down towards the kickstarter. And on January 5th the game was released for the Nintendo Switch. So lets take a look and see if the Arcadia Fallen was able to live up to my initial curiosity.
Image Credit: Galdra Studios
In Arcadia Fallen you assume control of an apprentice alchemist. As such a lot of the puzzle based gameplay involves mixing potions together. This involves these rotation puzzles. Essentially you are given a set of reagents and you have to match the symbols that the ingredients yield to the recipe in the book. The game provides a layer of optional challenge by giving you extra goals to do after the initial brewing, such as “Mix in 2 turns or less” or “Use only two ingredients”. The puzzles for the demon encounters provide a bit of a change up, being more about matching the full given pattern than mixing and matching the symbols.
The character customization is solid. You can choose between 3 different body types, Masculine, feminine and Androgynous, these body types have a choice between two hairstyles a piece. And there is the choice between being voiced by Erica Lindbeck or Sean Chiplock. As far as colors are concerned you can customize The Alchemist’s hair color, skin tone, eye color, and the primary color of the character’s clothes. If I had to offer one thing that I think would have liked to be able to also customize the accenting colors on The Alchemist's outfit. For example I played with the feminine body type and would have liked to change the color of the sleeves. On the shirt. Obviously its not anything game ruining, just a notion I had while making my character.
Arcadia Fallen does everything it can to give the player the reigns in shaping how they want their character to act. I liked that the choices made in the game seemed to be less about branching paths and more about how you’d want The Alchemist to react to their situation. That’s not to say that there aren’t some pivotal conversations you can have with party members to effect how their stories will end. I’ve only played the game once as of now but it did seem like there were at least two different outcomes, potentially more, for the endings of each of the major party members. I like this though because it still keeps things at an interpersonal level, being more about how you want your friend’s stories to end rather than how it's going to have major main plot implications.
Image Credit: Galdra Studios
So as with most visual novels, the story and characters are going to be the backbone of one’s enjoyment of the game. The set up is simple enough, its a quiet, relatively pedestrian day in The Alchemist’s home of Anemone Valley, before too long, some chicanery happens and The Alchemist finds themselves bound to Mime, the friendly spirit they were defending. Soon after that its discovered that the town is dealing with a bit of a demon problem. Luckily, the bond between The Alchemist and Mime allows them to banish the spirits. And from there the game centers around gathering up your merry band of adventurers and finding a way to stop this demon outbreak permanently.
The story does exactly what it needs to do. It fleshes out the world without ever resorting to a full on exposition dump. The conflict sets up interesting situations to see our cast put in, and is able to let the party interaction do the rest of the work in most situations. The story will often also present scenarios that put two or more of the members of the group at odds with one another, but they are so well written it never comes off like one of them is just being ridiculous for the sake of some manufactured plot ordained inter party turmoil.
As I previously mentioned, the characters in this game are great. I really enjoy all of the central cast. Mime, the friendly spirit you are bound to is quite endearing and her sibling-like dynamic with the Alchemist is a delight to watch play out. Victoria is a stern knight who very much cares about her duties as a knight, and as such has little patience for people who cause chaos. Micheal is a wild mage, someone who learned magic outside the jurisdiction of the empire, and thus is rather well traveled, street smart, and quite sarcastic.
Ann is a mage whose motivations lie in finding a subject for her research that will earn her a position as a professor in the mage academy. At first glance she seems selfish but turns out to care about people close to her more than she lets on. And Kaidan is an outlander, a man from a society of mountain people who left his home in order to try to help with the demon problem in Anemone Valley. He has an air of mystery about him and also brings a sense of intrigue with the knowledge from his own culture rather than the one that all of the other characters are entrenched in. The ancillary characters are also all pretty solid, I liked all them, except the ones I wasn’t supposed to like, in which case I carried a pretty hefty amount of disdain for.
The game does a great job at fleshing out the way all of these characters see the world, and letting you understand the path’s their lives have taken to see them arrive at that worldview. It makes it so that while you may not agree with everything they think or do, you can understand why that’s what they would do given their situation and previous experiences. I think a good test of how good the characters in a game like this are, is if they are still entertaining or interesting when they are interacting with the people that aren’t the player character. These characters pass that test. Some of my favorite interactions are the ones between Victoria and Michael. She tries to rigidly stick to order and the law while Michael is much more willing to bend the rules if he believes what he’s doing is right. And given the fact that he’s technically an outlaw mage, the two of them would likely be adversaries if not for The Alchemist acting as the lynchpin between the two of them.
I really like the dynamic between Ann and Quinn, the flower shop owner as well. The two were classmates at the mage academy, and Quinn tries their best to believe in other people, while Ann is very closed off and only wants to go back to the mage academy. Quinn knows first hand how good of a person Ann can be so they would very much like for her to not close herself off from the world as much. Those were just two examples, pretty much every possible combination of interaction holds some level of interest to me. Michael and Ann both being mages, but having very different thoughts on the empire and how they deal with magic. Or Victoria and Kaiden both struggling with their relationship to the concept of duty. Every dynamic is interesting in one way or another.
Image Credit: Galdra Studios
I think the choice of art direction does a lot to set this game apart from other games like it on a visual level. A number of visual novels that I’ve played are pretty similar looking at a glance. You could take one character sprite and impose it on the background of a different game and it probably wouldn’t seem all that out of place to me if I didn’t already know any better. That’s not the case with Arcadia Fallen, the thick white outlining on the character sprites really makes them pop against the story book-esque backgrounds.
The character designs are also pretty impeccable in their own right. I got a decent idea of what each character’s deal was through the visual cues in their design. Ann looks very buttoned up and proper, Michael looks very loud and chaotic, Goldner looks like the kind of man I want to punch in the face. The excellent selection of characters are all brought to life by some truly solid performances. I played the game with Erica Lindbeck as the voice of my Alchemist and she does a great job at believably portraying a multitude of different tones you can make your character take in a given situation. I didn’t play the game with Sean Chiplock’s voice, but I did play the demo with his voice once through and he was also really solid for the part of the slice of the game that the demo covered.
Sarah Nicole Robles brings an upbeat yet often very anxious energy to Mime to make her all the more endearing. Allegra Clark is very believable as the stern knight that Victoria is. And she does a great job at portraying the more vulnerable moments where Victoria is caught between being lawful and being moral. Alejandro Saab does a wonderful job at portraying Michael’s wit and sarcasm while making it very clear that it is likely a step-ford smiler smokescreen. Laura Post does a great job at portraying Ann’s intellectual curiosity as well as the sort of superiority she feels she has due to her intelligence and lack of interest for the world outside of the mage academy. Joe Zieja does a great job at portraying the sense of mystery that Kaidan is introduced with as well as his more fish out of water tendencies. The ancillary cast all also turn in very solid performances, with the stand out one to me being Kyle Mcleary’s portrayal of Ronan.
Image Credit: Galdra Studios
Summary
Arcadia Fallen gets a strong recommendation if you are a fan of visual novels. An enjoyable fantasy setting tees up a delightful cast for an entertaining adventure, and with how briskly the game moves along, it took me about eight or so hours, and some of that was idle time, I could easily see myself going back to it a time or two in the near future.