Enchanted Arms is a very classical Japanese RPG that suffers from many problems, but thankfully has one major strength and few minor ones that outweighs the bad and makes it a great RPG that I will fondly remember.

The game starts off awfully bad with a cliché storyline and an abundance of obnoxious characters. The entire storyline borrows heavily from multiple influences that can be readily identified, but the problem is that it practically plagiarizes other Japanese RPGs. Surely the designers must have thought that most people who would play their game would have played other JRPGs before? For instance, the introduction text talks of a Golem War that happened 1000 years ago, a great battle that nearly wiped out mankind and that resulted in the loss of all magic (but enchanting, which is not really "magic" in this universe). Today, technology has replaced it, but some people are about to repeat this war and make the same mistake again. Yes, if you've played FF6, you'll most probably recall the War of the Magi, a terrible battle that nearly wiped out mankind 1000 years ago and that resulted in the disappearance of magic. Today, technology reigns supreme but some people are about to revive the dreaded destructive force known as "magic" and repeat this senseless mistake. There's also a guy named Toya who is idolized by the main character Atsuma, who admires him so much that he wants to become just like him one day: that's his goal. Such a relationship is of course nothing new since the Cloud/Sephiroth duet from FF7. While I am well aware of the well-known theory that if we look hard enough, every story is a thematic variant of some Greek or Shakesperean story, I think the Enchanted Arms folks could have taken into account that these similitudes are bound to be perceived by people since they are rooted in the same field, with the same games appealing to the same gamer demographics. They could have plagiarized, say, the Frasier show or some Renaissance play and get away with it. But being a Final Fantasy copycat while working on a RPG is like writing a science-fiction movie with lightsabers, a galactic empire and a mystical energy that binds all things together and can be manipulated by trained people bound by a code of duty, honor and good, with some renegade members advocating free use and destructive manipulation. You can bet that people will notice, since most of them that will be interested in your movie will have seen Star Wars before.

But looking beyond the storyline, Enchanted Arms provides some very funny scenes and some good characters, though most of them are overly characterized (one guy is a snobbish gay, so EVERY single line of dialogue he says is aimed at communicating that. Enough already! I got it!). This hints at one of the most annoying things of the game: it assumes the player is stupid. There are tutorials for climbing ladders and opening chests. (Yup, they tell you "Press "A" in front of a chest to open it.", even though when you get in front of a chest, an "A: Open chest" line appears on screen.) I don't get why I should be told how to do that since I've been pressing A to open chests or climb ladders for - let me see - the past 20 years? Don't you guys have an instruction booklet to tell people that anyway? Lighten the load!

Enchanted Arms' true strength lies not in storyline nor characters, but in the combat system. Now that is one very balanced and deep thing which I have not seen for quite some time. It is a mix between classic turn-based RPGs and Tactics-style combat grid. Each turn you give commands to your characters who have to move on a limited grid of 4 squares wide x 3 squares deep to position themselves in order to launch attacks on the enemies, which are themselves positioned on an identical 4x3 grid. Some attacks are Direct, some Ranged, and some Support. 4 characters are in your party at one time, which means you must have a balance between Ranged and Direct attackers to avoid crowding and thus wasting turns while some characters cannot get to the enemies. In pure Rock-Paper-Scissors fashion, each character has an elemental attribute which means it takes half damage from attacks of the same element and twice the amount from attacks of the opposing element (Fire/Water, Wind/Earth, and Light/Dark). But each attack can be of Element X or non-elemental, which gives place to more varied strategies since the Vampire golem character, for instance, is Dark-Elemental, but attacks with Non-Elemental moves: thus he takes half damage from Dark and twice from Light attacks, but doesn't inflict more or less damage on anyone. Some characters are thus better suited for some situations, while others serve a more general purpose. Characters are fully healed in HP and MP after each battle, but they lose Vitality Points after every battle turn and every time they get hit (or lose lots of them if they die in a battle). When a character runs out of Vitality, they start every battle at 1 HP and 1 MP, which means you have to replace them. You can travel with about 10 characters and so you have to switch your 4 in-party characters regularly to avoid having any of them exhausted. This mechanism fosters diversity in your team (bring along characters of each element so you're never ill-equipped to face the current dungeon) and efficient strategic thinking - the quickest you can dispatch the enemies, the less Vitality you will lose. Thus every battle is sufficiently "challenging" even if it's easy - the challenge becomes in doing things very quickly so you can keep on using your current team. The great strength of the battle system is that every battle starts with random placement of your characters and the enemies on the grid. This makes every battle unique, for even if you encounter the same group of enemies twice, your strategy has to adapt to the starting positions. One time you'll have your fighters up close and ready to smash, and the battle will be a breeze. The other time you'll have to move them out of the back ranks and cover your ranged characters that have started in the front row. If a character is placed on the square just in front of another, he provides "cover" for the character in the back, which halves damage received from Direct-type attacks. Thus Mage-type enemies can be hard to dispatch in one battle if they start in a position of cover. And the icing on the cake comes from Combination attacks: as characters fight together they gain Friendship points which fills their combo gauge more quickly the more they have. When two characters attack the same target and both have their combo gauge filled, they make a combination attack which can boost significantly the damage they inflict. This becomes a factor in Boss fights and desperate situations.

As you can hopefully gather from this last paragraph, I was pretty impressed with the combat system. The Level-up mechanism is just as interesting: characters gain EXP and level-up automatically as in every other classical RPG, but they also gain skill points which can be used to purchase new skills or increase their parameters, such as "Direct Power", HP, MP, Speed, "Support Power", etc. You can thus decide to skip on certain skills and boost certain parameters to develop your character in different directions.

The game's challenge is very generous. Battles usually require you to think about this (the random placement of characters prevents you from using the one "perfect strategy" every battle since sometimes you won't be in the position to use it) but are never too difficult. There's a Retry option that allows you to start a battle again should you die, which can be used indefinitely. This, coupled with the fact that you can save anywhere at anytime (except in a battle) means that you won't lose anytime replaying a segment you've already completed. The game is long (it took me 47 hours to complete). For me, that's a drawback: as in any JRPG, there are too many random battles. But it seems to be a strength for the hardcore RPG fanatic (or at least that's what developers seem to think). There is one STUPID exception though. The ending is composed of a series of seven boss battles, and the first of them is INSANELY difficult. In fact, I was almost breezing through the end castle, but I died systematically and very quickly at this boss fight. I had to practically cheat to complete it, by going to the casino and betting my fortune at the roulette and reloading if I lost over and over until I won, exchanged the prize for stuff to sell, and buy skill gems to boost my characters up to an insane level so I could BARELY win. This is unforgivable. I suppose the boss is difficult but fair if you do the optional quests near the end, where you go in some shrines to beat the Weapons (oops, FF7 rears its head again...). You can kill optional super-hard bosses (I even read on a forum that one of them is called Omega...) to gain "God weapons" (yeah, Ultimate weapons, they're the same alright). But this is dumb. If you NEED to do the optional quests and gain the top weapons to beat the boss, then they're not optional, unless you cheat like I did. The most frustrating thing is that after this first boss fight, all the other following are not hard at all!

Visually, Enchanted Arms is treat. Character designs are interesing and the environments are beautiful. Special effects and magic is breathtaking! Unfortunately, conversations are conducted in a Fire Emblem-style graphical interface, with characters appearing superimposed over the screen from the waist up. It feels static, and conversations get visually boring quickly since you never see them in the environment, and they have about ten animations for generic emotions.

One of the minor but important strengths of the game is its humor. It works really well and some scenes and dialogues are truly funny. In fact, one of them has to be hands-down of the funniest things I ever saw in a video game (right up there with some of Knights of the Old Republic's HK-47's most famous quotes). If you ever get to the part where you investigate the theft of the Golem Flute and Karin asks you "So, based on the evidence, this means that...", be sure to pick "The thief uses trained mice!" Laughs guaranteed.

All in all, Enchanted Arms suffers from many flaws, but its battle system really did it for me. I recommend that you rent it first to see if it suits you, and keep in mind that the story picks up and gets better the more you play (though it fails to reach stellar heights).