Gaming Age
5th October 2006
Enchanted Arms
The best old school-style, next gen RPG so far.
When someone uses the term RPG, it can be difficult to know exactly what kind of role-playing game they are referring to. You've got your real time RPGs, your MMORPGs, and of course turn-based RPGs. I enjoy all three types to one degree or another, but I happened to grow up playing the turn-based type. Sure I played Legend of Zelda on the NES and all the versions that followed, but it was Squaresoft that really drew me like a moth to the flame.
The Japanese company grabbed hold and just wouldn't let go.
All the way up through the Super NES, Playstation and PS2 I was an avid follower. I even collected about a half dozen Final Fantasy 7 wall scrolls including one of Aerith (Aeris in the US version). Final Fantasy X was the reason I bought a PS2 and shifted the Dreamcast down one slot on my A/V switch.So it should come as no surprise that I've been disappointed in the lack of turn based role-playing games available on the XBox. Sure there were real time RPGs like Fable and the Star Wars RPGs, Knights of the Old Republic. But none of the turn based variety I grew up with. It was unfortunately the same with the XBox 360 until just recently.
Though it's not developed by Squaresoft, Enchanted Arms is as close a facsimile as anyone could come without actually having Squaresoft do the development. It doesn't matter to me though. If Squaresoft isn't interested let Ubisoft and From Software run with it.
Which is exactly what they did. Enchanted Arms is an excellent game with an intriguing story. In the game, you play a rapscallion, student Enchanter named Atsuma. He skips class causes trouble, but has a big heart, a strong sense of honor and an Enchanted right arm? Which is incidentally where the game gets its name. "Arms" does not refer to weapons in the typical sense. It's actually a minor mistranslation.Anyway, the techniques of magic have been lost long ago and all they have left are the skills to enchant Golems to act as their servants. That and the ability to look the other way when one of your boyhood buddies is a flaming homosexual hell bent on hooking up with your best friend. The closest the game has gotten to outright sexual connotation is when Makoto (the homo) asks Toya if he likes the taste of the pink pickle in the lunch he made for him. It's pretty damn gay in my opinion, but unless you are a 'roid raging homophobic it doesn't have to interfere with the game.
So everything's moving along gaily when all hell breaks loose and Atsuma is forced to grow up and take the world on his shoulders. Which is incidentally when you start jumping into the combat system.
The combat system is actually more reminiscent of the plot-less Final Fantasy Tactics than any of the previous Square epics. Your characters fight on two opposing 16 square grids. Each character has a certain amount of movement and ranges that vary with each type of attack. Some moves will affect a pattern like checkers or crosses; others affect only the square in front of you. There are attacks that cover a wide range and do smaller damage or affect a row of enemies to a lessening degree as you move further away.You have the typical stats of HP for hit points and EP for energy. Each time you start a fight your HP and EP are full, a departure from the classic RPG. Instead of draining HP or EP over time you have VP or Vitality Points that must be replenished at health stations. If your VP drops to 0, you are forced to fight with 1 HP and 1 EP. I'm not clear what effect it has on the game other than making sure you rotate characters with low VP out of your party and replace them with fresh ones.
Other nice features they've added to the game include the ability to save anywhere and the ability to restart a battle if you get your ass handed to you. This won't help you if your party is not configured properly or if you forgot to buy enough healing potions or resurrection powders, but it is cool if you just happened to screw up your strategy.
Your characters all level up at the same rate regardless of whether they are in your party or not and as you gain experience points you also gain skill points. Only characters that actually fight earn skill points so you still have to rotate your party around to make sure your skills are balanced. Skill points are used for two purposes. First they can be spent on increasing your characters' attributes like maximum HP, maximum EP, attack damage or support spell strength. Second, if the character in question is a Human, then you can use skill points to learn new skills. Skills can be found or purchased in any of the many stores along the way. New skills you can learn give you different attack patterns, the ability to heal party members, reduce damage on yourself and party members or negate status effects to name a few.One of the central concepts of the game is the use of Golems. Golems are basically automatons with a pre-configured and static set of skills. Some excel at dealing range damage, some are strong melee fighters, some are focused healers and others are more balanced. Golems are synthesized from spare parts you find around the map or buy in stores. There is a list of golem parts that you can buy from any store, but some golems can only be obtained by defeating them in battle and synthesizing a new one out of the scrap parts.
Other than these few differences however, it is very much like the typical turn-based RPG. You move your party members, pick their attacks then sit back and watch the show. Each party member performs an animation with cool visual effects and you see the telltale damage numbers pop up over your enemies' heads. You can see your opponents' Hit Points to better gauge what abilities to use and to judge how effective your attacks are. There are even the typical element based attacks where water defeats fire or air defeats earth. Which is just one more reason why you want to have a balanced party.
Since that about wraps up the combat engine, the next thing worth mentioning is the voice acting. One of the negative aspects of the Japanese animation style that is constantly pointed out to me is the way the English voice actors speak too quickly or use rampant run-on sentences. Well that phenomenon is quite apparent in Enchanted Arms. So not only do you have a homosexual Makoto that speaks with a flamboyant feminine lisp, but you have a bunch of Japanese to English translation that comes off as unnatural and rushed. You could call it the Speed Racer effect. The saving grace is the fact that you can disable the English voices and listen to the Japanese voice acting with English subtitles. It makes it more like the traditional RPGs anyway since it wasn't too long ago that you couldn't put full digitized dialog of multiple languages into a forty or fifty hour game.Where the game really blows me away is in the graphics department. The environments are absolutely stunning. It's exactly what you'd expect from a Squaresoft title just from a different group of guys. The cinematics are unbelievable, the cityscapes and environments are chocked full of detail and original style. It's truly something to behold and one of the main reasons why I adore this style of game. I can't seem to get enough of the artistic representation of these alternative universes. It seems like I should be able to say more, but words just don't seem to do it justice. Suffice to say the game has excellent graphics.
So at least for the time being and for myself personally, Enchanted Arms is a great game. With the Japanese dialog, the stunning visuals and the solid turn-based combat system it's the first game in a long time that sates my appetite for the old school RPG.
