charming, bold and honest game that i am unfortunally not a fan of.

final fantasy 3 for the nes is one of my favorite games of the era, playing this game made me realize i was playing a final fantasy 3 without the excuse of being a nes game, because all the nes limitations are here but with the coat of paint that the ps1 allowed.
a dinky map mixed with all the other items that takes 30 seconds to load.
confusing and at times criptic progression structure that will make you accidentally stumble into the progress after the whole day looking for it through the whole map.
games from a generation before allowed items and magic to have descriptions, yet this one really is trying to cosplay as a nes game and simply not have it.
a random encounter that is not random, it will trigger every 20 steps and the spell that avoids random encounters lasts for 1 minute, MANA IS A LIMITED RESOURCE.
at some point you will hit level 50 by nothing but the silly random encounter and then nothing is a challenge anymore, just a nuisance, the last boss requires level 37 to beat with relative ease, so its not even challenging, just annoying.
so many unrelated missions and dungeons my lord, if you trim the fat, this game could be 11 hours long, yet they stretched a nes-like rpg into being 60 hours long.

power to people who likes this game, it genuinelly has a very cute charm to it, but its with games like this that i get convinced that backloggd score is given based on people that rate games based on how they remember the game is, not on recent playthroughs.
a friend of mine who love this game gave a quote that made me understand the situation quite well ''its one of those japanese games mean't to last 2 to 5 months'' i wouldn't agree with him if i haven't found out that this game helped sell guide magazines like crazy, which is a design i despise, making stuff obtuse and cryptic for the sake of selling guide or extending game lenght, its artificial.

i though i was alone and it only didn't click for me, but i recently checked a reviewer i follow (check @Ardwyw_mp3 he's cool) and apparently i'm being too nice to this game.

power to people who love it, but honestly i don't see myself opening it again, not to deny its charm tho, this game being 11 hours long would be a absolute blast

Wild Arms' story is so strong and connects with me a lot. The idea of pure love towards all life is simple, yet not that many pieces of art revolve around it. This raw feeling of adoration of nature, human beings and our home planet is carried throughout the whole game is beautiful... I wish more games were written the way Akifumi Kaneko writes his. He critics humanity, yes does this not to say that "humans are bad", but to say that we have the strength to be better. So let's live with courage to overcome obstacles, love for others and ourselves and hope for the future that we shape!

I went into this expecting it to either be a pile of garbage or mid at best but came out thinking that Wild Arms is a standout title on the system that holds up to this day

Of course, it is lackluster in some areas. The puzzles can either be move object A to point A or be incomprehensible due to the horrible translation to the point where unless you trial and error it, you’re not getting through that locked door. Thankfully however, that only happened to me twice. Beyond that the game likes to give you no sense of direction on where to go next, and while I like that aspect a lot, it’s not for everyone. That’s ok though because im the only person that matters and none of you are real i dont think so this game is a 9/10 can’t wait to play the rest of the series very soon

fun janky oldschool ps1 jrpg, good ost but couldn't call myself a fan of the graphics/aesthetic. story was nice and engaging though. i can tell why this one's a classic

also i found out there's a dupe glitch you can do almost immediately after getting the party together that lets you steamroll through the entire game with max stats. i swear i didn't do it the game is pretty easy without it

(okay, maybe i did after beating the game so i could kill the optional superbosses but listen i was not going to grind for like an hour)

I love this game. Excellent t for one thing: I have made four or five attempts to play this game since it debuted, and in each case my file gets lost or corrupted at about the halfway mark.
It’s curse, right?
I just started a new play through a couple weeks ago, and what happens? This time the sd card gets stuck in the sd card reader and tears in half lol
But you know what?
I’m still reviewing this game because it’s got some stuff to talk about.
I like the swapping between character segments. I’ve always liked those kinds of pieces in RPGs.
The characters are likable for the most part. The graphics, while dated, aren’t that bad. Going for the SD look in 3D is an interesting choice, but it grows on you.
Combat is fun. The music is really good.
The story, from what a I’ve gotten to is good.
I’m starting over again. But this time I’m backing that save up in the cloud lol

Wild Arms

La trama bastante típica de JRPG, pero destaca en las escenas, el principio está muy guay y tiene escenas de por medio que madre mía. Y la escena final :,)

Muy destacable la OST en lo que no es música de batalla, tiene algunos temazos impresionantes.

(7/10)

La OST.

Viejo Oeste+JRPG da la combinación de un juego que dada para muchas cosas, pero al final queda en poco y nada, pero amo la estética que lleva el juego y la música es un deleite para los oídos, lo mismo que el combate no se siente pesado ni lento en todo momento, además el sistema de la barra de Fuerza que con cada nivel de Fuerza tenemos una habilidad para hacer da un toque al combate, las funciona no son ni difíciles ni fáciles, lo mismo con los puzzles, ya que cada personaje brinda algo puzzles dependiendo de sus herramientas, ya la historia...no me gusta mucho quitando a Cecilia y todo su arco de evolución y Zed com su gran carisma y sus motivaciones, los demás personajes se quedan muy cortos a pesar de que les dan cositas como Jack y su búsqueda del poder o lo del pasado del prota, Rudy.
Al final, hasta los villanos se quedan atrás, teniendo una base muy interesante y usable, pero no exploran ni dan momentos ni nada, espero que Wild Arms 2 mejore esto.

I try not to let expectations dictate anything before I play through a video game with eyes unclouded- but Wild Arms is a strange case. On the surface, it seemed to be a game that I’d absolutely adore. Classic simple turn-based PS1 era JRPG with a unique aesthetic and lots of fanfare? Sounds right up my alley! In execution, however, Wild Arms fell apart little-by-little and resulted in something less than favorable overall. I don’t despise this game by any means, but I am confused by what it had to offer.

The peak of Wild Arms- funnily and disappointingly enough- starts before you even begin the game. The 90’s anime intro movie combined with the frankly outstanding music is perfect. Watching that intro on Youtube years ago was the biggest advertisement that got me curious about this game, and it worked because it looked so.. unseen? The PS1 era of JRPGs is famous for bursting with creativity. Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Cross, Parasite Eve, Persona- decades later and I struggle to think of any games since that feel like any of those. Wild Arms seemed like it would be another on that list. A blending of Fantasy, Sci-fi, and the Wild West? Just on paper that seems like a Pandora’s box ripe with ideas. In practice it lent itself to a game that felt dull, derivative, and worst of all dissatisfying.

Being blunt, I think Wild Arms is boring. I don’t like to toss that term around much, but I found this game to be just that. More than any JRPG I’ve played in recent memory I can recount many times where I was just standing still or drifting off on my phone because I didn’t find what it offered very compelling. The combat mechanics are very straightforward- which is not a criticism as someone who’s favorite video game series is Dragon Quest- but lacks any real agency or depth. The first half of this game I just turned on autobattle and watched me win every fight no problem. The second half when I unlocked strong multitarget magic turned into me using one thunder spell and reaping the rewards. Every boss fight is buff Jack > have Jack do strong sword techniques > have Rudy shoot gun > heal when needed. I described the game to a friend as being “babies first JRPG'' because it is absolutely pathetic in terms of difficulty and holds your hand so much that nothing scratches any itches this genre provides. Even the superbosses of the game, which I fought out of curiosity, are effectively impossible to lose to if you just equip a certain item. I don’t have a problem with easy games, heck, a lot of the JRPGs I love are easy- but when it’s presented so sluggish and with so little agency, I found myself spamming the invisibility spell every second I could just to avoid getting into fights entirely.

I also think the game is borderline broken and unbalanced as all hell when it comes to your very few bits of player agency. The notable example for me is the magic system, which gives a surprising amount of freedom in your choices of what spells you learn. About halfway through the game though, you are given the option to learn advanced magic. It costs the same amount of resources to learn as basic magic, and you can undo your spells at any time and reallocate those points. So basically, halfway through the game you can just undo the progress you made and choose a lot of options that are just.. objectively better. Cecilia the mage gets exponentially stronger at this point if the game in the span of like 10 minutes of menu fiddling. I liked that I had the choice to redevelop the character, but it makes an easy game even easier. The EXP balancing is also all over the place. In one of the dungeons I fought a regular random encounter that netted me 10k EXP. The boss at the end gave me 4k. The satisfaction of fighting a strong enemy- like a boss encounter- is ruined when the rewards aren’t even close to proportional. I can think of even more examples like how strong Rudy’s ARMs are to use versus the price to refill the ammo- but I think it’s emblematic enough of how thoughtless the game feels already with the current examples.

The overworld is also just.. not very fun to explore. The drab colors fit the story and themes of the game well, but it lends itself to a very homogenous world that feels clunky to navigate as a result. The map is near useless and shows the bare minimum amount of info possible, along with needing to be found first entirely rendering a good chunk of the game map-less. And most annoyingly is the use of teleporters sprinkled all around that disorient your location and make (the prevalent) backtracking convoluted and slow given the long repetitive animations of using them. By the time you reach the advanced magic and can finally fast travel, it feels like a godsend- and while satisfying in that regard, feeds into the frustration even more retrospectively.

Finally, I think the story is just whatever. None of the side characters stood out to me at all and the main cast is decent enough if only for the fact that I just like the trope of a trio on an adventure. Plus you get a talking mouse companion which is just objectively awesome. I wish the world and story used the barely prevalent wild western themes more given it was one of the things drawing me here, but the fantasy and sci-fi elements were interesting enough to be passable. The melodrama didn’t really work for me given how uninvested I was most of the time, but there’s some good stuff to be found in this department here and there so I don’t think it’s quite as flawed as the gameplay- even if still pretty bland.

Where the game shines is the dungeon design, which I thought was pretty consistently great. Not everything is a winner, but combining Zelda-esque puzzles, a great balance of labyrinthian exploration, and a perfect length made them really fun, and seeing how the tools you unlocked worked in a puzzle context was neat. None of them are hard or push the mechanics very far, but they are enjoyable. In terms of presentation, the game visually is just ‘pretty good’ or ‘solid’ but in a simplistic way that I like. The music, however, is definitely the strongest part of this all and has some excellent and memorable tracks.

By the end of Wild Arms as it got goofy with the Sci-fi, ramped up stakes, and gave you a more full (albeit shallow) gameplay experience- I warmed up to it a bit more and had some fun with it, but probably the most important anecdote I can give here is that I actually shelved this game for a while because I was so unimpressed by the first half of it all. I never do that, and I think it speaks volumes to how middling this game is to have me go that far in avoiding it. Like I said, I don’t think this game is bad, but a lot of the elements of it are underwhelming or poorly implemented in a way that- even with the good- culminates in an experience that is somehow lesser than the sum of its parts.

I don’t love Wild Arms as much as I desperately wish I did. This era of JRPGs is so, so incredible- but this one is a reminder to me that not everything is a heavy hitter. Maybe someday I’ll revisit this game to see if my mind changes at all, and in doing so I’ll huddle up with it on original hardware to give it that charm, but until then I am not impressed with this game. I got the platinum trophy in an effort to really make sure I wasn’t missing something here, but this will be one I don’t think about all too often in the days to come. A shame, but whatever. Can’t win ‘em all!

I’ve really been in the mood to play some more PS1 RPGs lately, and I’ve also been meaning to play Wild Arms for a little while now. It’s an RPG series that I’ve seen around for years but I feel I just never hear anyone actually talk about. Given that they managed to make like six of these, I figured it was about time I actually check some of them out, and what better place to start than from the beginning~. It took me about 34 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

Wild Arms is the story of three characters in the world of Falgaia. You have Rodi the wanderer, Cecilia the princess, and Zack the treasure hunter. You start the game by playing out each of the three (in whatever order you like) as they start on their own, but they very quickly meet up and begin adventuring together in this (at times quite shockingly dark and grim) setting of western fantasy, high technology, and (surprisingly) only just a bit of wild west flavor thrown in there too. I understand the wild west theming and stuff gets more and more present as the series goes on, but it nonetheless struck me as very surprising just how little there actually is in this first entry with how strongly I’d associated Wild Arms as “the cowboy RPG” up to this point XD. The setting isn’t terribly unique, and neither is a lot of the plot (though I certainly don’t think that in and of itself is a bad thing, mind you). It draws very heavily from anime and RPG narrative devices that were popular at the time (with some inspiration from Chrono Trigger some of the most obvious of it), and at points it can be downright distracting just how much you might be thinking “I’ve seen this before” x3. That said, it still honestly mixes this stuff with more novel elements in a way that I think manages to be executed pretty well, even if none of it is incredibly unique on its own.

Writing-wise, Wild Arms is a very mixed bag, but the kind of thing you’d expect from a relatively green company (the staff had a couple RPGs under their belt, but nothing like this as Media.Vision currently existed) on the relatively early PlayStation (barely a month before FF7 in late 1996). It’s a story about self discovery, a story about revenge, a story about love and what it means to fight for what you believe in, but it handles all of this rather imperfectly. Some of this is due to how the three stories of the main characters aren’t blended together that well (Zack in particular sorta has His Own Deal compared to Rodi and Cecilia who are much better narratively intertwined both in plot and themes), but the biggest reason I’d say is that they made the frankly inexplicable decision to make Rodi a silent protagonist.

This might’ve worked well if he was anything like a player avatar, but he simply isn’t. He’s exactly as important as the other two protagonists, but he just inexplicably doesn’t speak, which means that all of his big character moments need to be communicated by long sections of other characters effectively speaking for him to tell the player what his whole ass deal is. That’s not to say the story is bad-bad though. This game still manages to have some moments that are really striking and touching moments (like Cecilia & Rodi’s dream, one of my favorite parts). For late ’96, I think it’s still a pretty well written if quite imperfect game, but it’s not one I’m surprised has ultimately gotten quite buried among the avalanche of much better written RPGs to follow on the PS1 in the years following it.

Mechanically, it’s a very bog-standard turn-based RPG. You go around and explore, you do turn-based battles. There are a couple of unique aspects here and there, like how you gain Cecilia’s spells just as you want from a big list as you find more spell tags to trade in for new spells (which means they don’t scale great and is honestly a pretty less than good bit of design) or Zack’s new techniques by clues you find in the world, but outside of that, it should all be extremely familiar to anyone who has played even a few old RPGs. The difficulty balancing is pretty rough, however, with most boss fights and such not being terribly hard unless they have an annoying status effect, but then there are bosses peppered throughout the game that you just need to get lucky to beat. Whether it’s because there are two of them and they both hit like a truck or because they happen to have a really nasty status effect (or even instant death from which you never get any defense), it makes for some very frustrating difficulty blocks at certain points. The puzzle design is also absolutely brutal in some places, and I absolutely recommend using a guide if you’re stuck, because this game loves environmental puzzles (a lot like Lufia 2 does), but damn if some of them aren’t viscous. It’s all a mixed bag, but it’s more often good than it is bad enough that I can still recommend it.

Presentation-wise, I think this is honestly some of the game’s strongest points. While battles are 3D (and look pretty darn cool with some really sick creature design for such an early PS1 game), the rest of the game is all 2D. It very often has the feel of what I called a “super Super Nintendo game”, even down to having what look a LOT like Mode 7 effects (and even a Mode7 airship! XD). But sprites are well drawn and expressive with lots of little bespoke animations for certain scenes, especially on the main characters. The music is also excellent as well. It has a very RPG of RPGs sorta feel to it, and gave me a lot of both Final Fantasy and Zelda vibes in a way that is absolutely a compliment.

Verdict: Recommended. While Wild Arms 1 has a pretty good amount of flaws or problems, it’s still an all around quite enjoyable time. There are certainly better RPGs to spend your time with, particularly on the PS1, but you’ll still probably have quite a good time with Wild Arms as long as you don’t need a narrative or systems that are particularly unique or distinct. Wild Arms still manages to stand alright all these years later, even if it’s been surpassed quite thoroughly since then~.

Nothing that stands out as much as you might hope based on the novel cowboy-fantasy combination: the combat's a little basic, the towns all feel the same, the story has too much lore and not enough character. Really, there's not much of a Western flavour at all beyond Rudy's guns and a few of Michiko Naruke's compositions. ("Wayfarer of the Wilderness", which quotes Ennio Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold", is a true RPG overworld classic.)

But it's still a pretty good time. The game's biggest strength is its pacing; I played this almost exclusively in one-hour increments, and in just about every single one of those increments I could expect to do a dungeon, go to a new town, wander around the map for a bit, and stop right before the next dungeon. You get a little taste of all the game's flavours in a comfortable portion every time you play, which means I know exactly what kind of fun I'm gonna have every time. (It also means it gets a little wearying towards the end, but at 25 hours or so, it's still a pretty brisk RPG.)

If any one of those flavours dominates, it's the dungeons, which are (likely not coincidentally) one of the stronger areas of the game. Each one's layout teases you enough with different paths that you feel like it's worth exploring for goodies, but not so much that you think you'll get lost or exhausted before reaching the end. Puzzles are well-placed (even if a few are either dull or obtuse) to break up the flow of the dungeon. Even the enemy encounters are designed well despite the basicness of the battle system; it won't take long to figure out a strategy to use against the dungeon's particular combinations of enemies, but you nevertheless need to figure it out.

I just wish I liked just hanging out in the game a bit more. The battles take too long (they shouldn't have been 3D at all, although given the time period I imagine Media.Vision didn't really have a choice) and the music during them is grating. The music in towns are great, but the towns lack personality and your characters rarely do much interesting in them.

This is a game that's remembered, to some extent, as the game that people played while they waited for Final Fantasy VII. But I'd say it deserves better than that; honestly, even if FFVII is more interesting on the whole, I enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay of Wild Arms a lot more. It's brisk where it matters and doesn't try to do more than it can handle, two aspects that can go a little underrated in RPGs. I had a good time with it.

What would be a pretty standard RPG in mechanics and narrative is incredibly elevated by how smooth it is, there are so many quality of life improvements to the core gameplay that it's a blast to go through it, even if the story can come off as a bit generic.

Since your party is always the same each charcter is fleshed out in unique ways, like the tool system which gives each one unique ways to interact with the world outside of combat, making exploration so rewarding.

Rudy is probably the least interesting; he talks the least during cutscenes and during combat he's just a DPS like Jack but without the same level of versatility.

Jack is unussual, he has the most attacks based on random chance and his capacity to act first in most combats make him useful and interesting.

Cecilia sort of unbalances the game, her variety of spells is so limited at first you're made to take very careful choices with how you spend your crest graphs (Which are a very welcomed mechanic), but quickly you have more than enough for every enemy encounter to the point were they boil down to just using the right spell.

Wild Arms is also PS1 2D game on the most part, so it's pixel art is gorgeous, the backgrounds have so much texture and detail to them thanks to it's western influence, never feeling the same even during combat. And the music, delightful, something I can see myself listening again and again.