The cookie is goooood. Having been a long time RPG fan, my first venture with the console being PlayStation and the epic game that is Final Fantasy 7 and before that was tabletops and pens and papers.
I picked up Enchanted Arms for a lot of reasons. Mostly because i needed my RPG fix and also because i didn't have the equipment to hook up my PS2 and my xbox up to the tv at the same time.
Its really not a bad purchase despite what everyone's says. I found it better then Blue dragon at least.
Its got a lot of rough edges and it lies when it says its a 40 hour game. i clocked 80 hours leveling and buffing my character stats before i decided to forgo the super dungeon final boss and just get the last three achievements to end the game.
The story is pretty simple and follows the character Atsuma who along with Makoto, and Toya are students at the Enchanter's University in Yokohama City. At the university, they study to become enchanters, beings capable of controlling powerful man-made Golems. According to the back-story powerful Golems known as Devil Golems laid waste to the land 1000 years ago during the Golem Wars, the Devil Golems were all locked away and sealed and now regular Golems in the modern era serve mankind.
One day, while the three students are skipping class to attend a local festival, a earthquake occurs. Additionally, the Golems in the area appear to go berserk and begin attacking people. Rushing back to the university, the three find everything is in chaos, and that a mysterious sealed ward which students were forbidden to enter has opened.
That pretty much sums up the first 45 minutes or so.
The characters are pretty interesting and all of them have a nice back story but everything is hampered by the terrible voice acting. The subtitles which are turned on by default does not match up with the English dialogue very well, but the inclusion of Japanese dialogue does help things.
What really might interest people is the Combat/Battle system which plays very similarly to a game like chess or a more advanced version of Pokemon.
The fights in the game are turn-based and use a grid field similar to what might be found in games like Shining Force, but on a smaller scale. Allies generally attack first and enemies afterwards, except in the case where the party's speed is significantly lower than the enemy's, in which case the enemy attacks first. All characters and enemies in the game have an elemental affinity -- Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Light, and Dark. Characters hit by their opposite element suffer double damage while characters hit by the same element only suffer half damage. The elemental relationships are as follows:
* Fire <--> Water
* Wind <--> Earth
* Light <--> Dark
The player (you or whoever else is playing) must position up to four characters in strategic positions to take advantage of their skills. Skills vary per player but generally follow a certain set of rules
* they are either Normal Based or of the Same elemental characteristic of the character
* The damage is either single cell or splash damage.
After the battle, EXP, SP and TP (tp is gold), SP is then used for non-golem characters to learn skills you purchase with TP, or to boost the characters' stats such as HP, EP ( The equivalent to MP in this game), Direct Damage, Distance Damage, Support, and Speed parameters. Direct Damage, Support, and Speed parameters have a cap of 999. that cap is another bone i have to pick with this game because it really ends up hampering the final end game activities.
The achievements are tremendously easy to get, not like avatar easy where you sit around for 5 minutes pressing a button and you have all 1000 points. More like 25 points are awarded for advancing past important plot points, 75 points for defeating the major bosses in the game, and 150 points upon completion of the game.
Thats it, I'm not trying to write a review or anything, i just wanted to get my thoughts out on this game. Despite its sort of linear story telling and sub par gameplay its a really beautiful game and the battles can be rather addicting.
Oh yeah - i also beat Rock Band Guitar On hard. time for drums w00t!
Mason Rhade's blog
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