This review contains spoilers
Some background, first. I was first made aware of this game through an LP, which I stopped shortway in once I saw how coooooool the opening was. I later decided to incorporate the game into a small project I devised to hype myself up for the then-upcoming Persona 5: I'd play a jRPG from a different series counting up. Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star II, Wild ARMs 3, Breath of Fire IV, Persona 5. I got as far as Wild ARMs 3 before falling off, largely for unrelated reasons (I was working a new job that wasn't shaking out, and my motivation got sapped away). I made a couple other token attempts at it over the years, at most only getting a couple dungeons into Chapter 1. It wasn't until I decided to play it on-stream that I finally had the time and motivation to see it through to its end.
And, while it became clear after a while that my cohost and I were largely playing the game for ourselves rather than an audience, I'm glad we played through it on-stream, because there's no way in hell I would've had the motivation to finish this on its own.
I'm largely unfamiliar with Wild ARMs overall, so I can't be sure if some of this game's quirks are exclusive to this game or parts of the series overall. I know stuff like the Tools, individual character prologues, and sci-fi bent are series-wide elements while the FP system is wholly invented for this title (though backported to one of the Wild ARMs 1 remakes?). Keep that in mind as I talk about this game and critique particular elements.
Wild ARMs 3 feels very much like a product of the PS1 era school of jRPG design, just made on the next console's technology. I could very easily see a version of this coming out on PS1, maybe leaning more into sprites than 3D models and splitting its four chapters into four discs. I acknowledge that Wild ARMs 3 feels deliberately subversive in this regard, with stuff like Skies of Arcadia-esque vehicle combat, its retooled FP system reading more like a fighting game's Super meter than traditional Magic Points, emphasizing defending by tying it to weapon reloads, its focus on upgrading the same weapons rather than cycling them out at new milestones, being able to dodge enemy encounters through the Migrant system, creating a save point Mimic, and the extreme limitation of healing items outside the Secret Garden. But this all feels like mechanical commentary on the state of things from this era. Anyway, the Mediums/Guardians are another take on Final Fantasy Summons/Espers, there's an arena and a Pit of 100 Trials-esque bonus dungeon, and there are plenty of WEAPON-esque superbosses roaming around, waiting for players to take them down.
I think an issue I have with Wild ARMs 3 is that, for as much as it tries to subvert its template with its unique mechanics and its setting, it struggles to sustain its own identity. The myriad of unique mechanics are great attention-grabbers, but it rarely feels like the game evolves its high concepts. An easy mechanical example of this comes from the game's three modes of transport - horses, the Sand Craft, and Lombardia. Like Final Fantasy before it, Wild ARMs 3 uses these to gate off different parts of the overworld, with horses being used to clear canyons, the Sand Craft navigating the sea, and Lombardia acting as an airship replacement. Entirely fair, not terribly unique but always a solid way to create mechanical complexity to world exploration. But Wild ARMs 3 goes one step further by taking a leaf out of Phantasy Star's book and changing up combat when you're riding something. Good idea, but I feel like each of these has a disproportionate amount of focus:
- Horse combat is normal combat, just with different animations. As charming as it is to watch every enemy in the game running to keep up with the party, there are very few unique encounters, nor are there any unique interactions for attacking enemies on horseback, even though the animations would suggest otherwise.
- The Sand Craft gets a huge amount of focus in the game's second and third Chapters, with a bunch of wholly unique mechanics and its own upgrade system, yet this ultimately boils down to a complete distraction. Dragon Fossils are easy to come by after the initial 15, which makes the act of gating upgrades behind them pretty arbitrary. There is a single check the game makes gated behind the Sand Craft's upgrades - you must defeat Balal Quo Naga to acquire Raftina, who is required to enter Dim Root Path towards the end of Chapter 3. But Balal Quo Naga is a complete boolean check: either you're able to overwhelm it in one hit (i.e., you have the Ark Smasher), or you aren't able to outpace its healing. After this, the Sand Craft is all but forgotten, particularly after you encounter...
- Lombardia is her own unique character, with her own dungeon and boss fight and everything, becoming pivotal to how the game resolves its third chapter. But in terms of how she fights, she's essentially a stripped-down version of the Sand Craft. Instead of each character having a unique role managing the vehicle, you basically just get four characters' worth of identical turns. What complexity existed in the Sand Craft's combat (for as much of a distraction as it presented to the narrative) is completely striped away, and Lombardia's fights just feel even more like going through arbitrary motions.
To bring my point back, for as much emphasis as each of these get, the actual depth to each of these is only skin deep. And since they're so shallow, there's little sense that these things really enrich this world, and so the experience of playing the game falls back into going through familiar established motions.
The absolute worst aspect of this are the game's villains. The game sort-of presents itself as a segmented vignette storyline, with its central party wandering around like ronin (or cowboys!), showing up to help individual problems that crop up as a consequence of the overarching plotline. This episodic approach is a great idea on paper that complements its western setting. The problem comes down to its execution. Each Chapter has its own villain to get its unique focus, slowly building in scope from a rival crew headed by a bandit gun-for-hire to a world-ending ghost-in-the-machine. In between that, you have three dumbasses called Leehalt, Melody, and Malik, later joined by their boss Siegfried. I cannot articulate how boring these stupid cloaky armory demony dipshits are, and how much they grind any scene featuring them to a screeching halt. They're there to tether the version of the world we see in the first chapter (a standard western setting with spirits and magic) to the version we see in the last chapter (a ruined planet, once verdant but since corrupted by alien influence and life-draining technology). Every scene they're in, they slowly exposit a little more of what's going on, sprinkling in a little more technobabble about how this setting works or what they're trying to do. They command the focus of every single dungeon, teleporting in to screw over the good guys then dipping out after they've either created or partaken in a boss fight. You fight these losers (or Janus, who they've sucked the charisma out of, or their weird minotaur android Asgard) at least a dozen times, with little mechanical progression across any of these fights. They are like a gravity well of pacing and character development, since these losers have none of their own and only exist to cause problems. This would be excusable if they were only there for a little bit, but not for the grand majority of the game's run time! Forget about Sephiroth, freaking Garland from FF1 has more presence than any of these assholes.
This isn't even getting into how stupid the game's technobabble is. Like yes, you're gonna have willing suspension of disbelief with this sort of thing. So sure, human aliens from Earth have syphoned the life force from this planet. I don't quite get how humanity was made to believe that the events of 10 years ago happened unknown millenia ago, but sure, okay, that's our premise. But then it turns out that you can just shoot a specially-modified gun at an ethernet cable to restore the quintessence of the planet? What? And what are Elws???
I've been pretty mean, but for as many things as there are to dislike about this game, there are just as many that I love. Much of the non-villain cast is great! Our heroes are all very fun - Virginia, Gallows, and Clive are great characters with lots of fun moments throughout (Jet's okay too). Maya Schrodinger is a fantastic character, easily the most consistently compelling character around and perhaps this game's strongest realization of its Western genre, with her moral ambiguity and the way she makes Virginia grow through their rivalry. There are all sorts of memorable NPCs in the party members' families, and a lot of who the major players are feel thoroughly defined by how their pre-existing relationships develop over the course of the game. The fact that every NPC in the game has a unique name, if not a unique design, makes this dying world feel strangely alive.
Sidequests are good, too! I only had the patience for some of them during my playthrough, so I didn't see the bottom of the Abyss or the end of Gunner's Heaven, but I appreciate that they're there. Likewise for the Telepath Towers and Millenium Puzzles; even though my colorblindness prevented me from being able to play the latter, they're clever puzzles that I hold nothing against. The Secret Garden probably comes too early into the game for how broken its reward is, but the Decaying Labyrinth that's tied to it is a legitimately great dungeon with an excellent gimmick. I love how many little character pieces simply exist for the player to discover, like Martina's whole subplot (definitely wish I'd seen that through on my playthrough) and the entire novel embedded in the story purely so Clive has something to share with his daughter. And while I can't say that I'm behind every decision made with the optional boss fights - it takes a certain level of misplaced moxie to ask the player to fight the same boss literally 100 times - I will say, one of the funniest damn things I've ever seen in a video game is the "Adult Magazine" fight. Great layered setup and pay-off.
Dungeons and music fall into the trap of being repetitive, but they are strong before they're overused. A lot of the game's later dungeons stand out for this reason - because the game takes its time committing to its sci-fi shift, by the time it actually gets there and has dungeons to reflect that motif, it's too late for the game to spam them - stuff like Demondor and Nightmare Castle look great and have fun gimmicks to spice them up. And even though the game could waaaaay benefit from the EarthBound thing of multiple tracks for incidental encounters, "Gunmetal Action" is still a damn great combat theme.
Finally, while I do not understand why they decided to leave in so many debug features, I'm grateful they did. Don't like the silly names you gave the main party? Just talk to some completely incidental NPC with the mystical power of changing your entire identity! Don't like an NPC's name? The game has you covered - just use a Name Tag on them to change it! Feel free to spice up your spell names, too! And if you wanted to know what day of the year it was, Armengard has you covered, with 366 unique lines that show up contingent on the date listed on the PlayStation's internal clock - a feature that goes completely unused throughout the rest of the game. It's weird, but this is the sort of thing that gives this game such a strange, unique identity.
I think, if I'd grown up with Wild ARMs 3 or played it at a time of my life when it could have informed my tastes, it could have easily been one of my very favorite games. Gen 2 of Pokémon is my favorite, one of the reasons for which being the sheer amount of loose, incidental stuff that goes into making it feel like a more complete world. I get a lot of that feeling playing Wild ARMs 3 as well. It's a game that focuses on breadth over depth, and while that makes the experience of shotgunning a game in a sequential livestream format unappealing, this would be a great game to simply live with. If, say, you were someone who spent a year chipping away at it, checking in every day to see what Armangard had to say, trying to solve another Millenium Puzzle, trying to find more Telepath Towers, drilling a little deeper down into the Abyss, all the while pushing bit-by-bit further into the main story? I could easily see this being someone's favorite game. That unfortunately isn't the case for me. Still, it's a game I'm grateful exists and that I had the chance to play.
And, while it became clear after a while that my cohost and I were largely playing the game for ourselves rather than an audience, I'm glad we played through it on-stream, because there's no way in hell I would've had the motivation to finish this on its own.
I'm largely unfamiliar with Wild ARMs overall, so I can't be sure if some of this game's quirks are exclusive to this game or parts of the series overall. I know stuff like the Tools, individual character prologues, and sci-fi bent are series-wide elements while the FP system is wholly invented for this title (though backported to one of the Wild ARMs 1 remakes?). Keep that in mind as I talk about this game and critique particular elements.
Wild ARMs 3 feels very much like a product of the PS1 era school of jRPG design, just made on the next console's technology. I could very easily see a version of this coming out on PS1, maybe leaning more into sprites than 3D models and splitting its four chapters into four discs. I acknowledge that Wild ARMs 3 feels deliberately subversive in this regard, with stuff like Skies of Arcadia-esque vehicle combat, its retooled FP system reading more like a fighting game's Super meter than traditional Magic Points, emphasizing defending by tying it to weapon reloads, its focus on upgrading the same weapons rather than cycling them out at new milestones, being able to dodge enemy encounters through the Migrant system, creating a save point Mimic, and the extreme limitation of healing items outside the Secret Garden. But this all feels like mechanical commentary on the state of things from this era. Anyway, the Mediums/Guardians are another take on Final Fantasy Summons/Espers, there's an arena and a Pit of 100 Trials-esque bonus dungeon, and there are plenty of WEAPON-esque superbosses roaming around, waiting for players to take them down.
I think an issue I have with Wild ARMs 3 is that, for as much as it tries to subvert its template with its unique mechanics and its setting, it struggles to sustain its own identity. The myriad of unique mechanics are great attention-grabbers, but it rarely feels like the game evolves its high concepts. An easy mechanical example of this comes from the game's three modes of transport - horses, the Sand Craft, and Lombardia. Like Final Fantasy before it, Wild ARMs 3 uses these to gate off different parts of the overworld, with horses being used to clear canyons, the Sand Craft navigating the sea, and Lombardia acting as an airship replacement. Entirely fair, not terribly unique but always a solid way to create mechanical complexity to world exploration. But Wild ARMs 3 goes one step further by taking a leaf out of Phantasy Star's book and changing up combat when you're riding something. Good idea, but I feel like each of these has a disproportionate amount of focus:
- Horse combat is normal combat, just with different animations. As charming as it is to watch every enemy in the game running to keep up with the party, there are very few unique encounters, nor are there any unique interactions for attacking enemies on horseback, even though the animations would suggest otherwise.
- The Sand Craft gets a huge amount of focus in the game's second and third Chapters, with a bunch of wholly unique mechanics and its own upgrade system, yet this ultimately boils down to a complete distraction. Dragon Fossils are easy to come by after the initial 15, which makes the act of gating upgrades behind them pretty arbitrary. There is a single check the game makes gated behind the Sand Craft's upgrades - you must defeat Balal Quo Naga to acquire Raftina, who is required to enter Dim Root Path towards the end of Chapter 3. But Balal Quo Naga is a complete boolean check: either you're able to overwhelm it in one hit (i.e., you have the Ark Smasher), or you aren't able to outpace its healing. After this, the Sand Craft is all but forgotten, particularly after you encounter...
- Lombardia is her own unique character, with her own dungeon and boss fight and everything, becoming pivotal to how the game resolves its third chapter. But in terms of how she fights, she's essentially a stripped-down version of the Sand Craft. Instead of each character having a unique role managing the vehicle, you basically just get four characters' worth of identical turns. What complexity existed in the Sand Craft's combat (for as much of a distraction as it presented to the narrative) is completely striped away, and Lombardia's fights just feel even more like going through arbitrary motions.
To bring my point back, for as much emphasis as each of these get, the actual depth to each of these is only skin deep. And since they're so shallow, there's little sense that these things really enrich this world, and so the experience of playing the game falls back into going through familiar established motions.
The absolute worst aspect of this are the game's villains. The game sort-of presents itself as a segmented vignette storyline, with its central party wandering around like ronin (or cowboys!), showing up to help individual problems that crop up as a consequence of the overarching plotline. This episodic approach is a great idea on paper that complements its western setting. The problem comes down to its execution. Each Chapter has its own villain to get its unique focus, slowly building in scope from a rival crew headed by a bandit gun-for-hire to a world-ending ghost-in-the-machine. In between that, you have three dumbasses called Leehalt, Melody, and Malik, later joined by their boss Siegfried. I cannot articulate how boring these stupid cloaky armory demony dipshits are, and how much they grind any scene featuring them to a screeching halt. They're there to tether the version of the world we see in the first chapter (a standard western setting with spirits and magic) to the version we see in the last chapter (a ruined planet, once verdant but since corrupted by alien influence and life-draining technology). Every scene they're in, they slowly exposit a little more of what's going on, sprinkling in a little more technobabble about how this setting works or what they're trying to do. They command the focus of every single dungeon, teleporting in to screw over the good guys then dipping out after they've either created or partaken in a boss fight. You fight these losers (or Janus, who they've sucked the charisma out of, or their weird minotaur android Asgard) at least a dozen times, with little mechanical progression across any of these fights. They are like a gravity well of pacing and character development, since these losers have none of their own and only exist to cause problems. This would be excusable if they were only there for a little bit, but not for the grand majority of the game's run time! Forget about Sephiroth, freaking Garland from FF1 has more presence than any of these assholes.
This isn't even getting into how stupid the game's technobabble is. Like yes, you're gonna have willing suspension of disbelief with this sort of thing. So sure, human aliens from Earth have syphoned the life force from this planet. I don't quite get how humanity was made to believe that the events of 10 years ago happened unknown millenia ago, but sure, okay, that's our premise. But then it turns out that you can just shoot a specially-modified gun at an ethernet cable to restore the quintessence of the planet? What? And what are Elws???
I've been pretty mean, but for as many things as there are to dislike about this game, there are just as many that I love. Much of the non-villain cast is great! Our heroes are all very fun - Virginia, Gallows, and Clive are great characters with lots of fun moments throughout (Jet's okay too). Maya Schrodinger is a fantastic character, easily the most consistently compelling character around and perhaps this game's strongest realization of its Western genre, with her moral ambiguity and the way she makes Virginia grow through their rivalry. There are all sorts of memorable NPCs in the party members' families, and a lot of who the major players are feel thoroughly defined by how their pre-existing relationships develop over the course of the game. The fact that every NPC in the game has a unique name, if not a unique design, makes this dying world feel strangely alive.
Sidequests are good, too! I only had the patience for some of them during my playthrough, so I didn't see the bottom of the Abyss or the end of Gunner's Heaven, but I appreciate that they're there. Likewise for the Telepath Towers and Millenium Puzzles; even though my colorblindness prevented me from being able to play the latter, they're clever puzzles that I hold nothing against. The Secret Garden probably comes too early into the game for how broken its reward is, but the Decaying Labyrinth that's tied to it is a legitimately great dungeon with an excellent gimmick. I love how many little character pieces simply exist for the player to discover, like Martina's whole subplot (definitely wish I'd seen that through on my playthrough) and the entire novel embedded in the story purely so Clive has something to share with his daughter. And while I can't say that I'm behind every decision made with the optional boss fights - it takes a certain level of misplaced moxie to ask the player to fight the same boss literally 100 times - I will say, one of the funniest damn things I've ever seen in a video game is the "Adult Magazine" fight. Great layered setup and pay-off.
Dungeons and music fall into the trap of being repetitive, but they are strong before they're overused. A lot of the game's later dungeons stand out for this reason - because the game takes its time committing to its sci-fi shift, by the time it actually gets there and has dungeons to reflect that motif, it's too late for the game to spam them - stuff like Demondor and Nightmare Castle look great and have fun gimmicks to spice them up. And even though the game could waaaaay benefit from the EarthBound thing of multiple tracks for incidental encounters, "Gunmetal Action" is still a damn great combat theme.
Finally, while I do not understand why they decided to leave in so many debug features, I'm grateful they did. Don't like the silly names you gave the main party? Just talk to some completely incidental NPC with the mystical power of changing your entire identity! Don't like an NPC's name? The game has you covered - just use a Name Tag on them to change it! Feel free to spice up your spell names, too! And if you wanted to know what day of the year it was, Armengard has you covered, with 366 unique lines that show up contingent on the date listed on the PlayStation's internal clock - a feature that goes completely unused throughout the rest of the game. It's weird, but this is the sort of thing that gives this game such a strange, unique identity.
I think, if I'd grown up with Wild ARMs 3 or played it at a time of my life when it could have informed my tastes, it could have easily been one of my very favorite games. Gen 2 of Pokémon is my favorite, one of the reasons for which being the sheer amount of loose, incidental stuff that goes into making it feel like a more complete world. I get a lot of that feeling playing Wild ARMs 3 as well. It's a game that focuses on breadth over depth, and while that makes the experience of shotgunning a game in a sequential livestream format unappealing, this would be a great game to simply live with. If, say, you were someone who spent a year chipping away at it, checking in every day to see what Armangard had to say, trying to solve another Millenium Puzzle, trying to find more Telepath Towers, drilling a little deeper down into the Abyss, all the while pushing bit-by-bit further into the main story? I could easily see this being someone's favorite game. That unfortunately isn't the case for me. Still, it's a game I'm grateful exists and that I had the chance to play.