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Dungeons consist mainly of rushing into a room, solving whatever simple yet fun puzzle obstructing your progress with one of the many gadgets you earn along the way, and rushing out again; all the while dodging random encounters. This isn't the first time I've said this about an RPG, but Wild Arms: ACF would have been much better if combat was limited to boss confrontations and other significant melees. Most characters have two sets of abilities, one set that's limited use (like mana-using spells) and force powers that charge up during a battle, which most random encounters won't last long enough to make use of. These can usually combined for devastating effectiveness, but even then there isn't enough of them to provide a real feeling of depth.
The problem is also a bit of shoving a square peg in a round hole. It reuses the same system from Wild Arms 3, which worked to great effect there because you had four playable characters, and some ability to customize them with assigning mediums. Here all the mediums get lumped onto Cecilia and they're far less effective anyway. The only real customization is the ability to choose Cecilia's spells, but this ends up being a little too freeform, leaving you guessing what spells you'll need to face unknown dangers ahead. Using the same three limited characters over and over with very little change for so long just isn't fun. I started to skip every random fight possible, until I ended up being creamed by bosses for not leveling enough. There are five other playable characters, but they join up very rarely, and it's only possible to gain three for good when you're practically finished the game, making it pointless and frustrating.
There's a number of side quests and other optional extras for those times you need a break from the main storyline. The best by far are the block puzzles, where you shove gigantic colored blocks into a certain arrangement to make them all vanish from the board, and earn special prizes. The only problem is each temple only contains a single puzzle, forcing you to go through the tedium of searching the map for the next one. That in itself is a tedious side quest of examining every last block of this wide world, as is analyzing every last random monster, but at least they're optional exercises.
Wild Arms: ACF isn't going to change the world. If someone asks me what I thought about it ten years from now, I'll probably say, "The main character's hair was blue, and I liked it." That's better than many other RPGs have faired, but I can't help thinking that if the developers had put more effort into it I would have a lot more to say.
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