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Worst RPG Ever!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 21
Date: September 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Wow I made the mistake of buying this piece of garbage before playing it because of the lack of RPGs for the XBOX 360! Hey I was desperate!
Having said that, this game is absolutely awful.
First off the the story and dialogue will bore you to suicide.
the dialogue is so tedius and meaningless its just a waste of time. The apparently "Gay" member of your group will sit and talk about how in love he is with the other male character for way too long and other conversations that have nothing to do with gameplay take way too long.
Graphic wise this game is not what you'd expect from a huge console like the 360, it looks like a PS2 game and not even a good one.
Also the battles are boring. I have played RPGs and turn based games for years and the combat on this game is uninspired and just flat out lame.
Alot of this game is way too drawn out. conversations and movies and boring and have no story value and take forever to get through. Dont get me wrong sometimes a long cutscene is cool if its telling the story and is exciting and well done. these are not like that at all.
basically there might be some people out there who might dig this but I dont. Id rather play any of the Final Fantasy games or any of the other turn based RPGS out there. This was just a waste of $59 in my opinion. If they are going to charge that much for games for this system they better be really good because PS2 games are cheaper and last i checked they had better RPGS for alot less money. New system or not games like this will not keep a system selling!
Definitely Rent this if you really want to check it out before you buy it.

Horrible, even for an xbox 360 game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 16
Date: September 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The idiots at ubisoft got together one day and decided to make the worst role playing game in the history of role playing games.

What they ended up doing to accomplish this was take every negative factor from all past role playing games, and jam them all into one horrifically bad excuse for a video game.

The dialogue in this game is completely irrelevant. There is no reason to pay attention to any of it, anything you need to know you'll figure out on your own. There is hours of spoken dialogue in this game, none of it bears any purpose. Characters speak, but they say absolutely nothing. Conversations that go like "How are you?" "I am ok." "You look cold" "I am cold" "Thank you". After that waste of programming code, you're allowed to continue on. The spoken dialogue is also done by what have to be the most unproffesional voice actors I've ever heard. They either over emphasize the idiotic personality of the character, or don't give the character any personality at all. You will speed click through all the dialogue in the game, that is if you end up wasting your money on this game.

The game is just one long straight line with random encounters along the way. I spoiled the entire game for you right there. You run forward, fight some monsters, and win the game. That's not worth sixty dollars in my opinion. Ubisoft deliberately released a game after putting absolutely no effort into making it interesting. You get one town of irrelevant and annoying dialogue, where the high point is running around collecting tickets. Final Fantasy X was just a game where you run forward throughout the whole thing, but at least they realized that they had to make their characters slightly interesting.

The battle system is slow, and makes the turn based system of battle look even more ridiculous than ever. It's like the battle system from koudelka, you're on your own grid and use ranged attacks against your enemy who's on their own grid. This is the most irratating system for turn based battle in my opinion. Ubisoft will probably explain that they thought long and hard about it and decided to make a turn based battle system that let's you use strategy to defeat your enemies, they just forgot to plan the actual enemies in the game around this concept. What I mean by that is you fight enemies who can attack every square on your grid, and you gain abilities where you can attack every square on their grid. Chess it is not, more like turn based Rochambeau.

The menus in the game are very time consuming, and were obviously just thrown together and abandoned. You make a weapon in one menu, quit that menu, open a different menu, equip the weapon. You buy a skill in one menu, quit that menu, open a different menu, learn the skill, back out of that part of the menu, equip the skill. Ubisoft apparently thinks that when you make a decision to own something, it's for the sheer joy of knowing that it's not being used as a part of your repitoire.

One are where they obviously invested (wasted) alot of effort was in making neat little companions, which they call "golems". There's alot of them in this game, so you can have fun making them and looking at them. You'll only use one at a time, so the other sixty will have to wait in limbo. Each one is designed to be unique and speak one of two styles of japanese, slow and menacing or high and hyper. They even wrote biographies for each golem, they explain their uniquely irrelevant details.

This game is literally the worst game out for the xbox 360. Yes, even worse than perfect dark zero. Shame on you microsoft, and shame on ubisoft.

Not even so bad it is good...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: September 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Staggeringly dull, haphazardly assembled, and crafted with the loveless automaton hands of a stoned sweatshop, Enchanted Arms presents mind-numbing inaneness from open to close. Saying this game has a poor story and worse dialog is like stating that humans occasionally enjoy a little air. Nonsensical menus contrived with absolutely no care to the innovations of the game style over the last dozen years, dully plodding redundancies in EVERY aspect from "strategery" combat to the anachronistic or trivial mini-games, and an unhealthy obsession the designers had with making the "A" button do everything (including most of what might be considered the fun parts), leave the player permanently dangling in the flatulent wind of offensively bad gameplay.

From appearances, there were 1-2 pretty decent artists on the design team, and the rest were hacks or students with blindfolds. There are a few truly nice views and structures, and it is too bad the entire game couldn't have been done as well. Heightmapped outdoors are often flat and angular with a texture slopped over them, and interiors are hard to enjoy with the flickering seams and uninspired layouts. As a positive, there are a large number of creatures, some with absolutely stunning artwork, very little of it... moving. (Positive as I can manage this soon after playing it!)

In short, I can only think of a very narrow audience that would consider this to be a good game, and I won't name them lest I seem the labeling-type. It isn't even a $20.00 game, when that day comes, save yourself the misery and buy a pizza.

100% lukewarm

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 13 / 28
Date: September 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Bad stuff out of the way first. The dialogue is pretty useless at times and the dialogue that's not useless is very adolescent in nature. I get the feeling that they added a lot of filler text for some reason. They make a point of telling you how to do something simple like climb a ladder, then they tell you again, then they tell you that they just told you before reminding you how to do it just to make sure you didn't forget from the first 3 lessons. If I had the attention span of 2 year old that might be helpful. Given that I'm 28 it's a bit insulting and at best slows down gameplay.

The voice acting is pretty silly too. Some of the speech is still in Japanese, which is pretty lame they didn't bother to translate it. For instance, every time a character fights or a fight ends there's a random voice blurb they say. That's a nice touch and all the human characters have English voices. However, all of the golem characters have voice blurbs too but they're all in Japanese. It's small, but annoying.

I've also got one of the cooler characters that is evidently poisoned or has some negative status effect on her because she's constantly at 1 hitpoint and 1 magic point. I can't seem to find out what's wrong with her through her status sheet in the interface. I even looked through the manual for some info, no dice.

Don't even get me started on the overly-gay guy in your party at first. I'm not saying that to bash someone's sexuality in any way, but this guy is WAY over the top. The interface is also a bit clunky at times and they don't go through some of the stuff that they really should spend time on. For instance they don't really explain what Skill Points are and that you can spend them to improve your character stats and to learn new skills. I was through the first boss before I found the interface to spend skill points to boost stats. At that point I had a huge cache built up so I buffed all my stats but then when I went to learn skills I didn't have any left because I didn't realize you used the same pool of points to boost stats and learn skills. I could have used less instruction on how to use ladder and more on elements like this.

There are some limitations on where you can go and what you can do that surprise me too. You would think you'd get a lot more freedom on a 360 game. I get the feeling that this game was made simply for the sake of having an RPG on this console, not because it was a cool game to make.

The good. The graphics are pretty good and the combat system is decent. Don't get me wrong, I really expect better graphics from the 360, but the stuff in this title is passable. Some of the magic and particle effects are cool, but again, not as spectacular as what I'd expect from 360.

Overall it seems inspired by the Final Fantasy Series with heavy favoring to FF VII, but with elements from pokemon (gotta collect them all) and some elements from the Full Metal Alchemist anime series.

Challenge rating is pretty simple too. I'm not a genius but I've won every single encounter I've run into. Only one or two has been challenging in the least. There's not a way to adjust difficulty that I've been able to find.

I find myself playing the game through, but I don't think it's because it's such a cool game. I think it's because I dig RPGs and I've already paid for this one. The game as a whole seems like it was geared more toward the 12-13 year old crowd.

If you are a DIEHARD RPG fan then you might consider picking up a used copy, but don't expect to be blown away.

Let's rename this one to "Brokeback Arms" (nod)

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 23
Date: December 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I suspect the reason some reviewers liked the game so much better with "subtitles" instead of "voices", may be because they put an embarassingly feminine male character complete with quaint vocal intonations which are unmistakably homosexual in quality. Many typical people who do not respond with interest, enthusiasm and joy at the chortling and sighs of a distinctly non-hetero voice will likely feel very unconfrtable at having their teens and pre-teens absorbed in a game which injects this blatant atypical sexualization into the teen roleplay environment that is Brokeback Arms. Rent it before you buy it or skip it altogether (sorry I rented it) Some things are just deliberately vulgar, subversive, subliminally insidious and JUST WRNOG and compel most people to call it what it is for the sake of trying to ensure no further games of this type are created.

Not the best but it serves the purpose

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: October 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Overall it was not a great game. I am glad I played it, the combat system which I at first did not like grew on me. I found it very linear which is not a problem for me. I avoided most of the side quests so I could just finish the game. So it filled a void where I did not have a RPG to play, so it gets 3 stars from me.

Not worth the money... not even for rpg fans

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: April 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This was the first game we got for our 360 because my brother was buying it and he wanted this. After we started playing it he regretted purchasing it. It is a good looking game but it is very poorly localized and only slightly entertaining. The story doesn't seem to fit together very well and a lot of times you will find yourself wishing you could skip through the repetitive dialog.

As for the actual gameplay you battle on a grid where you can move around and use moves which hit a certain range. This is actually a fairly fun battle system but it slows things down with the game having to load this battle screen every time you get in a random encounter. You do have the ability to create golems and use them to assist you in battle, but you don't have to make them and most of them are not really all that helpful. I justed used my regular characters through the whole game.

If you are an RPG deprived 360 owner you might think this is just what you need, but I would suggest you just skip it. There are many other games on the 360 better than this one. If you don't like any games besides RPGs then why did you buy a 360? Seriously, it would be better to let upcoming RPGs like Mass Effect and Blue Dragon define your xbox 360 RPG experience. If you still want to buy it do NOT pay the $59.00 because you should be able to find it used somewhere cheap.

Buggy game, could have been much better...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 13
Date: November 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

So when i started playing Final Fantasy 13...uh I mean Enchanted Arms, everything was... Seriously, this could easily have been right out of the Final Fantasy vaults. The games looks, feels, and sounds like a Final Fantasy game, just worse. It's an very beautiful game and when it works it's a lot of fun. The story is some kind of FF reject about somebody's magical arms...well it's dumb so I won't go into it.

Instead of materia and stuff like that, you get a whole bunch of golems. That's really the main part of the game. There are only six "characters" in the game that you can play at different times. The rest of the time it a bunch of creatures (golems) which is pretty cool because you have a large variety (40+) different golems to play with.

The worst part about the game is that for some reason it drives my XBox 360 crazy. After playing for a while it locks up and the XBox says that the disc is dirty and can't be read. It's almost like all those pretty graphics overheat the 360. Therefore, you should save VERY frequently. Unfortunately there are a couple of long story driven parts with 2-3 very hard battles that don't let you save in the middle and then crash then game when you're done. I got to replay those lovely parts several times until I could get through the cinematics and dialogue to save.

Speaking of dialogue, there is an unusually large amount of completely useless and silly dialogue that slows down the game.

In the end, if you absolutely FF games and need a fix since they don't release them on XBox then give it a shot buut beware. For everyone else...go play Oblivion again or something.

A RPG that Wins by Default

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: September 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First off, I really liked this game for the fact that i'm a big turn-based RPG fan. So warning to the buyer, Enchanted Arms is an RPG in the truest sense of the phrase. I will start by saying that if you aren't a turn-based RPG fan you should probably rent this game first to see if you like it, it's definitely worth a rental!!! This is a genre that the 360 was missing, though there are other RPG's for the 360, none are Turn based. So let's get started!!

Graphics, Great!! I'd say definitely better than Xbox or PS2, but not Amazing, but I would say "Great". The graphics shine the most in my opinion when in a battle, magic spells and skills shine vibrantly and beautifully!! There are also extra extended skills which are loosely similar to the FFVII limit breaks, which look amazing!! Are the graphics Next-Gen? I would say yes!! Do they compare to other graphically amazing 360 games like Fight Night 3 (just one example)? No it doesn't but at times the game does show 360 power.

Sound, Okay, nothing amazing here at all! Voice over are average, they are good but I have seen better. Background music is typical of your average RPG.

Controls, Great. For a turn-based RPG that is. I mean it is turn based so it controls never get complicated, Menu navigation is really easy and standard I was able to figure out how to upgrade skills, equip, and synthesize golems without ever looking at the manual.

Gameplay, okay this is where and why I decided to give this game a 4 instead of a overall 3. The gameplay is pretty fresh, because of the addition of Golem creating and using them in Battle, which I will touch on a little later. But first the battle system, which is a pretty good combo of Turn-base/strategy, cause your team is place on a grid where you can only move your players anywhere within the grid, of course movements are limited to spaces available and how far a specific character can move. So strategy comes in to play by trying to put yourself in range to attack, heal others, and defend. What really impressed me was the use of Golems, which I can only compare very loosely to Pokemon. Golems are used similar to how Pokemon are used, i.e. to help you fight, heal, protect, etc. This feature adds another level of gameplay to this game which raised this game from "mediocre" to "Very good". Simply because you can capture parts of golems you have fought or randomly find parts to create your own Golems to fight for you. Building different golems is pretty easy and quite addicting, thus far. I am only in the first 25% of the game right now and I am already addicted to creating golems from parts I have found, I only imagine this feature getting better with the ability to build stronger and more interesting golems. Without this feature this would have been a really mediocre RPG. So overall the gameplay holds this title together and great gameplay is what we all look for in a game right?

Story, the story so far seems to be average, like I said I am only 25% in to it so I am hoping this will improve as the game goes on but for right now there is nothing amazing here as far as the story goes.

So overall, if you are a turn based RPG fan and you own a 360 then you will definitely want to pick this game up. But this game is definitely not a ground breaker and definitely not a reason to run out and buy a 360 (there are other games that warrant that). But all in all I can't think of a reason to tell any XBOX 360 turn based RPG fans not buy this game, especially since it is the only one of its kind available for the 360. For others though I would only suggest waiting for a demo or a rental to see if you like what this game does.

I personally am a fan of lots of all Genres of games, with the exception of a lot of strict car driving games, so I thoroughly enjoy this game so far. I could definitely understand an argument for this game not being even close to one of the best RPG's ever, but for the first turn based RPG for the 360 I think it fairs pretty well.

Highly recommended if..

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Normally i dont write reviews for games but this game does deserve one so here i go. I would explain the story itself but thats for you to find out besides its in the back of the box and in most game descriptions so let me get to the point.
1. YES!! Just so you all know one of the characters is indeed gay, really really gay (i, personally, dont have any problems with other's sexuality, some people say if you fear them you like 'em but who knows) But seriously, at the beginning i was susprised, as you know, its not something common in games, but his/her dialogue adds for some of the funny moments of the game. Besides if you dont want him/her to fight you can always remove/change him/her.
2. The graphics seems like out of one of the latest xbox games or early 360, which is great. And as Most RPG's there are a lot of FMV's which would let you wanting to know what happens next.
3. As most RPG's the story is long and immersive.
4. The gameplay requires strategy so it goes far from using your best summon/attack constantly unless you are fighting weak enemies, which as in pokemon or FF can be found almost everywhere.
5. The Golems (think of them as pokemons just so you can understand) are incredible. In the really beginning you have acces to a wolf which is really nice. So as many said before me, you have to collect them all, either by "building them" or fighting with them (and then building them) And some of them are not part of the story, some of them you have to look for, so they really add hours of gameplay and replay value.
6. Some people have mentioned really extensve tutorials, well thats because afterwards nobody would tell you where to go or what to do, so you better pay attention. Besides you can always press A and just skip them, its not that hard, so it really isnt something to complain about.
In conclusion, if you like RPG's -Golden Sun, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, just to name some- you would most likely enjoy this game.

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