The Wild ARMs series is one that eluded me in years past, but when the original Wild ARMs was made available for free last March, I decided to go back and trek through the franchise in its entirety. Well, here we are ~15 months later and I wanted to take a moment to talk about my experiences with the games. Im tackling this as a wholly comprehensive series retrospective from the eyes of a relative newcomer, so yes, there is a lot to say. There are seven total games in the series: five numbered titles, a remake of the original, and lastly an SRPG which is to date the final entry in the franchise.
As you might expect, the original Wild Arms sets up many of the recurring ideas and themes that are seen throughout the series. It takes place on the world of Filgaia, a sort of desert-world that is essentially in a state of significant decay. Drifters are wanderers of this world, taking on mercenary-like tasks wielding ARMs firearms that carry deadly capabilities but also an adverse stigma to the wielder in the eyes of the worlds people.
Above the politics and people of the world are the natural Guardian spirits, animal-like gods that wish for Filgaia to return to a restored and healthy state. Most of the games have this machines vs. nature dichotomy underlying the narrative, but Ill get to that later. Without boring you too much with specifics, you have your three main characters team up for a few reasons. They each have their own goals and motivations, but they are also deemed to be the heroes chosen by the Guardians to stop the invasion of the coming Demon forces. Wait.. Demons? That wasnt exactly what I was expecting.
I know that might sound silly to series veterans, considering how old the game is now, but that caught me off-guard. Demons, in the Wild Arms universe, are best described at machine-alien ..things, that are coming to Filgaia because reasons. Anyways, they are bad and throwing nature out of wack, so they need to be stopped. But enough about that.
Wild ARMs sprites outside of battle hold up reasonably well, especially on the PlayStation Vita screen. The game is structured fairly typically: you start off in a town, explore a world map to find more towns and dungeons, buy new equipment at new shops, fighting random battles along the way. When I say explore a world map, I really do mean explore. At one point I found myself a little lost on the World Map trying to figure out where exactly I was supposed to go; I knew what I was supposed to be doing but not told exactly how to get there. I was mildly frustrated for a moment, but soon realized it had been forever since I actually explored an RPG world map. It felt great to actually find my way around to discover how to progress the game, finding a couple of optional areas on the way.
Dungeons in Wild ARMs are a little reminiscent of 2D Zelda. A series of interconnected rooms are filled with puzzles and chests, and your characters use Tools, such as bombs or the hookshot, obtained throughout the game to surpass these puzzles.. Oftentimes dungeons will have areas not accessible the first time through because a tool obtained later in the game is needed to traverse them. This allowed for revisiting of dungeons to be a worthwhile (but totally optional) endeavor to obtain new accessories and items. All in all I appreciated the incorporation of this optional backtracking too often are areas in games visited one-time-only to be totally ignored and forgotten about when you are finished with them.
While the sprites have aged decently through the years, the same cant be said about the characters during battle, as the game switches to 3D models as you can see above. It certainly took some time to get used to. The battle system is a round-based one, where you input each characters command before the round, and the turn order is decided by a speed stat. Besides the typical turn-based elements, each character has a Force bar, which fills up as they dish out or take damage. The higher the bar, the better your characters stats are. However you can use segments of the Force bar for special moves, which means your parameters will lower at the expense of using one of these moves.
All in all Wild Arms feels very typical in many respects, but its easily apparent why it is considered a classic. Its 15+ years old now and it took me some time for me to adjust to the visuals, menus, and interfaces. Nothing in the narrative wowed me or struck me as all too interesting, but nothing pushed me away either. The character focused plotlines were more interesting than the overarching save-the-world one. The music is pretty fantastic throughout, lots of use of acoustic/steel guitar, trumpet/brass melodies as well as the well-known whistling of course. The game isnt especially difficult, but there are a few boss encounters that threw me off before I picked up on their attacks and patterns.
-Music Favorites-
Overall After the Chaos and Destruction
Town Village of the Elw
Dungeon Courage
Battle Battle ZEIK
Cutscene Alone in the World
My initial impressions of the sequel were quite positive. Everything received a boost visually with more advanced character models and geometries, the music was still pretty good, although a slight step down from Wild ARMs. There was also a new skill system in place, and more characters with unique abilities and unique ways to advance those abilities. There are also more party members which led to both more interesting battle set ups and more Tools for various puzzles in the dungeons. It initially seemed like Wild ARMs 2 had improvements across the board.
However, WA2 might be the easiest RPG I've ever played. Easier than Final Fantasy IV, easier than Grandia. Its difficult not to laugh when bosses wind-up and attack you only to do 0 damage. You see, the game introduces a Personal Skill system, which are essentially passive skills you can put points into to activate. Thinking defensively I figure to put some points into P DEF and M DEF for most of my characters. I expected a minor but hopefully significant decrease in damage, what I got was a game-breaking windfall. Just about every enemy regular attacks did literally 0 damage, including bosses. I wondered if this was a minor imbalance early on in the game but this brain-dead level of difficulty never improved. The only aspect that could possibly cause headaches after this was status afflictions.
WA2 introduced a few changes, now the overworld and towns are explored in a sort of isometric 3D scope rather than top down 2D, which would stick for most of the remaining games in the series. In addition, exploring the world map improved with the games search system to find the towns, dungeons, and many items on the map.
The dialogue was also very oddly phrased at times which also started to really wear on me. I couldn't get interested in the story and I felt like I was tripping over textbox after textbox. Especially the lizard characters Liz and Ard, whose diction may have been an attempt at humor, but I found it annoying more often than not. One line that did get a chuckle out of me was: Gentlemen don't like violence but love the violence of words. Prepare for word torture! I can't keep quiet. I'm full of dangerous phrases that should be censored. But it wasn't just those characters; the script was very awkward (and slightly confusing) the way they threw in game specific diction, such as "Pillars", quotes and all. Seemed redundant at times too, and it always seemed like everybody spoke more words than they needed to when getting a point across. The narrative was more intricate than Wild ARMs but not to its benefit in my opinion.
Battles played very similarly to the first Wild ARMs, with the main additions being more unique skills for each of the six party members. With more members to choose from, that did add an extra level of complexity as to how to prepare for a boss encounter or whatever, but considering the nonexistent challenge, its hardly necessary to think about strategy too much as long as you can deal with status elements. Battles were also a tad slower than the original game, which dragged everything down in addition to the numerous dialogue boxes.
-Music Favorites-
Overall Opening
Town Western Village
Dungeon Chapel
Battle Battle vs Lord Blazer
Cutscene Starting Off
I was very pleasantly surprised by the third game in the series, in almost every facet. Most of the elements that dragged down WA2 were absent, and a couple new elements were introduced. The Migrant Seal system, for example, was a great way to mitigate some of the issues with random encounters, as you can choose to skip battles at times depending on your Migrant Level.
The battle system itself isnt too much different from the first two games, but one area that does significantly differ is how you can set up your characters ARMs for use in battle along with their Guardians. Whereas guardians before only affected some stats and allowed you to summon them, now they directly affect what abilities are available to the character.
In addition, every characters ARM could be upgraded in a variety of ways, whether you wanted to increase damage output, number of bullets, critical hit percentage, etc. All that mixed with unique character Force skills, many of the support systems clicked together very well. None of the other WA games would have the same level of control in these regards, although WA5 was somewhat close.
Wild Arms 3 also had the best Western feel of the series and some of the better characters. Like the original game, while the overall narrative (once again involving a decaying Filgaia) was ho-hum, I felt the individual character vignettes were particularly well done. Some characters had their drawbacks but each was at least partially believable. I also quite liked most of the music in this title, arguably the best in the series.
-Music Favorites-
Overall You Look Defeated When Sad
Town 1 Scenery Called Everyday
Town 2 Long Days of Rest
Dungeon1 Fate Breaker
Dungeon2 Let's Run Around, Let's Look Over There!
Dungeon3 Losing One's Way in Darkness, Losing Something in Darkness
Battle Blood, Tears, and the Dried-Up Wasteland
Cutscene Night of the Legends
It was neat seeing the scenes from Wild ARMs again now in 3D. As I only played the original Wild ARMs about half a year before Alter Code F, I can't say I was feeling truly 'nostalgic' seeing the events again or hearing the remixed music, but it was still definitely cool to see. I did like Alter Code Fs music selection as a whole, but there were also a handful of the tracks were disappointing coming off the originals, which is probably unavoidable any time you make changes to any well-loved soundtrack.
All in all I think it was a suitable remake. It's basically the story of Wild ARMs 1 in the style of Wild ARMs 3. Dungeons had a suitable balance of maze-like qualities and puzzle variety, the overworld is a little barren but does allow for some non-linearity and there are a couple of extra areas (and a bunch of items to discover). A large chunk of the music changes I thought were not drastic enough to be insulting, but there were a few that I didn't care for, such as the 'destroyed town' theme and the sealed library.
Depsite similarities, Alter Code F is much shallower than WA3 when it comes to party member builds and customizations - you can't do anything with the guardians other than cast them, and the only character that you can effectively manipulate stats for is Rudy when it comes to upgrading his weapon. The best aspect of the game is probably the 'collecting' of new guardians and Crest Graphs, and figuring out the dungeons. But because you can't change up your party make-up all too much, the general strategies don't really change throughout the game, so it did drag at times. Fortunately, you can skip most random encounters with the Migrant Seal system, also borrowed from Wild ARMs 3.
As an aside, I quite liked the character art used in the menus for this game. Its still similar to the series anime-style, but with a rustic sort of edge to it. Not saying its better or worse than the original character artwork for Wild ARMs, but it definitely stood out to me, in a good way. The line-shading technique brings to mind hand sketched portraitures similar to those used in a WANTED poster, only maintaining an anime style - a presentation to well match the some of the visual themes of the series. Perhaps a little too clean, though.
All I have to say about the story elements that I didnt say already with respect to the original Wild ARMs is that FMV scenes with self-paced textboxes were waaaaaaay too slow. Then again, when are self-paced text boxes ever a good idea?
-Music Favorites-
Overall Remorse and Promise
Town Sealed Town
Dungeon Conquering the Darkness
Battle Gs Roar
Cutscene Boy of Hope
Bonus The Sweet Candy
Wild ARMs 4 is a true oddball of the series. It introduces a significantly different battle system from all the games before it. Often referred to as the Hex system, positioning is now important for your party more on that in a bit. There is no longer an explorable world map instead you only can travel to point locations on a map screen. While there are dungeons somewhat similar to the earlier titles, locations that are essentially straight paths are also introduced, enhancing the linearity of the game as you never truly get to wander or explore.
The change in battle system was interesting to say the least. Instead of a round-based system like all the previous entries in the franchise, I was faced with a purely turned based queue on top of a hexagonal grid, and each character moved individually. Characters can occupy a hex-location, and status effects did not affect the character directly, but the hexes instead. It might sound interesting on paper, but ultimately I found the system in to be greatly unbalanced. Yulie's Mystic ability, which affected the whole battlefield, and Raquel's move&attack ability were far too easy to abuse and basically steamrolled everything. There were some interesting additions to strategy to keep in mind, like how to minimize damage by manipulating hex position well, but mostly besting bosses comes down to abusing overpowered skills.
Wild ARMs 4 also houses the worst implementation of the tool system. Instead of a variety of tools held by the different party members, Jude can pick up a sword or staff in a dungeon and carry it around for pretty mundane puzzles involving switches. However, one neat addition is that instead of a Migrant Seal system like WA3, you can turn off encounters entirely if you solve an optional puzzle in each location.
Most of the scenes in the game are done in a still-portrait style, with talking heads and a textbox underneath. The game tries to add interest to these scenes with cut-ins and rotating slices and such, all to a hilarious effect. WA4 has a low-budget feel to it in general. Some scenes do use full motion of character models including one of the most ridiculously ridiculous cutscenes Ive ever had the pleasure to experience.
Seriously, just watch this scene, the whole thing. Its so awful/awesome. With Japanese voices for best effect.
The narrative in a nutshell adults are sketchy and probably evil.
-Music Favorites-
Overall Over the Wind
Town Nightless City Guara Bobelo
Dungeon Perilous Change
Battle The Shining Spear Pierces the Darkness
Cutscene For the Sake of One Flower
Wild ARMs 5 takes several of WA4s new elements and refines them, ditches the tool system for a better one, and brings back a fantastic world map.
The Hex system is back, only much more properly balanced this time. In addition, only 3 out of 6 characters can be active in battle, so party configuration is something to think about for the first time since WA2. Runes can be equipped to give different characters different abilities as well, so theres a good assortment of set ups you can use in battle. Characters can also be swapped in and out, so you arent stuck with a set battle group.
WA5 has one of the best world maps of any JRPG Ive played. There is a fair amount of variety in locale visuals, several altitude levels, some tricky paths and nooks, its pretty good looking for a PS2 title, and there are several things to find. The main thing I didn't care for was that all the chests were hidden and had to be found with the detector ring. That was a Wild Arms 'thing' back to the classic games, but it was annoying roaming around the map pressing □ all the time.
While the tool system isnt quite the same as WA1-3, its much better than what was tried in WA4. Dungeons are back to being at least a little interesting again (with some great background tracks I may add). There are lots of secret rooms and chests to gather, things to keep your mind on other than battling or getting to the end. I felt they dungeons hit a good mix of length and complexity.
While many aspects of WA5 are quite solid, the cast and narrative are universally awful. Not even a scene like that linked WA4 one to laugh at.
-Music Favorites-
Overall The Mountain of No Return
Town Goodbye and Hello
Dungeon The Road to Tomorrow Follows Behind You
Battle Terrible Monster Attacking Crew!
Cutscene Only Because It's Important, Does it Easily Break
Bonus1 Understanding the Vastness of the World and Still...
Bonus2 Fereydoon RYGS_5013 (Battle)
The one SRPG of the series, it took a while for Wild ARMS XF to grow on me. Not until more classes unlocked did I really start to enjoy my time with it - allowing for more permutations of class/skills/passives. Theres a lot of variety in how you can set up your party, which is definitely the highlight of the game. I'm confident I enjoyed it more than Jeanne D'Arc - which felt very unbalanced in comparison and with less customization available for character builds. That sort of surprised me because Jeanne D'Arc seemed better received by review outlets.
The plot isn't totally nuanced or anything that hasn't been done before, but I feel it's better paced and more grounded than other Wild Arms titles. A few characters are much more interesting than any the ones in Wild ARMs 4 and 5 as well (which isnt difficult to achieve). There are some wacky turns and plot elements but it seems to be well constructed in how things are foreshadowed and executed, though it's slightly predictable.
My biggest issues with the game are some of the sub-systems, like equipment and searching. Materials can only be gained from sending characters out on 'Searches', which seem to be inspired from FFTA's "Dispatches". Each equipment types upgrade path is pretty limited and linear in fashion as well. Ultimately what this results in is that upgrading equipment comes down to mindless/repeated menu use of sending-->recalling-->spending-->, it's like a chore. But the stat boosts you get are definitely immediately apparent. I wish you could get materials other ways or if 'Searches' didn't just feel like something to waste time.
Sometimes the success and failure conditions are creative and force you to approach things differently than just "Do lots of damage to things". One example is a level where you have to weaken, but not kill enemies for the first part of a battle until you have a character reach a certain spot. It was tough to keep the damage to my party in check as I wasn't able to simply remove the units actually dealing the hits.
-Music Favorites-
Overall The Painted Future Set Upon an Easel
Town So Warm and Soft
Battle Intrude Upon Happiness, Plunder the Future
Battle 2 Beauty And The Shining Sword
Bonus A Weapon Born From the Womb of Mankind
As you might expect, the original Wild Arms sets up many of the recurring ideas and themes that are seen throughout the series. It takes place on the world of Filgaia, a sort of desert-world that is essentially in a state of significant decay. Drifters are wanderers of this world, taking on mercenary-like tasks wielding ARMs firearms that carry deadly capabilities but also an adverse stigma to the wielder in the eyes of the worlds people.
Above the politics and people of the world are the natural Guardian spirits, animal-like gods that wish for Filgaia to return to a restored and healthy state. Most of the games have this machines vs. nature dichotomy underlying the narrative, but Ill get to that later. Without boring you too much with specifics, you have your three main characters team up for a few reasons. They each have their own goals and motivations, but they are also deemed to be the heroes chosen by the Guardians to stop the invasion of the coming Demon forces. Wait.. Demons? That wasnt exactly what I was expecting.
I know that might sound silly to series veterans, considering how old the game is now, but that caught me off-guard. Demons, in the Wild Arms universe, are best described at machine-alien ..things, that are coming to Filgaia because reasons. Anyways, they are bad and throwing nature out of wack, so they need to be stopped. But enough about that.
Wild ARMs sprites outside of battle hold up reasonably well, especially on the PlayStation Vita screen. The game is structured fairly typically: you start off in a town, explore a world map to find more towns and dungeons, buy new equipment at new shops, fighting random battles along the way. When I say explore a world map, I really do mean explore. At one point I found myself a little lost on the World Map trying to figure out where exactly I was supposed to go; I knew what I was supposed to be doing but not told exactly how to get there. I was mildly frustrated for a moment, but soon realized it had been forever since I actually explored an RPG world map. It felt great to actually find my way around to discover how to progress the game, finding a couple of optional areas on the way.
Dungeons in Wild ARMs are a little reminiscent of 2D Zelda. A series of interconnected rooms are filled with puzzles and chests, and your characters use Tools, such as bombs or the hookshot, obtained throughout the game to surpass these puzzles.. Oftentimes dungeons will have areas not accessible the first time through because a tool obtained later in the game is needed to traverse them. This allowed for revisiting of dungeons to be a worthwhile (but totally optional) endeavor to obtain new accessories and items. All in all I appreciated the incorporation of this optional backtracking too often are areas in games visited one-time-only to be totally ignored and forgotten about when you are finished with them.
While the sprites have aged decently through the years, the same cant be said about the characters during battle, as the game switches to 3D models as you can see above. It certainly took some time to get used to. The battle system is a round-based one, where you input each characters command before the round, and the turn order is decided by a speed stat. Besides the typical turn-based elements, each character has a Force bar, which fills up as they dish out or take damage. The higher the bar, the better your characters stats are. However you can use segments of the Force bar for special moves, which means your parameters will lower at the expense of using one of these moves.
All in all Wild Arms feels very typical in many respects, but its easily apparent why it is considered a classic. Its 15+ years old now and it took me some time for me to adjust to the visuals, menus, and interfaces. Nothing in the narrative wowed me or struck me as all too interesting, but nothing pushed me away either. The character focused plotlines were more interesting than the overarching save-the-world one. The music is pretty fantastic throughout, lots of use of acoustic/steel guitar, trumpet/brass melodies as well as the well-known whistling of course. The game isnt especially difficult, but there are a few boss encounters that threw me off before I picked up on their attacks and patterns.
-Music Favorites-
Overall After the Chaos and Destruction
Town Village of the Elw
Dungeon Courage
Battle Battle ZEIK
Cutscene Alone in the World
My initial impressions of the sequel were quite positive. Everything received a boost visually with more advanced character models and geometries, the music was still pretty good, although a slight step down from Wild ARMs. There was also a new skill system in place, and more characters with unique abilities and unique ways to advance those abilities. There are also more party members which led to both more interesting battle set ups and more Tools for various puzzles in the dungeons. It initially seemed like Wild ARMs 2 had improvements across the board.
However, WA2 might be the easiest RPG I've ever played. Easier than Final Fantasy IV, easier than Grandia. Its difficult not to laugh when bosses wind-up and attack you only to do 0 damage. You see, the game introduces a Personal Skill system, which are essentially passive skills you can put points into to activate. Thinking defensively I figure to put some points into P DEF and M DEF for most of my characters. I expected a minor but hopefully significant decrease in damage, what I got was a game-breaking windfall. Just about every enemy regular attacks did literally 0 damage, including bosses. I wondered if this was a minor imbalance early on in the game but this brain-dead level of difficulty never improved. The only aspect that could possibly cause headaches after this was status afflictions.
WA2 introduced a few changes, now the overworld and towns are explored in a sort of isometric 3D scope rather than top down 2D, which would stick for most of the remaining games in the series. In addition, exploring the world map improved with the games search system to find the towns, dungeons, and many items on the map.
The dialogue was also very oddly phrased at times which also started to really wear on me. I couldn't get interested in the story and I felt like I was tripping over textbox after textbox. Especially the lizard characters Liz and Ard, whose diction may have been an attempt at humor, but I found it annoying more often than not. One line that did get a chuckle out of me was: Gentlemen don't like violence but love the violence of words. Prepare for word torture! I can't keep quiet. I'm full of dangerous phrases that should be censored. But it wasn't just those characters; the script was very awkward (and slightly confusing) the way they threw in game specific diction, such as "Pillars", quotes and all. Seemed redundant at times too, and it always seemed like everybody spoke more words than they needed to when getting a point across. The narrative was more intricate than Wild ARMs but not to its benefit in my opinion.
Battles played very similarly to the first Wild ARMs, with the main additions being more unique skills for each of the six party members. With more members to choose from, that did add an extra level of complexity as to how to prepare for a boss encounter or whatever, but considering the nonexistent challenge, its hardly necessary to think about strategy too much as long as you can deal with status elements. Battles were also a tad slower than the original game, which dragged everything down in addition to the numerous dialogue boxes.
-Music Favorites-
Overall Opening
Town Western Village
Dungeon Chapel
Battle Battle vs Lord Blazer
Cutscene Starting Off
I was very pleasantly surprised by the third game in the series, in almost every facet. Most of the elements that dragged down WA2 were absent, and a couple new elements were introduced. The Migrant Seal system, for example, was a great way to mitigate some of the issues with random encounters, as you can choose to skip battles at times depending on your Migrant Level.
The battle system itself isnt too much different from the first two games, but one area that does significantly differ is how you can set up your characters ARMs for use in battle along with their Guardians. Whereas guardians before only affected some stats and allowed you to summon them, now they directly affect what abilities are available to the character.
In addition, every characters ARM could be upgraded in a variety of ways, whether you wanted to increase damage output, number of bullets, critical hit percentage, etc. All that mixed with unique character Force skills, many of the support systems clicked together very well. None of the other WA games would have the same level of control in these regards, although WA5 was somewhat close.
Wild Arms 3 also had the best Western feel of the series and some of the better characters. Like the original game, while the overall narrative (once again involving a decaying Filgaia) was ho-hum, I felt the individual character vignettes were particularly well done. Some characters had their drawbacks but each was at least partially believable. I also quite liked most of the music in this title, arguably the best in the series.
-Music Favorites-
Overall You Look Defeated When Sad
Town 1 Scenery Called Everyday
Town 2 Long Days of Rest
Dungeon1 Fate Breaker
Dungeon2 Let's Run Around, Let's Look Over There!
Dungeon3 Losing One's Way in Darkness, Losing Something in Darkness
Battle Blood, Tears, and the Dried-Up Wasteland
Cutscene Night of the Legends
It was neat seeing the scenes from Wild ARMs again now in 3D. As I only played the original Wild ARMs about half a year before Alter Code F, I can't say I was feeling truly 'nostalgic' seeing the events again or hearing the remixed music, but it was still definitely cool to see. I did like Alter Code Fs music selection as a whole, but there were also a handful of the tracks were disappointing coming off the originals, which is probably unavoidable any time you make changes to any well-loved soundtrack.
All in all I think it was a suitable remake. It's basically the story of Wild ARMs 1 in the style of Wild ARMs 3. Dungeons had a suitable balance of maze-like qualities and puzzle variety, the overworld is a little barren but does allow for some non-linearity and there are a couple of extra areas (and a bunch of items to discover). A large chunk of the music changes I thought were not drastic enough to be insulting, but there were a few that I didn't care for, such as the 'destroyed town' theme and the sealed library.
Depsite similarities, Alter Code F is much shallower than WA3 when it comes to party member builds and customizations - you can't do anything with the guardians other than cast them, and the only character that you can effectively manipulate stats for is Rudy when it comes to upgrading his weapon. The best aspect of the game is probably the 'collecting' of new guardians and Crest Graphs, and figuring out the dungeons. But because you can't change up your party make-up all too much, the general strategies don't really change throughout the game, so it did drag at times. Fortunately, you can skip most random encounters with the Migrant Seal system, also borrowed from Wild ARMs 3.
As an aside, I quite liked the character art used in the menus for this game. Its still similar to the series anime-style, but with a rustic sort of edge to it. Not saying its better or worse than the original character artwork for Wild ARMs, but it definitely stood out to me, in a good way. The line-shading technique brings to mind hand sketched portraitures similar to those used in a WANTED poster, only maintaining an anime style - a presentation to well match the some of the visual themes of the series. Perhaps a little too clean, though.
All I have to say about the story elements that I didnt say already with respect to the original Wild ARMs is that FMV scenes with self-paced textboxes were waaaaaaay too slow. Then again, when are self-paced text boxes ever a good idea?
-Music Favorites-
Overall Remorse and Promise
Town Sealed Town
Dungeon Conquering the Darkness
Battle Gs Roar
Cutscene Boy of Hope
Bonus The Sweet Candy
Wild ARMs 4 is a true oddball of the series. It introduces a significantly different battle system from all the games before it. Often referred to as the Hex system, positioning is now important for your party more on that in a bit. There is no longer an explorable world map instead you only can travel to point locations on a map screen. While there are dungeons somewhat similar to the earlier titles, locations that are essentially straight paths are also introduced, enhancing the linearity of the game as you never truly get to wander or explore.
The change in battle system was interesting to say the least. Instead of a round-based system like all the previous entries in the franchise, I was faced with a purely turned based queue on top of a hexagonal grid, and each character moved individually. Characters can occupy a hex-location, and status effects did not affect the character directly, but the hexes instead. It might sound interesting on paper, but ultimately I found the system in to be greatly unbalanced. Yulie's Mystic ability, which affected the whole battlefield, and Raquel's move&attack ability were far too easy to abuse and basically steamrolled everything. There were some interesting additions to strategy to keep in mind, like how to minimize damage by manipulating hex position well, but mostly besting bosses comes down to abusing overpowered skills.
Wild ARMs 4 also houses the worst implementation of the tool system. Instead of a variety of tools held by the different party members, Jude can pick up a sword or staff in a dungeon and carry it around for pretty mundane puzzles involving switches. However, one neat addition is that instead of a Migrant Seal system like WA3, you can turn off encounters entirely if you solve an optional puzzle in each location.
Most of the scenes in the game are done in a still-portrait style, with talking heads and a textbox underneath. The game tries to add interest to these scenes with cut-ins and rotating slices and such, all to a hilarious effect. WA4 has a low-budget feel to it in general. Some scenes do use full motion of character models including one of the most ridiculously ridiculous cutscenes Ive ever had the pleasure to experience.
Seriously, just watch this scene, the whole thing. Its so awful/awesome. With Japanese voices for best effect.
The narrative in a nutshell adults are sketchy and probably evil.
-Music Favorites-
Overall Over the Wind
Town Nightless City Guara Bobelo
Dungeon Perilous Change
Battle The Shining Spear Pierces the Darkness
Cutscene For the Sake of One Flower
Wild ARMs 5 takes several of WA4s new elements and refines them, ditches the tool system for a better one, and brings back a fantastic world map.
The Hex system is back, only much more properly balanced this time. In addition, only 3 out of 6 characters can be active in battle, so party configuration is something to think about for the first time since WA2. Runes can be equipped to give different characters different abilities as well, so theres a good assortment of set ups you can use in battle. Characters can also be swapped in and out, so you arent stuck with a set battle group.
WA5 has one of the best world maps of any JRPG Ive played. There is a fair amount of variety in locale visuals, several altitude levels, some tricky paths and nooks, its pretty good looking for a PS2 title, and there are several things to find. The main thing I didn't care for was that all the chests were hidden and had to be found with the detector ring. That was a Wild Arms 'thing' back to the classic games, but it was annoying roaming around the map pressing □ all the time.
While the tool system isnt quite the same as WA1-3, its much better than what was tried in WA4. Dungeons are back to being at least a little interesting again (with some great background tracks I may add). There are lots of secret rooms and chests to gather, things to keep your mind on other than battling or getting to the end. I felt they dungeons hit a good mix of length and complexity.
While many aspects of WA5 are quite solid, the cast and narrative are universally awful. Not even a scene like that linked WA4 one to laugh at.
-Music Favorites-
Overall The Mountain of No Return
Town Goodbye and Hello
Dungeon The Road to Tomorrow Follows Behind You
Battle Terrible Monster Attacking Crew!
Cutscene Only Because It's Important, Does it Easily Break
Bonus1 Understanding the Vastness of the World and Still...
Bonus2 Fereydoon RYGS_5013 (Battle)
The one SRPG of the series, it took a while for Wild ARMS XF to grow on me. Not until more classes unlocked did I really start to enjoy my time with it - allowing for more permutations of class/skills/passives. Theres a lot of variety in how you can set up your party, which is definitely the highlight of the game. I'm confident I enjoyed it more than Jeanne D'Arc - which felt very unbalanced in comparison and with less customization available for character builds. That sort of surprised me because Jeanne D'Arc seemed better received by review outlets.
The plot isn't totally nuanced or anything that hasn't been done before, but I feel it's better paced and more grounded than other Wild Arms titles. A few characters are much more interesting than any the ones in Wild ARMs 4 and 5 as well (which isnt difficult to achieve). There are some wacky turns and plot elements but it seems to be well constructed in how things are foreshadowed and executed, though it's slightly predictable.
My biggest issues with the game are some of the sub-systems, like equipment and searching. Materials can only be gained from sending characters out on 'Searches', which seem to be inspired from FFTA's "Dispatches". Each equipment types upgrade path is pretty limited and linear in fashion as well. Ultimately what this results in is that upgrading equipment comes down to mindless/repeated menu use of sending-->recalling-->spending-->, it's like a chore. But the stat boosts you get are definitely immediately apparent. I wish you could get materials other ways or if 'Searches' didn't just feel like something to waste time.
Sometimes the success and failure conditions are creative and force you to approach things differently than just "Do lots of damage to things". One example is a level where you have to weaken, but not kill enemies for the first part of a battle until you have a character reach a certain spot. It was tough to keep the damage to my party in check as I wasn't able to simply remove the units actually dealing the hits.
-Music Favorites-
Overall The Painted Future Set Upon an Easel
Town So Warm and Soft
Battle Intrude Upon Happiness, Plunder the Future
Battle 2 Beauty And The Shining Sword
Bonus A Weapon Born From the Womb of Mankind
