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.