About as simple of a dungeon crawler as you can find. User-friendly enough and chill if you just want to grind, but not really interesting beyond that. I got interested in it after learning HAL worked on it, but it's really not their finest work.

Graphics and music are good, but gameplay can be really frustrating especially considering huge difficulty spike the game undergoes in chapter 3. Not only will you fight alone what's usually the hordes of enemies for some time, but the dungeon of chapter 3 is a beast of a maze that the game won't ever surpass.

It's a game that constantly surprises you, but none of its surprises are good. Party members leave and join whenever throughout the dungeon (them joining isn't a positive because you have to equip them again), bosses just pop up from nowhere.

If you want a simple experience that's basically nothing but grinding, get yourself an emulator to save state or rewind if needed, and you might have an ok time.

By 1992, Final Fantasy IV was already two years old. While it was definitely far from perfect, it to me represents an important step forwards for the JRPG genre, with more attempts to properly tell stories through combat, innovations in turn-based gameplay and more.

With this in mind, Arcana is dated, somewhat off-balance, and honestly? It's a bit tedious. With navigation in a tile-based first-person perspective with awful draw distance and framerate, and Return Rings and the Home spell having so little consequence, dungeon crawling becomes a matter of trial-and-error, warping back to town when resources run low, naturally Getting Stronger in the process, and trying again until you happen to find the right path forward and survive on your way there.
It gets even more trivial once money becomes less of a concern and you can just stockpile Tents from the shop, which fully restores the party's HP and MP.

But... I don't know! It's really not particularly more compelling than something like the NES Final Fantasies, but... it's a HAL Laboratories JRPG. It's got a Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando soundtrack! You know those more JRPG-ish tracks that Ishikawa did for Kirby Triple Deluxe? He's got some serious chops for this kind of genre! I would have loved to see more of this!

To me specifically, Arcana is just such an aesthetic game. It's brilliant to see and hear and experience, to keep wondering "was this song written by Ishikawa or Ando?", to listen to little motifs and melodic fragments come in and out in a way that foreshadows how Ando would handle future Kirby soundtracks, to finally get to the credits and see Masahiro Sakurai and Satoru Iwata's names.

And it's wonderful to experience these things that lead up to the legacy of that pink puff that means so much to me.

The polar opposite of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That game had the problem of not being focused on cards, while having cards dictate the flow of the game to the extent that without them sometimes you couldn't attack (or rather, you could, but would be heavily penalized for it).

Arcana's main flaw is that there's not enough cards. That sentence was going to be all I posted for this review originally as a shitposty blurb, but I genuinely think that this game's "gimmick" is so undercooked that all you're left with is a serviceable but entirely forgettable dungeon crawler. The card motif was this game's selling point, but in game it's relegated to either sprite borders or feels like you're using a consumable item.

It plays totally fine as a dungeon crawler. The music is pleasant and it's easier to navigate these dungeons than something like Shin Megami Tensei 1. If you had to sit down and play this game, you wouldn't be miserable. But why would you go back and play this over SMT1? That game is held together by shoestring and aged much worse than Arcana, but it's still a 5/5 because you're Doomguy with a small legion of hell/your girlfriend following you the entire time. In this game, you have a nerd with a dumb blue hat, that nerd's friend during specific levels (side note, this game's separated by levels to the extent that there's a level select option in the game), your girlfriend and at best one hellspawn (the monster fusion mechanic being the best part of the gameplay, more than anything relating to cards).

In an ideal world, HAL would have swung for the bleachers and made a JRPG that properly incorporated card elements that turned out like Unlimited Saga. It would have been total mess and we'd all gaslight ourselves into believing it was cool so hard, we'd forget that the plot of this game happened. Instead, we got a below average dungeon crawler and still forgot the plot of this game. At least we got a rare Kirby out of it.

The whole game is a war of attrition. Once your spirits learn their healing spells, dungeons become a simple matter of hoping the arbitrary encounter rate gives them enough time to recharge their MP before one of your human characters croaks. Readily available healing items do little to offset the linearity of the resource management, and the only meaningful choice is deciding whether to set aside some of the spirits' MP for their equally important multi-target attack spells. All of Arcana's constituent mechanical elements are simple, really; enemies and even bosses rarely have more than one option; combat is staged unfussily and reasonably well-paced, assuming there are fewer than five enemies in the group, which happens less often than you'd think; the dungeon design is spare yet offhandedly cruel, punishing the curious adventurer with long or complex paths that lead to marginal rewards (if any at all). No real surprise that Shin Megami Tensei would banish this to obscurity six months later.

To its credit, it certainly has more flair than your typical Might and Magic/Wizardry-like. Frankly I only played it because I wanted to enjoy some of Jun Ishikawa's early non-Kirby music and it's a more tolerable game than Alcahest.