Enchanted Arms, released in 2006 by From Software — at the time still long before the fame later brought to it by Dark Souls — was among the very first Japanese RPGs released for Xbox 360, just a few months after the console launched on the market. The story is set at an academy where students learn to control golems, mechanical beings serving as companions in battle, and the young hero Atsuma, along with his classmates Toya and Yuki, gradually uncovers a conspiracy tied to dangerous experiments on the border between man and machine.
Battles play out turn-based on a chessboard-like grid, where character positioning affects attack range and the ability to combine party skills with summoned golems, which can be collected, upgraded and merged with one another over the course of the game, similar to other collector-style RPGs. There are dozens of golem types with different elemental properties and appearances, so the player gradually assembles their own team according to their preferred combat style. The game also offered an online multiplayer mode for player-versus-player battles, a fairly unusual addition for a Japanese RPG of that era. The visual style combines anime aesthetics with the not-yet-fully-mature graphics of the new console generation, placing the game more among the transitional titles between console generations.
Reviews were mixed to average, and the game was seen as a solid but not particularly original genre entry, whose main value lay mainly in the fact that it existed on Xbox 360 at all in such an early period of the console's life and offered fans of Japanese RPGs at least some choice. For JRPG fans, Enchanted Arms represented a welcome alternative at a time of a noticeable shortage of similar titles on the console; today, though, it's remembered more as a historical curiosity and an early work from a studio that would later become famous for a completely different, much darker style of games.
Why play it: If you're after a historical curiosity and an early work by From Software, it offers a solid, if not especially original, JRPG from a time when there were precious few of them on Xbox 360.
Game 132 of 259 for Xbox 360
