Fans of moe fighting game Arcana Heart have been disgusted to see the state of the PS2 port of this arcade title’s sequel, known as Suggoi Arcana Heart 2. The game normally enjoys fame for having loli sukumizu wearing characters and similar, but now trades that for bug induced infamy…
Horrendously aliased (pixellated) sprites compared to the arcade version are the major complaint, but command lag and control problems also apparently leave players unable to perform many specials.
Quite a blow for a title which is essentially character design based.
The pre-release caps showed no such problems, leading many to suspect that the publishers deceptively included shots of the pristine arcade version instead (hardly a novel practice in game marketing, but still disappointing).
There does not appear to be any convincing excuse for this, as the previous game suffered no such issues, and porting a 2D fighting game to the PS2 is hardly a technological challenge.
Those who wish to try the game anyway will find that it is on sale now.
Via Hachimaki.
This lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbSZfKfFDow
this makes me cry!!!!!!
“and porting a 2D fighting game to the PS2 is hardly a technological challenge.”
Actually, you’d be surprised. While this was pretty much true of games running on some arcade boards, the board that Arcana Heart 2 ran on was really just not very compatible with the PS2 hardware. Pretty much every other 2d fighting game ported to PS2 so far ran on Naomi board, which was more compatible with the PS2 hardware. Arcana Heart and Arcana Heart 2 ran on the eX-board, which is not nearly as such. Arcana Heart FULL might not have had as many issues, but it still had some (such as the ridiculously long load times if you didn’t own an HDloader). This is why you don’t see some shoot ’em up type games ported to PS2 or they get additional slowdown on PS2.
Examu still sucks though, since the port isn’t the arcade perfect version anyways.
Alright i’m gonna post one last time in regards to Arcana Heart 2.
I picked up a copy today and just finished training a while ago. I think it’s pretty obvious that there is some bias going around here. First of all there is absolutely no Arcana Heart 2 arcades here in Southern California therefore to tell fans of the game that the PS2 version is not in comparison with the arcade version when EXAMU probably had no intentions of making them equal in the first place.
Believe me, i also thought Arcana Heart 2 would be as easy as playing Melty Blood for PS2 or Version B. The gameplay for Arcana Heart 2 on PS2 is the same as playing Arcana Heart 1 for PS2. That’s the impression i got anyway. I had no problem initiating any combos and super moves.
I trained with the new characters Petra & Akane…..they gacv me absolutely no lag at all.
The music had no lag either and i heard some pretty decent BGM play while training.
The ONLY thing this article did prove is the fact that the pixellated sprites were horrid. But i do believe the graphics can be fixed if ATLUS does intend to ever license this game in America in the future. I didn’t mind this problem as much as some of you would but it would have been a major plus since the rest of the bugs were false.
The original Japanese article linked to a video that clearly shows the slowdown.
Bias?
You want to ask our SBO qualifier Arturo Sanchez for Arcana Heart 1 his opinion?
You want to ask Heartnana in Japan his opinion?
You want to to view the volumes of laggy PS2 footage?
We have arcade boards here, we’ve played on them.
We are not making s♥♥t up.
You say you managed to play Petra with no lag comparatively.
Compared to what, your imagination?
Complete and utter bullshit.
Try her 236 move, hell try her super, hell TRY any of her freaking normals with gunshots.
You might be one of the rarities but the Arcana community as a whole is pretty much devastated at this travesty of a port.
It’s not even 2.6, it’s 2.5 with several bug fixes that added in more bugs.
We’re not alone, Japan’s reaction is more or less the same.
Also, an added note.
AH2 DESTROYS AH1 in specs.
There is no way the PS2 could have handled this game correctly.
The shortcuts they took and the lag that is still present completely indicates it.
The dithering of the sprites on motion, the music cut-outs, the removal of stages in training and versus, all of it adds up to a company (Ecole) that was very obviously aware of the limitations of the console and trying to cut as many corners as they could.
And they still couldn’t get it running at normal speed.
Hmm, if i recall correctly, the arcade board AH2 runs on 1gig of ram, so if the ps2 only has 32mb of ram, that would explain something maybe. 2d games are probably less taxing on the gpu and stuff, but it’s wrong to think that just because it’s a 2d game that it’ll run just fine. The resolution and effects used in 2d games use up different resources than 3d games. You can’t possibly believe that something like blazblue or the kofxii would run on the ps2 just because they’re 2d right? Remember back to the Saturn and the playstation and their differences. X-men vs SF didn’t have tagteam chars on the ps1 version (unless you picked your chars a certain way) but the saturn version, with the ram cart did. The ps2 is like, 10 years old now, it’s older than some of the children that play it.
To the guy who thinks that some copies may have bugs and some may not, be prepared to be disappointed. I wouldn’t even call the slowdown and graphics bugs, but intentional, because the guys porting it didn’t care to optimize for the platform and just banged it out.