Ara Fell was a very mixed bag for me. When it was good it was really good but there were several things about it that annoyed me to varying degrees. I thought the turn based combat was fantastic. It was simple to get used to but had enough complexity and variety to keep me learning. I also loved the crafting system to upgrade your gear. You can go hunting for items or try to buy them at various shops. There is a good variety of levels; enemies; characters. I think the range of difficulties will make sure that anyone can be satisfied. I thought the game kept a good management screen for listing your quests. The story was pretty good overall although it did drag a bit at parts. I also liked how there didn’t seem to be a level cap and how if you wanted to grind up your level the option was there. The enemies were also somewhat easy to avoid if you don’t like grinding.
On the flip side I thought that the game could have done a better job detailing your quest locations. There is no quest marker and some times not even detailed objectives. For instance one quest I have to gain access to an area. In order to do that I have to find an unnamed amount of stone figures to help. I know this now but on the quest entry it just gain entry and leaves out how to do so or where they may be located. I also found the difficulty curve to be all over the place. Sometimes the mini bosses were easier to defeat than the random enemies outside of where they were. The game also does a poor job of giving you an idea of how ready for a quest you are. Some games flat out suggest certain levels you should be at to attempt it but Ara Fell does not and several times I found that my party could be one hit killed. One could say that I needed to grind more and wouldn’t be wrong but when you’re obliterating the local enemies it makes me think I am ready for the local mini boss or quest boss. Graphically Ara Fell is a pixel game so you either enjoy that or don’t. I will say that sometimes the game did a bad time outlying where you could jump or what can be climbed making me take longer than normal to navigate. I also didn’t like how you had to quit to the main menu in order to load a previous save.
I played Ara Fell on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. You can save whenever you want aside from a few select moments and there are ten save slots. I tried playing with both a keyboard as well as the Logitech F310 and had a good experience with both. You can change the difficulty any time you want to. There are three graphics settings. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game is capped at 60 FPS but this isn’t a huge deal for this genre and the game stuck close to 60 FPS for the majority of the time aside from a few drops lasting a second or two.
Game Engine: Unity
Graphics API: OpenGL
Game Version Played: 1.01
Game Settings Used: Weather and Pixel Perfect On
GPU Usage: 0-73 %
VRAM Usage: 547-860 MB
CPU Usage” 12-18 %
RAM Usage: 1.7-2.5 GB
Frame Rate: 40-60 FPS
A lot of the issues I had with Ara Fell were minor ones. I did enjoy my time with it overall and would recommend it to JRPG fans. I played the Enhanced Edition and finished the main game and epilogue in thirty two hours and fifty minutes. I did this on a combination of difficulty levels ranging from hardest to easiest as I said I found the difficulty curve all over the place. I paid $8.79 CAD for it and that is a great deal, I would even say that the current normal price of $17.49 CAD is more than fair.
My System:
Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.4 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Solus | Mate 1.27.0 | Kernel 6.1.5-229.current