Wild Arms Makes a Successful Jump to Playstation 2

The third incarnation of this not-as-popular-as-it-should-be series recently hit North American shelves, giving you ample time to have it by now (that is if you are into RPGs). Successfully bringing the series up to next generation standards on the Playstation 2, Wild Arms 3 retains all the elements that fans love, while changing enough to keep the game fresh.

Let's start with graphics. WA3 is noticeably different. The first two sported average 3-D graphics on the Playstation, whereas WA3 uses cell-shading for the characters and 3-D backgrounds. Yup, cell-shading…but don’t let that stop you from giving this game a try.

The cell-shading look is okay in this game, I personally feel an update to straight 3-D graphics would have been better, but the graphics never were the reason people played this series, I hope. There is one noticeable oddity to the graphics, though, and one that might cause a player to ask why? The entire screen image is covered with an almost invisible overlay—giving everything a sort of colored pencil look. It’s like sideways rain drops over the screen image, I guess they were trying to give it an old-style western feel. You’ll notice it even more when running your system with s-video or higher. At first I thought there was something wrong with my connection, no such luck…

Next up, the music. Simply put, it’s very well done—catchy with western influences. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself humming the tunes when you really shouldn’t be (kind of like those cursed Lunar songs). There are even remixed versions of songs from the previous two games.

Now onto the core of the game—gameplay and story. The gameplay borrows heavily from its predecessors, more so from Wild Arms 2. You use 4 characters throughout your journey (sorry guys no hidden vampire this time). And yes it is the typical world is ending, you must save it deal, but the characters are really what makes this series work. These are people joined for different reasons but with a similar fate and it's interesting to watch them develop throughout the game. Your adventure through Filgaia is a rather linear one—that is if you want it to be. Because, those of you who know the series, know that there are great side quests to occupy your time, but more on that later.

Unlike the previous version, every character now uses an ARM, which can be upgraded in various ways, such as hit ratio, power, number of bullets, and more. There are no new weapons or armor to be bought or found. Basically what you start with is what you are stuck with, with the exception of finding Mediums to improve stats and offer spells.

As you make your way through the game, Mediums become avaialble and can be equipped to do massive elemental attacks. Also by equipping them, you gain basic magic spells that cost FP (Force Points, which you gain by attacking or getting attacked in combat) to use. This is kind of cool because all your characters are now magic users and they did away with using crest graphs to fuse spells for the one magic user in your party.

The use of personal skill points to improve you character’s stats, first introduced in the second game, is somewhat different this time around—you assign them to skills that become available depending on the Medium you have equipped. You can have up to 3 mediums equipped at a time. So for instance: I have a fire medium equipped on my one character so he gets fire attacks and attack boosters as well the ability to assign Personal Skills points to increase his defense against fire and other abilities. And as you travel through Filgaia, you’ll find accessories that you can fuse to your Mediums, adding additional skills such as status wards and more.

This brings in another cool feature, the chain multiplier. Using the example above, say I use my personal skill points to max out my character's defense against fire attacks and an enemy hits my character with a fire attack—he will block it and cause a Chain 1 effect, which adds .1 to the multiplier effect of the experience points you receive. So at the end of the round if I get 10 EXP, that particular character gets 1.1 X 10 instead of the standard 1. There are ways to really add to your multiplier for some massive EXP.

Back to the sidequests. Like the second game, there are many cool extras in this game. Everything from the now-slightly-different monster cubes (with extra bosses in the them) to the Secret Garden—no I don’t mean the Hallmark movie and it wasn’t really that bad, I mean…anyway…as I was saying, the Secret Garden is the place where you can grow your healing and other helpful items. You just have to give the girl in the garden a hand first (a very annoying job it is too!) and then you can grow your own items…you can figure it out from there. There is much more for you to discover in this game, so it’s definitely worth a second trip through.

In all, WA3 incorporates many of the addictive elements from the previous versions, but changes them around a bit to make them exciting. I definitely recommend the game if you are a fan, or a newcomer. And if you like this one and haven't played the other two, I would definitely go back and play them all—WA2 has a lot of depth and tons of hidden stuff to occupy you and the original is an early example of one of the better Playstation games out there.

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