E3 06: Enchanted Arms

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Being the first Japanese RPG for the 360, the graphics are a particular focus of the developers. After all, the fantastic worlds these games conjure up is one of the main reasons to play them. From what we've seen so far, it's one area in which we're sure that Enchanted Arms will not disappoint. While we only had the opportunity to check out a single town, it was filled with people, unusual architecture and colorful touches like confetti and balloons.

Of course, what rests at the core of any RPG is its battle system. Enchanted Arms has a fairly typical turn-based one, spiced up with glitzy special attacks and rounded out with some strategy elements. Each character is placed on a grid, and can move from one space to another; similarly, each attack has a certain range which it can affect on the enemies' grid. Your four characters (a mix of humans and golems) can attack individually or join together for special combo attacks. Interestingly, the guys who showed off the game seemed most keen to point out that you can fast forward the attack animations and put everything on auto-battle; their tone suggested a lack of confidence in the fact that the battles were actually interesting enough to bother with. We'll see how that pans out in the final version.