Exclusive to the PS3′s Playstation Network for its Stateside release, Arcana Heart 3 is a niche fighting game with a relatively small audience compared to Mortal Kombat and many other fighting games, but if you’re a fighting game fan, you might want to read on.

As the series is known for (and is often a dealbreaker for some less open-minded folks), the roster is an all-female cast, with the High School age being around the median in terms of age groups. This has basically put the game into that unfortunate “only for pedophiles and weeaboos” generalization for many gamers, especially here in the states. As a fighting game fan (and as close to being a weeaboo as you can get without actually being one), I can dispel that pretty easily. While they’re all female and some of them get pretty close to straight-up fanservice levels, there is a surprisingly complex game to be played.

Gameplay is best compared to Guilty Gear and Blazblue, which isn’t surprising as Arc System Works, creators of those two series, published this one. A fast-paced fighting game where there’s a LOT of things going on at once. Not in the Marvel vs. Capcom sense that there’s a million characters on the screen at once, but rather, there are so many move types a character can pull off, and the game is so fast that you can literally do all of it in such a small amount of time. The control scheme is fairly simple. 3 standard attack buttons, which represent Light, Medium and Heavy, essentially. The fourth face button is mapped as the Homing Attack, which simply launches yourself towards your opponent, no matter what direction they are from you. This can also be used during an attack with what’s called a Homing Cancel, which cancels the attack while launching you to the opponent, best used after an attack that launches your opponent upwards or to the wall to follow-up with more attacks. The fifth button is the Arcana button (more on that later). Combinations of these buttons also open up a variety of attacks, such as throws and your Extend Force (again, more on that in a bit). As always, most different special moves have different varieties, depending on if you hit Light, Medium or Heavy. Generally, Light is the weakest and Heavy is the strongest, but Light would also be faster and easier to combo into than Heavy.

The game has two universal meters employed (some characters have an exclusive meter that corresponds with some of their moves). The first and arguably most important is the Arcana Gauge, which is essentially your standard Super meter in most fighters. It starts at one third and slowly builds up as you attack and are attacked. Things that eat up portions of this meter are the Homing Cancel I mentioned (eats up one third), and super moves (all characters AND arcana have at least one of these, also eats up one third). There’s also an especially powerful move called the Critical Heart that all characters have. Some of these are incredibly hard to land, but they all deliver a large chunk of damage upon proper landing, and eat up an entire 3 thirds of the bar. The other bar is the Force Gauge, which starts our maxed out. This fuels your Extend Force, more on that in a bit.

There are 23 characters, with 23 corresponding arcana. This might sound complex at first, but it’s really not. Simply put, you choose both a character and an arcana. So there are technically 529 different matches you can choose from in this game. Each character has her own set of normals, special moves and meter-consuming supers, as the standard fare for most fighting game characters. However, the arcana also has its own special moves and supers, as well as certain powerful gimmicks that can completely change the flow of the fight. So the character is one half, and the arcana is the other. While an idividual character may excel at some things and have one glaring weakness, you can cover that weakness up by using a fitting arcana. For example, say you’re using a character that doesn’t have any projectiles. Simply pick an arcana that does! Arcana aren’t limited to just bringing more moves in, however. Some actually give the character an added boost. While every character has a universal air jump -and- air dash for aerial mobility, the “wind” arcana will add yet another air jump or air dash. It also lets you quickly launch yourself towards the ground while you’re in the air, and the “ice” arcana improves your ground dash as if sliding on ice.

The Arcana button is something of a fourth attack button, similar to Blazblue’s “Drive”, that benefits from the attributes of your selected Arcana. The “wind” arcana, for example, allows these attacks to be jump canceled, while the “time” arcana allows you to hold the button down, creating a “shadow” and allowing you to move around and attack normally; once the button is released, that shadow will actually attack where you originally initiated it, making it perfect for extending combos. The “magnetism” arcana will infuse this attack with the ability to pull in enemies, and the “fire” arcana makes the attack unblockable. This attack is also almost always chargeable, and sometimes needed in order to take full advantage of the arcana’s effect. The button is also used for an arcana’s specific moves, following certain analog stick inputs. Each arcana also has an “Extend Force”, which expends the Force Gauge. While it is active, it bestows the character’s attacks with a new property. The “fire” arcana, for example, gives the user’s attacks an added explosion, essentially doubling the hits in a combo, while the “water” arcana allows landed attacks to actually slow down the opponent, making combos easier. Naturally, the Extend Force quickly eats up your Force Gauge, but it also allows you to use your Arcana Blaze. The Arcana Blaze, as always, is different for each Arcana, and are either straight-up high-damaging attacks or give the character a new power for a limited time. The “ice” arcana simply unleashes a barrage of ice attacks, but the “water” arcana floods the field with water, slowing your opponent down considerably to allow extended combos, or making it much easier to land certain attacks, such as command throws.

In addition to the 23 arcana, naturally there are 23 characters. Each of the characters are all quite different from one another, and all play quite differently. Poster child Heart is your basic “shoto”. She has a dashing punch, a spinny kick and a jumping uppercut at her disposal. While she doesn’t have any projectiles, her default arcana, “love” does! Two of them! (Keep in mind that while all characters have corresponding arcana, they’re not locked to them.) Heart’s best friend, Saki, is the “Chun-Li” charge character, sporting typical (down)up and (back)forward inputs, but also brings initially intimidating (up)down and (forward)back move inputs, as well. Katana-wielding Kamui has a technique that, for a small amount of her own health, powers up her sword and allows use of devastating and powerful attacks otherwise not available. Child prodigy Kira, using the aquatic spirit she controls, is the resident 360-input grappler, throwing enemies to the top of the screen and back down for serious damage. All the basic archetypes are covered, but in standard fare for games like Guilty Gear and Blazblue, some characters are really out there, for lack of better words. Series newcomer, Eko, is armed with the power to bring whatever she draws to life. Riding on a green companion that she has drawn to life, she attacks using both small projectiles that she draws that spawn out into the field, as well as her giant companion delivering crushing blows. There are 23 very different characters, and you can match any one of them with any one of 23 very different arcana. If you’ve ever wanted some serious character diversity, this game screams it.

All of that and I haven’t even gotten into the game’s modes! The game doesn’t have a standard “Arcade” mode, but the Story is pretty much the equivalent. The only real difference is that you have a list of characters to choose from in terms of who you want to fight against. The choices don’t make much difference, at least from my experiences. Some characters will mention that you defeated a character you previously fought, but that’s about it. After a few fights you’ll eventually reach the final battle against Ragnarok, a very non-typical fight where you’re on an area complete with actual platforms you can jump on, where you have to take out individual marked targets that launch different attacks at you, while contending with some annoying drones that you can’t destroy (least I don’t think) that tend to get in your way. Not that hard, just different and might pose a challenge on a first battle. Then there’s the standard Versus mode, which can be fought human vs CPU or two people playing against each other. Nothing much to note, same as always really. Score Attack pits you against seven random opponents using preset rules and only the highest of difficulty settings, ultimately ending in an 8th fight against Parace armed with the arcana of “life”, which has attacks from most all the other arcana. She makes most SNK bosses look incredibly easy in comparison. Good luck!

Training mode is fairly standard, not much to say about it. I will say that enemy recording and playback, while present, is needlessly confusing in that it requires you to go through menus to do so. It’s not really that big of a deal, but if you haven’t done it before the instructions might not be clear. Playstation Network modes are your online modes (duh). Has all your standard modes of online play, including character-specific rankings and notably good netcode. Very easy to find a match by your specifications, and ranked match making doesn’t take long at all. Lag is also very minimal, in most fights I’ve had not existent at all. You can save replays from matches you have for later viewing in the Replay Theater in the main menu, as well. Given the nature of the fanbase, you won’t have to worry about running into the same character over and over again, either. The Gallery is where you can view illustrations obtained by playing through the game, as well as watch videos and animations, as well as listen to music and sound effects/voices. Then of course the Options, which lets you toggle various things such as difficulty, round time, volume and button configuration, as well as checking rankings.

The game is incredibly easy to pick up and play at a casual level, with many characters playing similar to other fighting game favorites. Understanding arcana, Extend Force and other such techniques, however, might be somewhat of a challenge. You’ll have two entire move pools at your command while playing, and that can be somewhat intimidating to remember, so depending on how fast you can pick up on it, that might be quite a large step in the learning curve. That in addition to how complex both characters and arcana can be will mean mastery of this game will take some true dedication, and most of them are quite challenging to even learn the basics for, much less use effectively. It also doesn’t help that this game does not include a Tutorial, or even an actual instruction manual since it’s a download title. However, this game is quite friendly to newcomers. The lesser difficulties are actually fairly easy, but still provide a decent challenge for people who aren’t too good at fighting games, thus letting them improve their skills and learn basic defense. While I won’t recommend it, the game also has a Simple control scheme that allows normals, supers, and arcana attacks to be used with single button presses (Light does normals that auto-combo by mashing, Medium does specials and Heavy does arcana attacks; holding a direction changes the attacks, however) for people that don’t care for proper execution, though this prevents you from using many of the game’s more advanced moves properly. So, very easy to pick up and have fun with, but decisively difficult to master.

Of course, it all comes down to the basics. It’s a fighting game, all the characters are girls, and one could argue there’s a less-than-necessary amount of fanservice in the game (most illustrations unlocked from clearing a character’s Story mode include that character along with another character in a somewhat suggestive position, for example). However, looking past first impressions, you’ll find that this game is unlike any other. With so many different matches of character and arcana to choose from, with each having two large move lists to utilize, there are a lot of options at any given time. Add in with Extend Force and Arcana Blaze and you’ve got yourself one deep fighter. If you’re new to the series or the genre, you’ve got a lot of practice ahead of you, but for $30 on the PSN, it’s pretty cheap even by discount fighter standards. So if you’re not ashamed to play a game that can be described as one hell of an anime catfight, this is a worthwhile buy, if not just to try out something different, because even for a fighting game guru like me, this was a breath of fresh air.