Enchanted Arms Review (X360)

How It Stands Out

Enchanted Arms stands out in a couple of other ways. After each battle your HP and magic points are refilled completely, but each character also has vitality points that decrease over time. When their vitality points are gone, you have to switch a new character into your party. You recharge these points at special stations spread throughout the game world, but they are spread far enough apart that you can’t rely on your “A Team” all of the time, which keeps things interesting. In addition to the human characters that join your party, you also can build your own golems as you fight and defeat them around the world. Building a strong team of golems is surprisingly satisfying and another aspect that keeps you addicted to the game.

Character advancement is also interesting because in addition to earning higher levels like normal, you can also buy new skills and also upgrade your HP, EP, and other stats by spending points earned in battles. It all works together surprisingly well and you are constantly earning new attacks and golems and getting stronger which makes the whole game very satisfying.

Xbox Live Golem Battles

Along with the main quest, there are a handful of side missions and bonus things to do. The main draw is that you can try to collect all of the more than 100 different golems spread throughout the world and build a super team which you can then take onto Xbox Live and fight against other players. The battle system doesn’t really lend itself to particularly exciting human vs. human battles, but it is interesting to see what golems other people are using. The meat of the gameplay, along with all of the achievements, is found in the single player, but multiplayer battles are a nice distraction.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, Enchanted Arms can look very nice at times and very bland at times. I have seen some people on message boards claim this is the second worst looking game on the 360 (with Gun being the worst) and I couldn’t disagree with that more. The characters are nicely detailed, the lighting, particularly the natural lighting when exploring outdoor areas, and the environments have that nice next-gen shininess to them. It all looks good most of the time, but occasionally you’ll come across an area that just looks bad compared to the rest of the game. This inconsistency definitely hurts the visuals overall, but there are a lot of areas that will absolutely floor you.

The sound is pretty blah for the most part. The music is typical of JRPGs and the little sound effects the golems make and the one liners your character constantly spout get old after a while. It also has to be noted that the English voice actors did an amazingly poor job and I highly recommend switching over to the Japanese voices instead.

Bottom Line

Overall, Enchanted Arms wraps all of the JRPG clichés into one shiny looking package, but the end result is still surprisingly good. The core of the story and characters and gameplay is exactly like a dozen other games you have played, but Enchanted Arms does a lot of little things right that make it stand out. I absolutely love the fact that you can save anywhere, restart battles when you lose, build an army of cool golem characters, fast forward, and even let the AI battle for you. The pace of the game is amazingly fast for a traditional RPG and I’m very happy with it. There is a lot to like in Enchanted Arms so I highly recommend it for RPG fans.