I'm going to start this review by saying that I was a Kickstarter backer who backed this game with only moderate expectations. For a visual novel that only got approximately $29,000 USD I was definitely blown away by the quality of the world building, character art, and voice acting. At times I felt like the characters spoke too slowly but that became less of an issue on subsequent playthroughs. Each playthrough took me approximately eight hours if I interacted with each character and did optional alchemy mini-games. I still haven’t found certain permutations of decisions that the creators have hinted at being possible such as an ending where one character is executed , so I will likely play it one or two more times to get them all.
Like other people have said, this game has many shared themes with Dragon Age concerning magic and magic users, but in my opinion they handled the tropes well and it was not just an imitation of Dragon Age. I appreciated the fact that the party has banter with each other between conversation and plot events instead of just interacting with the main character. I appreciated how the creators handled Mime’s characterization as a little sister/mascot character. I usually find mascot characters to be annoying but she was very endearing. I also appreciated that Arcadia Fallen had casual inclusion of Quinn as a person who uses they/them pronouns.
I’m definitely looking forward to the sequel that the team is working on.
Pro Tip: The game didn’t explicitly mention this, but you can rotate the alchemy wheels counter -clockwise by right clicking the wheel. Some of the later alchemy challenges require you to do this and I was pulling my hair out until I figured out that you could turn them the other way.