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Wild Arms 4
By admin | August 26, 2010
The story starts off with Jude Maverick, a normal teenager that decides to skip class one day to go off into the nearby forest to explore. Jude accidently stumbles upon an ancient weapon called an ARM, which is a gun that embeds itself onto Jude’s arm. Jude activates the ARM on accident and blows a hole in the machine that keeps his world alive. Through this hole lies another world called Filgaia, which has recently been ravaged by war so all Jude can see is a vast ocean of sand and dead machinery.
Throughout Jude’s journey to fix his own world he stumbles upon three other individuals that need Jude’s help. The first is Yulie, who appears to be a very scared girl with mystical powers. Next is Arnaud, a very big scaredy cat with powerful magical powers backing him. Lastly is the most outspoken and bold of the group: Raquel, who is a very prominent swordswoman and whose only goal is to gather as much beautiful treasure as possible. The story didn’t wow me but it did give me enough to keep me playing through.
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The battle system for Wild Arms 4 is very unique. This game uses a pretty simple hex-based system where there are seven hexes on the board and based on their size can hold one enemy or up to four and the same goes for the player and his party. When the battle starts, you and the enemies are all placed in random spots on the grid and you can only attack enemies that connect to the hex you occupy. This leads to a very strategic battle system where you can either spread your resources thin and take on multiple enemies or you can hole up on one hex and use your whole team to decimate individual enemies. There are also three hexes on the outside area that are imbued with one of the four elements found in the game: air, water, fire, and earth. For example, when you occupy a fire hex all fire based attacks are halved against that character or it can help Arnaud by beefing up his magical spells.
There are a lot of different skills that you can acquire throughout your adventure. There are three different kind of skills you can acquire which includes passive skills: these are activated at random times throughout the battle based on chance; active skills: these are skills that include magic and take away MP; force skills which take away some of your force energy which you build up throughout the course of the battle by taking a turn. All these different skills make it so battles never get boring and you will always be acquiring new skills so no need to worry about be stuck with the same ones throughout the whole game.
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The dungeon part of the game didn’t fare nearly as well since there are a lot of simple puzzles and some irritating platforming sequences. The puzzles generally involve you carrying items that make you move slow back through an area you have already been which is really frustrating since you get attacked so many times before you actually make it to where you need to go. The platforming parts are very hard since you have a fixed camera and can’t adjust to get the best angle for a jump.
The graphics are some of the most colorful and detailed I have seen in an RPG in quite some time. The characters are all very unique in design and represent their personalities well. The animations for skills and magic attacks are all very well animated and never display jilted animation. The environments are the highlight though and that might surprise you since I said that most of the world is covered in sand but when you do enter a new area like a snow covered mountain or an ancient ruin, you will be surprised by the amount of detail and care that has been put into each area.
The sound side of things isn’t as nearly up to par as the visuals. The music is very catchy but there are not nearly enough tracks so you end up listening to the same tunes over and over again. The biggest problem though lies in the horrible voice acting. The voices don’t match their characters very well and they always end up delivering each line terribly. This is one of the times I wish they would have just left the Japanese voices in and just let me read the subtitles.
Topics: PS2 Game | No Comments »