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First XBox 360 Traditional RPG

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 15
Date: December 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First off, let me say that I'm a huge role playing game fan. I have been for as long as I can remember. One of my main gripes with Microsoft's XBox was that there was a huge lack of good RPGs. It seems with the release of Oblivion, which was an action RPG, and the release of this game, which is a turn based RPG, they are off to a good start with the 360.

The battles in this game are fun and strategic. Your characters are placed on grid-like terrain, and it's your job to move them around and position them to be able to attack the enemy. The enemy is also on the same grid, opposite of you. The positions of which your characters are placed at the start of each battle are random, so it does require strategy on your part.

Another huge part of this game is golemn collecting. Think of it as a Pokemon-like collection experience. Many of these golemns have unique powers that will be of great help to you on your journey. Golemns that you can collect are different from normal enemies in that they actually show up visibly on your map, as opposed to the random battles you will enter into to fight normal monsters.

The story is the best part of the game. It starts out slow for the first few hours, and then after a certain event that happens to you in the game, it's full steam ahead.

The main character, Atsuma, is your average meatheaded student who doesn't quite pay attention in class. Throughout the game, his learning curve doesn't seem to improve too much. He's always the last character to figure out what is exactly happening around him. His arm is what ties this story together, as it is the source of a mysterious power. Throughout the game, more backstory about his arm will be revealed to you. At first you will be joined by two characters, Toya and Makoto. Toya is more like a mentor to Atsuma and takes him under his wing at the beginning of the game. Makoto is the game's over-the-top stereotypical gay guy. He's madly in love with Toya and claims himself to be the president of Toya's fan club. Makoto is the source of much of the game's great comic relief for the first few hours of gameplay.

Later in the game, you'll be joined by Karin, Raigar, and Yuki. Karin is a headstrong woman who is part of a group called the "resistance movement". Raigar is Karin's personal bodyguard, who reveals himself to be freakishly strong. When you first meet him, he doesn't talk much, but he'll open up as the game progresses. Yuki is a selfish little girl who's main goal in life is to become the most famous golemn hunter that ever lived. She's also the source of alot of the game's funny dialog as the game goes on, because she has something to say about everything.

Speaking of the dialog, it's suprisingly fresh and natural. It never tries too hard to be funny, and in return you'll find yourself laughing aloud many times throughout the game.

I would love to reveal more of the story to you, but since it's the greatest part of the game, you'll have to get it and see it for yourself. Overall, Enchanted Arms is an enjoyable experience that has a good few fun sidequests to enjoy along with it's main storyline, which should keep you busy for many hours. I'd personally suggest this game to anyone who likes turn based-style battles or anyone who enjoys a fulfilling RPG story.

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.

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.

Solid Role-Playing Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: November 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Fabntastic Game Idea - the videos are impressive. This game has some fans in the USA, and it deserves them. What you do is the good old solid RPG stuff - talk to people, fight bad guys, become part of an epic story, etc.

The graphics are up to next gen standards and the play is fast and furious when the fighting starts!

Great RPG for the 360 - I hope there's more!

XBOX's Answer to Final Fantasy

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: November 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a very solid RPG that has a very similar gameplay and feel to Final Fantasy. IT is definitely worth playing for people who enjoy RPG's. One thing I want to make clear -- if you do decide to purchase this game, give it 3 or 4 hours of gameplay before putting it down. It is slow moving at first, but starts to get interesting around the 3-hour marker and gets all the way until the end. So please enjoy.

big surprise

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 7
Date: January 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I was never into rpg, so when I ordered this game online I thought it'd be a fun action fighting game,(not knowing it was rpg). when it arrived i had the means to sell it or something but decided to give it a try but I didn't plan on getting hooked on the game so I got more into rpg eversince enchanted arms. Its story line is like a mix of SCRY ED and Naruto if ur into that kind of thing. Even Xplay gave it a good review, so don't be like me, don't judge by the cover. Also the comic is very interesting2 makes you think it was a manga first.

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

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? :^)

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.

Not so Enchanted Arms

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: January 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

With a unique battle system and a huge plethora of characters to choose from this title seems like it can't miss. However, within the first 5 min of the game you quickly realize that this is "my first RPG." the story seems compelling, for about an hour, then the mundane side stories kick in and is only fit for "filler" use. the "twists" are pretty much non-existant, and I found myself finishing it only because I bought it. All in all, there is little to love, save maybe the collection of the different usable battle characters. If you find yourself in a "gotta catch 'em all" kind of month, then by all means pick it up, but I suggest that you wait for a solid RPG to blow in.

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