PixlBit

                

    I've been playing Enchanted Arms all weekend and it's still fun. I'm now at 50% completion somewhere between 20 and 30 hours of playtime. Some of the boss battles I've won with all but Atsuma unconscious and he with a shred of health left. After one particularly difficult boss fight outside London, there's a long hour plus segment that is all dialog with a three item fetch quest thrown in just to see if you were paying attention to the NPCs you've been talking to. I thought I would never get back to fighting. After that I was finally given my next main quest and set off on a long hike to Kyoto full of frequent random encounters. I took this screen shot at a place called Fork on the way to a desert town that is the first rest stop for the party before going to Kyoto.

     Travel is a very linear experience with random encounters every minute or so and occasionally a chest just off the main trail or a special Golem which, if you beat it in battle, you get its core to synthesize into one you can use in your party. I never use Golems as long as I have four humans in my party. i drop them in if a party member leaves as part of the story or if, in a rare instance, one of my party members tires out from too many encounters.

     There's some exploration in the game but most of the chests are pretty easy to find and interactive objects are few and clearly highlighted with glowing bits so that there's not much point to try and interact with every object in the world like you might in other games. 

     The environments are fairly detailed and interesting but since very little is interactive and you can't stray very far from the path, the main source of interest becomes the battles and managing the stats of your party members. There are various resources such as something called TB and another called SP that you gain from battles and find in chests that you can use to learn new skills, increase your core abilities, buy cores for the creation of Golems and weapons, and buy gems that are an essential part of synthesizing Golems and weapons. You can buy items like healing potions too but I never buy them prefering to use my support character's skills instead. It becomes a real task to figure out just how to spend these resources in a way that makes for a winning team.

     My main strategy has become having two front line fighters and two support/ranged attack characters. I order the support/ranged characters first in the sequence of turns so they can prepare the way for the fighters. So far this basic strategy has worked well for me but of course there are many many different strategies you could come up with using all the different Golems you pick up along the way and all the different skills you can learn.

     Aside from battles you sometimes have to gather information by talking to lots of NPCs in order to progress. I generally try and talk to everyone anyway in games as sometimes there's funny comments. The gay element is still there even though Makoto is MIA. I talked to two women in the rebel base and they didn't come out and say it, but their comments were highly suggestive that they were gay. Plus Atsuma is constantly whining about needing to rescue Toya like he was a long lost lover. I'm not bothered by all this. Not at all. But it's worth mentioning since this element is so rare in games. 

    Enchanted Arms is a solid JRPG for the Xbox 360. I'm pretty happy with it so far.