After being dragged out by her friend to take part in an adventure, Lita finds a mysterious ring that will change her entire life. Step foot into the world of Ara Fell to try and help her save it.
Ara Fell is a 16-bit RPG game set on the world of Ara Fell. You will take up the role of Lita, a spunky girl who finds a mysterious ring that causes a ghost to start talking with her that will change her entire life. She, along with her friend Adrian, will end up joining up with two others who are wrapped up in all of this. You will need to work towards hunting down all of the Artifacts of Power in order to help save Ara Fell. Will it be enough, though? Or will forces beyond your control cause events to take an unexpected turn.
The story in Ara Fell is fairly enjoyable, and you can definitely tell a lot of work went into crafting the lore of this world. You will find out about the vampires who are looking to earn their freedom, a corrupt kingdom that is in need of saving, and about the mysterious elves who turned themselves to stone in order to save the world in the past. The story will last you somewhere around 12-20 hours, depending on the amount you explore the world. The game can be a bit slow to start off, at least it was for me, but it does thankfully start to pick up around the second or third chapter.
Speaking of exploring, Ara Fell generally makes it easy to do so. You are given a decent amount of freedom, allowing you to wander into places that could possibly spell trouble for your party. The world is wonderfully crafted and looks quite good, but at the same time the world tends to look a fair bit too busy. The outside areas have a lot going on in them, something that can cause the senses to go into an absolute overload. It feels like if the effects just got toned down a tiny bit the game would feel a lot less like an assault on the senses in terms of how much is going on with the screen.
When it comes to combat you have two main options. The first is that you can simply plow through the game with Story Mode enabled, a mode which will pretty much instantly kill any enemy except for a few key storyline bosses (and even on those it can provide a great benefit by placing a damage over time effect on the bosses). The other option is to engage in the active time system to issue out your commands to take down enemies the harder way.
While I primarily played through the game with using Story Mode, I did take down some bosses without it. When it’s one of your character’s turns, you will need to be sure to select who it is you want to attack with and issue their commands as soon as possible. Enemies will be beating down on you while you make your decisions due to the active nature of the system. As you attack with your characters, they will regain MP for using their special skills. The one exception to this is Seri Kesu, the sorcerer of the team. Her MP does not restore over time, but in exchange for this she gains more powerful spells.
As you level up your characters, you will be able to raise up stat points. While it seems like a good system to really try and help specialize your characters in whatever role they should be, you end up having to evenly level up everything anyways to increase your defenses. I feel like it would’ve been much better to just ditch the stat point system and have characters just gain the proper stats as needed naturally.
During my time playing the game it underwent a massive amount of updates so I’m not really able to speak of any bugs or issues along the way. What I can say, however, is that developer is very active in trying to fix issues as they are reported (including some very game breaking ones I encountered early on in the game). I always appreciate it when a developer is active in trying to make sure their game is as bug free as can be.
Ara Fell is a nice, enjoyable experience for the time it lasts. For the amount of time the game will last – even more should you hunt down and do all of the side quests – you are definitely getting your money’s worth for the content. I do wish that the screens could be made a bit less busy and that the progression system didn’t force you into having to spread out your stat points so much. If you don’t want to just Story Mode through all of the battles you will also find a decent challenge within, and thanks to the fact you’ll quickly recover your health and MP after battle, you won’t be getting majorly attritioned throughout the dungeons.
Ara Fell Review Score
3.5/5
Ara Fell is available now on Steam.
I would like to thank the developer for providing me with a key for review purposes.
