Moving To A Game I Managed To Beat. . .

We have Wild Arms 3. I've mentioned previously that with the RPGs I've purchased, I've been lucky enough to pick games that each had something unique about them, to make them distinct from the others. I wouldn't always say that feature is a good thing - the issues of weapons repair and necessity of having water in Dark Cloud got old real fast - but it's something to start with.

With Wild Arms 3, it was the Old West setting. It's still some fictional planet with magic and monsters and such, but the fact the characters use guns, rather than swords, and wear some odd combination of the types of clothes common in Westerns, if not real life, it helps the game to stand out a little. And it fits with the overarching story in the game, that the planet is dying, gradually drying up, and nobody is quite sure why. This leads some people to live concerned only with getting what they think they need or want, while others are more concerned with protecting the innocent, or proving themselves.

One of the members of your crew has no past, and so he lives to get what he can now. Or so he says. Under that wealth-obsessed exterior, he might be a bit nicer than he appears. It's a bit of an Eastwood character in a Leone western, where you don't really know anything about him other than what he does (gun for hire), but over the course of the story, you learn he's not as mercenary as he appears. Things like that, and the history of the world they inhabit, make for some interesting fodder.

I won't claim I understood everything characters said about harnessing energy or dream demons, but I didn't find myself bored by the story, or the writing. There's enough humor to keep things from getting too introspective. Which is nice. The game doesn't fall into the trap some games I've played do (Okami), where they kill all the tension and momentum of a boss fight with some dull, overwrought, extended cut scene. It also sorts of twists the pattern where the heroes defeat several bosses, then learn that doing so has enabled the real threat to emerge. It still sort of happens, but in this case it's more like the true threat had plans of their own that would have been interfered with by the other evil schemes you stop.

And it avoids the typical strategy of gradually building your team up which most of the others I've played follow. Where you start with one of two characters, then, like Baron Munchausen, you keep meeting oddballs you decide to join your cavalcade for one reason or another. With Wild Arms 3, everybody meets at the same time. There are Prologues, which are very short dungeons that detail each character's abilities and how they got to that place. Took me about an hour for all four, but it'd take someone more observant a little less. I had a hell of a time finding the dungeon Gallows' part was supposed to take place in.

Which does bring up one thing I didn't like about the game. Trying to find where you're going is a pain in the ass. You wander the landscape, hitting a shoulder button which causes your characters to emit some kind of radar pulse, and if there's anything (dungeon, sign post, random goodies), it'll appear. If you aren't close enough, you'll walk right by without a clue, which, combined with the randomly spawning monster fights, gets irritating. Especially if all you have is some vague description of their being monsters to the northeast, given to you by some bartender or townfolk to work with.

The gameplay's nothing too complicated. Travel to location X, find Bauble Y, fight randomly spawning Cannon Fodder Q, until reaching Boss. Since each of the characters has various tools they can use to help the team get around, and they acquire these as they progress, there's a bit of that backtracking to old locations that always reminds me of Metroid Prime. There's not nearly as much in Wild Arms as there was in that game, but it happens occasionally. With the fighting, you give the characters the standard commands like shoot, defend, use magic, use item. Because they're using firearms, they do have to periodically reload (if the fight goes long enough), but they do that automatically if you tell them to defend. They eventually collect these mediums, which grant them access to guardian spirit powers, which is helps with the magic.

What's nice is you can swap the mediums around, since they each carry different spells with them, and in theory, you can put your force together in a way to give them the best chance to win. There are several different approaches to take, depending on whether you want to focus on keeping all your character alive, or killing the boss as quickly as possible, or attack magically, or whatever. So that's nice. I'm usually trying to strike some balance between "kill them fast" and "Don't die", but sometimes (if the enemy has strong attacks of a type one of my characters I highly vulnerable to) I just accept that character's going to die, and I'll bring them back when the fight's over.

I would say the final boss battle is a little overboard. I get what they were going for, the new version of the planet defending itself with progressively more complex lifeforms that would gradually inhabit it, it's a neat idea. But when I'm on my 9th consecutive boss fight without any sort of break in the action, and I'm still not to the end, it's getting a little overboard. I spent almost 3 hours on that fight. But. . . they didn't kill the tension with lots of overwrought dialogue, so I can't complain about that.