An Ocean of Mud

So.


It took some time for me to digest things, but I managed to beat Wild ARMs 2 last Tuesday, and it's time for the final thoughts before I pick another game to take on.


The ending was actually pretty good, only marred by the age-old tradition of cutscenes overriding player input when it comes to text boxes.  It came close to turning a fairly nice closing sequence (everything gets wrapped up fairly tightly, casualties are light and fairly deserved) into a boring set of static screens.  An interesting thing is that except for the actual credits, everything was done using the in-game engine, which could be a turn-off to some but helped tie things nicely in my opinion.


SPOILERS:  The final boss was an absolute blast, being the evil demon of doom Lord Blazer, that your main character Ashley channels for transformations Breath of Fire style (down to having blue hair).  In a bit of plot escalation done right, he pops up right after you manage to wax the Kuiper Belt (AKA Lavos' granddaddy) and then Ashley channels the local anime Excalibur and, quite frankly, wrecks Blazer's face.  It was a lot like final Power Rangers episode, and got further boosted by various other characters showing up to help fuel your best super move and say uplifting stuff.  Eat your heart out, Final Fantasy IV!  End Spoilers.


Anyway, it all works out in the end.  I'm not particularly keen on trying out the local collection of superbosses, mostly because they require something like 5-10 hours of extra grinding that I flat don't have the patience for.


So, in conclusion, Wild ARMs 2 is a fun little game, and deserves attention from anybody looking to see what old-school Playstation RPG goodness was all about.  It is a little rough around the edges (the graphics are overall fairly meh, the Wild West influences slowly dwindled to nil in only a few hours in favor of the usual JRPG clichés), but it works out pretty damned well.  The puzzles were actually a nice touch, giving much-needed brain-stimulation to what usually amounts to monster mazes.  the story actually made use of some tired elements in a fine way, giving them new life and taking them to new heights (a frickin' invading evil dimension, not just eldritch legions, a hostile alternate universe).


Yes, it was very enjoyable all around.  The Harvest Has Triumphed!

Boss Fight At High Noon

Or,y'know, not.


The Wild ARMs 2 campaign is going quite smoothly again.  This game is something else; I find so much that I like, then it remembers its a PS1-era RPG and finds a way to remind me.  A list of examples:


The Setting


We have a combination of Post-apocalypse rebuilding and Wild West aesthetics, giving us crazy awesome stuff like Texas Rangers that ride around in troop trucks and carry rifles that have huge, permanently attached bayonets, Rambo-esque desperados that use the kind of artillery rarely seen outside of bullet hells, and dusty clapboard mining towns that revolve around psycho-sensitive ore.  We even get crazy awesome stuff like sentient transforming dragon mecha from another dimension.  The primary threat?  It's a damn world-eating alternate universe, as in an actual universe that devours worlds.  Eat your heart out, Galactus.


Unfortunately, the whole Wild West thing takes a back seat to the usual legion of RPG stuff, like the standard wizard types that need care and feeding, the standard rival-but-not-really 'mysterious wanderer' party member, the standard loads of ancient ruins, and the gobs of Magitek goodies that the bad guys get.  This game heads straight into the usual formulas way too often.  But even then, its does it very well, and we have plenty of unique concepts and crazy awesome to play with.


The Gameplay


Holy crap, an RPG with good dungeon puzzles!  Even the cliché puzzles are done interestingly, and sticking in Zelda-like tools like bombs and grappling hooks and wands is a stroke of genius.  The combat portions are done very well.  Its a little too easy for veteran RPG players, but giving us turn based combat that gives you sword-and-sorcery goodness and gun-toting explosive death at the same time is something special.  The "Force Point" system is a very good take on the old mana meter.  In short, this is fun stuff.


Unfortunately, there are minor but very annoying flaws.  The game opted for both "stop at the edge" and "fall right off like a moron" when it comes to being at the edge of platforms.  This makes some of the timing-centered puzzles infuriating, especially with the wonky old-school controls.  The game's puzzles have garnered an somewhat evil reputation, but mostly undeserved.  There are, however, a bit too many of the old "what the hell do I do to get to the next town/dungeon" problems.  I don't need linear, spoon-fed questing, but leaving the player high and dry because you forgot about an incidental part of a dungeon you conquered twenty or more hours ago is unacceptable. 


Well, that was a bit of a mouthful.  I haven't reached a verdict just yet, though as it stands the campaign will be concluded in a week or two (hopefully sooner) and I'll likely fall on the positive side of the spectrum.  I've already decided to put Wild ARMs 3 on my watch list, since it seems to be the closest we'll get to the Good, The Bad, and The Random Encounter RPG the series is known for.  The Harvest Never Rests!

Will You Defeat Them, Your Demons?

Well, the Wild ARMs 2 campaign is proceeding quite well.  It's been a fun ride so far, and it still hasn't really let up yet.


The story has come fairly close to the climax, with the Big Bad Evil Guy and his minion now utterly crushed.  But we've got plenty of disc space to fill, so we have a big nasty impeding nuclear holocaust to deal with.  There was a fair bit of buildup, with the baddos making off with a forbidden nuclear weapon and the diplomatic scene going fairly berserk.


SPOILER ALERT:  The 'nuclear weapon' isn't missile or bomb or even a rigged bit of fissile material.  They went to great lengths to disguise it for the reveal, but my intel has uncovered that its a damn nuclear-breathing dragon, and it's gonna rampage and burninate the earth Godzilla-style.  The extra crazy awesome is that there is a second nuclear dragon out there and you get to use as an air vehicle.  That's right, the game that gives you a flying mansion as an airship decided to give you a frickin' nuclear-powered avatar of flashy death.  I love this stuff.  END SPOILERS


The main character has finally figured out that the whole having a demon inside you to give you powers is kinda messed up, and we'll see whether or not we get any angst.  My money's on a big no, followed by more gunslinging antics and quasi-sentai transformations and theme overrides.  We shall see.  The Harvest Never Rests!

Pillars o' Doom

Finally, I've gotten back in the saddle and started to play Wild ARMs 2 again.  It's a lot easier to pick up and play again that I first believed.  Most RPGs (especially from the PS1 era) have a nasty habit of leaving you very confused if you try to put it down for more than a day or so.  This game is an exception; the hint system in place is quite useful, and the maps are just busy enough to work through.


Overall, the game is going very well.  There are some surprise difficulty spikes, but they actually serve to keep you on your toes more often than not.  The titular ARMs mechanic is actually improving, giving you all sorts of firearm-based goodness to play around with and harvest the unworthy.  The magic system is also pretty functional; the 'Crest' sub-set giving you limited-in-quantity but rewritable spells, while the 'Guardian' subset giving you unlockables based on how many monster kills your summoner-dude gets while equipped with given elemental Guardian.  There is a third subset, but I haven't done the necessary steps to unleash it just yet.  We shall see.


The whole Guardian concept is also worth noting.  Your equipment is the usual weapon plus armor affair, with a slot for the usual accessories like status-immunity items, minor buffs, or even giving basic attacks elemental properties.  Each character also has a Guardian slot, which acts much like Final Fantasy summon monsters.  Each Guardian boots certain stats, and after a certain point in the storyline, is summonable for a large (but reasonable) cost in the game's take on MP.  They're your usual flashy affair, and tend to be very cost-effective.  The animations are also fairly nice, with the 'attack' summons being reminiscent of single portions of the fabled Knights of The Round, and a healing summon that looks like somebody took Secret of Mana's Flammie and turned it into a G4 pony.  I'm not kidding.


The storyline is alright, being a twist on the usual RPG formula.  That said, there are some unexpected moments here and there.  Tim, your summoner, is to be used as some sort of sacrifice by his native village.  Instead of telling him what an honor it is and how the gods think he's awesomesauce, they pretty much just press-gang him and then outright order him to die.  He's all of ten years old by the way.  Fortunately things are sorted out and he gets to be part of your flashy doom squad.  Our villagers realize they're being assholes, which makes it a bit easier to swallow.


All in all, this is a worthy addition to the RPG specialist's collection, and I'm sorry that I never tried this series out before.  I wound up with one game or another in the series a long time ago, and never touched it; not sure why, probably because I have to make up my mind to play a new game and get the jibblies when I don't have access to a guide.  Yeah, I'm a total noob wuss like that sometimes.

Fistful of Gella

Well, things seem to be moving apace in Wild ARMs 2.  It's been a while since I've utterly torn through a PS1-era RPG, but that's what's happening apparently.


There's lots of good things in this game.  The enemies are (mostly) pretty damned freakish, and while they are your standard polygonal garbage of the time, they actually are something to look at; even compared to big names like Final Fantasy VII, they hold their own quite well.  Unfortunately, most spells and spell-like effects are pretty lackluster from a graphics standpoint, and this is exacerbated by technical hiccups and oddities (there seems to be a very short but noticeable loading time for each effect, multi-target attacks have a habit of staggered sequence instead of one 'big boom' effect, onscreen damage results are also staggered).  The ARMs weapon concepts are realized fairy well, making for 'big gun' options and actually needing a bit of strategy to work properly.


The dungeons are mostly enjoyable to wander through.  The puzzles tend to be straightforward without feeling dumbed down.  There are a few here and there that are quite obtuse, with one in particular being both absurdly simple and maddeningly off-the-wall.  SPOILER WARNING:  There comes a point where the games wants you to listen to enemy communications, but doesn't tell you how (and neither does the official guide).  The solution is to walk up to various locked doors and use the 'call' option from your menu.  END SPOILERS.  All I can really say is that old RPG problems are old, and even players like me that grew up with the older style and its inherent frustrations can smack into walls like this fairly easily.


Oh, and this game likes to use 'tools' (think Zelda-style gear, but with its own flair) for puzzles.  Some of them are about what you'd think (Fire Rod, Freeze Rod, and Bombs do what you think they do), with a throwing knife and a familiar being fairly creative variations on things.  Hilariously, one 'tool' is the ability to deliver a mighty kick.  But even it pales compared to the item radar tool, the aptly named Booty Call.  Yes, that's right, if you can't find something, it's time for a Booty Call!


On that note, it's time to go.  The Harvest Never Rests!

The Good, The Bad, And The ARMS

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!