Enchanted Arms

"Great JRPG for the 360!"

Enchanted arms is a JRPG for the xbox 360. Is it worth buying you ask? Yes it is and now let the review begin!

STORY 9/10
I found the story of Enchanted arms quite gripping. It starts with a college student called Atsuma with his know-it-all friend Toya and a well...strange guy called Makoto skipping class to attend a festival where panic strikes the city. I'm not going to spoil any further for you but you'll meet your standard JRPG characters. Sadly there isn't many cutscenes at all and most of the story progression is done by 2 characters talking on screen. On quite a few occasions you get to chose what to say but it has no impact on anything apart from the odd line of dialogue. overall great story.

GRAPHICS 8/10
Enchanted arms is a beautiful game with some great environments. The creatures and character models look great and the graphics are one of the strong points but some of the textures and environments look a bit bland and boring. The graphics for this game aren't really jaw dropping, just pretty good.

SOUND 6.5/10
The Enchanted arms soundtrack is mostly forgettable and at the end of the game the only tunes I remembered were the battle music, victory jingle and the main menu music. The English voice acting is awful and the characters lack all emotion in their voices. It's best to just swap to Japanese voices and although you won't understand the words you get subtitles instead. The sound isn't to good overall but it shoulden't bother you to much.

GAMEPLAY 9/10
This is a JRPG and as you'd expect there is plenty of random and boss battles. The battles have a good strategy element to them and are played on a grid. Your attacks hit a certain number of squares and most of the time I found the battles fun instead of annoying. Unlike other JRPG's instead of the usual batch of main characters there is also 100 creatures to fight with called golems. It has a pokemon feeling to it and the golems range from a pizza to massive plants. One problem, this game is pretty linear and apart from golem hunting and the casino there really isn't all that much to make you play through again.

Enchanted arms is a great game but it might be pretty average if you're not really an RPG fan. If you're not sure about this then just rent it. Overall great for RPG fans and good for others.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/12/07

Game Release: Enchanted Arms (EU, 09/08/06)