Thanks to PQube for the review code
Title: Arcade Spirits
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $19.99
Release Date: 02/12/2019
Story
In this visual novel, you take control of someone seeking a job, and finds one at an old arcade thanks to their AI assistant. Here, they learn about the history of the arcade, the nature of arcade gaming, and meet a wide cast of characters! The plot I managed to experience during my run was pretty comfy, with the usual branching paths that you’d come to expect from a game like this, and the writing overall I found to be decent, even if it could get a bit too referential at times.
Presentation
Arcade Spirits is a visual novel, so it looks and plays a lot like one. Not much I can really add here outside of how it does use some pretty cool arcade thematics for chapter title cards, the title screen UI, and other aspects such as the relationship meter and end of chapter score. The character art is all fairly well drawn, though some of the throwaway characters do stand out quite a bit in quality compared to the main companions you hang out with.
The music as a whole is fairly chill. That’s basically the best way I can describe it and it is neither outstanding nor grating, and for the type of story this game tells I think that’s a fine thing for it to do.
Gameplay
Covering visual novels like this on SFG can be pretty tricky, since the main draw to one is the story, and since I don’t want to spoil it, what I explained above is all you’ll get regarding my thoughts on it. Since these are experiences with lots and lots of reading to it, the notion of gameplay is more or less just relaxing and reading the story at your own pace, choosing options as you need to, and having the overall experience flow well, not unlike the many other games like it or even the more interactive ones with in-depth relationship mechanics like Tokimeki Memorial.
Well, Arcade Spirits might not have the most gripping narrative or engaging plot I’ve seen from a VN, but I will at least give it props for having dialogue choices and visible meters to guide you along for what each command does. If you want to go towards a general emotion, the choices make it pretty clear what option correlates to them, though if you want to be like me and just focus more on answering choices honestly and seeing what you get, the game’s fine with that, too.
You got your usual feature list for a game like this: quick save/loads, auto reading, speedup skips in case you need to catch up or blaze through a portion you already read before, (though this option did act a bit finicky on Steam Deck, so I mostly just left it be, as sometimes it would just hang the whole game for a minute or so on deck) and dialogue/autoread speed options from a menu.
The general UI for saving/loading reminded me a lot of some other, less good VNs I covered here for SFG, but thankfully Arcade Spirits has a lot of its own charm to stand on as a cozy, Arcade-themed adventure, and the writing is far, far better than stuff like Shiba Inu. The characters actually make sense here and have good arcs to learn about!
While I can’t exactly say much else about the story without spoiling much, I will note how this game definitely leans pretty hard of referencing older games at points, to the extent that certain retro games are name dropped outright, which is rather bold. Heck, there’s even a side chapter where you’re told about how Arcade games work and the real life process of keeping them in check and how emulators work, furthering the dive into a subject the devs are definitely passionate about
Conclusion
Ultimately, Arcade Spirits won’t knock your socks off or really give you much of an engaging, must read to the very end kind of story, but what it does succeed at is being a decent tale referencing the good and bad times of arcade culture, and having some well-written characters that do managed to hold your interest enough to at least learn more about them and find one to befriend.
For a visual novel, Arcade Spirits plays fairly typical, and one that I could easily recommend on a sale, but for the full price, this is one I’d say is more advisable for folks more interested in character development and the relationship mechanics than finding out a huge mystery. If you’re a fan of Arcades and like the thematics of working in one, or really attach to a character here and want to learn more about them, then the plot here will serve a nice dose of nostalgia, and be worth sticking around for a bit. I just wish the overarching narrative was more gripping.
I give Arcade Spirits a 6 out of 10.