It's not a mystery that Japanese gamers have the possibility to play games that will never get a release date in other countries of the world. And it's not a mystery that 90% of these games are often minor, low quality productions designed to appeal exclusively the hungry Japanese market. But what about the remaining 10%? Well, sometimes, for reasons unknown to you and me, many great games are destined to remain an exclusive fruit for the Japanese shelves.

The first Arc The Lad game, developed by Sony's subsidiary Arc Entertainment, was one of the most important RPGs released at the time of the Playstation launch in Japan. It was 1995, and Sony Computer Entertainment considered the RPG genre a secondary one in the Western market. Adding to that, the Playstation was introduced in Western countries as The "3D" gaming machine; for the first time, players were able to see 3D characters and 3D worlds on their TVs. And unluckily, Arc The Lad I was a project still into the 16-bit era of 2D graphics: not an ideal choice to launch the console in North America and Europe.

But the success of console gaming exceeded all expectations, and the RPG genre has surprisingly become one of the keys to open the doors to an ever-growing fan base. Thanks to games like the Final Fantasy series, Xenogears, Grandia, Phantasy Star, and the others we all know, nowadays there are millions of people who would pay a plane ticket to Japan just to get their hands on all the RPGs they have missed in the past. It's not a surprise that the Game Boy Advance is basing part of its unstoppable success on high-quality portable versions of many of the best RPGs from the SNES era.

This entire long introduction to say that Working Designs has chosen the best moment to publish all the three Arc The Lad games in one unique package. Arc The Lad I, Arc The Lad II, Arc The Lad Arena, and Arc The Lad III - released just a couple of years ago in Japan - are all contained into The Arc The Lad Collection.

The box set for PsOne (compatible with Ps2, of course) includes 6 discs and a lot of goodies that fans of the series and enthusiasts of Role-playing games will simply love. Actually, it's sufficient to take a look at the box set to understand that Working Designs wanted to do a quality job, from every point of view. When I received the package on my desktop (you can take a look at the picture of the opened package here), I spent half an hour just looking at the box, the beautiful manual, the little extra stuff contained within the Omake Book (Omake is the Japanese word for "extra" or "bonus", as Working Designs explains). Yes, I've also built all of the 24, cute, little character standees. Then, I popped the disk of Arc The Lad I into my Playstation and started playing. Well, it was the beginning of a very long journey.

The first game in the box, the original Arc The Lad released in the 1995, is a straightforward strategy RPG and the shortest in the package, thus giving the impression of being a sort of big introduction to the real core of the series - Arc The Lad II.

More than six years from its release, Arc The Lad is still a highly enjoyable game. It doesn't have the great looking maps of the following episodes - you can move into the game world selecting the cities and locations you wish to visit in a no-frills map screen - and it always remains a very linear adventure, but it's a game able to narrate a beautiful, classic and truly epic story. Arc starts his journey in search of his father, mysteriously disappeared when he was just a little child. Now, a strange force has been awaken, a force that could be connected to his father's destiny. During his journey, Arc will meet new friends, which will eventually become members of his party. This basic story, full of all the clichés of any epic tale, is anyhow developed with great style, and as the events unfold, it becomes more and more interesting.

From this point of view, the brilliant dialogues, magnificently translated by the talented team at Working Designs, play an important role. From Arc The Lad I to Arc The Lad III, there is a whole bible of lines, but the tone and the language always remains above the average of the dialogues that gamers have to read in so many Japanese games translated in a rough English for the Western audience.

Strategic RPGs are not very common on consoles. While in RPGs like Final Fantasy or Grandia you can't control the movement of your character on the battlefield, in Arc The Lad you can move the characters on an imaginary grid before you perform each action. The position of the members of your team on the battlefield becomes fundamental: during the most difficult battles, you have to create a clear strategy to distribute your characters, especially if you are fighting on an extremely vast battlefield. Each character can perform generic actions like attack, cast magic, use items or skills, and all is done via a game user interface that is simple and intuitive. During the battles, characters gain experience points and level up, thus increasing their various stats.

Of course, the first Arc The Lad has its limits. It may seem way too easy, excessively linear, and it lacks elements typical of great part of the RPGs currently on the shelves, like shops, money to buy new objects, the possibility to equip different armors and weapons. But all this still leads to a gaming experience that after 6 years it's fresh, intuitive and able to narrate a great story.

Arc The Lad II is probably the true core of the series. It's a wonderful adventure, and overall it proves to be one of the most beautiful RPGs for PsOne. Yes, we could have missed one of the most artistic adventures of the latest years, a game which brings the player into an epic tale like few other titles are able to do.

While sharing the visuals of Arc The Lad I, the second instalment boasts a much more refined game system. Adding to that, while the first Arc The Lad is extremely short for the genre - you should need no more than 12 hours to complete it - this second adventure is much bigger, with at least 45 hours of pure role-playing gameplay. And the efforts you did in the first Arc The Lad were not worthless. In fact, in Arc The Lad II you have the possibility to import the save data from the first game; in this way, you can use levelled-up characters and powerful items from the beginning of the adventure.

New heroes are introduced in this adventure. The main character here is Elc, the last of the Pyrenians, an ancient tribe gifted with the power to control fire. He is a mature boy, a bounty hunter whose destiny will intertwine Arc's journey. The development of the characters - overall, they are more than a dozen - is very deepened and makes the story of Arc The Lad II more complex, and darker than the one of the first game.

The first addition to the game system is the beautiful, hand-drawn World Map. You can move your character following the roads and paths available, travelling from one place to another. Arc The Lad II is less linear than the first episode; there are much more towns and places to visit in each continent and more secrets to discover.

Enormous improvements have been done also in the characters and inventory management. In Arc The Lad II, the characters can finally equip armors and weapons; items can be modified at Item Smiths. An Item Smith can add special attributes to an existing item and raise the power of the item; items with special attributes, once equipped, can raise characters' stats. Shops are also present in the game. Here you'll be able to buy weapons, armors, healing items and much more cool stuff that you can modify with the help of an Item Smith; you can also combine two or more items at special places called Combine Shops. Overall, this system gives a great freedom to the player, who is able to customize her/his party till to slightest details.

But there is much more in Arc The Lad II. First of all, you can embark in a lot of different jobs as a Hunter. All you have to do is to pay a visit to the Hunter's Guild. Here you can take a look at the jobs available or at the wall with the "Wanted" posters. There are many dangerous monsters roaming in the world of Arc The Lad II, and if you are good enough to catch them you can make a lot of money, useful to buy new weapons and items for your party. The side missions featured in Arc The Lad II are amusing and add a lot of replay value.

Capturing monsters - and using them in your battles - is another cool thing that you can do in the game. You have to use the ability of one of your characters, Lieza, in a fashion that reminds a lot the Pokemon games for Game Boy. You can give new names to the monsters you've captured and you can also change a monster's class or give it new abilities. Basically, in Arc The Lad II, not only you can customize the characters but also all of the monsters you've captured. Oh, you can also sell monsters for good cash.

Overall, Arc The Lad II is a complex, complete, well developed, exciting RPG that every owner of a Playstation should play and love. I've really nothing to complain about it; this game gives the player a lot of freedom, and it boasts one of the most complete RPG systems I've ever tried.

Arc The Lad III is the latest adventure in the series; it's a relatively new game, and it comes on two discs. The first evident change from the previous episodes is the introduction of 3D polygonal environments that brings the series out of the 16-bit era and completely into the 32-bit generation. Once again, it's possible to import the save data from Arc The Lad II to unlock special events, and that's just great, and rewarding.

You could be surprised finding out that the third game features a completely new cast of characters. The connection with the two previous instalments can be discovered only playing the whole adventure; while this could disappoint many fans of Arc, it's also one of the reasons that keeps you glued to the screen till to the last revelation. With Arc The Lad III, but also with Arc The Lad II, the developers had the same idea that Kojima have had for Metal Gear Solid 2. They introduced new heroes with unique personalities to give a different point of view on the events of the saga.

Alec is the young hero of this new episode. Like Arc at the very beginning of the epic saga, Alec is just a young boy. His family was destroyed in the so-called "Great Disaster". A mysterious man, a Hunter, saved Alec from the fire. For years, Alec has been wondering if he will ever know who his saviour was. One day, his village is attacked by a group of plunderers. Alec and his best friend, Lutz, are secretly sent to hire a Hunter at the Hunter's Guild to save the village. It's the beginning of a new voyage in the world of Arc The Lad.

This time, the structure of the game is based on the job system of the preceding episode. While in Arc The Lad II jobs were just side-quests, in Arc The Lad III you have to accept jobs to proceed in the adventure. This makes the game much more linear and repetitive than Arc The Lad II. Surprisingly, the third instalment is not as innovative or brilliant as the preceding one.

Arc The Lad III's battle system is nearly identical to the one of the previous instalments. The battles are maybe a bit easier, since the battlefields are more limited than those in Arc The Lad II, but the developers added a few novelties to spice things up a bit. The monster summoning feature is once again here, but it has changed a bit. There is a new character, Theo, who has the ability to seal monsters into special cards. Overall there are 117 creatures that can be sealed and used in battle; since Theo can carry only five cards at a time, you can send the cards you don't need to the Monster Society, where you can retrieve them when you prefer. And no, surprisingly you'll not find Pikachu, the mighty electric mouse, in this one. I know. Life is hard sometimes.

Arc The Lad III also features an excellent items and weapons creation system. Basically, you can mix items and weapons to create new, powerful objects for your party. There are special places, called Item Society and Weapon Society where you can synthesize new objects and experiment to find new formulas.

Overall, Arc The Lad III is a good RPG. It probably lacks the depth and the originality of the second instalment, but it still offers dozens of hours of amusing gameplay.

The package also includes other two discs, a great manual, and an Omake book. The first disc contains Arc Arena, the other a special documentary on the making of The Arc the Lad.

Arc Arena - Monster Tournament, is nothing more than an add-on to Arc The Lad II. In fact, you need to have Save data from Arc II, and it's important that Lieza, the summoner of the game, is in the Save Data, or you'll be unable to use your monsters in Arc Arena. You can play against the CPU or against a friend; in this way, if you both have played Arc The Lad II, you can use your own monsters to fight each other in the tournament. Arc Arena is all about strategy. In fact, you don't have direct control over your monsters. You can train them and tell them to use a certain strategy. Then you throw them into the arena and see who the winner is.

The "Making of Arc The Lad" CD is a great documentary on the making of the enormous project behind the series. Through a series of good interviews, you'll learn directly from the developers the story of the development of the games; from character development to localization of the game for The Arc The Lad Collection, this extra CD is something that fans of the series will be happy to have.

The Omake book included in the box contains Thumb button covers for your Dual Shock controller, an exclusive PsOne Memory Card holder and 24 Characters mini-standees: nice stuff.