I'm playing Enchanted Arms, the first JRPG released on the xbox 360. It's a bit of a marmite title; plenty of people loathe it with the burning of a thousand suns, others love it like the fluffiest, cutest hamster in the world. I quite like it but don't love it, which breaks my marmite analogy. Gah!

The battle system is quite similar to that of the HoMM series. They are turn based, set on a grid, your 4 characters on one side, the enemy party on the other. Position, the correct use of the correct power, and other such tactical thoughts are a must if you want to succeed. It's not another entry from the school of "hold down X to spam basic attack!" In an excellent move, you can fully automate a battle and speed the animation up; this makes passing the random battles relatively painless. The automate AI does a good job of handling the reasonably complex battle system. Battles even have opera music, just like HoMM.

If you have the right sense of humour the game's quite funny. The idiot protatgonist telling the idiot heroine that she's high-maintenace after saving her from her latest bid to win the "Stupidest character in a JRPG" award mostly made up for the urge to bang my head against a brick wall, for example. The story itself is a load of mad guff about a boy with an arm which breaks enchantments, god-like evil robots flying around the sky, and ... er, I dunno. Thankfully the plot knows it's inane and pokes fun at itself from time to time. This must be the first JRPG I have played where the idiot protagonist is called an idiot by everyone he meets, instead of being passed off as a cool, brooding loner with a heart of gold. Poor Atsuma, his best friends keep telling him he has a single brain cell.

It's a launch era game so it's not overly pretty and has parts which feel clumsy and clunky. The menu systems could have used more thought as they force the player to make more button presses than is necessary at certain points. The entire game lacks polish. The English voice acting ranges from acceptable to nasty. The music and sound is entirely forgetable, except for one area where they had the sound of a drill boring into rock playing in the background. That made me want to mute the TV. I was in that area for over an hour.

Yeah. Ok but not great.