Worus

So I finished Wild ARMs 4 on Saturday. It was a pretty good game. The length was about right. The thing that I missed was that the world felt far less expansive than previous games. This might have been because there was not a true world map screen where you could wander around. There was literally a little map to move from point “A” to point “B.” Also, there were only four towns for the entire game. Previous games had so many towns I could hardly keep track of all of the names. This game only occurred on one continent, which was also strange.

Despite being shorter, the story was pretty fleshed out. This was accomplished by having dialog at more than just the start and end of areas, but all throughout. The story was more like a constant conversation, much like you’d expect travelers to have. I also totally dug the comic book style interactions with the characters. Instead of showing small models moving around in the field, there were nice drawings laid out like comic book pages for most of the dialog in the game. It was pretty neat looking.

Speaking of talking to people, the game lacked some control issues. Trying to talk to someone or activate a moving object using the confirm key was a little tricky. As I approached people to talk, I found myself going up and just hitting confirm a whole lot to make sure that I had caught the person’s attention.

The puzzles weren’t too difficult in this game, which is a departure from previous games. They still had their element, but I didn’t spend an hour or two on any given puzzle so that was nice.

The music was really pretty good. I’m buying the soundtrack, but it’s me and soundtracks so I don’t know what that says. The battle theme had some harsh chords in it, which I didn’t appreciate. I prefer a catchy battle theme with non-hostile chords, because I have to hear it all the time.

The new HEX battle system is pretty neat. It caused me to do all sorts of things I wouldn’t normally do in another battle system. Since almost all actions affect the HEX on the field, instead of the individual characters, I found myself actually inflicting poison onto my characters just so that they could be in that HEX, because it was strategically the best place to be. Go, get poisoned, when it’s strategically unworthy for you to remain I’ll move you to an unpoisoned HEX. There are two things strange about what I just wrote: I intentionally inflicted poison on myself, and I did not bother to cure the poison status ailment opting to just wait it out strategically instead.

The other interesting thing about the HEX system is that since movement on the field is an important part of battle, there are skills to accompany movements. One can only attack adjacent to themselves, unless they posses an ARM with bullets loaded, namely Jude, or are using magic. Certain parts of the field are ley points, allowing for special, elemental effects of certain skills, which is neat. When the force gauge fills up enough, you can execute a force skill. Many of these are combination skills so all of the characters involved have to be in the same HEX in order for it to be available so there’s the moving to get to another character’s HEX because the combined power of the characters will be better than using the turn to attack.

There’s a skill to bring all characters together into the same HEX at once, called Gather, which is supremely useful in combination with Jude’s Joint Struggle, which has power based on the number of characters with Jude. There’s also the Isolate skill, which moves everyone in a HEX to another HEX. One would think this was mostly for enemies, but I actually found myself casting it on myself as well thinking, “Get the hell out of there or everyone will die next turn!” The whole HEX system is very clever, and refreshing for a role-playing game battle system.

The final battle was good. I was pleased to see the the final battle’s lyrics weren’t taken out, as they were from Windward Birds in Wild ARMs: Alter Code F. The ending was pretty good too. I didn’t like the very last part. Through the whole game, the theme was “different paths, the same future.” In the end, Arnaud and Raquel leave to find a cure for Raquel’s disease, saying that it’s okay that they leave because everyone will meet up again, “different paths, but the same future.” The very last line in the game was “the four never met again.” What the hell? Raquel did end up dying from her disease, but that was honestly to be expected. Apparently, the rest of the characters who saved the god damned world together never so much as spoke again? What the hell? I do not get that at all.

All in all, this game was 37 hours of “yay,” and I’m dying to play Wild ARMs 5 when it’s finally released. Until then, Xenosaga!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 23:31:15 and is filed under My Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.