I picked up Enchanted Arms for the XBox 360 today. Put about an hour into it. What follows are my initial ‘gut level’ reactions. Warning: some spoilers for the very early parts of the game:

OK here’s my 1 Hour Review of Enchanted Arms.

First, let’s get this out of the way. You start with 3 classmates. Atsuma is the protagonist, and he’s kind of a slacker type. Toya is the smart, suave one. And Makota is the fretful one. Makota is also gay and totally in love with Toya. It isn’t clear if Toya returns the feeling yet. With the English voices on, I found Makota *extremely* annoying. He has a really over-blown ‘queen’ accent, if you know what I mean. Like a sleazy stand-up comic doing a gay guy. I quickly switched to the Japanese voices (with English subtitles) and find them much better. The English Atsuma played the character pretty ‘serious’, and the Japanese Atsuma is pretty over-the-top and crazy. Odd that I can say that, not knowing a word of Japanese, but you really pick up on it.

The game has a pretty slow start. If you talk to everyone, and you enjoy anime, then you’ll have fun. If you just do what you need to do, it’ll just seem weird. You start in class. Then you have to go to the cafeteria. Then you have to buy your lunch. Then you have to go feed your dog. Then you need to get out of the school. Dull. But add talking to people and you’ll meet the diet girl who is in despair over whether she should buy the cheap fattening lunch, or the expensive healthy lunch, given her low funds. You’ll meet girls in love with Toya and get to hear Makota try to defend his turf. You’ll meet a club (The Anti-Atsuma Alliance, or 3A’s) devoted to keeping tabs on Atsuma to protect the rest of the school from his slackerly ways, and so forth. I found this all amusing, and since I was reading the english subtitles I could click through it all really fast.
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