Long before FFVII was a thing on the PlayStation, this game was referred to as the best RPG on the system. In a lot of ways, Wild ARMS is a wonderful distilled RPG experience, and when I think about what an RPG should contain within it, this game and one other on this list, always come to mind first for me. Good story, likable cast, engaging villains you feel for, interesting setting, great puzzles, great dungeons, and tons of secrets that reward you for exploring the whole world,; Wild ARMS has it all.Yet, I may be getting ahead of myself.
Set on the world of Filgaia, the planet was ravaged centuries ago by invading aliens called the Metal Demons who came to conquer the world. The industrial humans and the native Elws joined forces and used the power of the Guardians, sentient beings created from the lifeforce of the planet, to fight them off. They won the war, but not without severe consequences. The planet barely survived the ordeal, the Elws were nearly destroyed and eventually left the world after becoming disgusted with humanity's methods of using the same technology as the Metal Demons to fight them, the Guardians are so badly weaken they vanished and became just some mystical legend some people talk about except for a few settlements here and there that still believe in them, and mankind was largely knocked back to a stone age and has been slowly trying to rebuild civilization.
Mankind has rebuilt itself in this wasteland to a stage of technology that closely resembles early industrial revolution and the U.S. frontier, but their are still castles and knights in some places based off the old civilization. The world is filled with Dream Chasers, drifters who wander the frontier wasteland looking for work and embracing their freedom to go where the wind takes them.
Beginning the series tradition, Wild ARMS begins with a long prologue that involves choosing to follow individual stories of the game's primary cast. Rudy is a silent protagonist and a Dream Chaser looking for a place to belong. His story begins with him helping a small town rescue a lost child who accidentally wakes up a monster sealed by the Elw in a local cave. Rudy saves the child by revealing his ability to synchronize and skillfully use ARMs, ancient guns that are based on Metal Demon technology. The townsfolk turn on him and exile him from the town for bringing back a power that many fear. Jack is a Dream Chaser and Treasure hunter, who travels with his friend Hanpan, a talking Wind Mouse, in serach of the Ultimate Power so he can resolve some dark crisis from his past. Hist story begins with a rather comical satire on Indiana Jones, as he tries to plunder an Elw Ruin only to set off most of the booby traps. He does gain information that what he seeks may be in the Kingdom of Adelhyde. Cecilia Adelhyde is the princess and heir of the Kingdom, who has spent most of her life at the Curan Abbey learning magic. Her seventeenth birthday is approaching and she will soon be able to return home for good to take on her royal duties like protecting the Tear Drop pendant she wears. She is contacted by a mysterious voice within the abbey and uncovers a hidden library where she battles a monster and frees one of the Guardians who informs her that she is the chosen Innocent One, who can serve as a medium between the human world and the spiritual world of the Guardians, he informs her that a great calamity is about to befall the planet.
The three characters meet in Adelhyde which is preparing a massive festival which is showing off ancient artifacts from the Demon Wars. Cecilia chooses to go incognito in order to investigate the calamity the guardians spoke of and ends up joining Jack and Rudy who are hired by the engineer Emma to exterminate a monster dwelling in a local ruin where some artifacts lay. Here they encounter the Golem, a series of massive machines built by humans and Elws to help protect the world from the invaders in the Demon War. In fact, Emma has excavated several of them, with this one being one of the last. So at this predictable point, you guessed it, the town gets attacked by demonic forces and it turns out the Metal Demons have returned. They injure Cecilia's father, steal the Golems, and devastate the kingdom until Cecilia gives in and hands over the Tear Drop to them. From this point the three band together as Cecilia and Jack both have connections to the Metal Demons and Rudy is asked to come along since his ARMs weapons work against the demons. At this point, Wild Arms continues to feel a bit typical by the book RPG. The demons, led by Zeikfried need the Tear Drop to wake their Mother up, who originally led the invasion of Filgaia but was sealed by the Guardians. They hope to conquer the planet for themselves because their own home world was destroyed by some calamity in the past and they've been looking for a new home. Granted, the current crop of Metal Demons were too young to fight in the past Demon War and only know their history and their Mother second hand.
While this all sounds pretty generic, Wild ARMS has this interesting habit of completely subverting your expectations and changing the dynamics of the story and characters. The Metal Demons start off as typical chaotic evil bad guys, but eventually it's revealed they have their own struggles and bickering going on within their own ranks. Zeikfried may not give a damn about humanity, but he's doing everything he can to give his people a better life. Zed turns out to be a Gilgamesh expy and winds up having a a rather friendly rivalry with the heroes before he finds something important to him to protect that puts him at odds with his race. Lady Harkan is a tragic figure and Boomerang (an expy of Shadow from VI), A Metal Demon from the Demon War whose love of battle was so great, he bewitched Lucied, the Guardian of Desire to side with the Metal Demons over Filgaia, winds up having a more professional respect with the group. When Mother finally enters the plot, it dramatically changes the plot for the villains and they soon have to reassert what they all actually want from the war.
The three central figures themselves also have some pretty good writing. A central theme of the game besides the ecological one, is the idea of "what is power? and what is it good for?" and while this theme permeates through all three character arcs, each have their own theme based on the power of the three greatest Guardians: Love, Courage, and Hope. Cecilia might be one of the best "Royals who want to be treated like People" stories I've actually seen in the genre. She struggles with her role as the "Innocent One" and her royal duties, her story is filled with tragedy after tragedy in the game's opening prologue but her personal story follows along "Love" as she learns that it's her compassionate heart that makes her worthy of her duty as both a royal and a spiritual medium. Jack has a pretty heartbreaking backstory, which surprisingly, the game shows you in the alternate opening, and his story is pretty good as Jack has to deal with discovering for himself what true power is to him. t first he seeks simply a power to destroy his enemies, but eventually learns that his laid back, almost apathetic attitude is one of the reasons why he doesn't understand what true power is and it's only when he grows up a little and comes to terms with his failures does he begin to really understand the real power he's been seeking. Rudy probably has it the roughest between the three. Despite being a silent protagonist/player surrogate, Rudy does in fact have a pretty involving back story that resembles Terra's backstory from FFVI in that he is an outcast blessed with a terrible power he never asked for that forever keeps him at arms length from society and this builds in him a terrible loneliness. There is actually a really interesting twist in his story about 3/4ths of the way into the plot that leads into his backstory about being raised by an archeologist who spent his life studying ARMs and the Metal Demon technology. He instilled in Rudy and unshakeable hope that one day, he'll meet people who will accept him. I know it sounds a bit sappy, but the game does a pretty good job of telling it. The rest of the cast is also quite memorable such as Marina the last Elw, Emma the eccentric scientist, Captain Bartholomew the comic relief, and goddamn Calamity Jane who may be the first Tsundere I ever encountered and is absolutely a blast as a character.
There are other great themes in the game, and oddly enough, when taken into broad strokes, Wild ARM's story actually feels like a true intermediary between FFVI and VII despite not being developed by Square. The three main characters have several parallels to characters like Terra, Locke, and Cyan. Boomerang is practically Shadow without the backstory. The game has an underlying theme about forbidden powers that destroyed civilization coming back to haunt the present and likely redoing the whole mess again, the Guardians also share some characteristics with the Espers working both as guides to help the party while also serving as a tool in gameplay to help fight, and Filgaia itself feels like the Ruined World at times with a sense of hopelessness about the planet recovering.
On the other side, I feel like Sakaguchi and Kitase may have been sharing drinks with the Wild ARMs team while working on VII because it surprising how many elements they share. An ecological theme centered around man's apathy for the plight of the planet dooming both, the planet being treated as a living being that all life is interconnected with, an ancient precursor race with advanced science and magic based on being in harmony with the planet and almost being wiped out by an alien threat they mostly dealt with, the last of their kind still in Filgaia is a flower girl who tends a flower garden in a place where nothing grows, an alien son obsessed with reviving his mother, said mother is basically what I would imagine what Jenova would have been like if she could talk and actually played more of a role in the story than plot device, the cast learns about the planet being alive and the ancient ways of living in harmony with the planet in the heavily Native American themed town of Baskar, the WEAPONS are expy's of Wild ARMs Golems both serving the purpose of protecting the planet from the alien invaders and ultimately turning on humanity as a series of optional bosses thanks to the villains, and the main character is sent into a coma after discovering a horrible truth about themselves that involves one of the characters diving into his subconscious and exploring his past to finally bring him out of it though the same thing happened with Terra in VI as well.
Again, I would point out that this is all in broad strokes, and I feel VII had a slightly better mythology concerning the Lifestream, but it's interesting how this game almost feels like a missing link between the two RPG titans. As if Wild ARMs took a lot of concepts from VI and added their own thing, and then Square turned around and did the same thing to this game. Course the games were only a year apart in release and most of this is likely coincidental, but the parallels are interesting to examine.
Gameplay-wise, Wild ARMS is also deceitful, it feels kind of bare bones compared to the deeper customization systems coming out of the genre around this time, but WA keeps it fresh by having all three characters play slightly different from each other. Rudy is a slow tank type character who can acquire various guns to use in battle, they pack quite the punch but they have limited ammo and their accuracy is independent from Rudy's stats forcing you to use them in conjunction with this Force skills to make the most of them. You can take his weapons to various Experts who can raise the weapons power, accuracy, and ammo; but each weapon still has a certain limit and some really powerful weapons are stuck with abysmal accuracy and ammo. Jack is the master of the Fast Draw sword technique which he learns from various statues, weather phenomena encounter in dungeons or story events. They are quite powerful, but usually really pricey, especially with his low MP. Jack can fix this by using special cards to permanently lower their spell costs, but they only work these skills. He's the strongest natural fighter and very fast, but his defense is lower than Rudy's. Cecilia uses magic which you obtain by acquiring Crest Glyphs, which you can use with a teacher to make various spells by combining two of the four classical elements to make the spell. You have total control of which spells she learns this way and can by pass status magic for more useful healing or offense magic if you choose. You can even dissolve a spell and make another so you're not really stuck with the choice either. Eventually she will meet an advanced teacher who can teach her a whole new set of advanced spells with higher attributes and the Randomizer Spell itself can occasionally let her cast a third tier you can't get access to any other way. All three characters are surprisingly broken, but the game it built around how overpowered they are, so it never feels too easy and some boss battles (like Boomerang) can be incredibly difficult if you're not prepared.
Force abilities were introduced in this game which is basically a limit break bar that will give access to one of four skills based on how much of the bar is filled and whether the party has learned the skill or not. The second level is the same for everyone and grants access to summons, but the character can only summon the Guardian they have equipped. Guardians come in a huge variety and most of them have to be found by exploring the map based on clues from townsfolk or some of the optional dungeons. Each character has mostly unique Force abilities. Rudy starts with Lock On which raises his accuracy to 100% and is paramount for his ARMS, Jack gets Accelerator which allows him to take his turn first regardless of the enemy speed. Cecilia learns Mystic, which allows her to make an item effect the whole team instead of one character. These abilities keep everyone feeling a bit distinct and grow more powerful as they obtain new skills throughout the game.
In addition to all of this, Wild ARMS is the spiritual successor to Lufia 2 and the dungeons are filled with ingenious puzzles to conquer instead of just straight combat or exploring a maze. To add greater variety, each character can obtain special tools needed to progress past certain traps like Hanpan the Wind Mouse who can cross gaps to hit switches or Rudy's rocket power skates needed to get past moving floors. The puzzles keep the dungeons exciting and memorable. The game is also just filled with secrets like optional dungeons, bosses, a coliseum, and finding all of the Guardians scattered around the world. There is surprisingly amount of content in this game and even some storylines don't reach their true conclusion unless you take the extra effort to backtrack and explore the world.
Overall, Wild ARMs to me is a simple, if well made gem of a game. It may feel like a cliche fest for some in today';s modern age, but this game was pretty rocking back in 96. I love the cast, the story, and the overall design of the game. Also, have I mentioned how great the soundtrack is, especially the opening, which might be one of my favorite openings in an RPG.
Reply With Quote