Do you remember what you were doing in 2008? The economic recession was in full swing, Tom Cruise’s Scientology interview was leaked on YouTube, and Manchester United beat Chelsea on penalties to win the Champions League final. Pretty wild times. Me though, I was hanging around my local Gamestation (R.I.P by the way) looking for something to spend my pocket money on. I was a little strapped for cash on this particular occasion, so naturally, I ended up rifling through the bargain bin. Little did I know I was about to discover a game that would still occupy my thoughts today.
You see, that bin contained a single copy of a game I had never even heard of, Enchanted Arms. I’d played a couple of JRPGs before, so naturally, I was intrigued. I recognized the Ubisoft logo on the front of the box (which was a good thing back in those days), but the developer was a total unknown to me. So I took it home and gave it a go. It was far from the worst game I’d ever played, but after a few hours, I’d seen enough. There was a hell of a lot of running down drab gray corridors, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea what was going on.
It was something about a young man with a magic arm (Enchanted Arms you see?) who turns up to a wizarding university only for the world to end, but that was all I could make out. Bored, I moved on to something else. I forget what.
Anyway, many years later, and now an avid fan of Dark Souls and its many successors, I chanced to look under my bed and found an old PS3 disc that I had almost completely forgotten about. It was, of course, Enchanted Arms, and I probably would have put it down and never thought about it again if I hadn’t glanced at the developer logo to remind myself who had actually made the thing.
I was stunned to see FromSoftware’s logo proudly displayed right next to Ubisoft’s. I was sure there had to be some mistake, or maybe there were two companies called FromSoftware, which admittedly wasn’t very likely. A small amount of research confirmed the contrary, however, and so there I was, no longer under the impression that FromSoft could do no wrong. That’s right, I even like Dark Souls II.
Enchanted Arms, on the other hand, had put me to sleep the first time I tried it, which bothered me for some reason. Had my child brain just failed to appreciate its majesty? Curious, I decided to give it another chance. It felt like the least I could do as a huge fan of FromSoftware’s more recent, better-known games. Having played it again, I still don’t think it’s any great shakes, but I did enjoy it a lot more than the first time around. In any case, there’s definitely stuff worth talking about that I either failed to appreciate or just didn’t experience the first time around.
What I find most remarkable about the game is how, in so many ways, it’s so absolutely bog-standard. It was the first JRPG on the PS3, so I suppose the powers that be wanted something solid enough and representative of the genre on the console before they tried anything weird. Still, it’s strange knowing that a company known for totally revolutionizing gaming with Dark Souls would play it so safe only a few years earlier.
Anyone who has played a Squaresoft RPG will know exactly what to expect from Enchanted Arms: turn-based battling, androgynous teenagers, extreme melodrama, and a questionable portrayal of homosexuality. I did manage to get a better grasp of the story and the lore this time though. Our protagonist, Atsuma is studying a form of magic called “enchanting” at the creatively named Enchant University. Unlike his peers, Atsuma is unable to harness magic directly but is able to siphon power from others through his right arm (again, Enchanted Arms). This makes him something of an outcast.
As well as enchanting, there exists another, much more powerful form of magic that has been lost for 1,000 years. It was used in the past to create creatures of magic known as Golems, which eventually turned on humanity, sparking a conflict known as “The Golem War”. The golems were defeated, and the most powerful among them were placed within the “sealed ward” to prevent future disasters.
Naturally, there are people out to open this seal in the present, and it isn’t long before they succeed and unleash a great evil upon the world. Things proceed as you might expect from there. It turns out Atsuma is some variety of chosen one, and it’s up to him and his friends (one of whom is an outrageous caricature of a gay man) to put things right.
I might sound dismissive, but while the game is thick with clichés, there are a lot of interesting ideas and moments in there too. Who exactly Atsuma is and where his powers come from is an intriguing mystery, and there are some suitably preposterous, but very entertaining twists towards the end.
What lets the game down is how the lore and exposition are delivered. There is a lot of dialogue, and most of it is actually fairly well written, but it is dumped on you, minutes worth at a time, constantly. It doesn’t help that the English voice acting is dreadful. This, combined with the aforementioned gray corridor problem, makes long sections of the game unbearably dull.
The visuals are pretty unimpressive all around really. There’s not much of a colour palette to speak of, and the animations, bar a few combat ones, aren’t that much fun to look at. JRPGs are all about spectacle, and Enchanted Arms only very occasionally puts something on the screen that draws the eye.
The combat itself is a little more interesting though. You and your opponents are arranged randomly on either side of a 6×4 grid with a barrier in the middle that neither side can cross. You assign actions to each of your party members, and once you’ve done that, your plan is carried out.
Each attack at your disposal has a range and spread, so the game is all about positioning your side so that they can avoid incoming fire while keeping the enemy in their sights. It’s an interesting blend of traditional turn-based combat and something more like a puzzle game. You have to think a lot more about positioning than you would in most games of this genre. It adds a layer on top of selecting the attack command over and over again.
There’s also a little bit of Pokémon, or maybe even Persona in the mix. There are dozens if not hundreds of different Golems to collect (you have to defeat them first) that can aid you in battle. The combat never gets so tough that this is required, but they do all have various elemental strengths and weaknesses, so it can help to have a few water Golems waiting in the wings for when you need to visit The Volcano of Flaming Doom or some equally fiery locale.
Releasing so early in the seventh generation’s lifecycle, Enchanted Arms was obliged to incorporate a handful of gimmicks in the name of innovation. I had completely forgotten that on the PS3 version, you could charge your EX gauge (which grants access to special moves) via a minigame in which you have to make Atsuma dance (no seriously) by waving the controller around. It’s an utterly vestigial feature. The Xbox Version, on the other hand, got an online PvP mode. I wonder if someone at Sony had to make a call on whether to include the PvP or the dancing game. I wonder further whether they found employment in the games industry ever again.
You could also use the motion controls to boost your special moves’ damage, and there was also a pizza-eating minigame that used them, but that was about it really. The PvP mode, on the other hand, was surprisingly fleshed out (for a JRPG anyway). There was an online leaderboard that tracked your success in battle and another that tracked your stats in the various casino games on offer, like bingo and roulette.
And that’s Enchanted Arms really—a game by an exceptional developer noteworthy in large part for its utterly unexceptional nature. Far from a bad game, but nowhere near the upper echelons, and certainly nowhere near the best FromSoftware is capable of. It isn’t hard to see why the game has largely been forgotten. It has a personal significance for me of course, and it stands as a reminder that great things come from humble beginnings, but there’s no getting around the fact that Enchanted Arms didn’t quite do enough to stand out.
I’d recommend it to any JRPG aficionados out there, and if you want to see what FromSoftware was doing before it hit the big time, it’s a good place to start. Otherwise, probably safe to give it a miss.