***Author’s Note***
Character images are from the PS2 remake. I like the artwork better.

So, I wrote this humongous article about “Wild Arms” just now (yes, I know. It´s a really long publication)…On the flip side though, that means more links to music for you and me 😉 Any ways, let’s get the show on the road. Shall we? As I was saying. In the mid-1990s, RPGs were everywhere, much like how FPS games are everywhere today. And back in 1996 Sony worked with relatively unknown developer called Media Vision to release an RPG in Japan (which was later imported to America in 1997 and to Europe in 1998) known as “Wild Arms”.

“Wild Arms” was originally released as a way to get RPG fans to buy the Playstation console while “Final Fantasy VII” was being developed and later translated. And people who played “Wild Arms” soon realized that it was something more than just a typical “Final Fantasy” or “Dragon Quest-like” game. Sure, the gameplay and story were very similar, but there was enough to the game that to compare it to those two franchises was a great disservice to all series involved.

Beyond the Wild Arms series, which Media Visions is most well-known for, they have developed the following games:

The entire “Chaos Rings” series, some of which have been ported to the Playstation Vita; “Shining Ark”, “Vaklyria Chronicles III”, and “Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth“. The original game on the PS1 had a unique style, in that the game itself was on a top-down, two-dimensional plane with late 16-bit styled sprites, but when battles happened, the game shifted to a 3D model with early 3D sprites. The 2D sprites have a timeless SNES quality to them, even if older, you can still appreciate them.

However, let’s get this out-of-the-way. The battle sprites are horrible. Practically all early 3D sprites are bad, and even those that aren’t too horrid have still aged like milk out in the sun and are just as sour to look at.

But, you know, mid-to-late 90s, 3D technology was still in its infancy. So you give older games some leeway due to game developers just getting their feet wet. And by 2000 and 2001 (when the PS1 was dying out) 3D graphics were massively improved, and that was just on the PS1. Compare Final Fantasy VII’s 3D graphics to “Legend of Dragoon’s 3D” graphics to understand what I mean. Heck, you could just compare VII to “Final Fantasy VIII” or IX.

So, you may be asking, what is “Wild Arms” and how can it be described in one sentence? To simplify things, it’s basically “Final Fantasy” meets the “Legend of Zelda” in a “Wild West” setting. Combat in “Wild Arms” is practically ripped straight from “Final Fantasy”. As you select your actions, and the characters or enemies with the highest agility go first, with the slowest agility going last. While the game series does change a few things, that simple fact never changes. No active time battle to worry about, it lets you plan your moves (which is a very nice feature for beginners). The battlefield changes in “Wild Arms 4” and Wild Arms 5, but is still “highest agility is first” combat.

There is, however, one really likeable thing that Wild Arms has that is very nice to see in a RPG, and that would be the ability to change your equipment every turn. This is important due to sometimes not having the right equipment on to deal with the current situation. While the game itself is neither difficult nor long, by any means, this makes battles against very hard foes, especially bonus bosses, much easier. So if you’re curious, the game clocks in at around 15-20 hours if you know what you’re doing.

When not in battle and in dungeons, you have tools at your disposal, which are used for solving various puzzles, whether it’s using Jack’s buddy/pet Hanpan to get a switch from far away, Rudy’s bombs or Cecelia’s water vase, each character has four tools to help them solve puzzles in the dungeons.

The tools for each character are as follows:

Jack – Hanpan, a Lighter, Grappling Hook/Hookshot and a Guitar which can be used to draw regular enemies towards you and fight some bonus bosses
Cecelia – The Teardrop which can do whatever the plot demands of it, a Watch that can rewind time, a Rod to talk to animals and a Vase that is used to put out fires Rudy – Bombs, a Radar for finding treasure, rocket roller blades and a punching glove if you feel like beating up the stage. You need the gloves if you want to get to the secret dungeon of the game. Of the twelve, only the guitar and the radar are not needed to complete it and can be missed.

Warning, spoilers for the game will apply, if you don’t want to know, skip ahead, you have been warned.

Anyway, the back story of Wild Arms is that a thousand years ago. Metal Demons invaded the planet, forcing humans, the Guardians and the Elw race, more on them later, to team up to stop them. The war was intense and hard-fought. However, in the end, the Demons were defeated and driven to the far corners of Filgaia, specifically up to the North. Nevertheless, the ravages of the war left severe scars on the planet, causing the planet to slowly die off. Heck, one of the weapons of the war apparently turned an entire river into sand.

Other than that, “Wild Arms” is a fairly simple story of a Princess (who feels trapped by Destiny to be the Princess and that no one can care for her or love her), a Swordsman (who lost everything and is itching for the absolute power to get revenge against those who wronged him), and a Wanderer who feels like an absolute outsider and is shunned by people for his weapon and abilities.

The three meet up by chance, and certain events happen that causes them to join forces.

Cecelia Lynn Adlehyde, the Princess, is a magic user who can communicate with mystical creatures known as the Guardians. Guardians in Wild Arms act much like summons in Final Fantasy. One of the last Guardians, as well as the one with the most damage output across the games, is a Dragon for crying out loud. She’s a typical mage character, buffs, healing, damage to enemies and all-around useful.

Jack Van Burace is the Sword user, master of the Fast Draw technique and is capable of learning new techniques by talking to people, observing nature in action, fighting with opponents or talking to statues that have abilities for him to learn. I have no idea why the statues can teach him techniques, but they can. Being the fastest character with an ability to be able to move first no matter what, he’s your primary attacker in the game.

Rudy Roughnight, the Wanderer, can use powerful canon-like guns known as ARMs, Ancient Relic Machines, though he’s not sure why. Slower than the other two, he’s also the tank, taking hits that would kill the other two characters and is capable of easily hits max damage output in the first game without trying too hard, especially if you have his level 4 Force ability. Shortly after the first mission where the three team up, the sky breaks apart, though I blame that on the balloon. Yes, that balloon, evil thing!

When that happens, creatures that were thought to be long gone, the Metal Demons, appear on the planet Filgaia once more to cause havok. The main Metal Demons are the following. Furthermore, some of them have different spellings to their names, depending on the game in question, so I put both spellings up.

Mother – The Absolute Existence, she is the primary antagonist and the source of the Metal Demons, as well as the kicker of the whole story. Her sole purpose is to destroy all living things before moving on to the next world. Kind of like Lavos from Chrono Trigger, now that I think about it.

Zeikfried/Zeigfried – The leader of the Quarter Knights. He’s the main antagonist after Mother and one that drives the plot for the second half of the game. He wants to dominate the planet and make it habitable for Metal Demons to live there after his home world of Hiades was destroyed.

Alhazad – The Mad Scientist of the Quarter Knights, using a mixture of magic, science, nanotechnology and other nasty things, he does some truly horrific things during the game. Children, animals, men, women, doesn’t matter to him, he’ll experiment on your body, laugh while doing so and then laugh more when people get upset at him. Even his fellow Quarter Knights find him disgusting. One of his quotes was “take an arm here, a leg there, ears from this thing. By the time you’re done, you wouldn’t know what it was originally while its eyes are begging for you to kill it.” When asked if he enjoys it, he says yes and refers to the “subjects” as toys that break.

Belselk/Berserk – The Strongest of the Quarter Knights, even Zeikfried himself says so. Not too bright, he just likes to smash. His name tells you all that you need to know about his strategies. He swings a mean mace. He’s also the first of the Quarter Knights to meet his end, being replaced about a quarter of the way through the game. In the remake, he is brought back to life for one final fight thanks to Zeikfried near the end of the game.

Boomerang – Belselk/Berserk’s replacement and a Ninja. He’s more of a Blood Knight, searching for a challenge. In fact, his desire to find a worthy opponent was so overwhelming that he got the Guardian of Desire, the Dark Wolf Lucied, to become his partner for most of the game. 1000 years ago, he fought against the Metal Demons because they were the better opponents, now he hunts your party down.

As an aside, when you beat him, he claws his way out of Hell, combining with the Guardian of Desire to unleash his full fury on you.

The music of the battle in question.

Lady Harken – The Murdering Princess of the Quarter Knights. She fights with a scythe and can use Fast Draw techniques just like Jack can. She’s also the youngest of the Quarter Knights, having not been alive when the war 1000 years ago happened.

Zed – A wannabe Quarter Knight who’s absolutely hilarious, and his music is pretty funny as well. You see. He’s the game’s joke character, never taken too seriously by anyone. Which is weird because when he finally does get serious, he’s far more dangerous than most of the rest of the Metal Demons, save for Boomerang, since both the Ninja and the Wannabe ends up as Bonus Bosses to fight against.

Zed’s theme, Oops.

As the game progresses, you find that the Metal Demons thought that Mother was going to eliminate all life on Filgaia. So they could inhabit it. However, they find out that Mother’s plan is simply to devour all life, including their own. Realizing this, they set up a situation so that your party can invade their base and destroy Mother, letting them make plans to take over the world.

During the course of the game, you come across relics of the ancient war against the Metal Demons, from the Guardians to Golems, to finding out the truth about Rudy and the Metal Demons as well as the Elw (pronounced el-loo) race. Elws are basically Space Elves, but with Dog/Horse Ear (which is kind of weird, in my opinion). The only races we don’t meet in Wild Arms 1 or the remake that’s on Filgaia are the Crimson Nobles, whom we meet in Wild Arms 2 and the Veruni, which we meet in Wild Arms 5.

Neither “Wild Arms 1” nor the remake, “Alter Code F”, really goes into the Backstory of the Metal Demons too heavily. When we get to “Wild Arms 3”, however, we find out the true back story of the Metal Demons. Humans first migrated to Filgaia and were welcomed by the Elw. Nevertheless, not long after words, Metal Demons from the planet Hiades, followed suit and invaded. It turns out that Metal Demons were once human, but they used nano-technology to turn their flesh metal and gain tremendous, almost god-like powers. It massively deformed them, however. Some kept their human-like forms, such as Zeikfried and Lady Harken, but the others took on more monstrous forms.

The Holmcross was an attempt by the Elw to create their own version of Metal Demons, to have people capable of using ARMs, since only a few people had the natural ability to do so, but Metal Demons had no trouble using ARMs. By the way, if it’s not obvious yet, Planet Hiades was actually Planet Earth, or at the very least, a colony of Earth, since Zeigfried called it “Planet Terra” in Wild Arms 3.

And yes, Zeikfried was known as Zeigfried in Wild Arms 3. Curse localization issues. Man, that wasn’t so simple was it?

Earlier, I mentioned Rudy had a Force level 4 technique. Well, all three characters have four Force techniques. They all start with their level 1 techniques. For Cecelia, she can bring out magical properties of any item in stock, and for recovery items, she can extend their use to the whole party. For Jack, he can move faster than everyone and get the first move in a turn no matter what. Very useful if you need to heal. Rudy gets the ability to make it so that his shots never miss.

They all get their level 2 technique, which is to summon the Guardians, at the same time as well.

The level 3 techniques happen as you go along the game. Cecelia gets to summon more power out of the Guardians. Jack gets a guaranteed Critical hit that does a lot more than normal damage, and Rudy will play protector for the rest of the fight, jumping in and taking blows for weaker characters. The level 4 techniques need to be found as only Jack has one that happens due to story events. Both Jack and Cecelia get the ability to use two techniques at the same time while Rudy’s level 4 is a lock on plus triple damage output for any of his attacks.

That basically means that his weapons can do damage cap of 9999 with ease.

Hey, it was a 90s RPG, breaking that limit wasn’t something that happened much until the PS2 era with Final Fantasy X and Wild Arms 3. There may have been others before that. Disgaea comes to mind of games that came out around that time.

While the in-battle graphics look like moldy milk, the story isn’t anything we haven’t seen before over-all, and the gameplay is standard for the time, Wild Arms is still a fairly popular series, spawning seven games across three systems. Wild Arms 1 and 2 are on the Playstation 1 and can be downloaded to the PS3, PSP and PSVita off the Playstation store. Wild Arms 3, Alter Code F, 4 and 5 are all on the Playstation 2, Wild Arms 3 can be downloaded to the Playstation 4 off the Playstation store. It even has trophy support! WHEE!

Sadly, finding a copy of Wild Arms Alter Code F or Wild Arms 5 will cost you at least 50 USD, as both are fairly rare.

Even so, despite all of that, Wild Arms is a series that is a lot of fun, with characters that are, mostly, memorable, entertaining and just plain fun. One of the major themes of the series that makes the games really enjoyable, beyond the Wild West theme, is the theme of growth. That your characters actually grow before your eyes. And I’m not talking stats here. You see them go from either angry or bratty or naive to people who understand how the world works and how to better the world. While their base personalities don’t change, they grow up, I guess you can say.

I guess there are three things to further comment on here.

First is that the best draw of the Wild Arms game series is the music. If you made a top 10 list of finest RPG music of all time, you’d have to include some of the tracks of any of the Wild Arms games. Second is the Item Glitch trick. To put it simply, any item you like, you can make 255 copies of. This makes stat boosting consumables, weapons to sell, restorative items (just use it on Elixers) or even items that you need to complete dungeons with if you’re stuck, and boom, no more issues. I won’t go into it too much. As you can find the glitch on GameFAQs if you really want to know how. It involves Heal Berries and having exactly 1 of the item you want to duplicate.

Funny enough, that glitch remains even on the PSN release. Sadly enough though, it wasn’t in the remake. The final thing is for the original Wild Arms game, if you don’t click “start” right away, you get the back story of more than a few characters. It also gives you a sneak peek at one of the final locations in the game.

I was going to end it here, but I would be remiss without at least covering the remake of Wild Arms, Alter Code F. So here’s the opening for the remake.

At its base, it’s the same game, just with shiny PS2-era cell-shaded graphics and an anime-look to it. Which means, in simple terms, the graphics have aged pretty good. Furthermore, unlike the original, which had a fixed camera angle, the camera in Wild Arms: Alter Code F can be spun around. It has been awhile since I played the game, so I can’t recall if you use the right analog stick, or if you use the R1 and L1 buttons to do so. The shoulder buttons for those of you who play using X-Box controllers.

Other changes to the game include the fact that only Cecelia can summon the Guardians. You can’t buy new weapons for your characters. Rudy forgoes using a sword completely for his ARM. Yes, Rudy had a sword in the original, but that was for only melee attacks and often times battles would be over before he really needed to use it. Jack fights with his sword sheathed most of the time only unsheathing it when he does a Fast Draw technique.

Another change is that you can have additional party members, up to three more, in your group at one time. They are Emma Hetfield, a researcher and scientist who studies Golems. Her abilities include pirating abilities from enemies and then emulating said abilities for herself. (Piracy is a good thing! #BadMoralsGamesTeachUs)

Jane Maxwell, AKA Calamity Jane, a treasure hunter and apparently the only other person that can use an ARM in the game. She uses a simple six shot revolver. She can also steal from enemies, taunt them, attack them with a giant bomb, but her true value is getting the first move in battle and causing your allies to follow right after her, meaning that all enemies go last. Very useful against Bonus Bosses.

The final permanent character is… Well, spoiler alert. You can get Zed to join the party during the closing bit of the game. Yes, THAT Zed. He’s actually pretty good and a nice member to have when you decide to go to the Abyss. As a side note, I wonder if on Filgaia it’s not “Go to Hell” but rather “Go to the Abyss”. There are two temporary characters in the game. The first is McDullen/MagdalenHarts, Jane’s butler. For a man in his 50s, he still kicks ass. Available in a couple of boss fights and is very useful for maxing out your exp gained in that fight.

And finally, Mariel, the only Elw left on Filgaia, is playable temporarily. Fun fact, if you take the time to level her as high as you can go, you can get some really nice bonuses after she leaves the party.

Only Rudy, Jack and Cecelia have tools. Rudy changes out his skates for grenades, Jack gets rid of the lighter for Jump Boots and Cecelia simply keeps her staff for talking to animals. She gets a Tinder Staff for lighting fires, a Change Staff for manipulating various gems that are in dungeons and a Wind Staff for making small tornadoes. Another change is that each character only gets one Force Ability instead of four.

Rudy keeps his Lock On. Jack keeps his Accelerator, which has a bonus ability of increasing his special abilities powers and changing how they act in battle. Cecelia is the only one who can summon. Emma throws bombs (which vary in power depending on how much she has pirated from enemies). Jane can use mystic, Zed, and Magdalen increases their attack power to 175%. However, in the case of Zed, he decreases one of his stats to 0 for the turn. I´m not sure which one though. As Mariel has Extension, which just means that one of her skills goes from a single person to the whole party.

Other than some bonus boss fights being redesigned, obviously all the dungeons got redesigned as well. Nevertheless, one of the biggest changes to Alter Code F from the original is that the world map is mirrored. Yes, that means that everything which was on the right previously, is now on the left and vice-versa.

When exploring and going from place to place, in the original Wild Arms, with only a few exceptions, you could go to the next dungeon right away without needing to talk to anyone, the downside was that the developers often times put a guard or something in your way to keep you from going that way until it was time. In Alter Code F, you can’t go to a new place until you find out information about it, then you have to search for it on the map until it appears. This was something that was implemented in Wild Arms 2 and remained for the rest of the main console games.

Combat is mostly the same, save that with more than three characters. You can swap between active and reserve characters each round, allowing you to change your strategy depending on what’s needed. On top of that, you can sometimes get combination attacks depending on the formation. Take THAT, Final Fantasy! Actually, Wild Arms 2 was the first game to do that, and Wild Arms 5 also allowed for swapping party members on the fly. Still, take THAT, Final Fantasy!

There’re a few more changes to the combat system, but I won’t go into it here, this article’s already long enough. The only other major change the game had, besides the above, including Berserk being brought back for one final fight, is that Rudy gets some closure to his story that he didn’t in the original. It’s a really nice and heartwarming moment to see.

I must bring this up, because I wouldn’t be doing anyone any justice if I didn’t. You see. There are a few problems with the American release of Alter Code F. Firstly, the Japanese version had voice acting while the American version did not. Wild Arms 4, 5 and XF were fully voiced, but not Alter Code F in America. Another thing is that the game was buggy. At times when you’re exploring the planet, the map disappears and only a black void exists there…And that breaks the immersion badly. In the matter of fact, it was so bad that the localizers pulled the game from store shelves and promised to re-release it later with the glitches fixed.

Of course, they didn’t, so the game is hard to find now. On top of all of that, the localizers didn’t really want to localize the game and told fans “you’re lucky you’re getting it at all”. It’s a testament to how good the gameplay, music and fans were that caused it to not be a worse game, in my opinion.

Credit:
Robin Ek – Editor

Phil Weigel
The Gaming Ground
Twitter: @SilverScarCat

More by Phil Weigel:

• Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia 3DS review – A solid and rather entertaining strategy RPG
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• The Banner Saga complete pack PS4 review – A neat fantasy tactical RPG that suffers from some rough edges
• American politics and Gaming – Nintendo Vs Modern day US presidents
• An open letter to Konami and its fans – The point of no return

Tags: Media.Vision, Playstation, Retro games, RPG, Wild Arms