After a fair bit of dithering, I decided to take a break from FFVII and start working on my huge backlog of RPGs I have on hand. It was hilariously pathetic; it took something like channeling the spirit of the nerdy warrior to commit an act of will to pick the damn thing, too.
I popped in Wild ARMS: 2nd Ignition, a fairly offbeat PS1 roleplayer. Like a lot of good games (and good fictional media in general) the Wild ARMS series takes a ludicrous concept and makes it frickin' awesome. In this case, the concept is "Wild West nonsense meets JRPG nonsense, also the world went kablooie at some point." A signature example is a piece of artwork done for Wild ARMS 2, with a bunch of cowboy types trying to pull an anime'd up Sword in The Stone. I'll try to find it online for your edification at some point; it's something to see.
Anyway, you get to tear about the countryside and smash evil with the main character Ashley using the Wild West's answer to the Buster Sword, a rifle with the bayonet from hell bolted on. And just to keep things grim-yet-whacky (grimfarce?) he gets possessed by some sort of demon. The devs decided to stick in your standard clumsy female mage, and your standard big taciturn muscleman, but spiced things up by things like letting the girl lob fireballs right out of the gate, and giving Brad McPunchespeople a damn bazooka.
The combat is a variation on the standard turn-based format, with the twist of the eponymous ARMS. The ARMS are basically gun attacks, which consume ammo. You start out with fairly basic attacks, though Brad's "Lock On" is pretty damned powerful, effectively being a guaranteed direct bazooka hit, and actually being as awesome as advertised. Guns don't suck in Wild ARMS, friends!
The setting so far is about what'd you expect; you venture forth and wreck assorted freaks, then you wander into places like a big late-medieval chateau run by a rich nobleman, who sends you to an old mining town right out of old Westerns, where you then go forth from there to a tower that uses freaky ore to transmit telepathic messages like a radio tower. Yeah.
One of the odder but actually nice touches is that you get a little animated sequence everything you load up a save, plus a counterpart if you quite a game at a save point. It helps make you feel like you are actually playing an episode of a show, and I've been given to understand that these sequences actually change as you progress though the game. And this is a two-disc Playstation 1 game!
Well, time for a bit of rest, then its back to rustling up some evil to smite. The Harvest Never Rests!
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