Enchanted Arms

6.5
Average

Gameplay	6.5	"Anyone want to buy a used golem?"
Graphics	7.0
Sound	6.0
Value	7.0

By Dene Benham

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It has been a thousand years since The Golem Wars. The land was scorched, cities were destroyed and people were indiscriminately wiped from existence. But now the world has been rebuilt. The devil golems, godlike in their power and their indifference, are a faded memory. All that are left are servants to humanity. Mechanical enforcers that help human police, comical misfits that serve food or entertain children, and armoured fighters that battle for the entertainment of the masses.

Then the unthinkable happens. The devil golems are released and death and destruction engulf the world again. The only person to stand in their way is the young, brash and blonde Atsuma. A student at Enchant University, he doesn’t know where he’s from; all he knows is he’s got a talent for fighting and casting spells. Oh, and a very powerful enchanted arm.


As Atsuma, the potential savior of the world, you jog around the game’s very pretty environments, pressing ‘X’ to open doors, climb ladders and talk to people. Sounds simple? Well it is. It is also a rather quaint idiosyncrasy of the game that three hours in you may be sitting through a two-minute tutorial on walking up to a ladder and pressing ‘X’. The game will then ask if you understand. Although tempted to answer no, I honestly couldn’t face the tutorial again and admitted that I did indeed understand. It is almost bizarre how long the game spends talking in circles and explaining, in depth, the most simplistic instructions.

Another, not so quaint, element of the game is the dialogue. For a start the voice acting is kind of grating. The characters are little more then stereotypes and the conversations often feel like one character repeating over and over what the previous character just said. Also, the way the character models are pushed into the foreground, to simply banter with each other, feels old. You would think that a next generation game would be able to integrate the conversations more seamlessly. That said, the pre-rendered cut scenes are very well done: well produced, dramatic and spectacular.

So, a jaunty jog through crumbling streets and a nice cut scene later, our hero Atsuma is challenged by a rogue golem. The fights are played out on a basic grid. Your party, of up to four members, is on one side of the grid, while the enemy forms up on the other. You select and then move each character before assigning them an action. The actions can be an attack command, a health spell, an item, or you can choose to wait for your next turn. The system is effective and there is a real feeling that a well thought out strategy makes a big difference in the fight. Especially since finishing the fight quickly gets you an experience points bonus.

The spells are also plentiful, from simple strikes to complex area effect spells. The big spells do massive damage to multiple enemies and are very nicely animated. And there are a lot of enemies. In sections of the game you will be getting into a fight every other step. But, this is pretty much a selling point for the game. You get to recruit enemy golems into your team once you have beaten them. There are over a hundred different golems that you can buy, level up and unleash during battles.

Unfortunately, for anyone who has played a few RPGs, there is something naggingly familiar about most things in Ubisoft’s Enchanted Arms. Everything, from the load screen and the menus to the battle systems and the villains, has a ‘seen it before’ smell. But if familiarity doesn’t breed contempt then get ready to push that ‘X’ button and shake your Sixaxis controller. In fact you shake the controller to swing on a rope, and you shake the controller to gain experience point multipliers, and you shake the controller to make Atsuma dance. And yes, the Sixaxis controller tilt functions does feel tacked on and superfluous.

It's true that Japanese RPGs all march to the same tune and Enchanted Arms does hit quite a few familiar notes. But it is professionally executed and knocking the game simply because there are some very familiar characters and situations may not be entirely fair. A lot of the characters and situations are drawn from Japanese mythology, and also from anime and cinematic conventions. Including such conventions into a game is often expected. It would be like playing the latest western RPG and then complaining that there’s another Ranger, another Enchanter and, look, they’re fighting another goblin.

Released last year on the Xbox 360, Enchanted Arms doesn’t reach any great heights on the PlayStation 3. It’s pretty, as you would expect, but rather routine. For those not familiar with the genre there is enough in the game to enjoy, as there is for those of us who like a good linear romp, amongst cutesy, big eyed characters with whimsical, sing-song voices and a taste for human suffering.

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