Introduction

In 1998 (and '99 for us non-Japanese), a game called Thousand Arms was released for the PlayStation, developed by Red Company and published by Atlus. The plot itself is fairly traditional JRPG (and, hell, Western RPG) stuff: heroic band fights vaguely defined evil for the fate of the world yadda yadda yadda. Still, while the bare bones of the game may be identical to so many others, it is not afraid to point out this fact on occasion, as well as subvert the normal memes. The main character, for example, has noticeably more personality than basically every other main character from the PlayStation Final Fantasy games, and most everyone else is one type of goofy or another. Imagine if Outlaw Star was a fantasy RPG and you'd have a good idea of what goes on in this game.

Oh, and there's this whole "dating game" element where you have to mack the ladies to power up your weapons. In spite of what you might think, though, it's less "I wanna get in her pants" and more an exercise in "how many different ways can Meis put a foot in his mouth?" At no point does the game imply that Meis gets farther than first base, and I would like the thread to do the same.

Visually speaking, the graphics fairly scream "early PSX" in spite of being released fairly late in the console's lifespan. Basically, it inverts the usual FF paradigm of blocky polygon characters on painted backgrounds; instead, it uses SNES-level sprites and anime-style animations on a 3D background. Oh yes, and there are several sections with voiced dialogue, a rarity for RPG's of this generation. I'll be following Kethyveris' lead for this by including both screenshots and videos for each such section; the first image of the sequence will have a link embedded in it, or you can click the icon at the sequence's end.

Finally, if you think the images for the first update are a bit "off," you'd be right. I've fixed the aspect ratio as of the second update, but since these images are still passable and I've grown terribly sick of the intro section in the process of preparing this LP, you'll just have to deal with it for now.

Let's play!

The Let's Play Archive

Thousand Arms

by Bobbin Threadbare

Introduction

Table of Contents