Traditionally, the Arc the Lad series hasn't broken much new ground in the RPG genre. It's stuck with the norm and generally done a great job with it. The series' latest installment, Arc the Lad: End of Darkness, takes a different approach and includes an online multiplayer mode and action-based combat system. To their credit, the new additions get the general idea correct, but fail to really go anywhere; leaving a dull, single-player campaign coupled with a mindless combat system and near-useless multiplayer mode.

End of Darkness uses the same presentation as the previous installment and actually manages to take it back a few steps rather than moving forward. Both the look and feel do nothing to draw you into the game. The entire game world is bland and boring. Towns are lightly populated and lack that "spark" of life you expect to see in an RPG. Everyone is just standing around waiting for you to come speak to them so the can spout their one or two lines of useless information. Once in the game world, things aren't that much brighter and suffer from insane amounts of repetition. Each time you visit a new area, you'll swear you've been there before -- even if you've just arrived in that area for the first time.

Character designs aren’t much better. All of the main characters come off as stiff and unlikable. Since the game features no voice acting (which is odd since the last one did), you're forced to watch through hours of poorly mimed action, complete with a few repetitive, over-exaggerated gestures. Enemies also suffer from a lack of variety, and are usually just color-swapped versions of enemies you've already seen.

Even though your characters are mutes during cutscenes, they haven't lost their stock of laughable catch phrases during battle. This was also a problem in the last game, but at least then you had the option of turning it off. Now you're not so lucky. The game's musical score fails to impress either. While it's not as annoying a problem as some of the game's other flaws, it’s not much better.

The story does as good a job of pulling you into the game as the presentation does. Arc the Lad: End of Darkness takes place five years after Twilight of the Spirits. You take the role of Edda, a young orphan who discovers that he is descended from a line of exorcists, giving him the power to destroy entities known as malademons, the physical form of people's bad feelings. After an encounter with a malademon, Edda decides to venture into the world and rid the world of evil. Eventually Edda learns that the malademons are related to a group named the Truth Sword whose goal is to cleanse the world of humans. As you work to stop the Truth Sword, you'll travel the world’s five continents and even run into members of the last game's cast and find out what happened to everyone. You'll also encounter nearly every RPG story convention and cliche' imaginable.

In-game tasks are handed out through the Hunter's Guild, which is where a bulk of the game's action stems from. You can choose to take missions from the guild itself or off the bulletin board. Completing missions through the guild will give you better opportunities to gain new spells and hone your fighting skills. Tasks are classified by difficulty, with the reward equaling the risk. So, if you take all easy missions you won't get as much of a reward as you would if you take hard ones. Difficult missions also come with the bonus risk of losing your equipped spells if you fail them. It should go without saying that I didn't enjoy this added risk, making it a major turn off. I wouldn't mind having to fight harder, color-swapped enemies or even running the risk of maybe losing a card or two, but losing them all is going way too far and doesn't make for an enjoyable experience.

Bulletin board missions progress the game's story. Though it's a neat way of pushing the narrative along, it doesn't work. Instead of progressing in a logical fashion, you're instead given little bits of the story that somehow relate to each other, leaving you to figure out just what's going on. Completing board tasks also increases your dignity rating. Once you've earned ten dignity points, you can take an exam that will increase your rank within the guild. Earning a higher rank will allow you to take bigger missions and move the story along even further.

Taking the game online is a little more enjoyable than the playing through the single-player mode. Once online, you can play through co-op missions with a group of friends or take each other on in player-versus-player combat. Completing online missions will unlock some of the more powerful cards in the game, which you can use in single-player mode.

Arc the Lad: End of Darkness isn't a very hard game, at least when it comes to the things that should make the game hard like enemy AI. Encounters are a joke and feature a very minimal AI that usually breaks down to, "Attack when you see a target." There's little in the way of tactics. Since you don't receive experience for killing enemies, encounters are also pointless -- so you really don't have to take part in combat unless it's during an event where you need to fight something. Though you'll miss out on collecting cards, few are really worth nabbing anyway, besides you'll more than likely end up losing them anyway once you fail a difficult mission.

Technical issues are what really make End of Darkness a pain. Levels are poorly designed and there are numerous times where you can find yourself pinned up in a corner while hordes of enemies block you in, all attacking at once. When in these situations, you can't run past enemies, so you're pretty much dead. Also, the action-oriented combat system isn't very active. Once you enter a combo animation, you can't break out of it if the situation changes, allowing enemies to score a few cheap hits.

From standard menu-driven systems to more strategically-minded ones, the Arc series has definitely seen the spectrum when it comes to combat systems. Arc the Lad: End of Darkness takes the series away from turn-based combat and into action-oriented combat, a change that ends up being a misstep in the right direction. The concept behind action-oriented combat is to bring the game closer to action-RPGs like Champions of Norrath or other hack n' slash games. And, in some respects, the system is successful. However, combat feels incredibly slow-paced and since you're not going up against the most challenging of enemies, it becomes repetitive.

While trying to create a hack n' slash RPG, End of Darkness also tries to jump on the CCG bandwagon by including a card-based items and magic system. Cards are earned by defeating enemies or by purchasing them in shops and are held in a wristband called an ALD. Cards are assigned to the face buttons and require card points in order to activate. During battle, holding the R2 button and pressing a face button uses whatever card is equipped. Card points regenerate slowly over time, or you can hold the triangle button to replenish them a little faster. As a fan of all things card-based, I actually enjoyed the system on some level, but at the same time, it never seemed to really fit into the overall scheme of what the developers were trying to do with combat. Ultimately, magic and items really mean little during combat and unless you're really conscious that you have the skills equipped, you'll just end up hacking away with a normal attack. At times, it feels like the developers were trying to reach something similar to what was seen recently in Guild Wars. At other times, it feels like they had all these great ideas for combat, and since they couldn't decide which ones to use, they threw them all in.

At it's best, Arc the Lad: End of Darkness is a collection of interesting ideas that never come together to form anything other than a collection of random ideas held together by a broken, cliche'-filled story. Some elements, namely the online portion, are entertaining, yet the positive aspects really can't hold the game up considering how quickly the negatives build up. Even if you're an Arc the Lad diehard, End of Darkness isn't worth the purchase.