Joan of Arc is a great game in pretty much all aspects but one: the fantasy elements such as monsters and supernatural nonsense.

There is of course nothing wrong with Fantasy and other fantastical settings, but like in the movies and on TV, too many mediocre products just use a well-known name (King Arthur, Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Spartans at Thermopylae, 47 Ronin and many others) to gain attention and if that’s still not enough to paint over a lousy plot and silly dialogues, add some totally misplaced supernatural BS to justify some special effects for the trailer.

Joan of Arc is by no means a bad game, but any random title for a random fantasy setting would be more accurate for it. When I hear «Sherlock Holmes», I expect an intelligent brain teaser, not Robert Downey Jr.’s mocking of the iconic character; likewise, when using Jeanne d’Arc as the protagonist, one should be allowed to expect an historically accurate depiction of the 100 years war, with tactically challenging sieges and battles between the English and the French, plus some religious and political background intrigue.

All too often, supernatural elements and gimmicks are used to fix otherwise flawed mechanisms when designers are unable to produce a decent, historically accurate and well-balanced battle & strategy system. For those who would rather win due to clever manoeuvering of their troops than due to the lack of the draw of some Djinni card, this is disappointing time and again. Feel free to publish all the superhero and transformer crap in the world if you must, but there is no need to abuse customers’ expectations of historical settings or iconic fictional characters that are equally associated with a particular setting, time, attitude and way of doing things.

History is so full of rich, interesting stories (A Song of Ice and Fire, i.e. Game of Thrones is based on one of them) that book authors, game designers and Hollywood producers would never run out of ideas, if only they had the creative fantasy to use them authentically instead of screwing them up time and again with elements that are simply out of place. «Gladiator» was great because, despite the somehow optimistic assumption that an emperor’s vanity would lure him into the arena, it stuck to an imperial Roman setting — if there had suddenly some witches or fairies emerged like in Keanu Reeves’ «47 Ronin», it would have been silly and destroyed the film. Many Asian movies suffer from the same nonsense: the story could be great and epic, but then they start jumping five meters high and 20 meters wide, which is just clownish and disrupts the immersion into a historical setting.

Maybe, one day Mythic Games can bring themselves to publish «Jeanne d’Arc – The History Edition»; until then, this is a nice, lavishly produced game, but just another monster slayer among thousands of other monster slayers.