Enchanted Arms takes place years after a golem war ripped the world apart. Golems are artificial creatures that are put together by enchanters. There were four "devil golems" in that war that were never completely eradicated and one of them wakes up and begins destroying cities. Nearly every enemy you combat in the game is a golem not to mention you can get 102 built, found, or fought and rebuilt and have them in your party. I kept track of ones I found here.
Enchanted Arms fits into the same groove of RPG as Final Fantasy X and Magna Carta. You have a map in the upper right hand corner and you navigate around areas that are all connected to one another. Enchanted Arms does eventually open up a series of warps to quickly get from one area to the other.
The battle system in Enchanted Arms is set up on a grid, turn based system. Each attack from each character attacks a certain pattern
Movement is the
same as RPGs like Final Fantasy X and Magna Carta.
Battle occurs
on a grid system.
and range of squares and if you want to attack your enemy you have to move your character into range and fit those enemies into the pattern. Each character and golem is element based with opposite elements doing twice the damage to the other and same elements doing half. It's never a good sign to me when a game has an "Auto Battle" feature. It's even worse when you can use that feature in new encounters with enemies you haven't seen before that might be difficult for your experience level. You can do many of the battles in the game this way. Turn on a movie or television for leveling bouts.
The graphics in Enchanted Arms are excellent. Of course, this is the first "Next Generation" RPG to hit Xbox 360 so there is very little to compare it to, but the environments are very beautiful and well-textured. The characters are fairly simple and cartoony in nature, but that was the style they were going for.
I played with the volume off most of the game because I found the voice acting irritating. The overall dialogue in the game was terrible too. There is one gay character in the game that is a flaming homosexual and is constantly making annoying babble to one of the other male characters. The jokes are cheesy and unfortunately most of the serious dialogue that moves the story comes off that way as well.
There are some hidden dungeons with enemies that are tougher, including a ten story hidden shrine with an ultimate boss at the end, oddly enough called Ultima.
There are a ton of things to buy, and unfortunately, the game makes it very easy to cheat and get money via a casino with a save point nearly on top of it. Use money to buy chips, bet it all to win a ton of chips then cash out those chips for items you can sell at the nearby
There are several learnable abilities for each character.
store. It takes a little while to generate a ton of cash but with patience, you will never be in want. What's even stranger is there is an item you can buy to give experience, so if one really wanted to cheat you could max out your characters in a matter of hours.
All of the achievments for Xbox 360 on this game were story based which was kind of a disappointment. A golem checklist or weapon checklist to complete would have added some extra value.
I took my time and searched every nook and cranny for golems ended up with around 90 and ended the game after a little over 40 hours, so there is a fair amount of content to this very linear RPG.