TGS 2005: Enchant Arm Hands-On Impressions

While the Xbox is not a system known for a large number of Japanese RPGs, it looks like the Xbox 360 is already moving to populate itself with those titles. Among the playable 360 titles at the Tokyo Game Show was From Software's Enchant Arm, a role-playing game in a futuristic setting with some nice eye candy. We discovered that the game has an interesting battle system behind the pretty face, too.

We took control of a party of four characters and set to wandering a large, intricately designed tower. Our group consisted of a uniformed, serious-looking young man wielding a spear; an adorable robot girl with a giant bazooka; a brash, tough-looking man with some sort of fist weapon; and a flamboyantly dressed fellow whose weapon was a bizarre collection of multicolored tubes and springs. The battles were random encounters, and Enchant Arm utilizes a sort of turn-based, grid-based system similar to a strategy game. The enemy characters face off against the protagonists on their own three-by-three square zone; neither side can cross into the other's area. You choose the actions of each of your characters, and the whole turn is taken when you're finished. Your available attacks all have their own areas of effect, from a single line of squares, to a pattern of squares, to the whole opposite grid. Attacks from different characters that pile up on a single foe will chain for combos and increased damage.

There's a focus on the level of detail in the game that you can see most readily in the characters themselves. Where other games have 2D, static portrait art for their dialogue sequences, Enchant Arm uses the 3D models to act out spoken scenes, floating them right above the text. It looks a little weird, but at least you get some time to enjoy the detailed models. Every button and insignia on a uniform is meticulously present, and the characters all look pretty snappy. The dark tower we ran through had nice textures and looked good, as well.

It's nice to see the 360 pony up some RPG offerings right off the bat. We'll bring you more information on Enchant Arm as it happens, so stay tuned to our TGS coverage and this gamespace.