Boring environments, poor balancing, and a stale plot ruin the potential of the innovative battle system.
Graphically, Enchanted Arms looks nice, for the most part it is bright and coloerful, and technicly proficient. However a lot of areas have some pretty severe lighting issues, and the developers clearly have no prior experience with normal and specular mapping, leaving some areas far too bright, or very dark but stupidly shiny, leaving the screen almost black, with speckles of white.
That said, the characters look nice and animate well, and the majority of environments are nice to look at and well put together.
Enchanted Arms has a lot of pacing problems, the game major flaw is it's complete inability to provide appropriate strength enemies for your level, this is not helped by the large amount of backtracking through previously visited areas, with the same, weak enemies.
Unfortunately, because of the inbalance of opponent strengths, this leaves you a painfull choice if you wish to become powerful enough to beat some of the games rediculously overpowered bosses. You either grind on these much weaker enemies, and take literally, tens of hours to reach an appropriatte power level, or you can simply boost your HP by abusing the ability to buy skill points, and winning heaps of money at the casino.
Unfortunately, the more logical option is by cheating the casino, which extremely tedious, and could be totally avoided had the developers included a few more areas in the game, and worked a little longer on balancing.
The game does have some good however, in the form of it's battle system. You are given two grids of 3x4 squares, one fo you, and one for your enemy to move around on. You choose your moves, and press the play button to watch the turn unfold, or you can select an auto option, where the computer will choose a simple action.
There are some other changes from the traditional RPG formula too, such as VP. Each character starts every fight on full HP and EP (Equivilent to MP) but after each fight, your VP is reduced. When it reaches 0, your character becomes tired and unable to fight, and from then on begins each battle with 1hp and 1ep. This is an interesting mechanic which allows you to concentrate more on beating your enemy, and not constantly checking your menu to see how much HP/MP your characters have left, and whether or not it's enough to make a bolt for the save point.
You can also create 'golems' creatures which can fight alongside you instead of your human teammates, there are a decent number of these to collect, but sadly, most of them are rubbish, and there is no reason to collect more than the ones you need. A missed opportunity for an achievement that may have added 5-6 hours of gameplay onto the games main quest, which should take between 30 and 35 hours to get through. Enchanted Arms plot follows what feels like a massively straightforward version of a generic anime/JRPG plotline. Atsuma, the games protagonist has little memory of his past, and as the plot unfolds in a very generic and unimaginitive manner.
While the game does have some very limited sidequests, they dont add too much to the game.
The game presents little in the way of complex puzzles, with most dungeon areas you will need to collect 2 or 3 amounts of ether from terminal scattered around the dungeon in order to activate the exit, and continue. None of these are placed cleverly, or require any thought to get to. You just get the feeling they needed something to keep the player running around.
While Enchanted Arms has an overwhelming number of bad features, including the terrible voice acting (although thankfully, you can switch to the much more proficient Japanese track) it still manages to be enjoyable thanks to it's innovative battle system, and well designed characters, despite the sheer amount of lost potential. We can only hope that the developers learn from this, and create a much better experience next time.