After about 30 hours in, here is a quick review of the game.
The patch works fine, some frequent broken english but you get the meaning of the talk anyways. Some menus and key words are not translated so you have to do some tests to get what they mean, but, for such a quick patch, kudos to you
Ars Arcanum.
Now, onto the game itself, I am a little disappointed.
Castle Meister was inferior to Alchemy Meister but it still had some interesting ideas and optional content to do. The town builder and the summoning system allowed for some fun gameplay, and the story, while not spectacular, gave enough lore to get a liking to the characters.
This game, being a sequel, assume you have all the knowledge from the previous adventure, this helps the characters to have some already build up chemestry between them but with lame and poor conversations that revolve around how great Avaro is and who should ride his dick first.
The novelty of this title is a system that let us pair two characters into a single unit. Depending of how strongh their relationship is, they get stat bonuses and combination attacks. Should they be defeated, only the unit lead dies and the other is sent to the reserves to deploy next turn. The best part of this is that you can break this union to do both characters actions on the same turn or unite a character to another and make this one move after, doubling the distance moved. Also, you can switch who is the lead even after their action, which is a good tactic when you have a tank/mage combination.
The castle builder has been replaced with a board of small bonuses (+HP, Phys Attack, Evasion, etc) that you progressively unlock with points you get by activating old monuments in the labyrinths. While this is a quicker custom bonus system, I liked the building part more.
Finally, there is a new type of accesory: Gems. You can buy them get them as occasional loot or (later on) craft them. They net you additional skills and support options, like give you elemental attacks, healing and buffs. This is my favorite addition so far, as they widen the capabilities of characters on the fly, giving you a lot of flexibility.
Then, why am I disappointed? Because the game gets repetitive very quickly. The routine is as follows: you get to a new city of mages that can create infinite labyrinths for their training. An anomaly occurs and the laberyrinths start to malfunction. Avaro and company go to investigate and solve the problem. They come back to the city, inform and go to another themed labyrinth, reach the deepest level, win, go back to the city, go to the next labyrinth. Rinse and repeat, with some flavour scenes with the characters in between. There are no optional dungeons so far, no crafting request, no character quests and no deadbeat dungeon either. The only optional content is the recruitment of monstergirls by kidnaping them and brainwash them via fucking (really, that's a thing).
Maybe I am a little burn out of the formula, but I believe Eushully reached the top with Alchemy Meister (3 routes, toons of optional quests, a lot of end game content and crafting challenges) and none of what this game offers gets to that level by a long shot.
It is still fun to play, but I would not get my hopes very high if you are interested in trying this out.
