Arcana Heart 3 - Limited Edition (Xbox 360)

I'm a massive fan of fighters and the latest addition to my collection, Arcana Heart 3 certainly doesn't dissonant.
First of all the visuals are brilliant! Crisp, vibrant and interesting, this attention to detail carries on through to the actual animation, with the attacks in gameplay looking and feeling fantastic.

Once you start to recover from the awesomeness of the visuals your instantly blown away again, this time by the sheer amount of choices you have to adapt your character! You can make over 500 combinations between the character and its power which affects how they play in-game! When I read this on the box I thought it could have been a bit gimmicky but its not at all, it actually adds a whole new dimension to the game.

The online gameplay is really nice too. Anywhoo, thought I'd pop on here and sing its praise in my little break away from the console. Now back to AH3 :-D

THIS GAME HAS MAIDS, SEXY NUNS, AND NINJA SCHOOLGIRLZ. OK are you still here? Right I'll carry on. I play a lot of fighting games, street fighter, blazblue, even melty blood, and if you know what melty blood is I'm wondering why you are reading this at all?

Gameplay:
The gameplay is deceptively fast-paced. It may look slow if you ever watch videos online, but this game is very technical and requires a bit of practice to get really good at. If I had to compare the speed of the game I would probably put it in between blazblue and street fighter: thrid strike. The game has a unique "homing" button which when pressed will allow you to do various things such as chase after your opponent and cancel your moves to extend combos. As well as choosing your character you also get to choose your arcana. Each arcana has its own set of moves and also provides different skills unique to that arcana. For example by choosing the blossom arcana, Kayatsuhime, you negate all counterhits.

Graphics:
The graphics are actually one of the weaker points of this game, I love the style of the game, but the sprites are low resolution and and the backgrounds are static and unexciting. The "HD" filters that you can apply to the sprites actually make them look blurred and low detailed, so it is better to leave them off. The animations are ok, but are still a little choppy. The game does have a neat feature if you play in a 4:3 ratio on a widescreen TV. Rather then just have black bars or a static image, you get animations of the characters that have been chosen, and they do a animation according to what the characters are doing on screen, so that is a pretty neat feature which helps to liven up the screen.

Misc:
The games style may not to be everyones tastes. There are a LOT of characters, but there are no male characters in this game, every single character is female and designed to be either cute, cool, or sexy. Also it is very much a anime style game, and the characters are modelled after such stereotypical designs such as ninja schoolgirls, maids, and nuns to name a few. Not that it is a bad thing, but keep that in mind if your bothered by this. Also other then the standard modes such as Arcade, versus and survival, there is not much to do. Blazblue had a challenge mode as well as a very well developed story mode, so in comparison Arcana is lacking a little bit. The extras are a nice touch, though the art book mainly consists of concept images rather then full colour images. Online is pretty smooth as well but as with all fighting games there is a bit of delay still and people usually resort to certain tactics which work very well in online play, however there is nothing that can be done about that, its just part of online play.

Conclusion:
If you are looking for a anime style fighting game, that is quite technical and has a varied and colourful cast, then this game is for you. Just don't expect the best graphics in the world and be prepared to put in a bit of practice if you want to get decent at this game. Also there are maids, nuns, and schoolgirls in this game. That there is a reason to buy this game alone.