Arcade Spirits

[got_quiet]

Name: Arcade Spirits
Status: Complete
Site: https://fictionfactorygames.itch.io/arcade-spirits
Rating: PG-13, light romance, light violence, some mental health talk
Pairing: options for gen and any pairing configuration
Description: Someone who loves arcades made a game about loving arcades and finding love at arcades




Arcade Spirits is a professional and polished game, which is a rarity in these reviews. Tl;dr it's a great little VN, with good writing and very nice art, a personable cast of characters, great mood-setting music, and a decent system that both helps you control the plot but also lets you make choices without feeling that you are obligated to say one thing or another to get the ending you are seeking. The length of the game is also decent. I thought it was going to be the end twice before it actually was. Retail cost of Arcade Spirits is $20. That is always going to feel a little steep for me when it comes to VNs, but this is because I am cheap, not because the game doesn't deserve it, and I think in this case the game is definitely worth that if you are a VN fan.

 

Arcade Spirits is narrative divided into 8 distinct chapters, with three primary arcs. In the first you're a depressed and aimless protag who is led to a strip mall arcade by your assistant app, and told that there is a high probability that you fill find your dream job here. You spend some time situating yourself at the job, meeting the other employees and the regulars, and gaining your passion back. The other arc (which appears to be optional) is romantic. You have lots of options here, 6 people, 3 girls and 3 boys, and all of them have different but attractive personalities. You can pursue a romance with one of them after getting a decent number of chances to develop a relationship with multiple people, and then for the rest of the game that relationship will have an effect on the story. The third and last arc is the most out there, where the other two where pretty firmly grounded in reality (with the occasional spoilery exception). In the last bit of the game your dream is threatened by Big Arcade and you need to devise a way to save it. This is the only part of the game where you can outright fail, but I think you need to actively try to do so because the system is quite lax.

I liked a lot about this game. The playtime took me two evenings, but I didn't get bored and played pretty much straight through. Outcomes work on a slight combination of stats based choice (choices you make increase 1 of 4 personality traits which will then lock you into certain options at critical moments) and more binary based (You need to trigger certain scenes or LIs will turn you down when it's time to confess.) The break points for these things are quite lenient, and the "scaling" is thematic. In the first part of the game you're kind of a statless husk of a depressed human being and as you gain back some passion and drive your personalty begins level up. You don't need to lean hard on a single stat to ensure that it remains your max at important moments. The game lets you turn on a mode that tells you what stat your choices will affect, but I suggest turning this off on the first run through because it is easy to be genuine and also manipulate the system, thanks to this leniency. I found that I could get two stats to a high level by end game and still diverged from those options with some regularity. Likewise I kept the attraction scores pretty high for two different people and only by the middle of the game, soon before it was romance time, did I find it more difficult to maintain both (and I think that is deliberate by the system, as it changes a couple things if you end up in a relationship.)



The choices are typically of two flavors. One is on the job problem solving, which tends to result in changes of relationship status with the people you interact with. The other is more personal, but these tend to be more limited. My one gripe is that when you are given certain major career options, there is really only one choice. The game gives you an "out" aka there are moments where you're told that you could give up on your dreams and settle for something safer and more mundane. If you choose this at any point that's game over. You get a little coda that says you found a steady job grats and achieve the "good end." But clearly this is not what the game wants you to actually do, so those choices are essentially dead ends. You're given opportunities to take back every one too before you commit. I get why in a game that is about finding passion and fighting through hardship that the devs might want the player to get to choose to keep fighting, but these felt like the only really meaningless choices in the game.

That said all the other choices were great. You are given a lot of options in each scenario and all of them play out with relatively decision tress of two or branches. Sometimes you are limited in how many encounters you can pick. There are multiple possible outcomes for each smaller scenario, and near the end of the game a lot of prior choices get callbacks. In terms of an adaptive narrative I think this game is the best I've played so far out of the BLM bundle.

Overall production quality is also great. The art is very well done. Everyone is cute in diverse ways that gives everyone someone who might be their type. There is voice acting but since there was an option to turn it off I did that immediately, and have nothing to say about that. The music was well chosen. The whole story takes place in a not so distant future where there was no bubble bust of arcade gaming, and so there's a thriving arcade community, and the music harkens back to that 80s heyday. The game also goes above and beyond by giving you an opportunity to customize the PC. This is a little limited, but for a VN it's a big extra, which is why I don't understand why people actually complain about it not being enough. You get to change the gender, hair style, and clothing color of the base model, which is pretty androgynous for what should be obvious reasons. So no, you can't make a busty babe or a hulk but whatever. And there are moments, including a romantic cut scene, where that model does show up, so that's a lot of work on the part of the artist.



There is romance in this game, but it's not the focus and in fact in the beginning you can tell your little app assistant that you're not interested. This does mean that a large portion of the game is not dedicated to you pursing anyone, resulting in a mild case of timeskip feeling, and a couple moments where certain relationship are declared a lot stronger than what the actual scenes you played through might suggest. It's maybe ironic that because the game does a good job of getting me invested in the LIs, I got frustrated when their romance routes were very brief relative to the whole arc of the story. But overall the balance of Arcade plot and romance plot is refreshing. Ultimately the relationship I picked felt more meaningful because it wasn't just about the relationship. There were mutual interests and motivations that existed outside of it. In some cases even when I was in a relationship there were times where I wanted to engage with someone else and it still made perfect sense to do so.

For those who do like to know what options there are in a game, here is the quick list. You have three coworkers and three patrons.

• Naomi - The Arcade technician. She's driven by passion and a love of the retro game.
• Gavin - The manager. He likes the challenge of keeping a business on the edge from toppling over. His main job is appears to be crushing Naomi's dreams in the beginning. But there's a competitive, passionate streak in him too.
• Ashley - Mascot and general floor assistant. She's kind of the quirky one, who's into cosplay and is willing to do things of dubious legality without much hesitation.
• QueenBee - a hyper competitive pro gamer with an aggressive personality.
• Percy - A quiet day trader who spends most of his time trying to beat the Moopy world record.
• Teo - An organizer of the dance game community who's friends with literally everyone.

Each LI does have a sort of trope but they are human enough to be interesting. I was planning on going for Gavin the first time around because I like Mr. Sensibles, but Percy turned out to be very sweet and in the end I ended up picking him. I liked all of the characters enough that I will probably run through again and 100% the game though, which is possible to track thanks to a properly functioning gallery.

The MC also is a good balance of reflecting the choices you've made and having a clear preset personality. And the issues the game approaches regarding depression, frustration, anxiety and fear of failure are all too real. There were definitely moments in this game where I was feeling personally attacked. But even though there is a little bit of armchair therapy that pops up for the most part the game is a light hand with those issues and I never felt like I was getting a lecture.

So all in all I'd say this is a successful VN. It's nice to play something that does have some straight forward romance elements but also has an interesting Gen story, something where the characters are easy on the eyes and emotionally engaging, and all of the bells and whistles are operating as intended. The renpy engine is taken full advantage of, with some new game plus elements thrown in too, and it's clear the game was made with love.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

It's interesting hearing from someone who liked the game. I bounced off it but felt like this was more a matter of taste than objective quality, sounds like I was right and it's perfectly enjoyable for people who's tastes it's more in line with. (I'm not even sure what about it didn't work for me, I just got bored)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not too surprised that it doesn't work for everyone. It feels like a very gen story even with the romance for one and the plotting is pretty slow. Like the first half of the game is kinda a low wage job simulator.