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Fun...but...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

While I enjoy a good JRPG game, this is not exactly fitting of the term GOOD. It isn't bad, but lacks in many departments. If you can get through the first few hours you'll enjoy the rest.

I really liked it.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 13, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Combat system took a little getting used to, but overall a great game. The story-line and the comedy were really good.

A resounding "EH"

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: May 10, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is nothing special. Its a mediocre RPG, which does nothing to stand out in an overcrowded room full of RPGs.

Ok, thats not entirely true. It does stand out in a few ways.

First, your main character may be the DUMBEST and most mentally inept main character ever. As I sat through the dialouge listening to his comments and questions, I couldnt help but wonder how he remembered to breath without someone stapling a note to his forehead reminding him to do so. His competence and observation skills can be accurately compared to a blind drunken monkey with ADHD.

Second, the VOICE ACTING. UGH. Now, the combat voice overs are just fine, as the characters yell out their various elements, attacks, or thank one another for blocking damage for them. However the voice acting for scenes and dialouge is EXCRUCIATING! Everything sounds so painfully forced. The dialouge itself is pretty aweful in that it repeats itself OVER AND OVER! For example, the game may tell you your next goal is inside that cave 30 ft away, as your camera focuses in on it. And by tell you, I mean bombard you with disasterous voice acting untill your willing to do whatever they ask if only they'll make the pain stop. Its clear where you need to go, but after walking over to it, the game will stop and play a nearly identical scene, complete with horrid voice acting, telling you that now you actually need to go INSIDE the cave. INSIDE the cave? What an idea! And here I was planning to LOITER AROUND OUTSIDE IT FOR 3 HOURS. Although, based on the dialouge thats about all your main character is smart enough to do on his own anyway, so its probably a good thing he has a slew of self-proclaimed tour guides following him around.

The combat system, while actually somewhat fun at first, is TERRIBLY unbalanced. Most of the time, battles about as evenly matched as a rabid lion in the ring with a one legged chicken. In normal fights, and about half the boss battles, your party is the rabid lion. In the other 50% of boss fights, however, you become the chicken, as the boss mercilessly and horribly violates your party before you get your first turn. And you cant resurect your party members mid-fight either. The game TRICKS you into THINKING you can, but this is a misconception. Any attempts to resurect a party member in any fight that they could concievably die during, will simply result in them being almost INSTANTLY re-ganked before they can even get a turn. This creates a vicious cycle of resurecting on your turn and your character dying on the enemies turn untill eventually you run out of VP and EP (vitality and ether/magic).

Worse still, is the grid movement system. Its as if at the begining of every fight, your enemy draws a line in the dirt and tells you, your not allowed to cross it, and your character being too mind-numbingly stupid to protest, just blindly follows this rule. Essentially the battle area looks more like a dodgeball court then a warzone, as you hurl attacks across the center line at your opponents on the other side. Did I mention your main characters good attacks are all short range, meaning both he and the target have to be standing next to the center line? And that nearly every enemy in the game after the first 30 mins or so, refuses to do anything except stand in the very back on their side of the court and hurl long range attacks at you?

How about the "rock paper scissors" sounding element system? See, in this game water beats fire, but then again fire also beats water. And every opposing element works this way, so as soon as you realize this, it suddenly stops being about strategy and starts becoming about whos rock is bigger.

And lets not forget the cover system. This is where you can place one character in front of the other, so the character behind suffers less damage from certain area attacks. It sounds great, untill you realize that in every fight where this might actually matter, the opponent COMPLETELY ignores this rule, and rapes both characters in one attack just for being close together. On the other hand, bosses can use this against YOU. Theres even a few bosses that hides in the far corner of their side of the dodgeball court, and place respawning enemies in front, meanwhile hitting your entire party for large damage every turn. Hiding in that far corner means your characters need to cluster together in the front corner of your side JUST so HALF of them can attack, meaning your tightly grouped when those respawning enemies decide to attack with their area moves.

Finally, theres comboing. Comboing is where you decide that one rabid lion isnt enough to thoroughly maul that defenseless chicken, so you call your 3 buddies over for a gang bang. This only really sees use in boss battles, and late game fights. Normal enemies CAN do combos too, but almost never get the chance. However, certain bosses can, and coincidently enough, also seem to delight in tempting you into hurling your xbox controller through the TV screen out of frustration. If you see an enemy begin a combo, you can accurately calculate your odds of survival by pausing the game and fliping a coin. Heads: your whole party dies. Tails: one party member survives long enough for you to make a futile attempt to resurect your teamates before sharing their fate.

Perhaps the only half decent element of the game could be the story itself. While hardly original (main character has a mysterious power, that he must discover more about as he progresses in the game which he will ultimately use to save the world) its not poorly done.

The characters, however, make up for the game almost havign a decent story. In short, your main characters a bumbling idiot, your other 3 permanent members are annoying, and the only decent and likable character in the game leaves your party after the first 15 mins of the game, and never rejoins. Also, and half naked homosexual follows you around for the better part of the game, and your main character cant recognize its one of his fellow students and best friends, because he wears sunglasses, a different color jacket, and changes his accent.

In conclusion, the experience of this game can be simulated by having your spleen removed while simaltaneously hitting your hand with a sledgehammer. If your a masochist with some free time and 20 dollars to spare this game is for you. For all others, do yourself a favor and buy Lost Oddesy instead.

Enjoyable, albeit not perfect

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 05, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Enchanted Arms is a classic Japanese RPG. Though not 100% groundbreaking or original it isn't exactly like any one single other game. Unique or not, it is quite an enjoyable game and well worth it for anyone who likes RPGs.

If I had to choose one previous RPG to which I could compare Enchanted Arms, it would have to be Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Like FFTA, the turn-based battles of the game take place on a grid. You pit the unique abilities of each character on your roster against the numerous baddies you randomly encounter throughout your travels.

Speaking of your roster, in true RPG fashion you start with your main character and a couple of friends. As you progress you collect "Golems", which I would liken to summons, except that each Golem is it's own character and is not summoned by anyone. One of the highlights of this game is the quantity and variety of Golems you can collect as well as the level of detail that went into each Golem, not to mention the human characters!

While the visuals may be stunning, particularly the in-battle animations, the voice acting and storytelling can be annoying and even down right insulting. One character has a flaming lisp and clothing that made me ask "Was that entirely necessary?" In addition, most of the controls are mind-bogglingly simple (i.e. "Push A") but the game insists on forcing you through a cut scene during which one of your companions provides you with a dissertation on the proper technique for pushing A.

Some would also argue that battles are too easy and become repetitive, but to that I would advise simply switching out a few of your Golems- you'll be amazed how quickly the battle dynamic changes.

In the long run, any complaints I might have are trivial at best. The bottom line is that I thoroughly enjoyed myself while playing Enchanted Arms and if you like RPGs, you will too.

Summary:

Pros
-Stunning Visuals
-Wide variety of party members

Cons
-Fairly linear
-Unnecessary tutorials

Amazing and Underrated

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game has, in my opinion, received unfair negative reviews very heavily. Personally, it's my favorite game I played in all of 2006.

First of all, it has amazing character development. Atsuma, the main character, starts off as a slacker in a college for Enchanters. He appears to be the only one in the school who enchants with his fists, easily earning the title of "stupid muscle". He jokes a lot, isn't serious and seems pretty dumb. But then, after losing his friends and then continuously trying to find and save them, and failing, he grows depressed. He's no longer at all the Atsuma from the beginning of the game. He's dark and moody, even getting close to calling it quits at times. At the end of the game, he's a perfectly-done balance of both, still joking and being silly, yet having an aura of maturity about himself. It's probably one of the best character developments I've ever seen in any game I've played - ever.

Secondly, the combat system is fun. It's not overly complicated or difficult to catch on. You are on a grid, split in two halves, one for your enemies that you cannot walk on and vice versa. It can sometimes be annoying if enemies walk too far back and you have to use mana-intensive long range attacks that don't do as much damage as a point-blank range thing, or if your allies can't move around fast enough on the grid, or stand in the way - it's not perfect by any means, but I rarely had an annoyance with the layout of the battle system. There's more to it, too! You can hold down a button and fast-forward through turns, so that you get through fights faster. You can even set the turn to Auto, so the computer chooses your attacks for the turn. That, combined with the fast-forwarding, makes most of the random battles smooth sailing and not as annoying as most other games. In addition to this, your party's health and mana is automatically restored after every battle, if they have any Vitality points. Each character has their own set maximum VP and the longer a battles goes on, the more vitality they lose. If they reach 0, they will always start every battle with 1 HP and 1 mana, until you reach a heal station. This, however, is of little importance, due to the fact you can carry a ton of allies in a pouch, so to speak, and just change your battle party with characters who still have VP. Lastly, all characters in your battle party AND in your "pouch" will get battle experience, thusly gaining levels and never becoming obsolete and useless due to being too weak (however, they get no SP, which is basically stuff you can increase stats, such as damage, health and maximum mana after each battle). Experience is even given if the character died in battle. Very few RPGs, if any at all, reward experience with such a relaxed attitude.

The storyline definitely kept me interested. People can say what they want, but I find a guy who has an arm that has a personal will of its' own and shoots huge fireballs and sucks the energy out of things pretty neat. The presentation of the story doesn't seem quite very good without getting into spoilers. Your main character's friends disappear and an ancient golem is awakened from underneath your enchanter's school. The world is in peril, you must save it. But it's so much deeper than this, there's sub plots, there's details about Atsuma that involve him in great depth with the moral and meaning and the whole freaking point of the story. The whole "saving the world" plot is also only secondary, it's not Atsuma's main goal or motivation. His main goal is saving his friends, the world is second to that. In fact, at the end of the game, the player must make a choice for Atsuma: kill his best friend and guarantee the world's safety, or attempt to save him, but in exchange endanger the entire planet? The game actually has two different endings, based on that choice.

The graphics don't even need very much mentioning, it's absolutely beautiful.

I only have two very small complaints about this game. First, they overuse their main battle music, which is this very dramatic theme. It's used for most of the battles, in most of the game. Many of the main boss fights, however, use their own themes, it's just for the random battles for the most part.

Then, we have the just mentioned random battles. In almost every RPG ever made, they suffer from random battles. Yes, suffer. It's annoying to start taking a walk to the next main storyline quest area, but then you run into twenty thousand random fights along the way. It's not just Enchanted Arms, it's everyone! The closest things I saw to fixing this is Shadow Madness and Final Fantasy 10. In FF10, you got an equip that disabled random battles, but you didn't get it until very late game. In Shadow Madness, the game difficulty actually didn't control anything other than the number of random battles happening, on top of you could press R2 and L2 to "duck" and have a very high chance to avoid the encounter. I really wish RPGs as a whole just had an option in a menu for the player to, at his whim, turn random fights on and off. That'd fix so much.

None of those complaints ruin the game, however.

This game, my friends, isn't perfect. But, it's pretty damn close. It will go down in history as an amazing game that Noone played and everyone else played Blue Dragon.

es okay...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

if you you like Japanese Anime, this is a wonderful game. i played to the end, and was fairly interested in it the whole time. it can get a little monotonous at times. battle after endless battle with pretty much the same creatures. the one saving grace was this avoid encounter capability you could get. finally the game was enjoyable. of course you need to do battle to gain levels enough to defeat the final monsters, but whooaa, enough is enough already. once the game was over, i was little let down. understandably, but i can honeslty say i have never again put it in the Xbox. anyone want to buy it? :^)

so so

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: September 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The first couple hours of this game will annoy you to the core as the story isn't special and one of the main characters is annoyingly gay. Its not that he is gay that is annoying, but the voice, the conversation, and the actions are all beyond the most flamming person you've ever met. He also has a love obsession with one of the other main characters who is not gay. Luckily the character seems to die off after and hour or two. If I didn't know this ahead of time, I woulda quit. After that the story line is decent but nothing special and kinda corny at times. Battle system is a bit different then other rpgs, but I don't think in a good way, but still it's different. This is a little bit of a spoiler but at the end of the game it turns out the gay guy didn't die, and they bring him back for the last 1/2 hr of play and final scenes of the game. This to me completly ruined it because the way they bring him back is horrible. Also horrible is in the final scenes the have the straight love interest of the gay guy held down to be kissed by the gay guy... :sigh:

Bottom line, this game isn't on final fantasy's level but for $20 it is worth it if you like rpgs and can deal the horrible beging of the game (and ending). There is plenty of game time, which makes it worth your buck. Enjoy it in the middle while you can though. If you're only so so with rpgs, give it a pass.

A Pretty Big Disappointment

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 14
Date: March 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game seemed like it would be fun, but it is full of extremely boring dialog presented in a boring manner. Call me politically incorrect, but there is a very annoying flaming transvestite character in the game that can't say a single sentence without making it a homosexual one. For example, he mentions how his love for another character is an ingredient in everything that he bakes. And after playing the game for a few hours and listening to his constant mushy remarks made with a horrid lisp, I had to shut the game off and I will be selling my copy to a poor unsuspecting soul who thinks that this game might be as fun as Final Fantasy games. Being a heterosexual, excessive homosexual content just doesn't entertain me the way that it might entertain someone else.

BOO!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 9
Date: February 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Ok, i want to start by saying two things: a) I love RPGs and b) it does not take much to please me... heres the problem though... this game had a lot of potential and i tried and tried to get into it but in the end i just had to quit telling myself it would get better.
Pros: 1.seemingly good story line.
2. Some of the graphics are good. (note the word some...)
Problems:
1. conversations between characters is horrible. the characters talk in a wierd split screen design. it is like the designers were too lazy to program movements. (hard to explain. you would have to see it...)
2. gameplay is done on a difficult grid system. most players can only attack pieces of the grid making the whole thing long and drawn out. they were trying to do something original and it turned out horribly.
3. too repetitive. this game uses the "shatter away" enemy fighting system that FFX used which was fine. but in this game the enemies come at you again and again and again... and they are always the same enemies. you get to a point where you start to dread running down a hall because you know it will take 1/2 an hour. on top of that, if you run from a battle your parties health/stats go down and so by the time you get to a boss at the end of the hall you are pretty much exausted.
4. the story line... i think it is good but you end up doing all these side missions that are filler to make the game drag out longer and it gets to be painfully old. the cut scenes that move the story along TAKE FOREVER to get to. its like reading a good book and having to play 50 obnoxious minigames in between pages. they knew they were lacking and that is how they fixed it.
ENDING NOTE: I PUT ABOUT 20-30 HOURS INTO THIS GAME AND FINALLY GAVE UP. I TRIED AND TRIED TO CONVINCE MYSELF THAT JUST AROUND THE NEXT CORNER THIS WAS GOING TO BE A GREAT GAME. THAT CORNER NEVER CAME, AND I AM NOW A LITTLE DEPRESSED THAT I DONT KNOW HOW THE STORY ENDS AND THAT I CANT SEE ALL THE CUT SCENES THAT COULD/WOULD HAVE MADE THIS GAME WORTH IT. I WANTED THIS TO BE SO GOOD AND I WAS BEYOND DISAPPOINTED.
IF YOU WANT A GOOD GAME, OBLIVION WAS A BLAST. MASSIVE, SEEMINGLY ENDLESS. IF YOU HAVE PLAYED THAT, MAYBE FFXI BUT IS HAS A MONTHLY FEE. IF YOU HAVE NEVER PLAYED AN MMORPG THOUGH, IT MAKES FOR AN INTERESTING EXPERIENCE. I JUST STARTED IT AND IT IS THE FIRST GAME I HAVE EVER PLAYED LIKE IT (MMORPG). SOMETHING ABOUT PLAYING WITH OTHER PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE, TALKING TO THEM, ETC. IS REALLY COOL.
HOPE THIS HELPED! STAY AWAY FROM THIS GAME!

One of the worst RPG's ever

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 29
Date: February 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Before I even begin my review, let me just say that I've been playing RPG's since 1984, when they were played in text form only. I've played everything from Zork to Bard's Tale to Diablo 2 LOD to Oblivion (all of which are great games)
Then I attempted to play Enchanted Arms. I knew within the first 5 minutes that I was not going to like this game. One of the main characters uses a saxaphone as his weapon, "blasting" enemies with song notes. The combat system is confusing and unfun. It's as if the people who created this game had never played an RPG before, because it doesn't seem to borrow any of the good attributes of the many great RPG's which have gone before it.

The fact that this game comes out on the very advanced XBox 360 system makes it expensive, but believe me when I say that you will quickly regret dropping $50.00 on it. Rent it if you must, but I like RPG's as much or more than just about anybody, and I could barely stand to play it for ten minutes.

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