Enchanted Arms

JPRGs used to be quality gaming experiences back in the day of Final Fantasy VII. So much so was my nostalgia for the genre that I simply had to get Enchanted Arms for the Xbox 360 2 years after it was released. Okay, so maybe I didn’t get it straight away but I did play it as soon as I got it.

However, once I got it and started playing it, I committed the RPG sin of getting stuck and then never playing it again. As time passed me by and my achievement hunter OCD kicked in 2011, I kept looking at it thinking it should be an easy finish. All I have to do is pick it up and start playing it again. But that involved revisiting the point at which I was stuck balls deep into a game I haven’t played for 5 years. Then 6 years. And so on. And I kept putting it off. Anyway, I eventually got my courage up and dived in to the game again this year.

It was as expected, I had no idea how the game worked anymore and spent the best part of two hours trying to get to grips with the control system again. Once I did, however, it all came flooding back to me and I was able to get out of the tight spot I was in and finish the game a mere 15 hours later - a small amount of time in JRPG world. That said, my total play time was double the average so I sucked this one up big time.

The story follows Atsuma who takes the Japanese-English conversion award for Most Annoying Protagonist by a country mile. He is whiney, stupid and never listens even when wiser characters are giving him advice. In fact, he goes on ignoring everyone right until the end of the game. I’ll cover this in the achievements section because it irritated the shit out of me.

Atsuma has got something wrong with his arm that means he is a secret destructive weapon of some kind. It could have been explained to me but the beginning of the game was so far away from me completing it that I can’t remember what was and wasn’t said – for more information on the story, use Google. But basically he goes on a quest to save his friend after the Ice Queen attacks his home town. Along the way he makes some new friends, makes some enemies and finds other people who are also annoying, but nothing compared to Atsuma.

The gameplay mainly focuses around a grid based combat system and uses random battle encounters as its way of dealing with combat. Random Battle Encounters is now archaic based on any new RPGs I’ve played recently where you can see the enemies in the field and chose to avoid them. That said, it worked for Lost Odyssey which was pretty good so no complaints about random battle encounters from me. The grid combat system makes more sense in general fighting principles. You take it in turns to move and then strike, which adds a much more tactical element than I’ve seen previously.

In addition to your main party of four humans, there are hundreds of golems to collect which will fight alongside you. This again makes the tactical possibilities and outcomes almost endless. This can have its own issues though as you can be spread quite thin and finding the best combinations to win fights could be time consuming in its self. That said, the combat is quite forgiving in that you can win the majority of fights by using the core of the main human characters.

The sound effects are annoying. I won’t say more than that. The world design is intricate but it’s not expansive. There is no world map and the exploration is limited to three dimensional planes which limits secret and optional location areas. They still built in the ultimate dungeon though but I will confess to not completing it – there wasn’t an achievement requirement me to do so.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

All of the achievements are earned by playing through the main story which is why they are all secret. However, there is one massive caveat to this. Toya, who is one of Atsuma’s friends from the beginning of the game, is being controlled by the Ice Queen. At the end of the game he will ask you a question. If you answer this question in a certain way, you will cut off the main story before you can get the last two achievements available to you if you don’t have back up save files.

So two pieces of advice; always have a back up save and follow Atsuma’s idiot personality to the end or else you will lose out on 30 hours of gameplay and have to replay the whole thing from scratch. You have been warned.

Downloadable –N/A

Enchanted Arms is a mediocre JPRG with irritating characters and questionable storyline. It doesn’t offer replay value but then again I can’t think of a JRPG that does other than Final Fantasy VII. This one won’t live long in the memory though and I’m glad to see the back of it.

Beyond Eyes (Xbox ONE)

This game popped up on a friend feed and looked like a really easy quick completion. Destiny is going nowhere fast mainly due to my apathy of not wanting to find other people to play with and Borderlands has only recently been completed so I thought I would treat myself to an easy 1,000 points. I was right on the easy but it came at a price.

Beyond Eyes follows the story of Rae, a ten year old girl who was blinded by fireworks. After the accident, she is visited by a cat called Nani (not the former Manchester United footballer) on a semi-regular basis. One day Nani stops showing up so it’s up to the blind ten year old to find out what happened to the cat... HANG ON, WHAT! A ten year old blind girl is allowed to go wandering off by herself because a cat that isn’t even hers stops showing up? Rae has got bigger issues than a missing stray. She has the most fucked up careless parents in the world.

Anyway, poor parenting aside, the gameplay sees you exploring the world as a blind girl does – using sounds to determine her surroundings. The more you explore the world, the more colour comes into it and more of your surroundings are revealed. You come across many things in the world which are only identified as you get close to them. It’s kind of effective as a gameplay mechanic however, some of the levels are really hard to explore... given the fact that Rae is blind. Chapter 5 is the most frustrating because the colour covers itself over after you have explored it making it nigh on impossible to work out which way you are meant to be going.

The sound effects are there to drive the game but given the fact that Rae is blind and it’s supposedly all you have, the music causes the game to become quite depressing before you finish it, despite its short length.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

With only 10 achievements I would have thought this was a quick one but the way I played meant that the first achievement I unlocked was for completing the story. The majority of the achievements are secret and involve having to do something in certain chapters with only two exceptions.

The first one that was a pain was finding everything’s true identity. It’s a pain because it’s quite easy to miss things in a game where the main character is blind and it does become time consuming exploring everywhere because Rae moves at about 0.05 miles per hour. The last thing I found was the dog, which carries its own achievement, and the reason was this was that I had to take the blind girl directly towards a dangerous unidentified snarling beast... only to find it’s a nice doggy. Bullshit. Why would I want the blind girl to have her face ripped off by a dog? For an achievement called Bravery of course!

The last one that was a semi-pain in the ass was finding all of the Nani experiences (and no, these are not experiences found on a football field). These relate to Rae’s apparent ability to sense where her cat friend has been previously and some of these are off the beaten track. This doesn’t really make any sense because you are following Nani so why would you need to look out of the way of the main path?

Downloadable Content – N/A

In summary, Beyond Eyes offers a short and unenjoyable gaming experience that doesn’t make any sense in terms of parental care or the real world. It becomes depressing after about an hour and is even more depressing come the end of the game. Zero replay value and in terms of content it’s not worth paying more than £10 for.

Borderlands

So Borderlands is one of the more critically acclaimed games I’ve managed to complete recently. Apparently loads of people love it because... reasons. I will go in to those reasons shortly, however if you want to save yourself the bother of reading the rest of this review, I thought it was a bag of wank. And the reason I’ve started the review this way is because I wish someone has said to me, ‘here you go, you can have the achievements. You don’t have to play the game.’ It would have saved me a lot of bother.

Firstly, the story. You are one of four generic, personalityless douchebags on a bus on some kind of search for some kind of treasure on the unoriginally named unoriginal planet, Pandora, which is basically a rip off of Mad Max or any other obligatory post apocalyptic fictional environment.

Apparently there is meant to be some kind of playful humour to the game and the cartoony look sort of tries to be back this up, but at the end of the day, no cartoon effects can numb the pain of gun metal grey and pooh brown environmental backdrops. If the ‘dialogue’ was meant to be humorous, it fails on an epic level. For a start, there isn’t enough of it. The game even tries to trick you into thinking there is a lot by showing two characters with actual spoken lines talking at the beginning of the game and then nothing of note for the next ten hours. I’m not even over-egging these two character’s involvement, it’s minimal.

My point is that the story doesn’t add any immersive value to the game. Anyone who loves Borderlands for the story or colourful characters needs to wake up by playing Saints Row.

Sound and graphics have a lot less bearing on my enjoyability with a game these days but the sound can really ruin it. Borderlands does okay in this area. The sound doesn’t take over, which is exactly want you want from the game that endeavours to keep you playing for over 60 hours, and it remains relative to the environment for the most part.

Now the gameplay... I’m not really sure how I can go about this without upsetting the entire world... I was expecting a game filling with lots of colourful enemies with a lot of variety while I go about killing them with a wide variety of weapons. The reality is you fight, in order: some guys; some dogs; some birds; some other guys; some weird aliens; more guys; more dogs. That’s it for the variety throughout the entire game with the exception of two boss battles. Whoppie.

In terms of the guns, this is just a fuckass of a game. Everything drops guns, even the birds and the dogs. However, none of them are any good. I really struggled to get genuine better weapons throughout the game and it even has a colour-coding system to tell you that some guns are better than others, except when they aren’t. Which is all the time. I had a orange weapon for ages despite the fact that it was worse than my green gun because it was rare and worthless, like I was expecting it to transform into some super enemy killing badass weapon just by holding on to it. I mean there is no way to improve or keep your favourite guns, they just become irrelevant and then get replaced by new similar ones.

Another note on the weapons is that they don’t have much variety either other than they might come with an elemental damage effect which you cannot unequip or change. They also have supposedly humorous names as well but at this point, I was just thinking that the game was up its own ass.

Achievements – 1,750 Points – 80 Achievements

Now one of the main concepts of Borderlands is the fact that it is meant to be played with others in a co-op setting but about 90% of the game and its achievements can be obtained through solo play which I’m all for. However, I think half the reason the world felt so empty was due to the fact that you are supposed to play it with others so that there would be at least one other person who isn’t a total psycho to keep you company.

I specifically targeted the co-op only achievements first to get them out of the way. There are only 7 out of the 80 achievements that actually require you to play with a co-op partner and of these six, only one of them requires you to play with other people and not use a second controller. Basically you have to play online with people to get it as it is a viral achievement for playing with the creators.

As I mentioned earlier there are four different characters you can choose to play as and each one of them comes with an achievement  to use their special ‘power’ to kill a certain amount of enemies. As you don’t get this skill until level five, it basically means you have to play the opening of the game four times. Not cool guys. Not cool.

There is one notable achievement out of the rest that’s more interesting for its name than anything else. If you succeed in jumping on the head of an enemy you will do a small amount of damage. If you succeed in killing said enemy, you will earn the achievement, ‘My Brother is an Italian Plumber,’ an obvious reference to the Super Mario franchise.

The rest of the achievements in the main can be obtained just by playing the game and completing every mission you come across it’s really hard not to be able to do this. Unfortunately, there is an achievement for attaining level 50 as part of the main game. You do however unlock the ability to play through the whole game again to get to level 50. This was an option I didn’t need to use though because of the copious amounts of DLC.

Downloadable Content

There’s a grand total of 4 DLCs to extend the Borderlands adventure which made my late playing of the game an advantage for getting the level 50 achievement.

The first of these is Borderlands’ own interpretation of the zombies theme that seems to be a requirement of every franchise for the last ten years. You visit Ned’s Zombie Island and have to complete a bunch of missions, the most painful of which sees you collecting zombie brains. You have to collect a total of 435 by shooting zombies in the head and collecting their brains; a concept that doesn’t make any sense. If you shoot them in head, surely you would destroy the brain?

The second sees you take on Mad Moxxi’s Underdome, a concept so Mad Max, it may as well have been called Thunderdome. This one is designed for four players to take on waves upon waves of enemies. Even if you do this the easy way (get to level 50 and then plug in a second controller with a level 1 character) it still takes in excess of two and a half hours to complete just one of the things you have to do three fucking times. It’s a grind-fest made worse by the fact that there is more attempted hilarity in the dialogue throughout which, after your first two and half hour run, will grate on you worse than a... cheese-grater.

The third instalment of the DLC is the one which attempted to fuck me over – The Secret Armory of General Knox. Playing online with others, something you are encouraged to do I might add, will cause the game to glitch if you end up with people using mods. At this point, every fucker out there uses mods. What happens is that it will add all missions you haven’t yet got to your mission list and if you haven’t completed all of the missions after finishing the main quest line, it makes it impossible to complete all the remaining missions in the DLC. There is a way around this though but you have to either break the graphics to get through the door or modify your save file to remove the glitched missions – something that is against Microsoft’s terms and conditions. Needless to say I was not fucking impressed that playing the game normally caused a requirement for me to stack 100 medikits against a door that won’t open in order to complete the game.

The fourth and final DLC, Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution, sees you go up against all the annoying Claptraps – complete with totally annoying dialogue – so they can annoy you while you kill them. This was actually pretty straight forward with the exception of the collectibles. You have to kill so many claptraps to get all of the rare drops from said claptraps of which there are 68 to collect. However, once you have collected say all of the oil cans, they will still continue to drop. It’s basically another 6 hours worth of grinding out kills to get all the items required which succeeds in making the game stop being fun, something that Gearbox have become experts at.

That above covers every area of Borderlands that pissed me off... pretty much the entire game after the first ten hours or so. I don’t get why people think it’s fun and I don’t understand why people still play it online doing the same thing over and over again, but to each their own I guess. This kind of rubbish certainly isn’t mine.