With many >25hour games I play, there comes a point usually about halfway through when playing the game starts to feel like a chore and I have to decide whether to push through or move to another game. Wild Arms 2 has probably claimed the record of how quickly I got to that point, thanks to its displaying so many of the same idiosyncracies as the first Wild Arms game (blocky graphics, ugly fonts, generally unengaging combat, shoddy translation). Add in a cocktail of fresh issues (the tedium of needing to 'search' for locations on the overworld map, and the terrible rotational camera angles that turned exploration from a joy into an annoyance) and the game turned into a chore for me somewhere as early as the tutorial chapter.
(An aside which I need to get off my chest: how bad does the translation get? Well, at one point they straight up put an emoji into a character's speech! It doesn't happen before or after either, the writers just decided on this one occasion for the character to end her dialogue with ":-(". On another occasion, you need to record somebody's voice and play it back later. And they actually translated her spoken line differently both times!)
However, there are some mitigating factors this time around which did make me rather glad I stuck with this game all the way through. While the difficulty leans towards 'too easy' if you know what you're doing, I do appreciate the increased emphasis on status effects (which add a bit of strategy) as well as the multiple ways to build your characters and acquire new skills. Thanks to a larger cast with more available tools, dungeon design is also more interesting than in the first game, even if the puzzles are sometimes rendered obtuse by either the rotational camera or the patchy translation. And finally, while I've ragged on the translation more than once, it does shine in places, with certain heartwarming moments that it somehow handles pitch-perfectly. The writing is more mature, and its exploration of what it means to be a hero and society's expectations of heroes are definitely among its strengths.
I've left its strongest point for last: it's soundtrack is phenomenal. The prominent use of acoustic guitar and its distinctively old-West inflection makes the music memorable enough, but it's also just really well crafted. It might just be one of my favorite Playstation soundtracks and that's high praise indeed.
I still do wish the game were more polished - 3 years between Wild Arms and Wild Arms 2 should have been enough time to iron out more of the original's kinks! And yet this game offered more personality and just enough hints of gradual evolution that I'm interested in seeing where the series goes from here.
(An aside which I need to get off my chest: how bad does the translation get? Well, at one point they straight up put an emoji into a character's speech! It doesn't happen before or after either, the writers just decided on this one occasion for the character to end her dialogue with ":-(". On another occasion, you need to record somebody's voice and play it back later. And they actually translated her spoken line differently both times!)
However, there are some mitigating factors this time around which did make me rather glad I stuck with this game all the way through. While the difficulty leans towards 'too easy' if you know what you're doing, I do appreciate the increased emphasis on status effects (which add a bit of strategy) as well as the multiple ways to build your characters and acquire new skills. Thanks to a larger cast with more available tools, dungeon design is also more interesting than in the first game, even if the puzzles are sometimes rendered obtuse by either the rotational camera or the patchy translation. And finally, while I've ragged on the translation more than once, it does shine in places, with certain heartwarming moments that it somehow handles pitch-perfectly. The writing is more mature, and its exploration of what it means to be a hero and society's expectations of heroes are definitely among its strengths.
I've left its strongest point for last: it's soundtrack is phenomenal. The prominent use of acoustic guitar and its distinctively old-West inflection makes the music memorable enough, but it's also just really well crafted. It might just be one of my favorite Playstation soundtracks and that's high praise indeed.
I still do wish the game were more polished - 3 years between Wild Arms and Wild Arms 2 should have been enough time to iron out more of the original's kinks! And yet this game offered more personality and just enough hints of gradual evolution that I'm interested in seeing where the series goes from here.
Shenobi
2 years ago