Solid JRPG, but it lacks polish.

User Rating: 7.8 | Enchanted Arms X360
By sazreal | Review Date:
This game is mixed with me right now. At times, you can feel the classic RPG elements in it, the random fights, leveling up, beautiful graphics. The story is there, but to me it is rather boring by its producer's trying to make you more drawn in to the characters and their back stories. I have ended up pressing the "A" as fast as I can to progress through some of these lulls, because the characters voice over is horrible. Not only that, most of the time they'll only say a couple words before you have to hit the "A" button again, which is a nod to the classical style of RPG story progression, but it's annoying in this game to me for some reason. Which I guess is really where this game fails... lack of gameplay creativity. It's got the new generation graphics, but the gameplay elements are there from the SNES era. you'll pretty much only use the B, A, Y, Start, and direction pad for most of the game. Yet every time you come to a "new" obstacle, they will go through a long progression of speeches to tell you you need to hit the A button to use that object. We should all know by now that "A" is the default "use" button and is generally hit first on trial-and-error situations. They also display the "Press 'A' to use" prompt on all interactive objects, so it's really just a waste of time to listen to some character call your player stupid because he doesn't know how to use a ladder. Which is another flaw with this game, the characters themselves are not standouts.

The main character often comes accross as having the IQ of a mentally handicapped person, yet he's the one who weilds this "golem" arm and all think he's got the greatest power to defeat the "Devil Golems". The main character often comes off being depressing and whiney, if I was in his party I would have left at the beginning when I had to show him how to use a ladder. It really seems like the producers are trying to say that the user's of the game are virgins to video games. The levels are often beautiful, but pointless "A to B" fashion, and really linear. You won't be wanting to go and re-explore the game after you beat it. I've found that most of the houses that you can enter, are pointless ventures that turn up nothing, so after a while you don't even want to talk to NPC's unless you have to, because they don't really give you anything valuable as far as information goes to better items. It looks like they put the foundation work for that in there, but then decided they wasted too much production time and filled it all with useless interactivity.

Where this game really does shine though, is the actual battle elements. The battles take place on a grid, and you can move your characters certain number of cells and attacks only hit certain cells as well. So you can play a lot of strategy in this sense and maximize your attacts. Most of the general battles will take 2 maybe 3 rounds at max, depending on where they place your party on the grid. It is random and sometimes they'll all be scattered to one side, so you spend a couple turns trying to get some of the direct ranged characters into play, and sometimes this will kill you off to. So far though, this has been the main addiction for me in this game, trying to kill the enemies in a good strategy. So having a team that complements each other is critical to success against bosses.

Overall, I'd say this is a solid RPG that is worth a try on the 360, since if you don't like the story, you can just rapid-tap your way through it and not really be lost to where you need to go and what to do. It brings hope to me that producers will bring other games of this genre over to the 360.

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