Gamermall.com rating: N/A

Arcana Heart offers an entirely female cast of eleven different girls, all based on varying anime stereotypes that we've grown to know and love. Along with the fighters themselves, you can select from a host of elemental spirits known as Arcana, which compliment the characters with additional special moves and augmentations. Being able to pair any girl with any Arcana makes for a very interesting dynamic and there's certainly a lot of combinations at your disposal.

The story of the game is somewhat familiar. Our world exists alongside the elemental world, which used to be joined together with ours but is now separated by a dimensional boundary. Mildred Avalon wishes to remove this barrier and merge the two worlds together, but doing so would result in cataclysmic consequences. It's up to the game's characters, the Maidens, to stop this chain of events from reaching its end.

In terms of gameplay, Arcana Heart is similar to other modern 2D fighters, clearly drawing inspiration from Guilty Gear and other high-profile franchises. Each Maiden has a wide array of regular attacks and special techniques, including overdrive-style attacks that deplete their power gauge. Most of these attacks are executed with circular d-pad inputs and a sequence of buttons. According to the default controls, Square, Triangle and Circle are attacks A, B and C respectively. X not only controls your homing dash but is used to activate Arcana-specific abilities.

From our initial play sessions, Arcana Heart feels somewhat stiffer than other franchises, but is still responsive and rewarding. Double tap dashes are much shorter than you might imagine, and a great deal of importance is relegated to the X button's homing dash. This becomes particularly crucial when engaged in aerial battles, which are clearly a strongpoint for the game. Every level is massive in terms of its height and certain moves can send your opponent (or you) spiraling upwards for what seems like miles. Your homing dash can then trace the movement upwards and give you the opportunity to execute spectacular aerial combos that require quite a lot of skill.

Other elements of Arcana Heart feel highly technical. Although we haven't mastered the specifics of the battle system, there are a surprising number of support techniques that supplement battles. Such things as cancels, guard cancels, homing cancels, counters and ground/wall/aerial recoveries make for extremely complex fighting. This is clearly a game with the hardcore fighter in mind -- casual gamers won't find much mercy at the hands of the unrelenting AI.

So far, our time with Arcana Heart has been enjoyable. The character designs are fun and definitely suit the chaotic, heavily Japanese style of the experience as a whole. Whether you're playing as the samurai schoolgirl Kamui, the petite puppeteer Lieselotte, the busty martial artist Mei-Fang or the battle maid Fiona, there's clearly something for everyone (we imagine). The elemental Arcana are also interesting, lending you control of fire, water, time and even death. It looks like gamers will be spending a long time finding a combination that works for them.

As positive as our experience with the game has been thus far, we did notice one particularly frustrating issue: move recognition. Most special moves in the game can be pulled off effortlessly, but techniques that require a circle from back to forward -- or vice versa -- are tempermental at best. It took us quite a long time to learn the proper timing to pull these moves off. Expert players will obviously work around this, but it is a notable frustration.

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