The first such license is Enchanted Arms, a J-RPG from FromSoftware, who have already established themselves as a well-recognised Japanese company with titles such as Armored Core and Lost Kingdoms already under their belt. We recently had an opportunity to sit down with the game, which will hopefully prove successful amongst fans.
The story is a little clichéd as far as J-RPG games go, but regardless still sounds somewhat interesting. You see, the world in which the game takes place used to have massive golems roaming the land serving mankind. After a while, the golems eventually went chaotic, causing havoc and devastation to the world’s inhabitants, only to mysteriously stop and be sealed away in an eternal slumber soon after. A few hundred years later, the golems awake and begin to cause destruction once again. For some reason or another, a young hero named Atsuma has a unique ability where his arm can absorb powers and control them – hence the name Enchanted Arms.
Beauty as far as the eye can see.
Enchanted Arms appears to be heavily inspired by Final Fantasy in its appearance, which can often be seen as a negative or a positive depending on how you look at it. The environments we saw were massive and rich with detail. Everything from characters to battle abilities felt in vain with the Final Fantasy games. However, that’s not to say Enchanted Arms won’t be able to stand on its own feet.
One area we saw was a place where gamers guided their character through a very lively town. The area looked incredible, with a fantastic draw distance, huge structures and a lot of vibrant colours standing out and making the town have its own unique atmosphere and personality. The town was lively, with NPCs doing their own thing and there was lots of activity going on that suited the theme of the town, which seemed to indicate there was some sort of festival going on.
The other sequence we saw was a battle with a fiery golem. The cut-scene, which acted as an introduction to the creature, was nothing but stunning, creating a real powerful and eerie presence of the golem. From there, Atsuma and three other teammates jumped into battle with the fiery golem. One of the most noticeable features of the combat system was how gamers attacked and had their turns. Instead of being a typical turn-based RPG, gamers have to strategically plan out their moves before your team acts. So, gamers will be able to select their attacks, and the sequence of who attacks when, beforehand. In addition, before finishing each turn gamers can shift their characters around a grid, which will allow them to position themselves closer or further away from the enemy to avoid certain attacks or to enable your own character to dish out certain abilities that require you to be closed-ranged. Gamers can choose from basic attacks, summons, and mana powered attacks. In addition to these, gamers could also unleash powerful attacks called EX attacks, which can be used when a character’s EX gauge builds up the more they attack during battle.
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This is a very intriguing battle system to see in action too. It combines the best of both worlds from many successful RPGs such as Fire Emblem (a tactical-RPG) and Final Fantasy X (a turn-based RPG), creating what could be a very promising move in the right direction for the genre. It not only requires gamers to position their characters correctly, but also requires gamers to think ahead of their enemy to counter-attack. Another feature that stood out during combat was the option to skip turn sequences. A common complaint with some RPG games is that they often take too long, but in Enchanted Arms gamers can skip the battle animations for each character, and even attempt to auto-resolve some battles.
In the demo we saw the text and voice overs were still in Japanese. However, an Ubisoft representative informed us about the localised version saying that while some of the voice acting in the English version was a little over exaggerated, each character has a very ‘different’ personality, which is reflected through the voice acting.
Enchanted Arms seems to pack quite a nice punch. Everything so far looks and sounds up-to-standards with past RPGs, taking advantage of the Xbox 360 quite well.
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