Enchanted Arms

Developer: FromSoftware

Release Date: August 29, 2006

Time Played: About Two Hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Problematicosity: Significant???

Would I play more? Yes?

It’s kind of serendipitous that the first two games for Season 2 of the Wheel of Dubious RPGs: “This time I have console stuff I paid too much money for” are both beloved(?) From Software classics(?) To be frank, if I had the capacity and willpower to make a randomizer wheel entirely out of dubious and non-dubious FromSoft games from the 90s to the mid-00s I’d do so, because their games can never be accused of being boring. Playing through Lost Kingdoms last year was a good example of that. That game has one cool, weird concept with its real-time card battle stuff, and it tries to ride that out for like 7-8 hours. It doesn’t quite succeed, but it’s neat that it tries.

Enchanted Arms definitely feels more like a fully-realized video game than Lost Kingdoms, albeit one that still has plenty of signature FromSoft quirk. This is one of the first games to come out of Microsoft’s short-lived attempt to court the Japanese market by throwing money at JRPG developers for exclusivity, and uh… It sure does look like a Playstation 2 game that had its assets hastily retouched and upscaled for 720p. That wasn’t an uncommon thing for games during the transition to HD, but it’s a look I find both ugly and endearing. So what is Enchanted Arms? It’s kinda, uh, Pokemon? But with a combat grid that sorta reminds me of Mega Man Battle Network? There are attacks and positioning and moving around and you can combo things? It seems cool! I sure didn’t need to engage in any nuance or monster building during my time with it, but I can see how Enchanted Arms could be a good time. Eventually.

So, hey, moreso than a lot of other kinds of games for this feature, I feel like the introductory hours of a JRPG like this are perhaps not entirely indicative of the full thing. That’s something that might be addressed later down the line, and I’m not opposed to doing follow-up streams of games that catch my interest, such as this one. As Shounen God Hand Imbecile Atsuma and his two friends(?) I managed to skip school, get into a fighting tournament, and then accidentally awaken an ancient evil or something, all within the span of a little more than two hours. There are pizza robots, there is hilariously bad English voice acting, the soundtrack is characteristically eclectic, and there is just the worst/best outfit design. It’s equal parts intriguing and baffling, and I absolutely would not mind seeing more.

Now, to discuss the weird, rainbow-colored elephant in the room, it’s fair to say that Enchanted Arms’ sense of quirk extends into “Problematic” territory. The game itself is fucking weird in a way I can get behind, but the exception is Makoto, one of the three immediate main characters, who such an over-the-top flamboyant gay stereotype that it almost goes into unintentional parody territory. Like, you know how Sylvando in Dragon Quest XI is awesome? Well, what if Sylvando was terrible? And pervasive? It’s a lot, and occasionally a reminder that 2006 was *a long time ago.* It sounds like he doesn’t get any better, either, which is definitely one of those things that puts a damper on my enthusiasm to play more.

Still, if nothing else, Enchanted Arms definitely seems… memorable in a way that might need some future investigation. I haven’t played enough to tell you if it’s good or bad, but it’s absolutely functional and at least mildly dubious in a way that catches my interest. I’m not sure if I want to invest the time to see if this promise bears fruit, especially since it apparently doesn’t start getting “great” until a dozen hours in, but I will never count a revisit out.

King’s Field: The Ancient City

Developer: FromSoftware

Release Date: March 25, 2002

Time Played: About 90 minutes

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Darksoulsiosity: Notable

Would I play more? Unironically yes.

So hey, King’s Field, huh? I finally played one of those on stream, specifically the last one. It’s kind of impossible to avoid this, so I’ll get it out of the way: King’s Field (and a lot of other early FromSoft RPGs, like Shadow Tower) offer a pretty clear window into how games like the Souls series came to be. The lineage is evident. I’m gonna try and avoid just saying IT LIKE DARK SOUL, however, because I feel like that kinda downplays what King’s Field is actually doing, which is more than just being a proto-Souls game. What is it doing? Confusing and infuriating me, mostly.

Now, for what King’s Field 4 is, at least from my 90 minute punishment session, is that it’s essentially a first person RPG whereupon you strafe around monsters and hit them whenever your stamina bar is at max. It’s weird, atmospheric, and inscrutable, but it’s also a clunk-ass video game even by the standards of the early 2000s. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a first-person game that hasn’t quite moved on to dual stick control, and instead uses L1 and R1 for strafing. Alongside your character having roughly the turn speed of a forklift, you aren’t exactly moving at a rapid clip, even when sprinting. It’s a… deliberate game, to put it lightly.

It’s a game that I find equal parts intriguing and irritating, but I think it’s something I could get into if I was in the right frame of mind. And maybe staring at a walkthrough or a map. I know that sense of discovery is often something that Souls adherents swear by, but I find this game crosses my personal level of tolerance pretty hard. I dunno if there are game-critical hidden walls the same way there apparently are in the first two Kings Field games, but if I *were* to stream myself playing this, you can rest assured that my only way of doing so is by ruining the magic as much as possible.

And that’s it for this week! In case you haven’t heard, I’m on a podcast now with ZombiePie and JeffRud called OFF THE DEEP END, whereupon we cover a bunch of weird RPGs in-depth. We’re currently playing through Xenosaga Episode 1, and just recorded our second episode on it. That game… it’s a lot. Like, A LOT. Consider giving it a listen, we’re gonna be covering a lot of fun stuff in the future as part of an off-week program for the main Deep Listens podcast. Who knows, I might even stream some of them!

Oooh man, Xenosaga and GS IV

I have words about them two.

Oh, wow. I almost missed reading this because you'd filed it under Enchanted Arms rather than King's Field: AC. But boy do I have things to say about King's Field. Actually, I should probably just write my own blog about it. For now, though, here are some (relatively for me) quick thoughts.

The first KF game (in NA... it was KF2 in Japan because a renumbering thing happened) was one of the first titles I bought when I got my PS1 way back in 1996. Even then I realized a lot of the technical aspects weren't the best, including a poor frame rate which got even lower in big open spaces, and a bunch of over-repeated textures. The impressive part was that it had no load times, though these were also disguised by long, winding, featureless passages between major areas.

But getting beyond the technical stuff, it was the sort of game that I was the perfect age to run around in, trying to figure out all its inscrutableness. And I more or less fell in love with it. It didn't really matter that the combat was clunky as hell (though it had its own satisfying sort of simplicity). It was about the exploration and the atmosphere. And I credit what I consider to be my fairly good sense of direction in 3D worlds largely to playing the KF games over and over again, most of which had poor map help.

Also, these games can be hard, though in a different way from Souls, I think. The combat is fairly simple to master, but the series requires that good sense of direction and a certain stick-to-it-iveness. I do distinctly remember loaning the game to one of my friends in high school, which he returned a week later, saying he had never even found the first save point so he could begin to bank any of his progress.

The second game (or third in Japan) was even better, with better graphics (chiefly a larger variety of textures, really), more monsters, more tightly designed areas, more cool stuff to find. Push comes to shove, it's probably my favorite in the series. Worth noting that those first three KF games were the first games that FromSoftware put out, ever, each one a year apart, before moving to other things. They are literally the primordial FS games.

And then came KF:TAC (or simply KF4 in Japan). Like its predecessors, I love it to death. The frame rate still sucks, and the controls are still clunky, but for me it's a still a joy to play. Sure, there's some weird, half-assed design in there on occasion, like an equipment repair system that only activates halfway through the game but then costs no money and only requires waiting around ("Welp, my sword is going to take ten minutes to repair, time to grab a snack!"). But there's just something about it that keeps drawing me back even these many years later.

I recognize that a large portion of my enjoyment of these games nowadays comes through some very heavily tinted rose-colored glasses... I've played the KF games so many times over the years that firing them up again is not so much entering a daunting and inscrutable world as it is reconnecting with an old friend, and with part of my childhood. But consider this: The KF games are almost the only games that are more than ten years old that I still go back and play frequently (like, once every year to 18 months). The one other exception is RE4. Weirdly enough, the KF games--and particularly KF2 and KF:TAC--are on that same level for me as friggin' *RE4* in terms of personal enjoyment.

This is probably why I should write my own blog about the KF games. I've literally been playing them for 25 years and I could probably stand to meditate a bit on why exactly they've hooked me to the degree they have. At the moment, I can't really explain exactly why they've stuck with me so much. A worthwhile question to explore, I think!

FWIW, since you mention "game-critical hidden walls," I don't think there are any in KF:TAC, though I play through it now on such an autopilot sort of mode that I can't be 100% sure. The only time I recall this definitely being a thing was in KF2, where there was a pair of boots hidden behind a number of hidden walls that were, indeed, required to progress, which is... not ideal. I can't recall there being anything like this in KF1, either, though there were certainly useful things behind hidden walls all over the place.

Oh, by the way, at one point in 2017 Rorie mentioned wanting to play a King's Field game on UPF at some point, and I think said something about them only being on PS1. I tweeted at him and pointed out that there had been KF:TAC on PS2. He then mentioned this on episode 492 of the Giant Bombcast (47m37s):

Rorie said he had some interest in playing it, but no longer owned a PS2. C'est la vie. As for me, I still own a PS2 and about 2-3 dozen games for it, but the KF games are the only ones I ever play on it anymore. It's basically become my KF machine, much as my 3DS was my Monster Hunter machine.

I warned you about the Enchanted Arms prologue, bro. Makoto more or less vanishes from the rest of the game after that intro (or at least that version of him) even if the other characters you get don't quite have the same level of, uh, "personality." I recall the combat really picking up too once you're out into the world. Maybe one of my first 1000 Gamerscore playthroughs? (I'm actually playing DQ11 right now and Sylvando does indeed rock. Glad to see a thoroughly positive gay character in a JRPG finally. I like where the story arc with his estranged father went.)

The KF games are super deliberate and reminded me quite a bit of Ultima Underworld, especially those slow turning circles. KF4 and Shadow Tower saw From getting real good at establishing an eerie and desolate atmosphere, which is an underrated quality behind what made Dark Souls so engrossing. I think I told you about Eternal Ring already, but that has a similar format too (and, like Enchanted Arms, feels very much like a tech demo for the fledgling console it appeared on).

Enchanted Arms had great combat, enough that I finished playing it, but the characters were bad. Reaaaaal bad.

As much as I want like to like a JRPG character who attacks by playing a saxophone, Makoto is just the worst.

When I saw your list, for a short while, I mistake Enhanced Arms, with Thousand Arms, which was an old PSone jprg/dating sim, that might be dubious, I don't remember it very well.

Also, while watching your stream, I was surprised of how bad the light in the game was, making the already not very good models even worst, making the character models, which are sort tried detailed but also anime style (a combination that is trick to do) look even stranger, like the main character looked like someone bought a default model and put an anime wig on top of it, plus the skin texture looked awful in some shots, making the whole thing more disjointed. No of this was helped by weird character design (like the girl with cowboy hat) and the game engine not matching it very well.

On KF, I only played Shadow Tower, and I have to agree about how sluggish and weird movement feel, something that other early 3D real time free move dungeon crawlers suffered, making them have this weird pace, where everything feel really slow and progress at a dismal amounts. To the point, that sometimes I would not be surprised that grid based dungeon crawlers and I mean the turn base ones, might be more fast-paced.

However, I heard that some horror games manage to use this, plus the low poly aesthetics for their advantage.