Enchanted Arms

"A good concept for a game, with absolutely no follow through"

The RPG repertoire for the Xbox 360 only offers up a few options at this point in time, one of them being Enchanted Arms. Outwardly, this game looked cool, and when I popped it into the tray, the title screen looked beautifulon my new LCD television, but that's about where the game stopped being great (with a couple exceptions). WARNING : this review contains possible very minor spoilers



Story (4/10):

I haven't had a chance to fully evaluate the story line of this game since I'm not yet finished, but I've played long enough to get the gist of it, and it leaves a lot to be desired. One of my main gripes with the game is that the cities are roughly named after real cities. For example, Kyoto, Yokohama, London (London? What?). The actual story line is pretty trite and played out as well. The game takes place in a world that is inhabited by humans and golems. Golems are monsters that you can battle against and use as part of your team (more on that later). Basically there were some ancient wars (cleverly dubbed the "golem wars"), where humans battled alongside golems and blah blah blah. Extremely powerful golems called "devil golems" were created as weapons and then sealed away after the war. Cut to the present where the main character, Atsuma, accidentally awakens one of said devil golems. Chaos ensues. A story begins to develop where evil persons try to revive more devils golems to cause more destruction. There are some minor twists and turns, the kind you could expect from any half-rate RPG storyline. but honestly going into more detail would be a waste.



Music / Soud (2/10):

The music in this game is kinda cool at first. It's catchy and features lots of acoustic guitar and real instrument sounds as opposed to the completely synthetic sounds of other games. On the other hand, the composer literally wrote one little catchy line for each tune, that repeats over and over, endlessly, with no deviation. It quickly drives you to the brink of insanity. Sound effects serve their purpose I guess, nothing great or extremely bad. There are voiceovers at times, and though they are not great, they are not bad.



Gameplay (3/10):

I would have given this section higher marks but there a couple huge flaws that bring it down. First let's start with the good. I really like the battle system of this game. Your 4 person party is positioned on a 4x3 grid, and the enemy party is set up the same in another grid that sits across from yours. Each character has attacks that affect a certain portion of grid either right in front of them, all around them, or in various patterns. If an enemy or ally is within this range they will receive the effects of the attack or skill. It is up to the player to stategically choose what attacks to equip to each character to cover certain parts of the map, and you have to position your characters throughout the battle to make sure your attacks remain effective. I still find myself enjoying the random battles because of this battle system. Also the fact that you can find golem cores and synthesize your own golems to use in your party is cool too, although once you get about 1/3 through the game, you will never want to use golems in lieu of your human characters anymore, as they have limited attacks and they are not as strong.

However, there are several annoying aspects of the gameplay that make this game subpar. First off, there is an elemental system like in most other RPGs where attacks of one element will be effective against characters aligned with another element and so forth. Well in this game, various pairs of elements are strong against each other which negates any strategic aspect of this feature. For example, fire is strong against water and vise-versa. So if you bring a fire elemental character into your party to battle a strong water golem, your fire character will do strong damage with his fire elemental attacks, while at the same time the water golem will deal heavy damage to your fire character with water attacks. Thus, there is no strategic advantage to changing your party because the elemental damage will just balance itself out. To me this is just evidence that nobody put any real thought into this game.

Also, your characters cannot use items on other characters in your party during battle, only on themselves. WHY? This is such an annoying feature during big battles.

Other various complaints: At the beginning of the game the computer explains everything to you: "In order to climb the ladder, press A. Then press up to climb." Also, the dialogue is horrible, absolutely horrible. You barely get any money for battles, and everything you can buy in the game is extremely expensive. There is no way to get all the stuff you want. For some reason you can't sell your old weapons, you can only sell healing/status items, so there is no way to really make money by selling things. I find myself spending all my money just to maintain a decent number of potions for my inventory. The game is linear. There have been absolutely no sidequests.

Overall: (3/10)

The only reason I am continuing to play this game is to beat it so I feel like I got my money's worth.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/03/07

Game Release: Enchanted Arms (US, 08/29/06)