Battle Princess of Arcadias opens with a failure. Plume, the Battle Princess of Schwert Kingdom, is sent to subdue a towering beast. She arrives too late. A score of soldiers are dead, including her beloved assistant. Days later, a new attendant appears before Plume while she is lost in grief and helplessness.
That is a bolder first act than most 2013 action RPGs attempted. It is also the best thing the game does, and the reason it is worth your time despite a thin second half. Battle Princess of Arcadias is a colorful, high-speed action RPG for PlayStation 3, developed by Nippon Ichi Software and Apollo Software and published by NIS America. It scores 7.0 of 10.
Trailer, via NIS America.
Plume of Schwert Kingdom
The game does not linger in misery. Schwert was once peaceful and beautiful. Now monsters have overrun it, and it is Plume’s job to set that right. The structure is a ladder: recruit warriors, fight skirmishes against the enemy, then take on large bosses in what the game calls siege battles.
The new attendant exists to pull Plume back into the work. That is the arc the game cares about, and it is handled with more patience than the genre usually allows. Plume is not a blank avatar. She has a rank, a title, a dead assistant, and a kingdom that needs her anyway. The opening gives her a reason to fight that is not glory.
Fighting, Platforming, and a Side View
Battle Princess of Arcadias is four genres stacked together: fighting, platform, role-playing and adventure. The side-view perspective keeps the action legible. The combat is quick and readable, and the platforming is functional. The other two layers are where the game thins out.
Nippon Ichi and Apollo Software clearly wanted the fighting to feel immediate. It does. The RPG systems around it never develop the depth the premise promises. Recruiting warriors matters, but the game gives you little reason to care which ones you brought.
- Developer: Nippon Ichi Software, Apollo Software
- Publisher: NIS America
- Platform: PlayStation 3
- Release year: 2013
- Genres: Fighting, platform, role-playing, adventure
- Themes: Action, fantasy
- Modes: Single player
- Perspective: Side view
Siege Battles and the Skirmish Ladder
The bosses are where the game makes its case. Skirmishes are fast and colorful, but they are also repetitive, and the game knows it. Siege battles change the scale. You are no longer clearing a screen of enemies. You are grinding down something that outclasses you, and the fighting mechanics finally get room to breathe.
The problem is the return trip. Between every good boss fight, the game sends you back to the skirmish ladder. The pacing is uneven in a way a shorter game would not have to worry about.
Grief as the Engine
The fantasy setting is standard material: a kingdom, monsters, a princess, a war. What lifts it is the loss. Plume’s assistant dies before the player has any attachment to the character, which is a risk. The game bets that the loss will land anyway, because Plume’s reaction is the point.
She is lost in her own grief and helplessness when the new attendant arrives. That is the emotional engine, and it runs the whole game. It does not run cleanly. Story beats are spaced far apart, separated by long stretches of combat, and the game is not always sure how much weight to give them.
Where the Role-Playing Falls Short
Four genres is a lot to carry, and only two of them get the attention they need. The fighting is good. The platforming works. The adventure framing is thin. The role-playing systems are the weakest layer of all.
Recruiting warriors should be the heart of an RPG. Here it is closer to a checklist. You gather fighters, you deploy them, and the game does not ask you to think about it again. The genre label promises depth the mechanics do not deliver. That is not fatal in a game this fast, but it is why Battle Princess of Arcadias lands at good rather than great.
What the 7.0 Measures
The published critical aggregate for Battle Princess of Arcadias sits at 7.0 out of 10 across six outlets. That number is fair, and it is fair for a specific reason: the game is better than its weakest systems and worse than its best idea.
The best idea is Plume. A heroine introduced through failure, given a dead assistant and a kingdom in ruins, is a stronger foundation than most action RPGs of 2013 bothered to build. The game does not fully cash that in, but it never abandons it either. The grief stays present, and the new attendant stays a character rather than a plot device.
The weakest part is the scaffolding. The fighting and platforming justify the price of admission. The role-playing and adventure elements are along for the ride.
What Battle Princess of Arcadias Gets Right
What the game gets right, it gets right immediately. Side-view combat is readable and quick. The bosses are the payoff the skirmish ladder is built toward, and they deliver on the promise of siege battles. The color and speed are not decoration. They are the game’s argument for itself.
What it gets wrong is patience. Battle Princess of Arcadias does not trust its own best material enough to slow down for it. The grief that opens the game is the most distinctive thing about it, and the game rushes back to combat every time.
The Case Against Waiting
Here is the part worth weighing. A game built on a heroine who arrives too late has one obvious subject: the cost of being late. Battle Princess of Arcadias raises that subject in its first ten minutes and then mostly stops thinking about it. The new attendant is a good idea, but the game treats the relationship as a way to restart the plot rather than as the plot itself.
That is the gap between the 7.0 and something higher. The combat is competent and the bosses are genuinely good, but competence in a fighting game is common. A princess who failed, and who has to keep working anyway, is not. Battle Princess of Arcadias had the rarer thing and spent its time on the more common one. Play it for Plume. Stay for the siege battles. Just know which half of the game is carrying the other.
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