Enchanted Arms
Sep. 15th, 2013 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAtsuma is the dumb kid at the magic school, who mostly gets by because his arm has the inexplicable power to break enchantments. But when all of the city’s golems go out of control and ancient seals start getting broken, he’s going to need to wise up and actually figure out what’s up with his Enchanted Arm.
This is by From Software (the folks that brought us 3D Dot Game Heroes), so I’m pretty certain it has no relation to the Wild ARMS series, beyond being inspired by it. It has a gunslinger character in a prominent role, and there are magic-powered golems, but it’s not set on a futuristic wild west dying world. Also, the mid-game reveal/"twist" about Atsuma's arm is basically just the twist about Rudy in the first Wild ARMS game. So I’m going to go with “homage,” similar to the way 3D Dot Game Heroes was basically a 2D Zelda game.
Graphically, this reminds me a lot of Legaia 2: Dual Saga, though I’m not certain why. Just the design sense, I guess? It’s nowhere near as pretty as Final Fantasy 13, but at least as good as anything the late PS2 games could manage.
They took a vaguely interesting but ultimately stereotypical approach to the main characters. When they’re introduced, you’ve got your standard dumb spiky-haired hothead who sets things on fire by punching them and holds a mysterious power. You’ve got your charismatic smart guy magic-user. You’ve got a staff chick who’s actually a flamboyant gay guy who wears a belly shirt and only follows you because he’s desperately after the smart guy. And then, three hours in, the latter two die at the end of the first dungeon and leave your party forever. They’re replaced by an idealistic wizard-woman (secretly a princess!), a taciturn warrior guy (with an evil brother and hours of backstory!), and eventually a gunslinger girl (with a tragic past!).
(Spoiler: If the opening is iffy in its treatment of Makato’s sexuality, the ending gets very problematic. It’s…immature, let’s just say.)
The setup looks like a tactical rpg at first, but you’re limited to moving on a grid on your “side” of the field, and firing at enemies on their side. There’s no flanking, friendly fire, or terrain differences; the grid is mostly about arranging your party to hit with area/ranged attacks and avoid the same. (There is a tactical nature to combats; keeping vulnerable characters out of enemy ranges and setting up columns to have hardier characters “cover” weaker ones; it’s just its own thing.)
Virtually all of the monsters are golems that you can add to your party by buying/finding “cores” that allow you to construct your own versions of them. (Using vendortrash gems that you never have enough of, of course.) So you can have a very large party of mons, and everyone gets XP after battles, but only the four characters that participate in each battle get skill points (which can be used to buy new attack and support abilities or to raise your stats). However, while your HP and EP (essentially MP; it’s used for all attacks and restored by passing your turn) are restored after every battle, you have VP which are basically “fatigue points” that run out for characters that participate in battles, and run out faster when those characters are injured or knocked out or when battles run long. So unlike FF13, repeated battles can wear down your party, and you can be forced to use your “B team” if things go badly or you go too long without healing.
Upgrading weapons works the same way: You buy or find a core for that weapon, then you can use the same vendortrash gems to create a new weapon out of it. Fortunately, the game tells you the stats of a weapon before you waste your gems making it, so you can skip making weapons that are weaker than what you have.
There appears to be only one of every core in the game, so you either have a weapon or don’t, and you either have a golem or don’t. And once you have them, you can’t lose or sell them. By the end of the game, you can have dozens of golems that you’ve never used clogging up your party. The human characters are almost always better, and rotating in never-used golems in the bonus dungeon is a good way to get most of your party wiped out before you can act. (The Agility score is only used to determine if the enemies get a surprise round on you; in the bonus dungeon you generally need all of your active characters to have near-maxed-out Agility to avoid surprise attacks.)
Some of the dungeons are better than others—which is to say, some of them have some zig-zagging and puzzle-like qualities, and some of them are straight lines that seem to exist as filler. (There are definitely segments of the game where I was going, “Oh, come on, just let me get there already!”)
The puzzles that are there don’t deserve the overwhelming abundance of tutorial conversations, though. Every single one of them boils down to "Approach the thing and Press X". I have to wonder if it was somebody’s idea of a parody, or the programmers lashing out at managers who think players are total idiots.
You can save anywhere that isn’t in a battle or cutscene, which I totally don’t object to. There can be very longer stretches between the healing points or shops, which is more of a problem. (I suspect, though I was able to avoid it, that you can save yourself in an unwinnable situation.) You can also Retry any battle you lose, and attempts to escape from battle are generally assured (though they cost you VP, which can wipe out your party members if you aren’t careful).
You can sort-of break the game by save-scumming the London City casino. I say "sort-of" in that in theory you can get infinite money (mostly by playing Roulette until you win big), and you can buy Skill Crystals to pump your characters' stats and a particularly powerful golem that's in the shop from the very beginning; but it takes forever because you can only convert about 1,000 casino tokens into 4,000 TB in each back-and-forth to the shop crystal (that top-level golem costs 99,000 plus materials) and saving and reloading isn't exactly rapid, either. For all the trouble of spending two hours trying to level your characters this way, you might as well just spend two hours grinding.
Speaking of grinding, I didn’t need to do much of it. I fought every battle I encountered, and tried to upgrade weapons whenever possible and spend my skill points sensibly, but I ran well behind the FAQ writers’ suggested levels. As long as you pay attention to elemental weaknesses and remember that your Ex abilities exist during boss battles (Raigar’s “Tiara Crusade” can reduce damage to your party by 90%--it’s the only way to get past some of the bonus bosses) you can tackle most of the game with no problems.
An interesting facet of the system is that your characters’ stats max out at 999, and you can reach that with equipment and skill points long before your levels max out, which means you hit a wall in the bonus dungeon: You can no longer deal more damage by leveling up. This wasn’t a big deal for me, as I did less than three-quarters of the bonus dungeon and in doing so made the story final battles pretty easy, but if you’re a completionist, it could mean a lot of very careful fighting and leveling to manage the really nasty stuff.
Overall: It is not a great game, but it’s a perfectly fine game. The battle system is fun, the story is formulaic, the dialogue is middling but has its moments, there’s plenty of obvious padding. I was frustrated it didn’t move a bit faster; and I wish there had been more point to amassing 60+ golems in my party who I never used. Decent mindless jrpg; there’s better stuff out there.
This is by From Software (the folks that brought us 3D Dot Game Heroes), so I’m pretty certain it has no relation to the Wild ARMS series, beyond being inspired by it. It has a gunslinger character in a prominent role, and there are magic-powered golems, but it’s not set on a futuristic wild west dying world. Also, the mid-game reveal/"twist" about Atsuma's arm is basically just the twist about Rudy in the first Wild ARMS game. So I’m going to go with “homage,” similar to the way 3D Dot Game Heroes was basically a 2D Zelda game.
Graphically, this reminds me a lot of Legaia 2: Dual Saga, though I’m not certain why. Just the design sense, I guess? It’s nowhere near as pretty as Final Fantasy 13, but at least as good as anything the late PS2 games could manage.
They took a vaguely interesting but ultimately stereotypical approach to the main characters. When they’re introduced, you’ve got your standard dumb spiky-haired hothead who sets things on fire by punching them and holds a mysterious power. You’ve got your charismatic smart guy magic-user. You’ve got a staff chick who’s actually a flamboyant gay guy who wears a belly shirt and only follows you because he’s desperately after the smart guy. And then, three hours in, the latter two die at the end of the first dungeon and leave your party forever. They’re replaced by an idealistic wizard-woman (secretly a princess!), a taciturn warrior guy (with an evil brother and hours of backstory!), and eventually a gunslinger girl (with a tragic past!).
(Spoiler: If the opening is iffy in its treatment of Makato’s sexuality, the ending gets very problematic. It’s…immature, let’s just say.)
The setup looks like a tactical rpg at first, but you’re limited to moving on a grid on your “side” of the field, and firing at enemies on their side. There’s no flanking, friendly fire, or terrain differences; the grid is mostly about arranging your party to hit with area/ranged attacks and avoid the same. (There is a tactical nature to combats; keeping vulnerable characters out of enemy ranges and setting up columns to have hardier characters “cover” weaker ones; it’s just its own thing.)
Virtually all of the monsters are golems that you can add to your party by buying/finding “cores” that allow you to construct your own versions of them. (Using vendortrash gems that you never have enough of, of course.) So you can have a very large party of mons, and everyone gets XP after battles, but only the four characters that participate in each battle get skill points (which can be used to buy new attack and support abilities or to raise your stats). However, while your HP and EP (essentially MP; it’s used for all attacks and restored by passing your turn) are restored after every battle, you have VP which are basically “fatigue points” that run out for characters that participate in battles, and run out faster when those characters are injured or knocked out or when battles run long. So unlike FF13, repeated battles can wear down your party, and you can be forced to use your “B team” if things go badly or you go too long without healing.
Upgrading weapons works the same way: You buy or find a core for that weapon, then you can use the same vendortrash gems to create a new weapon out of it. Fortunately, the game tells you the stats of a weapon before you waste your gems making it, so you can skip making weapons that are weaker than what you have.
There appears to be only one of every core in the game, so you either have a weapon or don’t, and you either have a golem or don’t. And once you have them, you can’t lose or sell them. By the end of the game, you can have dozens of golems that you’ve never used clogging up your party. The human characters are almost always better, and rotating in never-used golems in the bonus dungeon is a good way to get most of your party wiped out before you can act. (The Agility score is only used to determine if the enemies get a surprise round on you; in the bonus dungeon you generally need all of your active characters to have near-maxed-out Agility to avoid surprise attacks.)
Some of the dungeons are better than others—which is to say, some of them have some zig-zagging and puzzle-like qualities, and some of them are straight lines that seem to exist as filler. (There are definitely segments of the game where I was going, “Oh, come on, just let me get there already!”)
The puzzles that are there don’t deserve the overwhelming abundance of tutorial conversations, though. Every single one of them boils down to "Approach the thing and Press X". I have to wonder if it was somebody’s idea of a parody, or the programmers lashing out at managers who think players are total idiots.
You can save anywhere that isn’t in a battle or cutscene, which I totally don’t object to. There can be very longer stretches between the healing points or shops, which is more of a problem. (I suspect, though I was able to avoid it, that you can save yourself in an unwinnable situation.) You can also Retry any battle you lose, and attempts to escape from battle are generally assured (though they cost you VP, which can wipe out your party members if you aren’t careful).
You can sort-of break the game by save-scumming the London City casino. I say "sort-of" in that in theory you can get infinite money (mostly by playing Roulette until you win big), and you can buy Skill Crystals to pump your characters' stats and a particularly powerful golem that's in the shop from the very beginning; but it takes forever because you can only convert about 1,000 casino tokens into 4,000 TB in each back-and-forth to the shop crystal (that top-level golem costs 99,000 plus materials) and saving and reloading isn't exactly rapid, either. For all the trouble of spending two hours trying to level your characters this way, you might as well just spend two hours grinding.
Speaking of grinding, I didn’t need to do much of it. I fought every battle I encountered, and tried to upgrade weapons whenever possible and spend my skill points sensibly, but I ran well behind the FAQ writers’ suggested levels. As long as you pay attention to elemental weaknesses and remember that your Ex abilities exist during boss battles (Raigar’s “Tiara Crusade” can reduce damage to your party by 90%--it’s the only way to get past some of the bonus bosses) you can tackle most of the game with no problems.
An interesting facet of the system is that your characters’ stats max out at 999, and you can reach that with equipment and skill points long before your levels max out, which means you hit a wall in the bonus dungeon: You can no longer deal more damage by leveling up. This wasn’t a big deal for me, as I did less than three-quarters of the bonus dungeon and in doing so made the story final battles pretty easy, but if you’re a completionist, it could mean a lot of very careful fighting and leveling to manage the really nasty stuff.
Overall: It is not a great game, but it’s a perfectly fine game. The battle system is fun, the story is formulaic, the dialogue is middling but has its moments, there’s plenty of obvious padding. I was frustrated it didn’t move a bit faster; and I wish there had been more point to amassing 60+ golems in my party who I never used. Decent mindless jrpg; there’s better stuff out there.
