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UPDATED REVIEW FOR VERSION 3.0: This IS Arcana Now

I reviewed this mod several years ago and version 3.0 is a great update to the 2.0g version I already recommended to Arcana fans the first time around.

The balance of pretty much everything seems much better than not only the last version of this mod, but the original game itself now. The sheer volume of improvements all around compared to the original game that are put on display here is very impressive.

We don't have a movable map yet, and I doubt that's probably even possible, but we've got some REALLY helpful map icons that show up now. At almost all times even though you can't move the map around there is going to be an icon close to your location that could jossle your memory on where you need to go next if you're running the dungeons more than once during your playthrough. Just one of these icons specifically really helps when navigating the Ice Cave a 2nd time, which I've always personally found to be my biggest complaint about this game.

For others who thought the horrible original translation was their biggest complaint, I'm happy to say that's all fixed here and you actually now have a clue what's going on with this very limited story. You also can figure out what all of the spells do now since they have very informative names instead of the nonsense names like "Attribute 10" that were in the original game. This is the translation that should have originally shipped but was hardly out of place while living in the era of "Your Base R Belong To Us" and "Bimmy and Jimmy".

When doing a little digging on game mechanics for Arcana while playing, I stumbled into a few different forums and even an old school let's play for this mod. I'm impressed how open to suggestion the author was to changes, some of which I believe were already made and then updated again before the release of the patch. Though the credit for all the work on this mod goes to Sarah Shinespark, there appears to be a little Arcana fan club out there that also got to put their input into the end product.

Because of the "unarmed monk" and other weird behavior with the character stats and how it affected battles in version 2.0g, I couldn't recommend this mod to a first time player over the original game.

That all changes with this update. As of right now, version 3.0 Seal of Rimsala is the only way to play Arcana. ______________________________________________________________________

OLD REVIEW FOR 2.0g (12 Sep 2020): Formerly titled "Good hack of a good game."

While it's no Final Fantasy II or III, Arcana was a cool little SNES RPG that I find myself coming back to every now and then, so like I tend to do these days when I want to re-play a game I come to this site first and see if anybody has made a hack that both seems interesting to me and seems to be generally well regarded. This hack seemed to do both so I gave it a whirl.

All of the changes that have been made were welcome. I do appreciate the ability to gather more of the status boost items from chests and not have to grind as much for gold to purchase them as well. Not every RPG needs to be a 3-to-5-full-day grind fest like Final Fantasy III, and sometimes a very simple one like Arcana that can be completed in less than a day scratches the RPG itch.

There is, however, a pretty big, non-game-breaking bug. I'm not sure if my excessive grinding is the reason why I found it and nobody else has, but I noticed quite early on that at some point once you equip somebody with a weapon their attack power drops substantially (and goes right back up by unequipping the weapon). Having the ability to buff your strength quite a bit with cheap Strength Honey seems to have the unintended effect of making all of your characters unarmed monks that become crippled when you equip them with even the best end-game gear. (For example, at the end of game Alex's bare handed attack was 839 but when you equipped the Spirit Sword it dropped to the low 200's). This alone isn't a huge deal, but for some reason late in Chapter 4 everybody's attack was super low, with or without a weapon, and it was really hard to end the chapter. Once I went to Chapter 5 the attack went way up again in accordance with the high Strength stats and never was a problem again.

This bug does not effect any defensive stats, and you're completely free to wear the armor and shield/gauntlets without any penalty.

Suggested Future Updates:

I'm not sure if any of this is possible, but I figured I might share a little "wish list" for the future of this hack if the author continues to update it.

1. Movable maps.

It is never more evident that I'm going back to my grade school days to play a game than when I pull up a map and it's just stuck there showing a very small area. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could pull the map up and use the D-Pad to move the entire map in all 4 directions to the borders of the area?

2. Backtracking.

It was cool to see that code put in to select a chapter, but you use it you're stuck with the levels, stats and gear that was pre-programmed in. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to backtrack to earlier towns to buy stuff at cheaper prices, especially now that changes were made to the Honey and the prices?

3. New Game+

NG+ is just cool in all RPGs and it's a shame that aside from Chrono Trigger they're mostly absent from the SNES generation of games. It would be cool to start the game over at level 1 with all the characters but all the OP gear. Maybe give a Dark Souls style bump to all of the enemy stats the second time around and even bump the level cap for your players beyond lvl60 for the second go around to compensate for some really nasty battles end-game.

(I hope the author doesn't mind the suggestions. I do tend to throw these ideas into most of my reviews... But you should REALLY take a look at that STR/ATK bug before your next patch).

All in all, I would think that this is just about the best hack you could possibly hope for, given the extreme limitations of the source material compared to many of its RPG contemporaries. This hack surely sped things up and made it feel quite a bit less grindy than original, and in a game where only EXP and GOLD are the rewards for grinding to the exclusion of any rare items and gear, I feel this is a very welcome addition to the game.

Though I find it hard to recommend Arcana to anybody in 2020 who didn't grow up playing it, I would strongly recommend any fan of the game to apply this patch and give it another play through.

Thank you for sharing your work with us. :)

Arcana was one of those SNES-era games that you either have never heard of or you've played it (countless of times) and love it, despite its many flaws. Some of these flaws include the poor translation which makes the story almost incomprehensible at times and how slowly you progress through the various dungeons, literally making this game a "dungeon crawler".

The great news is that Seal of Rimsala fixes all those issues, providing faster movement through the dungeons, revised layouts of some of the more popular (or hated: Ice Mines) chapters, and a translation that answers the age-old question of "What the heck is going on now?"

Even if the patch didn't add any updates to items, equipment, and descriptions for both; the revised dungeon maps; and many of the Quality of Life updates (the more efficient level-up dialogue is amazing, same with the spell icons), the translation alone makes this patch worthwhile. Just having characters with unique dialogues for critical hits and dodging attacks is almost enough by itself but the revised story is spot on, including some of the more humorous nods to why certain characters don't have equipment when you find them.

Some of the changes like equipment locations don't necessarily impact the game to any large degree but the updated placements do change the game enough so it feels like you're playing not just an improved version of the vanilla game but a revised version, which gives this game a whole new cycle for players to enjoy.

As mentioned in previous reviews, there is one glitch that will cause a soft lock in the game and there's no real way to avoid it other than abusing save states; I tried and I'd end up failing 10/10. Hopefully this gets addressed in a future update but it should not discourage you from playing the game.

Arcana: Seal of Rimsala has replaced the original version in my SNES library and is the only version I'll likely play in the future. If you're a fan of the original or looking for an older 16-bit era RPG that has an absolutely incredible soundtrack, I highly recommend picking this up today!

There's a lot of neat features to this hack, I spent the evening playing through the game in about 7 hours total (counting one lost hour due to a very late Chapter 3 death). I won't spoil everything, but there's a lot of nice speedups present here over the vanilla game, and it felt great to play through it all.

The one caveat is that if you encounter a Bishop enemy, KILL IT ON SIGHT! Whenever it attacks you, it freezes the game. You all know how to use save states, right...?

[Update] My review wasn't the most favorable, but it was in the embryonic stages of the hack, but now shows improvement. The annoying attribute spells now finally show you what it is rather than calling it "attribute 21", imbued weapons and armor now are revealed on an updated status screen, we welcome the mimic creature, and updated weapon and armor descriptions. These are well done improvements that add flavor. By all means, if there is more updates done here, keep'em coming.

Don't know if possible, but maybe new playable characters and enemies? My appreciation grows regardless.

Takes a very slow, and downright monotonous game, into a very fun and enjoyable time. Made an account just to recommend it in fact. If the original threw you off, then I highly recommend you give this a shot. Just about everything imaginable is tweaked to make the ride more easily accessible. Clearly, a lot of love and time went into this, and boy does it show.

Arcana happens to be one of my personal favorite RPGs. While the game itself is not actually that deep, it was immersive and fun. I've always enjoyed exploration in games and even though Arcana doesn't actually have that much, what it does have is worthwhile. It's a game that I've always wanted to see a hack of but since it's fairly obscure I kind of gave up hope. Then came along Ms. Shinespark.

I've been keeping track of this hack when it was only discussed in the forums because it was very exciting to me to see anything at all happen with this game. I played it when the hack was first released and again after 2.0g (I have not yet tried the latest updates).

Overall, the changes that have occurred with this hack are beneficial. Though they are relatively modest, they are an improvement nonetheless. In fact, it makes it difficult to return to the vanilla version because there's really no advantage to doing so. But these modest changes are a bit of a double-edged sword, since this is a game that desperately needs a major overhaul to make it something special.

Arcana is NOT at all a perfect game. It has some very serious drawbacks that hinder both its strategy and replayability. First and foremost is the equipment. Most of it is based purely on a simplistic numbers game, meaning that if something has better attack or defense you better take it. This leads to a bunch of completely useless and obsolete equipment that players never end up even touching. After all, why would they take something definitively worse than something else?

This is compounded with very poor treasure placement which hardly rewards players with searching far and wide (except towards the end of the game). Most of the equipment that you might need is almost always found in the village shops.

The combat system is also deeply flawed. It feels like every other attack is a miss and every spell cast fails on at least one enemy. This is actually not an embellishment - the game literally makes spells fail on at least one enemy almost every single time. Take your time and think about RPGs in general and see if you can think of another game in which you cast spells and they fail nearly 100% of the time. In Arcana, this is the standard. At best, this is annoying and at worst, it's enough to make people throw their controller down and walk away.

To make this problem even worse, spells cost outrageous amounts of MP. For the most part, you can't even cast spells because if you do you'll soon run out of MP entirely. And the spells are nowhere near useful enough to warrant costing anything so ridiculous.

Having ranted about the game itself, this hack does attempt to rectify some of these issues (and does so fairly well). This is why I call these changes "modest"; I'm hoping that as the hack progresses, more attention will be paid to the flawed equipment and treasure systems.

For future releases, what I would love to see is the following:

1) More overhauling of the equipment so that each piece stands on its own as useful.

2) Better rewards for searching every inch of every dungeon (i.e., good treasure).

3) Hidden/obscured hallways and rooms. I don't know if the coding allows for it, but it would be amazing if this game had secret areas (think Lands of Lore).

4) Please fix the hit rate and spell success rate! I want to actually hit the enemies once in a while.

5) Rebalance the MP costs. The designers obviously paid no attention whatsoever to the cost. They probably threw darts blindfolded at a poster to come up with the numbers used.

To summarize, the hack is good but I'm hoping for more. I've seen what's been done lately and it's very promising so I hope Ms. Shinespark keeps at it (and thank you so much for what you've already accomplished!).

Years and years ago, back in 1992, I was exposed to the game Arcana on the SNES for the first time. I had never played a game like it up until then, being that I was only 10 at the time. However, the music and atmosphere of the game always returned to my mind whenever I was thinking of what to rent from my local video rental store during those long, hot summer days of my youth. I spent hour upon hour diving into the game, enjoying it immensely. Despite all the love for the game that I felt, I had an extremely hard time with it as I found it to be very unforgiving and the story didn't make sense to me. Most of the game play was spent grinding just to make it to the next chapter and being able to afford equipment, not to mention all the backtracking to ensure that your hard earned gold and experience wasn't all for nothing. At times, I felt like giving up as it was so easy to die and lose everything. I didn't get around to beating it for the first time until I was about 13 years old. Long story short, it was a grueling experience for me as a young boy despite the fact that I loved the game so much.

Over the years, I'd go back and play Arcana many times and I always wondered why it seemed like there were things wrong with the game. Things that didn't make sense or didn't seem to work right. Was there a reason for this? Maybe someone, someday, would fix these problems.

Well, the answer to those questions came in the form of the tireless work of Sarah Shinespark. Sarah has a great love for the game that exceeds even mine. Using her skills and what she discovered by diving into the coding of the game, she was able to find out that there was a lot more to this game than meets the eye. During this time, Sarah worked out and fixed a lot of the problems in the game that many of us fans of Arcana knew existed, but had to deal with. For example, she corrected parts of the translation to make the story more coherent. Remember how slow the game seemed to move while making your way through the long and various mazes that you have to fight through? Sarah sped that up and made it much quicker than before. Also, armor actually defends a person now! You now have a reason to outfit Darwin :) She also tweaked some of the prices of things purchased in the game to make them more accessible to players. Maps were redrawn to minimize needless backtracking. All that said, there are too many changes for me to list here in this review, but you can check them out in the readme file that she posted. None of the changes she made to this game take away from all that it offers, at all.

In conclusion, Sarah Shinespark fixed this game, improved upon it, and made it as close to the experience that it truly deserved. She made this game much more enjoyable and tolerable in many different ways. Sure, you have a character die and it's Game Over, just like before. But at least now when you go into this game, you have a fair shot at making your way through it, all the while still being challenged appropriately.

She did a wonderful job with her patch and I highly recommend that you check it out, both fans of the original Arcana and newcomers to it that want to experience a fun little known gem of a game. You won't be disappointed.

This is far superior to the NTSC-U_C release in my opinion. Yes, there are some bugs and graphical glitches, but plenty of optimizations and improvements. The FASTROM patch that's included is the most awesome, but the level-up overflow retention is nice too. With this FASTROM patch, the game progresses at a much faster, smoother pace.

The author has renamed several towns, enemies, and items. This includes a few main menu entries too, which are now FAR superior to what they were. A few of the treasure chest contents have been changed in Chapters 1 and 2. The encounter rate is also now about 35% lower than what is once was, which is nice.

Here's a big one for me. The script has been improved. Before, it was poorly written and contained loads of Engrish. To make the game harder, the inventory limit has been decreased from 48 to 24 slots. Some might not like this, but I would say this is an improvement for an already somewhat easy game.

Now onto the things that some people may NOT like. A few of the main character names have been altered, like Ariel - Alan, Salah - Sarah, and Efrite - Ifrit to name a few, but to me these are most welcomed. Additionally, the author swapped the opening HAL logo music with an unused SFX found in the ROM (Grass Flute), and also changed the SFX when you rest at an Inn to the laugh of the final boss of the game.

There's a number of minor bugs that I've brought to the authors attention, that may or may not see fixes in upcoming patch versions (at her discretion).

All and all, I highly suggest checking this out. You won't regret it.

I bought this game when it originally came out. Great game that has aged well for what it is, but it's flaws showed. You really managed to breathe some new life into this old gem. Sad that not many people are aware of what a great and unique little game this is.