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Rating: Awesome Wild Arms is a role-play-game that unfortunately drowned in the Final Fantasy 7 tidal wave in terms of press coverage and hype, but the fact of the matter is that Wild Arms is a fantastic game that no role-play- gamer should be without. The game was developed by a company called Media Vision (which, admittedly, I never heard of before Wild Arms). The story line starts out simply enough, but progresses to become one of the most engaging in RPG history. The game's many towns are huge and have tons of people to talk to, and with the many things going on in individual townspeople's lives, it gives the game a much greater sense of personality. Each of the main enemy character's motives are thoroughly explored throughout the course of the game in story line sequences, and a heicarchy of sorts is established among the enemy characters as they interact with each other. It's clear who the main bad guy is the whole time, but that doesn't mean that the designers of the game didn't do a masterful job of making you hate the other baddies. By the time you reach the eventual climax with each of the main bad guys and go against them in a boss battle, the game conveys a much greater sense of depth than if they were just no-name bosses that popped up out of nowhere. The boss battles themselves are probably the highlights of the game (besides the plot, of course). They last a fairly long amount of time and provide a much greater challenge than the bosses in FF7. The fighting interface is great, but I think battles happen a little too often, particularly in certain hot-spots where it sometimes feels like you can't take two steps without getting into a battle. And this gets more annoying as the game progresses as the non-boss battles morph from their original routine slug-fests to a much bigger, more time-consuming affair that sometimes makes every enemy feel like a mini-boss. This is one of the only complaints I have about Wild Arms. Fortunately, some in-depth AI features allow you to sit back and let the computer handle these battles, which makes it very tolerable, and it's well worth it anyway to get to the juicy story line sequences. The graphics are made up of the 2D sprites typical of RPG's in the pre-FF7 era, but they are very good for 2D sprites, and the 3D polygonal battle sequences were quite good for their time. It's a shame there aren't more in-game, anime-style cut-scenes like the wonderful intro, but the plot is conveyed dramatically enough without the use of fancy graphics. And last, but certainly not least, the music in the game ranges from good to downright incredible. It is very arguable that Wild Arms has better music than FF7. There's been a serious shortage of great RPG's in the US market after the release of Final Fantasy 7, and it looks as though this trend will continue until Square releases more of their magical games. While Wild Arms isn't quite as good as FF7 in my opinion, it is still a classic RPG in its own right. If you like RPG's, you should buy Wild Arms. It's as simple as that.
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