Enchanted Arms

"Did you play FFX and think, "Hey, I know how to make this game even lamer?" The guys at FromSoftware did."

Let me preface this by saying this review is being written LONG after the original release date of this game. However, I don't feel this fact invalidates a poor review. Were I to review such classics as FF III (American) or the immortal FF VII, they would still receive positive ratings, despite their graphical and audio limitations. That being said, this game is without a doubt one of the poorest, most repetitive, poorly thought out and obviously rushed RPG's ever produced. There is only one shining point in this otherwise unsalvageable mess, but I'll get to that in the meat of the review.

Regarding the comparison to Final Fantasy X, I feel it's appropriate because X was a prime example of how not to make an RPG. Linear storylines with characters that run the gamut from static to merely unlikeable to worthy of complete scorn do not make a good game. I don't care how many pretty movies you force me to watch, especially when most of them consist of poorly written and poorly acted dialogue.

Since the dialoge and story are my biggest beef, let's start there.

Story/Characters - 1/10 - Total crap.

If there were ever a game that dug deep into the smelly barrel of RPG cliche, this is it. Who is your main character? Why he's a young, idealistic but very strong kid with a hidden power and purpose that he will come to understand throughout the course of the game. Who will he meet on the course of his adventure? The stuck up princess character, the strong silent swordsman, and the wild and empowered young girl with a lust for money. Who else shows up? The mysterious man who understand so much more than you do (but of course tells you nothing straight out) and is convinced that you are the key to destiny, but does little to help you but relay cryptic messages despite being extremely powerful.

The story is pretty generic too. An ancient force from an ancient war is going to be reawakened to visit new horrors on the world. Magic will be reawakened after being long dormant. You gain control of monsters with great powers. Guys, I've seen it before. It was on the Super Nintendo and it was called Final Fantasy III. (in the U.S., for the picky) But what's even more offensive is the storytelling method. Games on the PS2 could handle hours of full motion video for storytelling, they didn't have to resort to static 2D renderings of 3D models having boring, unskippable conversations to get the story across. And when I mean boring, I mean apropos of nothing. Most of the time when your characters are talking it seems to come from some lame attempt to develop personalities and story, but it always comes down to them just arguing and shouting at each other, or mocking the main character (who it appears is an imbecile, but nothing other than the fact that everyone TELLS you you're an imbecile suggests that)

I dreaded the moments when a conversation would start, because I knew that even with my habit of jamming on the A button rapidly I was still about to waste five minutes of my life. Seriously. These plot points are long, tedious and without merit. I'm not entirely sure From Software even hired writers, I think they gave the job to their lighting artists, since they didn't have anything to do other than hit the "turn on ambient lighting button" and then take a long lunch.

Also, I don't need to hear the phrase "Yes, my queen" over and over again to understand when a character is a total tool. Just a tip.


Gameplay - 7/10

They could have had a 10. The battle system is sublime. The only problem with it is the elemental system, but I'll get to that later. This game gets a 7 because nobody walked into the From Software office one day and said, "Hey guys, I just got a memo! It's from every gamer who ever lived! It says 'Fetch quests bite donkey buttocks!' Guess we better cut all 5,000 of them out of our game."

Seriously, fetch quests? I can't just walk into a town, talk to the characters I feel like dealing with, and get on with the story? I've got to run around gathering crap for no reason at all other than the developers, sadistic SOBs that they obviously are, felt like forcing you to run around in their unnecessarily large environments. A man could get all the exercise he needs in a lifetime running up and down the "grand" stairs in London. It doesn't help matters that most of the things you're fetching are completely asinine. I've got to get fire for an old man, so that he doesn't die of exposure? Well why doesn't the old fool walk over to the other barrel full of fire sitting five feet from him? What's so special about the barrel he's in front of? Is it a family heirloom? Was he born by the barrel and expects to die there, as God intended? What's the deal?

Here's another interesting thing. Despite the fact the game relies so heavily on RPG conventions, the developers felt it was necessary to explain to you that most basic RPG convention: push "A" to interact with stuff. Guys, we're used to that one. I know how to climb ladders. I don't need to have a conversation in which yet another character insults my intelligence just to learn how to use a ladder. I'll figure it out, I made it out of first grade with my mental faculties intact. I'd leave it at "I'm not learning disabled," but I'm positive your run-of-the-mill learning disabled person would scoff at these explanations and feel insulted.

Anyway, let's talk about the good stuff: the fights. The fights save this game from the shredder. The fights are the only reason to play this game, and frankly they're a good reason to suffer through the rest of this mess. I've found that if you turn off the music, cut of the conversations and just leave the sound effects on, it's really a pretty good game. The fighting system is excellent in this game. Your characters stand on a 4 x 3 grid and can move pretty much anywhere on it. The enemies have a grid of their own. Your attacks only affect certain squares on that grid based on your position and they stay in position until their turn to act starts, so there is a deep level of strategy to the order in which your characters attack and where you place them when they do attack.

Damage can also be negated by character placement, as many attacks will be diluted if one character has another in front of it during attacks that affect a wide area. This is something you have to take into account when attacking, and something you must consider after your turn, because leaving a weak character with no cover can lead to undesired results.

When you put together a successful strategy for defeating the enemy, it feels really good, like you actually accomplished something with your choices. It's the game strongest point, and the only part that felt like it created any meaningful form of play at all.

The only problem with the game is the element system. You've got your four basic ones: fire, water, earth and wind; plus two others: light and dark. All very cliche. The polar opposites do double damage to each other, essentially negating one another. Generally, the winner of an elemental battle is decided by who goes first. If you've got water based characters and your enemies are fire, you better pray you get to go first, or you'll lose. It seems like it was conceived as another layer of strategy, but really it hampers an otherwise perfect system. Besides that, it's just a really tired convention that should have been done away with a long time ago.

Graphics/Environment Design - 5/10

It's an interesting fact that not EVERY surface in a video game needs to have a specular map applied. The rocks look like plastic, every brick looks completely saturated with water, the whole game is just so shiny. It's annoying. Why is it that when you walk around in a grassy field, you kick up more grass than a lawnmower? It looks like you should be leaving barren soil in your wake after you walk through an area.

Let's talk about lighting, too. Light is a funny thing, it often requires a source. But walk around in most of the dungeons in this place and you'll see none of that. What you'll see is almost uniform lighting, with the occasional SUPER shiny light source that does nothing but blow out the spec maps applied liberally to the surrounding surfaces. It's unrealistic and shows clearly how poorly thought out most of these environments were. Also, how about adding something to your dungeons beyond walls, floors, ceilings, and uniform glowing boxes that are present everywhere you go. Perhaps, I dunno, piles of rocks? A skeleton or two? General debris? Torches (remember, the light in these places has to come from somewhere)? I mean, give me something to look at besides shiny bricks.

In all fairness, my complaints aren't universal. The outdoor environments are pretty, and the fact that outdoor has the sun negates my problems with the uniform lighting. The water shader is beautiful, and is extremely well done. But outside is really little more than a dungeon with a sky. You can walk in only a couple of possible directions, and you're limited to a pretty confined path in any direction you take. It's just all too linear.

The battle effects are pretty as well, but mostly limited to bright flashes and particle effects. The camera shakes heavily during many attacks, and this adds an element of excitement to fights, but I suspect it hides some otherwise generic attack animations.

The main character designs are either generic or ridiculous. The main protagonist couldn't possibly be a bigger hodgepodge of RPG conventions if you took drawings of a collection of other protagonists and cut and pasted their designs together. The strong silent guy's design is completely out of place with the world he inhabits, the princess character is completely generic, and the empowered female character is just, plain, stupid looking. It's like they spent long hours gazing wistfully at Rikku, took out all her cute aspects, injected more obnoxiousness and put a cowboy hat on her.

As for the golems - the enemies and other characters you can control - their designs are varied and pretty interesting, but this is hardly something new to an RPG. They would have designed and modeled them anyway, because they're also your enemies. They don't stand out at all, but they're not particularly bad either.

But since they went ahead and spent so much time on modeling the golems, you think they could have thrown more than a day or so into modeling the NPCs? They've seriously got five or six of them, with a couple of color swaps thrown in just to trick the mentally handicapped. They didn't even bother trying to hide it either, at several points in the game you'll see "conversations" between NPCs where two of the exact same model, with different colored hats, are on the screen simultaneously. That's inexcusably lazy.

The cities are pretty interesting, but given that they're just plays off of already existing cities the developers don't get many points for that. The city you start out in is just a generic RPG city, full of magical spires and pretty glowing stuff. London (yeah, London) is, ready for this, a medieval European city. Groundbreaking! Kyoto, which you get to by heading west from London (makes perfect sense) is a medieval Japanese city. Are you detecting the pattern yet? It's just lazy.

Sound/Voice Acting - 2/10

Even Nickelback can stick more than one hook into a song, why can't the guys who made this game do it? The music repeats itself. The music repeats itself. The music repeats itself over and over again. It's like a 20 second clip strung out into the nether regions of infinity. There isn't very much of it either, and it rarely changes. Oh well, at least the option to turn it off is easily accessable.

As for the voice acting, I think I'd be doing actors all over the world a diservice by calling this stuff acting. Part of the problem comes from the generally poor quality of the writing, but the conversations between these characters are horrors I wouldn't wish on the residents of hell, no matter what circle they happen to be stuck in.

The battle sound effects are nice, so there's that. But pretty much everything about the battles are good, and, as I said, the battles are the game's only good quality.

So my last word on this game is this: unless you really like elegant battle systems, don't touch this game. Run from it. Flee its horrors. If you must play it, buy yourself a hazmat suit, prepare to jam the A button a lot during conversations, and wear a pair of sunglasses to protect your eyes from the blown out environments.

Just keep telling yourself, "sooner or later these idiots will stop jawing at each other and I can get back to killing stuff," and you'll be just fine.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 05/27/08

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