There's really no way around it: Luminous Arc is a clone of Final Fantasy Tactics/Tactics Ogre, yet to its credit, it doesn't really profess to being a creative and original experience. It wears its inspiration on its sleeve, basically asking you to take it or leave it. So should you take it or leave it? Depends on how much you love strategy-based role-playing games. If this brand of gaming is your passion then you could do far worse than Luminous Arc.

Luminous Arc makes no attempt to elevate this genre of gaming to new heights, instead relying on tried and true formulas to deliver what can only be considered a mediocre experience. As you'd expect, you'll be waging endless battles on an isometric arena, complete with tactical positioning for maximum damage and numerical indications of potential combat success. Been there, done that. All this retreaded gameplay is centered on your main character, Alph, a knight who works for the Garden Children, who in turn work for the Luminous Church, an organization committed to the eradication of witches. Story elements are presented with cut-scenes that benefit from some solid voice-work, though there is no apparent consistency for which scenes get voices are which scenes are eerily silent.

The principal source of annoyance in Luminous Arc is the interface, at least in terms of stylus use. It sounds simple in theory; you just click buttons and issue commands by tapping appropriate locations, but the isometric presentation wreaks havoc with the stylus, especially when trying to select a square that is partially hidden behind an object. Sometimes the square you want simply won't register and this can be exceedingly annoying. This issue could have been alleviated by allowing the player to rotate the battlefield, but you'll find no such option here. One solution is to use the D-Pad and buttons instead of the stylus, but for some unknown reason you cannot have stylus and pad control activated at the same time.

Luminous Arc comes across as a simplistic experience, perhaps a good entry game for newcomers to the genre, as you won't find much here that will tax your abilities. The entire gameplay experience is pretty rudimentary and linear , any character can use magic or engage in combat and items are doled out at stores in a predictive manner, which means you do some fighting, get some money, buy better weapons, and fight once again. Rinse and repeat. If you're a hardcore fan of games of this ilk then Luminous Arc will feel like a step back instead of a step forward.

One nice thing you'll find is the inclusion of WFC-supported multiplayer, always a welcome addition to any DS game. You'll find local multicard support as well, but it's the WFC that will get most of your multiplayer time, allowing you to wage battles in random matchups as well as those with friend codes. It's nice that you can use your single-player characters in multiplayer, but the designers have made online in such a way that it's not even available until much later in the game, which is an odd requirement.

In the end, Luminous Arc just comes across as a competent game with no single aspect that excels or attempts to push the genre forward. It's basically a generic strategy RPG that benefits from supporting WFC, though even this aspect is bare-bones. You could do worse...you could do better.