Thousand Arms in review

It’s taken us three months, but the Thousand Arms stream has reached its end. And while the game shall live on in the lore of the channel, the time has come to send it off. And also — as I am wont to do — to send off my memories of the time I first encountered it.

Back in 1999, years before I would come to know character designer Takehiko Itō’s work in Outlaw Star, I saw it in Thousand Arms. It was a game trying desperately to stand out in the golden age of original PlayStation RPGs. Within a year of its release, the console saw Final Fantasy VIII, Jade Cocoon, Xenogears, Suikoden II, Parasite Eve, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Breath of Fire III, Star Ocean: The Second Story, Tactics Ogre, Grandia, SaGa Frontier 2, Shadow Madness, Legend of Legaia 2, Tales of Destiny, …and that’s not even all of them.

We were certainly spoiled rotten for RPGs in the Fifth Generation of game consoles, and there’s only so much a person can buy on a high-schooler’s salary, no matter how much of our own lunch money we embezzled. While the circle of RPG enthusiasts I was friends with all got the Final Fantasy games, the rest of our collections had to specialize out of necessity. By borrowing from each other, we were able to cast a much wider net into the RPG sea. One friend had Suikoden, Suikoden II and The Granstream Saga covered; another owned Persona 2 and Jade Cocoon; I had the Lunar games and Chrono Cross locked down, and the one of us who actually had a job took on Diablo, Xenogears, Wild Arms, Breath of Fire III, Star Ocean 2, Parasite Eve and, yes, Thousand Arms.

As you might imagine, Thousand Arms had all the same jank and rough corners in 1999 as it did in 2023. But things like bad cameras, stuttering loads, dropped inputs and finding God pixels for common actions were all much more customary among the many games back then that served as the developers’ training wheels for the 32-bit era.

The game did succeed in its efforts to stand out, as it played like nothing that ever came before or — in so far as I know — since. No RPG has taken inspiration from the combat system. While we scoff at the dating scenes now, people on this side of the Pacific had never seen its like before. Downloading cracked and fan translated hentai games for Windows was still in its infancy, after all. Not that I’m accusing anybody here of doing that.

That’s not to say that romantic subplots didn’t feature in numerous other stories. But the next game out that seemed anything like the combination of RPG and Dating Sim was Mass Effect, and even then, the dating part wasn’t even remotely integrated into every aspect of combat. Closer relatives would come later, in the form of a certain category of niche titles on the PlayStation Portable and Vita that were far smuttier than our intrepid Sprit Blacksmith Meis even dreamed of being.

In any case, high school me thought it was unique, interesting, and well worth my time. Eventually, though, I would hit the wall. I don’t recall if it was a difficulty spike or just poor preparation, but early in Disc 2 I just couldn’t make any progress. For a while, I’d grind MP, go on dates, learn whatever random skills came up and hope it improved my fortunes, only for it not to.

And it was during that grind that the shine started coming off. I started noticing that all the attack magic sucked. I started noticing that despite all the focus on elemental attributes for spells and weapons, enemies didn’t seem to be weak or strong to any of them; the biggest predictor of damage was simply how far down the list a given skill or spell was. The repetitive nature of the date questions became glaringly obvious the more dates I went on. Simply put, I did not finish the game fast enough to stay interested. When the time came to return it to my friend, it remained unbeaten.

All these years later, my friend was lucky enough to still have their copy (most of their PSX games were stolen a while back; you could count the survivors on one hand), which I borrowed again for the stream. My goals were twofold: To actually complete the game this time and to attempt to satisfy a chat that had become unusually thirsty. As it turned out, it became a punishment instead.

Thousand Arms perhaps retains value as a curiosity, as a unique creation that encapsulates an era in time — especially the way a lot of its dialog is written. I wouldn’t recommend anybody start it up now for the sake of having a good time. Though then again, I’d probably play Thousand Arms twice if the other option was playing the far more pandering and less effortful ilk of Conception or Criminal Girls once.