Enchanted Arms Xbox 360 Review

What starts as a harmless act of disobedience, Atsuma and his friends cut class to visit the festival celebrating Yokohama City. When they reach the festival, Atsuma has nothing else on his mind but to take part in the famous fighting tournament and get rich by doing so. During the tournament Atsuma fights a young woman during which an earthquake happens! After that, Atsuma and his friends have much more to worry about other than the principle shouting at them.

Right let’s dive straight into this! At first glances, this game doesn’t look like anything special, RPG-wise. It looks like your basic Final Fantasy clone. Hero saving the world with various spells and fighting techniques, meeting interesting people along the way. The one thing that makes this different from the rest is the battle system of the game. I will get into that much later though.

The control system of the game is extremely basic. Move around the world with the analogue stick and your buttons for navigating menus and selecting the options within the menus. How this game plays in terms of free-roaming, which RPGs are usually about, is very limited. If you have played Final Fantasy X you will know what I mean. You get told some information for a location you need to go to, and then you go to it. It’s as simple as that. When you come along a path outside a city or town, there is always something conveniently blocking your way! Really annoying after playing something like Gothic II on the PC or Dark Chronicle on the PlayStation 2 due to the fact they have huge free-roaming in the game!

With the battle system, it’s not your basic 3-4 people in a line, make your choices, and after each choice you see the movement you have made. In this, you have a 4×3 grid to move around as do the enemy. From which you choose your attacks then you watch the moves play out. Depending on which attacks you choose it depends on how beautiful it looks! This battle system is nothing new to people who play a lot of RPGs. It will be recognized from a game called Koudelka on the PlayStation. This was an excellent game! To people who haven’t played it, you are in for a treat because it is a breath of fresh air to play an RPG with a different battle system that isn’t the same run-of-the-mill style.

During your adventures, you will find Golems which can be used in your party to help fight enemies or simply use them for healing to keep your stronger characters alive. The limit in your party is 4. But if you fancy a challenge and find today’s games too easy, you can chop and change of how many members you have in a party to make it more fun for yourself! Now, onto how the game looks!

The actual visuals of this game are absolutely stunning. Pure awe! The architecture of the areas are gorgeous, it actually makes you feel like you’re in a pure fantasy world. Instead of the typical girls with big cleavage and big muscled guys being the heroes. They actually look how old they are supposed to be. Some of the older characters look worn and tired, whereas the younger characters look young and healthy. The villains of the game look like real fantasy-world villains. You look at them and think ‘Please Mr. Villain. Don’t hurt my world’ then you obliterate them with stunning spells!

The monsters that you fight in this game are called Golems. They can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The ways they are designed are really nice as they don’t look like normal monsters you would see in this type of game. You can see that they look mechanical with the joints on their bodies being spherical. How they move is very mechanical as well they are rigid and clunky; a very nice touch to the game.

When it comes to the magical spells in this game, they are something to be applauded at. With the Xbox360’s power, it can show a lot of particles and detail within it all. The movie sequences in this game are something to die for; it is like watching a movie. With Final Fantasy, they seem to re-use a lot of the same things from previous games, just change the colours and call it a different name. Which for a lot of people that is fine, but the avid RPG players out there start to get bored of looking at the same things over and over. I know I do!

With the audio in this game, you get a nice little feature of which dubbing voices you wish to hear during your game play. You get to choose English or Japanese. A lot of people usually prefer the Japanese voice-overs in games because they like to hear what it is supposed to sound like. Other people just want to get on with the game and don’t care, just as long as they get a story and a game they enjoy! I will say that the English dubbed voices, although not very fantastic, actually suit the characters 100%, from how they look to how they move you would expect them to sound like that. The Japanese voices sound exactly how you would imagine if you have ever watched Japanese animation; very animated and over the top. They do add to the mood of the game though. You can feel how the character feels with either voice-dub. The music in this game is very well written. It is very orchestral and over the top, exactly what you would expect from something like this. During the battles the music gets you prepared to fight!

Overall this game is very beautiful, the story is strong and the game play is simplistic but has the depth to keep players going. During the release of this game, I don’t think other reviewers and people gave it the chance it needed due to Final Fantasy having a huge fan-base and following. However if you like RPGs give this a chance because it is worth every penny and you won’t be disappointed.

This game is what the Xbox360 has been waiting for. A console RPG with a carefree attitude.

8.1 out of 10