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« on: April 25, 2026, 06:01:13 PM »
Well, might as well talk about Wild ARMS 4 now that I'm pretty far in, past the part where I originally had to stop playing this PS2 game on the PS3 due to all the crashes.
The Wild ARMS games are a series of Western (as in "Old West") RPGs, but Wild ARMS 4 is an odd one that tried to shake up the formula by being post-apocalyptic, taking place 10 years after a global war that ravaged the planet. You play as Jude, a kid who's world is literally shattered when an army smashes through the invisible dome protecting his village in search of an ancient weapon: the ARM (a laser gun), which it turns out he's compatible with. Fleeing the destruction of his village with a rescued girl, he teams up with a pair of mercenaries to try to find out why this military splinter group is trying to revive the war and stop it.
So, all in all, pretty standard issue JRPG so far.
Where Wild ARMS 4 really shook things up for the series was in the battle system, throwing out the then-typical 3 person Dragon Quest-style combat and replacing it with a grid of 7 Hex-shaped positions on a circular board. When the battle starts, your 4 person party and the enemy are semi-randomly placed across the board. 3 of those Hex-spaces have elemental affinity, which affects the spells available to your casters and the damage received from elemental attacks. Player characters and enemies cannot enter each other's hexes, but multiple player characters and multiple enemies can occupy the same hex.
There is exactly 1 reason to ever have characters in the same hex, and that's that any item used on that hex affects everyone, like healing berries. But in general, you should avoid this at all costs, and the game WILL try to bait you at times into forgetting to spread your forces out by starting boss fights with everyone in the same hex. Attacking a hex attacks EVERYONE in the hex, so it's real easy way to get party wiped.
The difficulty balancing of this game is...erratic. Characters don't gain XP at the same rate. Once battle starts, every character starts with an XP multiplier of 1.0, with bonuses that kick in depending on actions during battle. Dodge an attack? +.1 to the XP multiplier of that specific character. Kill an enemy? +.2 or .7 depending on how many enemies. This severely disadvantages Yulie, who will never get XP bonuses of any kind since she's a primarily a healer and there's no bonus for healing. This severely advantages Racquel, a character who's just completely broken since she can move AND attack very hard in the same turn very early in the game. It's also easy for Arnaud or Jude to rack up multiple kills since they have ranged attacks that can hit multiple enemies and multiple hexes at once. You have to work to level up Yulie, and considering she's the healer you know she also has absolutely no HP once enemies start going after her.
And bosses will absolutely kick your teeth in if you don't make the right moves very early on in the fight.
On the flipside, battles go by pretty quickly, and you fully regain health for all party members after every battle. You don't regain MP, so segments of the game meant to be battles of attrition can get very hairy, but for the most part things are pretty breezy. While the game has random encounters, you can usually fulfill certain conditions to turn off them at nearby save points if you really want to. I don't recommend it since you need the XP, but hey...you CAN do it. And while death can come easily and swiftly, you also always have a quick retry option. These features were not common at all back at the time this game came out.
On a strange note, the game has a large emphasis on time-based 2D platforming to break up the RPG combat, and it's not very good in general. Jumping into or towards the screen feels very awkward, and there's a certain slippery nature to movement and jumping that can send you to the nearest bottomless pit extremely easily, requiring you to restart the section. And you are meant to play these sections somewhat recklessly, as there is a slow motion mechanic you can trigger that also makes invisible currency pickups appear in the air you can combo together. It's an interesting experiment, but I'm glad they ditched it for Wild Arms 5.
Equally strange is the game's character growth system. Like most RPGs, you unlock skills for each character as they level-up, but where Wild Arms 4 differs is that it also awards a set of re-usable skill points to each character at the player's discretion. All skills will eventually unlock on their own as you level, but you can use these bonus points to unlock later skills earlier without any hard commitments since you can reallocate the bonus points at any time and you get them back when the skill unlocks at its intended time. I get the impression this system is more important in the late game than the early to mid game, as you get more bonus points as you level and skills start to spread further apart.
So far, Wild ARMS 4 is a good RPG with a decent setup and a creative combat system with some surprisingly forward-thinking quality of life features, but generally poor production values (the insides of houses strictly speaking don't exist, as trying to enter one will just bring up a static NPC conversation image). I'm interested in seeing where the game goes now that I can finally play it properly, but the game I'm really hoping to see soon is Wild ARMS 5.
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