For those of you who are unaware: Ark the Lad: End of Darkness is the somewhat direct continuation of Ark the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits. End of Darkness takes place a few years after Twilight of Spirits, and this time around you’re in control of Edda, a young orphan who was raised by the village elder of Cragh Island. It’s a much different ballpark this time around from the last game. The turn-based combat system with multiple characters and weapon upgrade system has been dropped since the last game in favor of a bunch of seemingly random stuff: the card system, which is overly complex for what it’s trying to accomplish. The game plays like an action RPG game, where you’re running around and beating stuff up. The twist is, you don’t seem to level up. At all. It’s quite possible that I just can’t find my "level" screen to show me what level I am, but it’s the oddest situation ever.
The game starts off as Edda is staring in the sky looking at an airship. He starts talking to himself about bad luck associated with airships crossing your path (I just realized how pointless explaining this was, but bad luck and this game go hand in hand) as his little furball of a friend, Hemo, shows up. Hemo is a Slothian, but unlike other Slothians, he’s hyper and totally obnoxious and reminiscent of an Adam Sandler character: loud and stupid. Edda questions where his pink pal was, and Hemo whines about not being able to read a book. Edda looks in it and can only read one portion of all the text. A mysterious girl named Kirika, who seems to be really pissy, constantly appears and demands the book, not believing someone would hand it over so willingly. You then gain control of Edda for a moment as you run through the town without any direction whatsoever and you talk to hunters and fellow villagers in town.
I’m very serious about the lack of direction. I pissed away a good 20 minutes before finally figuring out that I had to trigger the game to begin to be remotely fun by talking to the old man on the docks, who, in turn, whines about not fighting and being nice. New for you, old man: in this game, you kill stuff.
Anyway, Edda is summoned by the village elder who wants him to tag along with hunters (who turn him down in the end). After a brief recollection of his parents, Edda follows the hunters into a cave and finds that they’re all dead. The game finally enters combat and you get to bash mushrooms with a stick. Then you go on to kill the "Darmyst," which is the evil spirit of a Deimos and cannot be killed through normal means. Fortunately enough, Edda just happens to be an exorcist by bloodline. He kills the spirit and goes comatose. Waking up a few days later, Edda finds that he’s in another town, with no memory.
He regains his memory shortly later, and nothing important happens during the portions of time he forgot, so it’s very pointless. We do learn one thing, though, regarding Hemo. Hemo serves one purpose: going into small holes. No, I’m not kidding. That’s all he does. His only redeeming point is his line, "You like guys?" because if this small pink thing insinuating you’re gay isn’t insulting, nothing is.
After too much foreplay, the game slowly eases you into what you’ll be doing the whole game: hunter missions. It’s downhill from there. The plot progresses slowly and in such a manner that it’s utterly frustrating, and that’s really a shame, because the last Ark game didn’t do a half-bad job with progression.
The graphics are reused from Twilight of Spirits. Nothing’s new besides the menus. Not even the other characters are altered much, aside from some clothing. What, ten years go by and Maru can’t grow a few inches, or change his posture? Damn it. Overall, the graphics are satisfactory, as there’s not much to nitpick about besides the fact that most everything was reused.
The sound, like the graphics, are reused. Sound effects and music are just as you left them in Twilight of Spirits, and to boot: there’s no voices this time. Well, there’s battle "grunts" and the like, but no cinematic dialogue I’ve seen. It gives me the impression that this game was pushed as a "me too" sort of title. I liked the last game’s music, truthfully, but it’s annoying to see so many corners cut in this game.
The gameplay is very sloppy. In essence, it’s what I originally described it as: an action RPG. You run around and hit the X button a lot, and every once in a while, use an ability you can assign if you find a card to use. There are way too many abilities that are too similar. Abilities such as: toss stone, toss bottle, toss polished stone, toss glass stone, toss iron ball. The only difference between those skills seems to be graphics (if you’re lucky, some just look the same), and the damage.
The redeeming factor of this whole change is being able to focus on your favorite character from the Ark series, if you wish. That’s right, any of them, even the pre-Twilight of the Spirits characters. That’s actually a smashing idea, and I’m glad they threw that in. Other characters besides Edda must be unlocked from cards you find. Once unlocked, they can be used as Edda would be used, but in addition to that, they actually can level up as opposed to Edda with his thumbs up his ass when it comes to getting stronger.
When Edda kills a "maledemon" or a "Darmyst", he must exorcise it. When he exorcises a monster, the energy enters Edda’s body, who in turn can level up the other characters with these points. This can cause a problem, as you must be Edda to level up other characters. That almost kills the whole point. You’ll have to be a character who can’t level up to level up a character who can, but to do that, you have to switch around a whole lot. It’s rather annoying, and causes many headaches in the long run.
Overall, Ark the Lad: End to Darkness is a downshift from the last game, which I actually enjoyed. It gives the feel that it was rushed out and that it’s trying to grab some runoff interest from people who liked the last game, only to leave them mainly disappointed as it plays nothing like the previous games. It was a bold attempt, but not executed very well.
