Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Have you ever gotten really excited to see a certain movie? I mean really really excited. It was promised to have everything… cool chicks, cool cars, and big explosions. You get to the movie theater and you decide to go all out. You get everything you can to make this a great movie-going experience. You buy the giant popcorn. The $5 box of Dots. You settle into the THX theater, lean back in your stadium-seating chair, and eagerly await the feature presentation.

The movie starts and you see some of your favorite moments from the trailers. It starts out delivering exactly what was promised. About halfway through the film, however, you get the feeling that something is missing. You find yourself being more annoyed than you wanted to be at the characters or the cliched plot devices. You aren’t surprised when the plot twists start to unfold, as you had predicted them an hour ago. It’s now becoming painfully obvious that the producers are trying WAY too hard to make this film exactly what everyone would want, thereby losing that special “something” that would’ve made you a life-long fan.

What I’ve just described is exactly the experience I’ve had playing Enchanted Arms. I’ve sat down with it several times now. Trying in vain to like something that I desperately wanted to like. But let’s face it, Enchanted Arms is sometimes brilliant but often mediocre. Nothing about it made me want to stick around. The story was pretty standard stuff, especially if you’ve played any Final Fantasy games since 6 or watched any amount of anime.

The graphics are pretty much at a level that I would call “okay”. Not horrible, but there were times that the jerkiness of the animations was… rather distracting. The audio is pretty good. My favorite feature was being able to disable the crapful English dialogue and replace it with the original Japanese dialogue. I’ve always found Japanese voice actors to be much more convincing on an emotional level in these circumstances.

But that’s about as good as it gets regarding any kind of emotional response. The story, as I said before, is very predictable (especially for RPG aficianados.) The character designs are… fine, I guess. Not horrible, but not really unique or inspired, either. The combat suffers from this chronic mediocrity as well. They tried really hard to come up with a good turn-based combat system, but it lacks depth. It also accounts for the entire multiplayer experience. I tried a few multiplayer rounds, but it was hard to get a good game going, as every time I tried, there were anywhere from 1 to 3 other multiplayer matches going on… total.

Look, I know a lot of people had good things to say about Enchanted Arms, especially the Penny Arcade guys, but even they haven’t finished the game. Or even played it any time in the last 2 weeks. Tycho seemed to give up on it at about the same point as I did. Gabe has gotten much farther. More power to him, I guess. Anyway, the point is that during the first few hours, Enchanted Arms feels like a really superb RPG, on a platform that so desperately needs a traditional Japanese RPG. Well, maybe “needs” is a matter of opinion, but until Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey come out, even the PS2 still has better JRPG’s (Dragon Quest VIII FTW!)

In summation, if you’re looking for the definitive next-gen Japanese RPG experience, you’re going to have to wait. Enchanted Arms is not it.

The Good: It has everything a good JRPG is supposed to have… but…
The Bad: …it lacks that special sauce and depth of play that could’ve made this a really great experience.
The Ugly: Complete lack of any “Great Moments” though it lacks any truly horrible moments as well.