Enchanted Arms

Please, for the love of God, save us from bad effeminate male voice acting. Fortunately, Enchanted Arms has an excellent Japanese voice acting cast that saves us from the pain of listening to the English voice actors. Now if they could only fix the stereotypical story and traditionally idiotic hero. Still, this is the first real RPG for the Xbox 360, and if only for that reason, I'm glad to have it.

Breaking it down into separate components, you'd mistake Enchanted Arms for any old RPG. The trick of this one is you'd be right. Following the same Final Fantasy model of running through the landscape, interacting with NPCs, and occasionally (well, alright, more often than occasionally) battling enemies, Enchanted Arms is pretty much stock standard. My main complaint is that it felt like there was more grinding in this game than I've seen in a while. The combat system, which you'll see plenty of, puts your characters on a combat grid. Each character's abilities require them to move to specific grid points to use certain abilities. Using this system, I found it difficult to keep from wasting game resources given all of the management I had to put into each fight.

I wasn't impressed much by the game's visuals. They don't seem to offer much beyond any other game, unless you like drab pre-rendered backgrounds and some remarkably not-stunning character designs. The powerful attacks weren't even particularly showy. And as I explained before, you'll likely want to switch to Japanese character voices at the first opportunity.

Ultimately, I can't say I enjoyed this game all that much, but if you're in the need, it is there. Let's hope the next RPG is more enjoyable.

Here's a new one for roleplayers: Embark on a 50-hour-plus fantasy epic traveling to exotic locations in an attempt to save the world. Sarcasm aside, you can also unlock more than 75 creatures and battle with them online.