Enchanted Arms (Xbox 360) Review
Posted by Chris McCarver on 09.07.2006
The first Japanese RPG for the 360... I hope the second one's an improvement.
Enchanted Arms
Platform: XBox 360 (exclusive)
Publisher: UbiSoft
Developer: FromSoftware
Release Date: August 29, 2006
ESRB Rating: T (alcohol reference, mild fantasy violence, mild language, simulated gambling, suggestive themes)
Review by CHRIS McCARVER
You have to hand it to Microsoft, when they see a pervasive issue hindering their success, they take steps to resolve the problem (eventually). The original XBox was considered a sales failure in Japan, largely since the games library were largely developed by western gamemakers, games that didn't speak to the eastern gaming mindset. The house that Gates built did not want to see the same thing happen with the second and current iteration of their home-gaming platform, so one of the launch-time goals became doing whatever possible to snag that Japanese gaming audience. Hence why you'll be seeing more Japanese-created games, especially in the RPG category, and hence why you're reading this review of the first such Japanese RPG for the XBox 360, Enchanted Arms. Whether this entry from FromSoftware (infamous for the seemingly never-ending Armored Core mech-combat franchise) will light the Japanese sales charts ablaze is still up in the air, so for now we'll see if this title deserves to spin in American 360 disc-trays.
Graphics
The graphics are a couple shades better than your run-of-the-mill import RPG. Like most roleplayers coming out of the land of the Rising Sun, the character models are heavily anime-influenced, larger-than-normal eyes, heavily-moussed hairstyles and all. The characters' clothing textures scream of next-gen rendering, with great attention paid to stitching and fabric texture. The characters do have an unfortunate lack of attention paid to collision detection, as all that hair can be seen passing through shoulders and characters fallen during battle segments can be seen with body parts phasing into the ground. Unfortunately, the graphics displayed during the game's plentiful dialogue sequences one of the thematic mainstays I hate in this genre, wherein largely static stills of the characters, two at a time, are projected onto the main in-game display with text blurbs cycling back and forth. For a next-gen title, this manner of dialogue exchange makes Enchanted Arms look more than a bit dated.
The environments are lavishly designed with architecture that melds the futuristic and the fantastic. Stonework villas and rustic town squares are set side by side with buildings more at home in the world of Babylon 5. The camera controls have a good follow rate behind the main character (which naturally represents your entire party), though a small number of the environments suffer from "Resident Evil camera angle syndrome," where the character moves around with the camera fixed at a single position, abruptly cutting angles when the character moves into an area too far for the camera to follow. Fortunately, this woeful camera system is only present in a few environments, and largely the standard left-stick-to-move-the-character/right-stick-to-move-the-camera method reigns supreme.
Gameplay
Set in a futuristic world that has spent a millennium rebuilding itself after a global catastrophe called the "Golem War," players assume the role of Atsuma, a dim-witted lazy student at a university for magicians ("enchanters" per the game's lexicon). Like many RPG protagonists (all too many, in my humble opinion), Atsuma is one of those unlikely heroes with some form of hidden power that you know will either be the main crux of the story or at least a major element of it. In Atsuma's case, it's the fact that something about his right arm causes enchantments to either go wrong or instantly deactivate. Since he's matriculating at a college for enchanters, this particular quality makes him something of an outcast for everyone, teacher and student alike, save for his best friends, popular overachiever Toya and his iffeminately gay sidekick Makoto. (Those gay/lesbian readers of 411 Games, please don't take that as a slam against the lifestyle; Makoto is such a blatantly bad gay stereotype, so trust me when I say he's the last gay character one would choose as a role model.) The trio decides to cut classes for a town festival, and of course, as sure as a blitzball game called due to tidal wave, an unexplained event drops nearly every resident unconscious (except the three main characters, natch) and sends the trio on a journey of rescue and discovery which has tragic consequences that sets the main story in motion.
The meat of any videogame RPG is the combat, and Enchanted Arms has it in spades. Combat in this game is done on a grid-style battlefield a la Final Fantasy Tactics, in which each turn consists of feeding movement, attack, defense, and healing instructions to everyone in your party before the turn begins. After the marching orders have been doled out, each of the player characters carry out their parts, after which the enemy characters do the same. The combat engine has an element of strategy to it, as all attack abilities have a certain range and hit pattern, so the placement of each character determines who all gets hit by a given attack. Health and magic points reset to full after each battle and you can retry battles from the beginning if you die, so where does the challenge come from? Each of the characters have an amount of vitality points that decreases after every battle according to how long the battle takes and whether any of your characters didn't make it out. You won't lose any vitality points if you can take out your enemies before they can even get an attack off, but each round that the battle is prolonged means a deduction and an even higher one if one of your party members gets taken out. On the upside, you can automate a number of the party combat commands and holding down the Y button will allow you to fast-forward through the pretty but often repetitive attack animations.
Unfortunately, the fact that there is a lot of combat in Enchanted Arms means you'll be doing your level best to breeze through each level as quickly as possible, as random combat encounter events pop up every fifteen to twenty seconds, so getting lost in a level means a slow whittling away of your vitality points. The vitality point system has significant challenges to overcome. First, there is no item findable in chests or buyable in item shops that will replenish your vitality points; they can only be filled back up at "recharge stations" sparsely pockmarked around the gamescape. You can opt to run away from battles, but the vitality point penalty is quite high, almost as much as the penalty a character suffers when keeling over in a battle. While having zero vitality points doesn't mean your character can't join a battle, the character will only have at battle's beginning one health point and one magic point (gee, thanks). And as said before, you can't walk five steps without finding yourself in a battle, so vitality points are going to mean more to players than even the in-game health points or currency.
The characters each have a variety of customization in terms of upgrading their signature weapons. Special note should be taken that each character and attack is tied to a specific element, such as fire or water. Attacking a character with an opposite element causes double damage, but like elemental attacks are reduced in damage by half. The item shops also allow you to create "golems," artificial lifeforms that are basically low-powered extra combatants useable during battles. They range from cute little Pokemon-types to adorable anime girls in maid outfits and nearly everything between, and their combat abilities are just as kawaii. Golems can also be hunted in various areas of the gameworld in addition to being purchased, but unfortunately leveling up your golems does little, so players will find themselves simply replacing their golems rather than continuing to upgrade them.
As far as learning new game concepts, Enchanted Arms is rife with tutorials both short and sweet and lengthy and boring. And even the short and sweet tutorials all take the same format: Atsuma finds something he's not familiar with, such as (dear God) a ladder, then his compatriots belittle his intelligence before explaining how to climb a ladder, swim, flip a switch, and most of all of that involves simply walking up to the item in question and hitting the A button. Sadly, all the short tutorials are largely for instructing you how to do something that common sense would walk you through regardless.
Sound
And it's here, in the area of audio, where Enchanted Arms exceedingly fails. I have to give Ubisoft credit for allowing players to select whether to listen to the voice acting in the original Japanese or the dubbed-over English. Reason being, the English voice track will make your ears bleed with its depths of horrible. Atsuma comes off as a lamebrain surfer-dude who places his accents in the wrong part of a sentence and constantly mispronounces Makoto's name (ma-KAH-toe). And speaking of Makoto, as I stated before, his voice actor ramps up the lisping gay guy motif that he becomes little more than a pale stereotype. All of the voice acting is equally as bad in the English track, so even if you're not one of those anime fans who, like me, prefer watching the stuff (and playing imported games) with the original dialogue and subtitles, go this route and save yourself the pain.
The music tracks are serviceable and conversely nowhere near as annoying as the English voice acting. Primarily composed of the kind of orchestral anthems one would expect from this sort of title, Enchanted Arms' music score is distinctive enough to entertain you through ebb and flow of the game, but it isn't so intrusive that you'll find your self trying to scratch the tracks out of your brain, which probably means the score won't find its way on any RPG-soundtrack cult-popularity lists.
Lasting Appeal
For those looking for an open-sandbox style of RPG, Enchanted Arms is not the way to go. The game's storyline is very linear, and with battle-sequences that whittle away at your vitality points popping out of the woodwork on a constant basis, exploration really isn't encouraged. In fact, the nature of the battle system would seem to greatly frown upon players doing anything from getting from one prescripted plot point to the other. The very nature of the game itself seems to discourage doing anything but rushing headlong through the game's singular plotline, since it offers very little in the way of story branching.
Fortunately, all those lovable little golems you've collected can be ported into XBox Live, where in you can assemble a team of the deadly little critters and pit them against other golem groupings in pick-up or ranked battles. Most of the golems are only collectable in sidequests that are only available towards the very end of the game, so playing through the majority of the 40-hour-plus main quest becomes essential to even reaching any of the unlockable golems.
Fun Factor
The golem collection adds something of a less-juvenile and less-inane Pokemon element to what otherwise is just another Japanese RPG that brings little new innovation to the table. The plot elements and character archetypes are nothing we haven't seen before in much better and more well-rounded games. Some of the stylistic touches all too prevalent in import RPGs make themselves all too much at home in Enchanted Arms may make fans of the genre feel right at home, but no novices to the Japanese RPG world will largely find themselves scratching their heads before going back to checking when True Crime: Streets of L.A. will make the 360 backwards compatibility list. (What? It is now? Cool.)
The 411
Enchanted Arms is a novel addition to the 360 library and it will give RPG fans hope for more import roleplayers on Microsoft's shiny white box, but for players that consider Japanese RPGs too bloody weird or formulaic, this title won't change their minds. I have to hand it to Ubisoft for taking a chance on bringing such a title to the 360, but, given FromSoftware's notorious lack of creativity in their flagship Armored Core series, calling Enchanted Arms just another Japanese RPG that offers little new (besides the golem-collection element) is not much of a stretch. A serviceable game, but nothing never done before.
Graphics
8.0
Decent character modeling, lavish environments, minor collision detection problems, outdated dialogue exchanges
Gameplay
6.5
Unique element of creature collection, largely needless tutorials, random battles way too frequent
Sound
5.5
Nicely composed soundtrack, horrible English voice acting but swappable with the original Japanese vocals
Lasting Appeal
7.0
Wide variety of collectable golems, the majority of which are only available towards game's end
Fun Factor
7.0
Great for fans of the genre, long in-depth storylines, RPG neophytes won't be converted
