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Enchanted Arms: Now for the PS3
Katchem_ash
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360's JRPG Enchanted Arms is now for the PS3. It has been released in Asian and will be released in Japan later this week. I does hope it comes to NA though. It would be good that I could play it on the PS3 rather than the 360.
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The battle system is awesome, though. It has auto-battle and fast forward, so you can breeze through the battles, but they are still random encounters. This is not cool.
The characters piss me off, and it has the dialog padding technique of questions...
"This is the Ancient Temple."
"The Ancient Temple?"
"You'll need to collect fifteen plot coupons to proceed."
"Plot coupons?"
EVERY FREAKING THING is repeated as a question by the main character.
Wait for a price drop. This game is alright, but not worth full price.
Yeah, the graphics are really awesome, and I love the levelling and battle systems.
I'm 17 hours into the game and it's still like this. It ceased to be funny a long time ago.
If I had a PS3 I would be tempted to get it for that, mostly because I get DRE like fucking crazy with this game. Its probably just my xbox though.
I am a freaking nerd.
Not going to happen. Wii needs far more basic graphics, and the 360 and PS3 have very different architectures...
It is coming out int he US and it is supposed to come out in March. At least that is what Gamespot is saying anyway
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/rpg/enchantarm/index.html
Just play with the mute on and you'll be fine for the "tutorial" phase.
Pros:
Graphics are shiny
Combat system with the grid is interesting
Between the human characters and all the various robots/monsters, you have a lot of options for who to stick in your party
A fast forward feature in combat to speed up the animation.
Save anywhere feature
Mixed (Could be a pro or con depending on your preferences):
Character development system is very simple.
You don't get a lot of money during the course of just adventuring compared to the cost of items & upgrades.
Although the graphics are good from a technical perspective, I personally didn't like the art direction that much.
Negatives:
High encounter rate + slow combat (due to the amount of time you need to spend arranging everything) = a whole lot of time spent in random battles.
Music is forgetable.
Dialogue isn't very well written a lot of the time.
Story seems to be pretty generic as far as I've seen.
All in all, I'd either wait for it to hit the $20 bin or just skip the game all together. Gamerankings has its average review score at 70.8% and I'd say that's about right. It's not a bad game and if you like RPGs you'll probably like it at least a little, but there are much better ways to spend your time and money (like picking up some of the RPGs you missed on the PS2).
As for XBox 360 RPGs being ported over to the PS3, I have no doubt that some games will be ported or mult-platform, just as some PS3 RPGs will be ported over to the XBox 360. However, hoping for any of the Mistwalker RPGs (Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Cry On) to be ported over to the PS3 is almost as futile as hoping that Halo 3 will be ported to the PS3. Mistwalker is practically owned by Microsoft and those 3 RPGs are all being published by Microsoft and I'm sure as part of the publishing agreement, there's a clause that those games are to remain exclusive to the 360 and possibly the PC.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
It may be a so-so RPG, but its an RPG nonetheless and it'll be on my PS3
"TO-YAAAAAA!"
That was the one thing that gave me the shits when playing. The gay guy was fine, but when Atsuma starts whining... Arghh. Although it's much less annoying with the Japanese voices enabled.
This was my major problem with the game. You start out with just human characters and you never have to worry about AP or use golems and suddenly at about 25% complete it becomes a requirement to worry about AP and maybe sub a golem in here and there to make it through a dungeon. Then you hit 75% where it's time to stop relying on human characters. At this point you have to spend hours powerleveling (training) golems, which just isn't fun. There was no transition from one of these paradigm shifts to the other. And in fact you were encouraged to rely on human characters at first, because they are simply more powerful than golems.
Bottomline: This is a poorly balanced and designed JRPG. It's pretty obvious that auto battle and fast foward were added after QA testing, because the battles are so repetitive, but necessary to bring your golems up to snuff.
I sold it for a copy of Raving Rabids and Ninety Nine Nights.
I can tolerate them if the game's story drives me onward or the battle system is good. Sadly Enchanted Arms lacks both of these features.
Yeah. They made a bunch of false assumptions, which is understandable, since most X-Box centric reviewers have little experience with the genre, but the criticism in this thread still stands.
I was pretty forgiving of this one at first, because of "omigod first JRPG" syndrome, but the honeymoon was over long before the game itself.
I don't mind random battles that much. Though I grew up playing RPGs that had them almost always.
Oh, and obligatory
i think the reviews are right, it's a by-the-books rpg and it's worse-off for it
quite pretty, though
I also like random battle systems where it's possible to avoid the random battles. For example, in Atelier Iris 2, each area has a monster meter and after you fight a certain number of battles (generally 4), you no longer get attacked on that screen until you save the game or leave the dungeon. Wild Arms 4 had a system where by completing certain objectives in each dungeon, you could turn random battles in that dungeon on or off.
Really it all depends on how it's organized.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
Come on folks, if Chrono Cross managed to do it 8 years ago, you'd think developers these days would be able to....
It didn't.
And truth be told, the graphics aren't as nice as people are making out, they're incredibly stale.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
I think it's a mix of tradition and laziness. I mean look at Dragon Quest. VIII is one of the best JRPGs out there and it still relies pretty heavily on random battles. I also think that it's probably a bit difficult to balance out the rate of advancement when you can run around practically avoiding everything. With random battles the developers can kind of help edge the player along at a specific advancement rate levelwise instead of kind of hoping they will be high enough by the time they reach a boss.
Sorry if this seemed a bit rambling. Getting the flu and I find that I'm a bit cottonheaded today :P
The only problem is that the golems in EA have only 3-5 "actions" each, including spells, attacks, etc. So each golem is usually a one trick pony. Even the main characters have only like 15-20 or so attacks/spells/etc, if I recall correctly. Some of which are pretty cool the first time (Pheonix Strike!), but not so much the 1034th. This is over the entire course of the game, by the way. Too bad you can't switch golems in battle. That would have made things more fast paced, but you manage a part in your stats menu that is built from a "deck" that is a limited sampling of your overall roster of golems. If that sounds cumbersome, that's because it is.
Oh and you are penalized AP when you retreat, so do that enough and you will either have to hoof it back to a rest point or you're stranded in a dungeon and have to restart from a save at the start of the dungeon, assuming you have one.
It's an abstraction of an abstraction!
EDIT: Does anyone see what I did there?
If you want an RPG that uses a grid system but isn't a full blown Strategy/RPG then I recommend playing Wild Arms 4. The story isn't any better than Enchanted Arms, but the combat system is highly enjoyable. If you want an RPG where you collect a ton of party members, I recommend Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, DemiKids, or any of the portable Pokemon RPGs since all of those games are better than Enchanted Arms.
Oh and thanks for reminding me that you couldn't switch characters in battle. I had forgotten that little fact, but that was one of my main problems with it; having to guess what elemental affinities to have in my party rather than being able to create a well rounded team and sub the appropriate character in when desired was highly annoying.
EDIT: That's another reason I like Megaten RPGs - death from random encounters is a very real thing so trying to play on auto-pilot the whole time just doesn't work.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
But there have been several very good JRPGs that did away with the random battles and done just fine.
Yes, thats why I said I love all aspects of JRPG's be it random or not. Really I wrote it there before. Maybe you didn't understand?
As far as Enchanted Arms itself, I rented it from GameFly and while I liked the fairly tactical nature of the battles, it did get stale pretty quickly. Will the PS3 version have any new features?
Umm, what you just said pretty much counts for EVERY RPG IN EXISTANCE, save for a few. Random Battles or not....
Back on topic, Enchanted Arms. Seriously, I stopped playing it BECAUSE of the ridiculous encounter rate and random battles. I mean, it's a decent game, decent graphics, typical story, with a decent battle system. However, the random battles pissed me off SOO MUCH that I decided to stop playing.
Decent is fine and all, but, when I'm having a "decent" battle system forced down my throat every 3 steps, is when "decent" becomes "fucking annoying". Especially since all I want to do is get out of this "decent" dungeon and just fight this "decent" boss to advance in the "decent" story.....
While it's interesting to see these systems, can you really say they are in any way better than being able to see and avoid encounters in the field?
Also I thought the gay guy was amusing, but I also have japanese voices turned on. I probably wouldn't be so amused if I actually had to listen to most of these characters in a language I could understand well
I am a freaking nerd.