Articles
By Spud Gun
Published: Mar. 18, 2007 2:31 PM
The Xbox 360 has been left largely wanting in the RPG category. There is Final Fantasy, but that’s just a brief shower in what is a drought of decent RPG’s. Enchanted Arms is Ubisoft's/FromSoftware's attempt to cater for this neglected genre. This is a game very much rooted in the Japanese turn based RPG game type, which has come as a breath of fresh air to hardcore fans.
The main protagonist is Atsuma, a student of Enchant University in Yokohama City, and he has an magical right arm that seems to nullify enchanting effects, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Atsuma has no idea why his arm is so special, but it unnerves his professors and his fellow students at Enchant Uni as there are those in the world who pursue much stronger forms of magic that could cause a repeat of the apocalyptic war that almost ended the world 1000 years ago. The war started when magically created serving creatures called golems turned on their human masters. The most powerful of all these creatures were the devil golems, and these were sealed away in various cities to protect the world from another catastrophe. You must guide Atsuma and his party through this land, in a quest to understand his gift and to rid the world of the threat of devil golems.
A hero with a magical right arm sounds like a strange concept for a game, but it’s a strange game. You see this from the outset in Atsuma’s interaction with his college friends Makoto and Toyo. Makoto is straight out of ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ and openly has the hots for his friend Toyo. It’s quite bizarre, and yet quite comical. Atsuma however is very annoying at the start, but he becomes less grating as the game progresses and the plot develops. This isn’t helped by the English voice over work which is dreadful and becomes quite cringe worthy at times. You will find yourself skipping through lots of character interaction. Thankfully not all interaction has voice communication, so you don’t have to endure the voice over throughout. There are plenty of tutorials and instruction in the game, perhaps too much. You are told how to activate a button, climb a ladder and smash boxes which seems excessive as they all involve the ‘A’ button and the player is prompted to press ‘A’ for the specific action when Atsuma is facing the appropriate object. The game also invites the user to interact at various stages, usually in the form of selecting a response to a question. This seems to be a token gesture to make the player feel more involved as opposed to contributing any real value to the game. Enchant Arms is a very linear game, and from time to time it feels it. You find yourself wandering from one place to another across a bland looking wilderness randomly encountering golems to do battle with on the way. Sometimes these battles happen within a couple of seconds of each other which can be frustrating, but you have the option of escaping a battle should it get too tiresome.
You get your first taste of battle soon into the game, and this is where the game shines. Battling bad guys is what the game is all about, and it’s very well implemented. After several battles, you start to see that there is more to combat than meets the eye. This is classic turn based combat with encounters occurring randomly. The battlefield consists of 2 halves of what resembles a small chess board (6x4 in size) with your enemies on the opposite half to you. Unlike chess, you cannot move into your enemies section and they cannot move into yours. Character selection is important in battle as each character has a guiding element to their attacks, and opposing elements do the most damage with like elements doing the least. You must move each character into position and then select an attack. The area of damage of an attack will appear in red, with different attacks having different damage patterns. Ranged attacks will hit the back of the board whereas close range attacks are most effective on the front line going toe to toe with your enemy. Placing of the characters is crucial as you quickly learn that grouping them close together invites close patterned attacks from your opponent. The order that you carry out every action is very much at the front of your mind. Having a character cast a protect spell before other characters are moved into the area affected may result in characters moving into the affected area after the spell has been cast. The order of events is critical in wining battles, and it’s this planning and strategy that makes the mechanism so engrossing. Once you have entered a sequence of actions for your party, you can execute the sequence or cycle back through the actions allowing you to change your strategy as you see fit. One problem with the static battle view is that it is sometimes hard to see the characters. Some are so small that you actually don’t see them, and others are so large that they obscure the view of others. Pressing ‘X’ cycles through a handful of view points so it isn’t a huge problem, but it would have been nice to have a rotational view bound to an analogue stick. Naturally enough a character is out of action (but not dead) when its hit points reach zero and all opposing characters must be dispatched for you to win and be duly rewarded with money (in the form of Tabs) and the obligatory experience points that contribute to levelling up your characters. Each character has a VP score that drops by 1 for each turn of battle, so it pays to finish your opponents off quickly. Your characters VP rating will not reset between battles like hit points or EP (energy used to perform any attack or defensive move in battle), and will continue to drop until it is recharged at a health station where all your characters get their VP rating restored. This isn’t so easy on long treks between cities with no health station, and if your VP rating reaches 0, a hefty sneeze will floor your character. So this must be monitored, and you must swap characters in and out to make sure your party is strong. Atsuma cannot be swapped out however, so if his LV level reaches 0 you have to live with it and factor that in to your battle strategy until it can be restored.
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