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> Results: Enchanted Arms
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ESRB Descriptors (They warn, we found):
Alcohol Reference: There's a bar in one place that is off the beaten path. Mild Fantasy Violence: I agree with this when it comes to the direct combat. You smack them, they fall down. Mostly it's not against human beings. But the cutscenes are quite a bit more intense. I wouldn't characterize the destruction of whole cities as "mild". Ditto with the fratricide. Mild Language: I remember a couple "dammit's" but nothing too troubling for this audience. Simulated Gambling: Mini-games in a casino that are easily avoidable. Suggestive Themes: The main villain is a bit over-the top, and there is an openly gay character. Atsuma is a bumbling student of enchantment. He has no regard for the rules, sleeps through class, but the best student in the whole school is his best friend. For some reason he doesn't understand his right arm has the power to negate all Enchantments and he keeps stumbling into just the wrong place at the wrong time. Catastrophe strikes and Atsuma has to find out what happened and how to stop it in order to save his friends and the world. Enchanted Arms is a classic style Japanese RPG with updated graphics and a couple cool things in the combat system that make taking turns a lot more of a challenge. When I say "classic style", I mean that the structure of the game is remarkably like something you would find circa 2001. The graphics are much more up to date than the game play; the places and people are beautifully done.  The combat system is intriguing. You fight on two grids of sixteen squares, sort of like a chessboard. Each character can move a certain distance, and their various attacks affect certain areas of the board. Some attacks just affect a line in front of you, some will take out a cross-shaped area, and so on. Combats are won by arranging your characters and their attacks in such a way to do damage to the enemies. Tactical placement of your characters is key. The more strategically you can build and use your various characters, the more successful in battle you will be. This is enforced by giving you a limited number of turns to fight with between these recharge stations spread all over the landscape. The story and the characters are compelling, and make you want to fight your way through to see it to the end. The dialog suffers some from translation errors and pacing problems, but the characters and their relationships still shine through. The more strategic combat is a welcome change from some of the frenetic button-mashers we've seen lately. 
No gore at all. Enemies defeated in combat just fall over, and after a set amount of time fade away in a flash of sparks.
There are some disturbing images in the cut-scenes. The enemy is the Queen of Ice, and she wields it to completely devastate a city. Right in there with those beautiful sprays of ice crystals you get to see people frozen solid and then shattered like they'd been dipped in liquid nitrogen. Nothing the T-rated crowd can't handle, though. One of the main characters, Raigar, kills his brother as a part of the story. Now, he's gone bad and he was part of the machinations that nearly destroyed the city. The death was in open combat. But he still feels pretty badly about it and so does the player to some degree. We have our obligatory over-the-top female villain. She tries to be seductive, but mostly she's just creepy. Our female character is actually very cute and obviously female, but she's not hanging anything out which was a very nice change. The little girl Yuki is a rather mercenary little thing, but she comes through like a trooper. One thing that we talked about a lot at our house was Atsuma's relationship with all the rest of the characters. While I grant you he's not exactly Einstein, for some reason everyone around him keeps calling him slow and treating him like he's an idiot. It's used as an excuse for a lot of the instructional texts. It can get grating, especially towards the beginning of the game where there's a lot of that sort of tutorial stuff but later on it's just affectionate teasing. Time is a factor on this game. You are looking at a minimum 40 hours of gameplay. And that's if you don't get into earning, training and upgrading your golems just for their own sake. There are over 70 of them to collect and use and each on has their own unique abilities. The part of this game that's going to take some explaining is a secondary character named Makoto. He's very obviously gay. He is catty, swishy, swooning, and just about every other stereotype. He's madly in love with the other secondary guy, Toya. (So is the rest of the city so it doesn't seem all that out of place. Toya has a fan club, for crying out loud.) You are all separated fairly quickly so you never really find out if Toya returns his affections or what. At the end of the game, however, you find out that Toya is most definitely not gay. In the ending cinematic Makoto lays one on him right on the lips and he's not happy. To avoid seeing the kiss, just don't watch the ending cinematic once the fireworks start. It's not that big a deal, though. It's just a peck, they have to hold him down to do it, and you don't even see most of it. Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Browse Amazon.com's selection of "Enchanted Arms" themed games Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Enchanted Arms |
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