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A RPG that Wins by Default

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: September 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First off, I really liked this game for the fact that i'm a big turn-based RPG fan. So warning to the buyer, Enchanted Arms is an RPG in the truest sense of the phrase. I will start by saying that if you aren't a turn-based RPG fan you should probably rent this game first to see if you like it, it's definitely worth a rental!!! This is a genre that the 360 was missing, though there are other RPG's for the 360, none are Turn based. So let's get started!!

Graphics, Great!! I'd say definitely better than Xbox or PS2, but not Amazing, but I would say "Great". The graphics shine the most in my opinion when in a battle, magic spells and skills shine vibrantly and beautifully!! There are also extra extended skills which are loosely similar to the FFVII limit breaks, which look amazing!! Are the graphics Next-Gen? I would say yes!! Do they compare to other graphically amazing 360 games like Fight Night 3 (just one example)? No it doesn't but at times the game does show 360 power.

Sound, Okay, nothing amazing here at all! Voice over are average, they are good but I have seen better. Background music is typical of your average RPG.

Controls, Great. For a turn-based RPG that is. I mean it is turn based so it controls never get complicated, Menu navigation is really easy and standard I was able to figure out how to upgrade skills, equip, and synthesize golems without ever looking at the manual.

Gameplay, okay this is where and why I decided to give this game a 4 instead of a overall 3. The gameplay is pretty fresh, because of the addition of Golem creating and using them in Battle, which I will touch on a little later. But first the battle system, which is a pretty good combo of Turn-base/strategy, cause your team is place on a grid where you can only move your players anywhere within the grid, of course movements are limited to spaces available and how far a specific character can move. So strategy comes in to play by trying to put yourself in range to attack, heal others, and defend. What really impressed me was the use of Golems, which I can only compare very loosely to Pokemon. Golems are used similar to how Pokemon are used, i.e. to help you fight, heal, protect, etc. This feature adds another level of gameplay to this game which raised this game from "mediocre" to "Very good". Simply because you can capture parts of golems you have fought or randomly find parts to create your own Golems to fight for you. Building different golems is pretty easy and quite addicting, thus far. I am only in the first 25% of the game right now and I am already addicted to creating golems from parts I have found, I only imagine this feature getting better with the ability to build stronger and more interesting golems. Without this feature this would have been a really mediocre RPG. So overall the gameplay holds this title together and great gameplay is what we all look for in a game right?

Story, the story so far seems to be average, like I said I am only 25% in to it so I am hoping this will improve as the game goes on but for right now there is nothing amazing here as far as the story goes.

So overall, if you are a turn based RPG fan and you own a 360 then you will definitely want to pick this game up. But this game is definitely not a ground breaker and definitely not a reason to run out and buy a 360 (there are other games that warrant that). But all in all I can't think of a reason to tell any XBOX 360 turn based RPG fans not buy this game, especially since it is the only one of its kind available for the 360. For others though I would only suggest waiting for a demo or a rental to see if you like what this game does.

I personally am a fan of lots of all Genres of games, with the exception of a lot of strict car driving games, so I thoroughly enjoy this game so far. I could definitely understand an argument for this game not being even close to one of the best RPG's ever, but for the first turn based RPG for the 360 I think it fairs pretty well.

Worst RPG Ever!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 21
Date: September 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Wow I made the mistake of buying this piece of garbage before playing it because of the lack of RPGs for the XBOX 360! Hey I was desperate!
Having said that, this game is absolutely awful.
First off the the story and dialogue will bore you to suicide.
the dialogue is so tedius and meaningless its just a waste of time. The apparently "Gay" member of your group will sit and talk about how in love he is with the other male character for way too long and other conversations that have nothing to do with gameplay take way too long.
Graphic wise this game is not what you'd expect from a huge console like the 360, it looks like a PS2 game and not even a good one.
Also the battles are boring. I have played RPGs and turn based games for years and the combat on this game is uninspired and just flat out lame.
Alot of this game is way too drawn out. conversations and movies and boring and have no story value and take forever to get through. Dont get me wrong sometimes a long cutscene is cool if its telling the story and is exciting and well done. these are not like that at all.
basically there might be some people out there who might dig this but I dont. Id rather play any of the Final Fantasy games or any of the other turn based RPGS out there. This was just a waste of $59 in my opinion. If they are going to charge that much for games for this system they better be really good because PS2 games are cheaper and last i checked they had better RPGS for alot less money. New system or not games like this will not keep a system selling!
Definitely Rent this if you really want to check it out before you buy it.

ENJOYABLE

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 8
Date: September 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Let me just start off by saying Atsuma is NAAASTY in terms of how strong he can get towards the end of the game. I'm about 80% done with the game and this guy is flat out amazing. I was skeptical about buying this game at first b/c of all the bad reviews but i took a chance and bought it. Boy am i happy that I did b/c this game should NOT be overlooked. I found it pretty funny that the beginning of the game has a lot of Naruto similarities. Atsuma vs. Toya, Naruto vs. Saske, all the girls r in love with Toya and Atsuma gets angry over it haha. There are other comparisons but i won't get too much into it.

Some of the stuff that I don't like about the game is that it's too linear meaning everything is pretty much straight forward. There isn't much exploring to do and the traditional world map is non-existant. A lot of the players will like the fact that there isn't much exploring to do b/c a lot of players hate seeing 5 different doors that they have to go thru in order not to miss out on anything important. Furthermore, the game's dialogue is a bit tedious; I didn't like millions and millions of small reactions such as "ahhh", "nooo" over and over in one converation, it beocmes a drag after awhile. DO NOT PLAY this game in English dialogue!!! just a warning b/c Makoto will make u NOT want to play this game early on haha. This guy just sounds ridiculously gaaay. OMG...he got on my nerves haha. He sounds much better in Japanese and rest of the characters do too. I didn't really like the music either. I love when I enter a battle and music kicks in; that's hardly the case for E.A. Music was dull and a little boring i must admit. Think of FF7 and how pumped up you would get entering a battle...AHH...haha, I wish there was a way of substituting music, at least the battle music from games to games.

I was really hooked on the battle system. Creating new golems, weapons and what not was really awesome and still is haha. Strategizing on the grid and doing the combos is fresh and "fawk yeah" worthy. Once you see all 4 of your characters connect on the combo can be truely viscious. I'm curious what's the highest damage others have gotten on their combos, I WANNA COMPARE!! haha.

Well I hope my review was somewhat helpful, if you have any other questions...feel free to email me at Ned006@aol.com and I'll be more than happy to answer.

100% lukewarm

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 13 / 28
Date: September 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Bad stuff out of the way first. The dialogue is pretty useless at times and the dialogue that's not useless is very adolescent in nature. I get the feeling that they added a lot of filler text for some reason. They make a point of telling you how to do something simple like climb a ladder, then they tell you again, then they tell you that they just told you before reminding you how to do it just to make sure you didn't forget from the first 3 lessons. If I had the attention span of 2 year old that might be helpful. Given that I'm 28 it's a bit insulting and at best slows down gameplay.

The voice acting is pretty silly too. Some of the speech is still in Japanese, which is pretty lame they didn't bother to translate it. For instance, every time a character fights or a fight ends there's a random voice blurb they say. That's a nice touch and all the human characters have English voices. However, all of the golem characters have voice blurbs too but they're all in Japanese. It's small, but annoying.

I've also got one of the cooler characters that is evidently poisoned or has some negative status effect on her because she's constantly at 1 hitpoint and 1 magic point. I can't seem to find out what's wrong with her through her status sheet in the interface. I even looked through the manual for some info, no dice.

Don't even get me started on the overly-gay guy in your party at first. I'm not saying that to bash someone's sexuality in any way, but this guy is WAY over the top. The interface is also a bit clunky at times and they don't go through some of the stuff that they really should spend time on. For instance they don't really explain what Skill Points are and that you can spend them to improve your character stats and to learn new skills. I was through the first boss before I found the interface to spend skill points to boost stats. At that point I had a huge cache built up so I buffed all my stats but then when I went to learn skills I didn't have any left because I didn't realize you used the same pool of points to boost stats and learn skills. I could have used less instruction on how to use ladder and more on elements like this.

There are some limitations on where you can go and what you can do that surprise me too. You would think you'd get a lot more freedom on a 360 game. I get the feeling that this game was made simply for the sake of having an RPG on this console, not because it was a cool game to make.

The good. The graphics are pretty good and the combat system is decent. Don't get me wrong, I really expect better graphics from the 360, but the stuff in this title is passable. Some of the magic and particle effects are cool, but again, not as spectacular as what I'd expect from 360.

Overall it seems inspired by the Final Fantasy Series with heavy favoring to FF VII, but with elements from pokemon (gotta collect them all) and some elements from the Full Metal Alchemist anime series.

Challenge rating is pretty simple too. I'm not a genius but I've won every single encounter I've run into. Only one or two has been challenging in the least. There's not a way to adjust difficulty that I've been able to find.

I find myself playing the game through, but I don't think it's because it's such a cool game. I think it's because I dig RPGs and I've already paid for this one. The game as a whole seems like it was geared more toward the 12-13 year old crowd.

If you are a DIEHARD RPG fan then you might consider picking up a used copy, but don't expect to be blown away.

Horrible, even for an xbox 360 game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 16
Date: September 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The idiots at ubisoft got together one day and decided to make the worst role playing game in the history of role playing games.

What they ended up doing to accomplish this was take every negative factor from all past role playing games, and jam them all into one horrifically bad excuse for a video game.

The dialogue in this game is completely irrelevant. There is no reason to pay attention to any of it, anything you need to know you'll figure out on your own. There is hours of spoken dialogue in this game, none of it bears any purpose. Characters speak, but they say absolutely nothing. Conversations that go like "How are you?" "I am ok." "You look cold" "I am cold" "Thank you". After that waste of programming code, you're allowed to continue on. The spoken dialogue is also done by what have to be the most unproffesional voice actors I've ever heard. They either over emphasize the idiotic personality of the character, or don't give the character any personality at all. You will speed click through all the dialogue in the game, that is if you end up wasting your money on this game.

The game is just one long straight line with random encounters along the way. I spoiled the entire game for you right there. You run forward, fight some monsters, and win the game. That's not worth sixty dollars in my opinion. Ubisoft deliberately released a game after putting absolutely no effort into making it interesting. You get one town of irrelevant and annoying dialogue, where the high point is running around collecting tickets. Final Fantasy X was just a game where you run forward throughout the whole thing, but at least they realized that they had to make their characters slightly interesting.

The battle system is slow, and makes the turn based system of battle look even more ridiculous than ever. It's like the battle system from koudelka, you're on your own grid and use ranged attacks against your enemy who's on their own grid. This is the most irratating system for turn based battle in my opinion. Ubisoft will probably explain that they thought long and hard about it and decided to make a turn based battle system that let's you use strategy to defeat your enemies, they just forgot to plan the actual enemies in the game around this concept. What I mean by that is you fight enemies who can attack every square on your grid, and you gain abilities where you can attack every square on their grid. Chess it is not, more like turn based Rochambeau.

The menus in the game are very time consuming, and were obviously just thrown together and abandoned. You make a weapon in one menu, quit that menu, open a different menu, equip the weapon. You buy a skill in one menu, quit that menu, open a different menu, learn the skill, back out of that part of the menu, equip the skill. Ubisoft apparently thinks that when you make a decision to own something, it's for the sheer joy of knowing that it's not being used as a part of your repitoire.

One are where they obviously invested (wasted) alot of effort was in making neat little companions, which they call "golems". There's alot of them in this game, so you can have fun making them and looking at them. You'll only use one at a time, so the other sixty will have to wait in limbo. Each one is designed to be unique and speak one of two styles of japanese, slow and menacing or high and hyper. They even wrote biographies for each golem, they explain their uniquely irrelevant details.

This game is literally the worst game out for the xbox 360. Yes, even worse than perfect dark zero. Shame on you microsoft, and shame on ubisoft.

Not even so bad it is good...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: September 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Staggeringly dull, haphazardly assembled, and crafted with the loveless automaton hands of a stoned sweatshop, Enchanted Arms presents mind-numbing inaneness from open to close. Saying this game has a poor story and worse dialog is like stating that humans occasionally enjoy a little air. Nonsensical menus contrived with absolutely no care to the innovations of the game style over the last dozen years, dully plodding redundancies in EVERY aspect from "strategery" combat to the anachronistic or trivial mini-games, and an unhealthy obsession the designers had with making the "A" button do everything (including most of what might be considered the fun parts), leave the player permanently dangling in the flatulent wind of offensively bad gameplay.

From appearances, there were 1-2 pretty decent artists on the design team, and the rest were hacks or students with blindfolds. There are a few truly nice views and structures, and it is too bad the entire game couldn't have been done as well. Heightmapped outdoors are often flat and angular with a texture slopped over them, and interiors are hard to enjoy with the flickering seams and uninspired layouts. As a positive, there are a large number of creatures, some with absolutely stunning artwork, very little of it... moving. (Positive as I can manage this soon after playing it!)

In short, I can only think of a very narrow audience that would consider this to be a good game, and I won't name them lest I seem the labeling-type. It isn't even a $20.00 game, when that day comes, save yourself the misery and buy a pizza.

Not the best but it serves the purpose

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: October 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Overall it was not a great game. I am glad I played it, the combat system which I at first did not like grew on me. I found it very linear which is not a problem for me. I avoided most of the side quests so I could just finish the game. So it filled a void where I did not have a RPG to play, so it gets 3 stars from me.

Buggy game, could have been much better...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 13
Date: November 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

So when i started playing Final Fantasy 13...uh I mean Enchanted Arms, everything was... Seriously, this could easily have been right out of the Final Fantasy vaults. The games looks, feels, and sounds like a Final Fantasy game, just worse. It's an very beautiful game and when it works it's a lot of fun. The story is some kind of FF reject about somebody's magical arms...well it's dumb so I won't go into it.

Instead of materia and stuff like that, you get a whole bunch of golems. That's really the main part of the game. There are only six "characters" in the game that you can play at different times. The rest of the time it a bunch of creatures (golems) which is pretty cool because you have a large variety (40+) different golems to play with.

The worst part about the game is that for some reason it drives my XBox 360 crazy. After playing for a while it locks up and the XBox says that the disc is dirty and can't be read. It's almost like all those pretty graphics overheat the 360. Therefore, you should save VERY frequently. Unfortunately there are a couple of long story driven parts with 2-3 very hard battles that don't let you save in the middle and then crash then game when you're done. I got to replay those lovely parts several times until I could get through the cinematics and dialogue to save.

Speaking of dialogue, there is an unusually large amount of completely useless and silly dialogue that slows down the game.

In the end, if you absolutely FF games and need a fix since they don't release them on XBox then give it a shot buut beware. For everyone else...go play Oblivion again or something.

It Gets Better as it Goes

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

As other reviewers have said, this is basically a complete Final Fantasy rip-off, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and its buggy in that the game tends to crash at odd times, which is a bad thing

Other bad things include the complete linearity of the early levels, where you can't turn left or right at all, you basically just follow a narrow path to each encounter, and also the very very slow save/load menu, which gets slower the more saves you have. I would reccomend just saving in maybe 2 slots because of that, and over writing one or the other whenever you save (which should be often)

Now on to the good: the game gets ALOT better if you stick with it. There's a little indicator that shows how far along you are, and I almost gave up on it in the 15-20% range because of the many problems, but for whatever reason i stuck with it and it got much much better 40% or so

The levels opened up and you could back track and explore sections you might have skipped earlier. You got more choice about what order to do things in too. And finally the story line kicked in, and by the 50% mark i was pretty much just playing it to see what the characters would say and do next in the cut scenes, which is a tribute to the story if not the game play

Another really over looked element is the humor in the voice acting. Its cheesy and silly but I really did laugh out loud in several places. So give it a chance and you might be surprised at how much better the middle is than the beginning

Enchanted Arms

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: November 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The A.I. has improved alot, in recent years this game has proven that.
Though i wished they had of gotten rid of the term based fighting system.
real-time fighting is the wave of the future.

Ventura

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