Thousand Arms

"Innovative dating system... that's about it."

Thousand Arms is a RPG that is different to other styles of RPG's because no other RPG's put such an emphasis on dating before. This is a unique feature because dating is very important in building up your character's skills and how happy/angry you make your girlfriends! You play the part of Meis Triumph in your quest to save the people from empirical terror of the Diannovan Empire. However, this game is flawed to the extreme in all the other areas that makes up a decent RPG. I shall explain below.

GAMEPLAY

The battle system can, in my opinion, be classified as the worst system in ANY RPG's. You fight one-on-one until either your character party or the enemy party is defeated. The fact that you have 3 in a battle party at a time but you can only control ONE character is stupid. The other 2 characters can contribute but ONLY by using defensive magics spells. Fair enough, you can swap between them but this wastes one turn unneccesarily unlike, for example, Breath of Fire IV where you can swap between characters without wasting a turn.

The amount of random battles doesn't help either. Usually this factor isn't annoying but in considering the flawed battle system in this game, you may be irritated by this.

Magic in this game comes in abundance. But the bad news is that most of the early spells are a simple waste of time and MP. You can do more damage from your sword than from most of the magic!

Coming onto the dating mini-games, this factor is actually the only good bit in Thousand Arms. By dating various girls, you can decide whether to make them happy or not and some of the responses are quite funny too. You can also buy them gifts to please them too and different presents suit different girls so you need to be aware of their likes and dislikes. The innovative aspect of this dating system is that you can acquire new spells and skills through making girls happy when they help you forge your sword to a higher level.

GRAPHICS

Nothing dull but nothing special either. The character portraits from each of the women during your dates are nicely presented and facial expressions are accurate enough. But overall, nothing to make you say wow.

MUSIC/AUDIO

The hours of voices inserted into the game has paid off. Each girl sounds different and unique so there is a sort of active participation accompanying the dating game. The in-game music however, is only half decent. There is no tune that grabs hold of your ear and not let go. Most of the voice-acting is decent in comparison to the wooden voice-acting in the Resident Evil games so credit goes to the voice actors.

REPLAY VALUE

There is no real replay value in this game. You may want to come back to this game for the dating stuff and try and get different responses from the girls. But apart from that, there's no incentive to go through the tedium that is the battle system.

RENT OR BUY

You should be very cautious. I strongly recommend you rent this game first to figure out for yourself what you enjoy about this game against what you consider the negative aspects. You may consider the dating system to be worth the game itself which is fair enough in which case buying the game is the option for you. Fans of the Action-RPG genre should steer clear of Thousand Arms, period.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/01, Updated 08/28/01