I’ve been struggling to finish Arms’ Heart for months. After 18 hours and 45 minutes the last shreds of my patience finally gave out in the final dungeon. It’s always been pretty close to bad, with a sophomoric storyline, tedious, repetitive gameplay and an insanely high encounter rate. But for 18 hours I could live with it, mainly because it’s rather easy to keep going once you start, and I wanted to find out where things were going. Once all the insulting final plot twists were revealed and I was thrown into the psychedelic final dungeon it was time to call it a day.

Story: Jena, the protagonist, was once part of a gang called the Lambs of Johan. The members of this group have had their hearts replaced with mechanical contraptions that give them great power, hence the title “Arms’ Heart.” At the start of the story Jena has abandoned the Lambs, taking with him a homunculus under development. The rest of the game involves him trying to raise the creature so he can get a wish granted when it’s fully grown, while defeating the other Lambs that come after him.

Eventually we find out what he wants to wish for – his mom gave him her heart and died, and he wants it back. We also find out what the shadow leader of the Lambs of Johan is trying to take over the country of Moldaria, and even though Jena put a kink in his ambitions by stealing the homunculus, he still got another power up and is now hiding out in some messed up dimension. That’s where I was when the random battles and lack of progress got too much for me. I’m deliberately spoiling the story to save you the trouble of playing this game. You can thank me later.

Graphics, Music: Nothing interesting. The character designs are pretty blah, though there were some seriously interesting enemy designs in there. Tentacled teacups, pink bats with ribbons, decomposing crocodiles, Hitler zombies… Some of them were really hard to look at, but I can’t fault them for creativity.

Battles take place from a first-person perspective and neither enemy nor ally attacks are ever animated. You just see whooshes and lights and sparkles. There are no animated cutscenes or FMVs either. The game is set in a crapsack world after several years of war, the color palette is dark, bleak and dreary, with a heavy emphasis on yellow, black and dark blue. I wish I could comment on the music, but I spent most of the game in battle so I only remember the battle theme. There was no voice acting that I can recall.

Characters: Your party members (on the right), your former fellow lambs and a few NPCs make up the cast of Arms’ Heart. Jena is the Naruto cosplayer with the heavy make up. Odette is a mole-turned-ally who naturally falls in love with Jena, just because. The drag queen lookalike is Dread, the local blacksmith, and the red-haired brat is his daughter Priscilla. Later on you’ll find out that Priscilla is the daughter of Medina, the long-lost princess of Moldaria and Dread’s wife. This is the kind of development the Japanese call もうどうでもいい, i.e.  nobody cares at this point in time.

I can’t call the cast compelling. Jena is a little more personable than his appearance suggests and might even fit well in in a better game, but his character development is random and unconvincing. Arms’ Heart also suffers from the same issue Saigo no Yakusoku did, in that most of the main players know each other well already, so the player is kept at arm’s length in all their relations and interactions. You’re only welcome to the party when it’s time to fight.

Gameplay: *sigh* This is going to be long, because a full 14 of those 18 hours was most likely spent fighting or running around dungeons. I’m not exaggerating! I’ve played a lot of RPGs over the last 15 years or so, and Arms’ Heart has hands down the worst encounter rate I have ever come across! People talking about terrible encounter rates say stuff like “a battle every three steps” but this time it’s actually true. I swear, there is LITERALLY a battle every three to five steps in Arms’ Heart. One two three *smash*, one two three *smash* You can almost never walk across the screen without *smash* getting *smash* drawn into *smash* yet another *smash* battle. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard the developers were sending a “You are a masochistic idiot” medal to anyone who could prove they actually finished this game.

Uhh, anyway, so the gameplay itself. It’s a dungeon crawler. The crawling is done in a third-person view, but the battles take place from a first person perspective with static enemies, like I mentioned above. The only thing unique about Arms’ Heart is the Howling Gear battle mechanic, where you have to align a spinning gauge on a gear with little blue baubles. Basically the white slice in the red square on the right has to meet the blue thing in the blue square to get net you a hit. It’s all a matter of timing. If you’re good you can time it so the little red sliver hits it instead, getting a Strike instead of a Hit.

Well I guess it’s not that unique, since I saw something similar in Shadow Hearts, which I played briefly on the PS2 and never finished. IIRC I got to Stonehenge and there was some underground puzzle I had to do and I just never got around to it. Some people have touted Arms’ Heart as a spiritual successor to the Shadow Hearts’ series, but I don’t know the series well enough to state whether that’s true or not. In any case every sensible successor should know which features to carry forward and which to quietly abandon. Progress, people, progress.

Here’s exactly why the Howling Gear is such a bad idea. No, it’s not because it’s hard to get hits off it, it’s actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. The problem is that it takes 5 seconds at the start of every character’s turn (not even every battle) for the Howling Gear to fire up, another couple of seconds enter your hits, a little pause if you either miss or get all strikes, then several more seconds to actually carry out the attack. Result: every turn in every battle that happens every three steps is slow, awkward and jerky. 14 hours of slow, jerky battles. Wanna escape from battle instead? Yah well, you have to use the Howling Gear for that too, and even three strikes will only get you a 75% chance at best. By the end of the game the only thing howling was me.

Some gamers might think this sort of thing is good, that a stimulating, challenging battle system is just what they’re looking for. But here’s the thing, it’s not stimulating or challenging at all. In fact, once you get attacks that hit all enemies, it’s pathetically easy. Arms’ Heart ladles out the EXP in spades, so you’ll be leveling up like crazy, meaning you can throw out those magic attacks at will.

There’s also a forging system of sorts, but it’s not that practical until you’re near the end, so I won’t go into it. Still, in spite of all my complaining I did manage to make it almost to the end. I guess I’ll admit the dungeon exploration wasn’t that bad. And the ease of the battle system made the time pass without me really noticing it. If only it wasn’t for DAT ENCOUNTER RATE and DAT HOWLING GEAR and if only the story had gone somewhere sensible in the end instead of some character that had only shown up once suddenly going “It was me all along!” I might be singing a different tune right now.

Right-o, I think I’ve covered just about everything in this game. I’m starting to think I will finish it one day, just not any time soon. Now to try and finish something else. I keep starting new games and I really need to break out of that cycle.