Female Fight Club | Arcana Heart 3: LOVE MAX!!!!! Review

I’ve never personally been competent at fighting games. The entry level skill is usually high, and it requires countless hours of training and understanding mechanics to even become slightly competitive. Arcana Heart 3: LOVE MAX!!!!! is a re-released fighting game for Vita and PlayStation 3 that helps minimize this entry level gap by having simple, tight controls and easy to execute combos, though the story attached to the game certainly doesn’t match the quality of the gameplay.

One of my favorite aspects of Arcana Heart is that action is fast-paced, and controls make it easy to get back in the battle. One button is literally called the chase button, which will instantly navigate your character to your opponent. This made it easier for someone like myself who often has trouble juggling character positioning and attack execution. It’s also simple to perform special attacks, so it never feels like you have to memorize 20 inputs to deliver one measly projectile attack.

Arcana Heart features an all female cast of fighters, and what’s most impressive is the individuality that each fighter possesses. This stems from the excellent character design that presents fighters from the likes I’ve never seen. My favorite fighter is a girl named Eko who can make her drawings come to life, so she rides on the back of her giant drawing who does the fighting for her. Not only are the character designs great, but the animations for each character are equally as impressive. Eko’s monster has an attack where he sprouts a drawn flower, and while the flower damages the opponent, he lays on his stomach and kicks his feet like an excited child. Since a deep story is often absent in fighting games, it’s refreshing to see these little nuances conveyed in attacks that give each character a personality through their attacks, and not just through written text.

The Story mode revolves around collecting celestial stones, which hold a power to summon a being that could destroy Japan. It’s a fairly by the books story, as far as fighting games go. You’ll fight various characters from Arcana Heart’s roster, and after about six fights you’ll reach the climax of two final fights to finish the story mode.

Arcana Heart’s final boss effectively stretches the gameplay farther than a fighting game should. Without spoiling who or what it is, the boss is a gigantic figure that is defeated by attacking five weakpoints located across the entire battlefield. This turns the fighting game into somewhat of a platformer, as it relies on using your jumping and chase button together to reach these points. It’s incredibly awkward to achieve, and whenever I failed to reach a point, it never felt like it was because I wasn’t executing the buttons properly, but because the boss battle is a platformer boss inside of a fighting game. The boss has projectile attacks which are nearly impossible to dodge, and I can’t help but feel that its unfairness is a lazy way to convey difficulty.

After you’ve completed the story, there’s a host of modes to keep you busy afterwards. An after story mode that continues the story after the main narrative, training mode, online matchmaking, and various other modes. Online matchmaking works well enough, though my only trouble was actually finding people to play online – or at least someone different than the one person I kept fighting.

One annoying design choice is that they’re character bars on each side of the screen that make the room for action small, and it feels constricting. This is especially troublesome on Vita, since portable fighters need all the space they can get. We live in an age of widescreen presentation, and limiting the game to an almost 4:3 ratio restricts the game’s gorgeous art from spanning across the entire screen.

Arcana Heart 3: LOVE MAX!!!!! is a solid fighting game that shines through its tight gameplay and fumbles with its narrative and some minor design choices. Those looking for an entertaining fighter that’s easy to learn will find a lot of pleasure fighting the computers – just don’t expect to find a lot of fighters online and compete with.

This review is based on a review copy of the PlayStation Vita version of the game Arcana Heart 3: LOVE MAX!!!!! by EXAMU Inc. and ARC System Works and distributed by Aksys Games.