Trek1701a's Full Review: Wild Arms for PlayStation 1
Wild Arms was published by SCEI back in 1997. It was the first RPG to use polygons in the battle sequences. It was released at a time that was somewhat of a drought for RPGs for the Playstation. To me it is a very standard console RPG. Nothing in it makes it stand out, but at that time having any RPG, even a standard one, was better than having none at all.
Graphically, the game is, you guessed it, standard. The non-battle scenes are 2D sprites harkening back to the 16-bit days (a dying breed). While I don't think that entirely bad. It makes things more accessible. Things like chests have to be put in plain sight (or at the very least very good clues to where the chest is), because you can't rotate the camera. The battles were poor compared to today's crop of games like "The Legend of Dragoon" and Final Fantasy VIII", but if you look at it when it was released it was state of the art. While there are no 10 minute spell sequences, the graphics get the job done.
The story is the classic standard RPG story and doesn't deviate from it in any way. The heroes (Rudy, Jack and Cecilia) need to defeat the villain (Mother and her Knights) to save the world. They meet characters that help them on their journey. They also must acquire and equip Runes to boost their stats. Nothing in the story truly compelled my interest in the characters. I didn't care that much about them.
The game only has three playable characters. This I like. In the game you don't have to worry about powering up characters that you never intend to use unless the game forces you to. A unique system that Wild Arms does do and does decently well is the character selection. Each of the characters are allotted 4 unique tools some highly useful, some never used. I found one that I wish other games would incorporate into them, the Radar. When you select it all you have to do is use the tool button and it will tell you where treasure is. This is exceedingly useful for non-chest treasure holders that don't always have booty. At times the group is divided and will need to switch back and forth from character to character to solve some of the puzzles in the game. This, I believe is unique.
The battle system is what would be called phased or round based. You select the actions for the characters before the round starts. Then when the actions are entered the results are shown. This adds a little more strategy than the traditional turn based games. If you get tired of fighting low-level enemies, you can set the game to auto-battle. I wouldn't recommend it for tougher enemies and bosses though.
There are some design issues, however, that I have to take issue with. The first is that instead of the standard words used in the menus, the game uses icons. While you do get used to them, while at the beginning they can be problematic until you learn them. Next is spell names. While I kind of like the fact that you aren't able to access all spells for your level, the game uses Crest Graphs that you can attach spells to and if you don't have the graphs you can't get the spell. The names and descriptions that the game uses can be confusing. For instance, instead of calling the low-level Wind spell "Wind", the game calls it "Vortex". You can tell that they had no confidence in the names they called them, by when you immediately selected a spell you get to rename them. The last one, was somewhat of a game breaker to me at times. It is the fact that when you need to go to a town or an area the sections are not labeled on the map. You get dots to represent major places, but no names. This to me was especially infuriating when going by boat. Later in the game you are able to get a teleport spell that alleviates the issue, but is annoying when you're travelling the world for a long time looking for a town and in addition being constantly stopped by random encounters.
There were some optional boss battles that I also, take issue with. If you want the best stuff (Armor, Weapons, etc.) in the game you need to defeat them. However, these bosses are so powerful, even more powerful then the end game bosses, you will need to pump up your characters to an exceedingly high level. I tried to fight one of these bosses, my characters were at about level 40, let me just say I didn't last three rounds. Let me say though, you don't need these items to finish the game, I didn't.
The game is somewhat short. I was able to complete the game in about 25 hours and I most of the things you can do in the game. My characters ended up at about level 42. And I didn't stop anywhere to level up all levels came within the course of the story.
Overall, Wild Arms was a decent game, not exceptional, but decent. Will I buy Wild Arms 2, I purchased it very recently.
1 Player 3 D Combat RPG Custom control functions, camera angles and more, Platforms: PlayStation, ESRB Rating: Kids to AdultsMore at Amazon Marketplace
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