Wild ARMS 5
Nov. 24th, 2008 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroSo, I completed Dragon Quest 4: The sixth chapter is mostly a cute bonus dungeon that culminates in egg puns, plus an alternate ending, and nothing disgustingly hard that require 30 hours of additional grinding. Which was good. I played a solid 30 hours of game, enjoyed it, and now I’m done. Following that, I’ve started into Wild ARMS 5. The major problem with the Wild ARMS series is that they changed developers between the third and fourth games, and the new developers took the series off in a completely different direction.
(Suikoden had a similar problem in that the first and second games were excellent, then they tried to be increasingly “innovative” with the third and fourth, which translated to lousy game mechanics and less fun games. When they made the fifth game, they were smart enough to make it really close to the first two games, just with better graphics and a few pleasant system additions.)
The first three games had a bunch of defining features: A prologue for each of the characters who form your main team, a world map where you needed to “search” for the next town or dungeon, magic that didn’t cost MP but instead relied on an FP gauge (kinda like a limit gauge—it grew when you attacked or took damage), a set of “tools” (grapple gun, boomerang, freeze ray, etc) used to solve puzzles in dungeons, and an “encounter-cancel” system that let you see how powerful a random encounter was going to be and choose to fight it or not (though you had a limited number of cancel points per dungeon, and strong enemies cost more to avoid).
Wild ARMS 4 didn’t have prologue chapters, brought back MP, removed the world map, had limited use tools only available in a few dungeons (with annoyingly simple puzzles, or luck-based ones), dumped encounter-cancel, and added in a lot of “filler” screens and rudimentary platforming. They also had too little plot for the amount of talking in the game, which meant the characters angsted over the same things over and over. Also, the main character of 4 was a whiny little boy, as compared to the strong and confident adults of the first few games. Compare:
The angst of 4: “My hometown was actually a hidden enclave of research scientists and I’m the only person who can control their secret superweapon and now I need to destroy their other superweapon before it destroys the world!”
The angst of 2: “The demon who almost destroyed the world 1,000 years ago was bonded to my soul and forced me to kill all of my friends; meanwhile terrorists are trying to destroy civilization and an encroaching parallel universe is going to destroy the planet.”
There’s a layer of depth they seem to have lost, there.
They seem to have gotten some of the message with Wild ARMS 5—there’s a world map and search system again; there seems to be a variant of the tools system (different cartridges for the main character’s gun that have map-screen effects), and the puzzles seem slightly more involved. They kept the hex map based battle system from 4, with a few alterations, but I can deal with that. I can’t comment strongly on the plot yet, though the main character seems very similar to the one from 4, and the tone is definitely closer to that. (In short form, it appears that 100 years ago, aliens came to Filgaia, took over, and now consider humans to be their slaves. And there are several groups of these aliens working at cross-purposes, with your character unknowingly stuck in the middle.)
What really gets me, though, is the voice acting. It’s much easier to deal with the character’s annoying traits when you can just click through them. When you have to hear the main character make a speech about “That’s bad, I just know it is!” for the seventh time, or endue their awful battle call-outs, (“We can do this…together!”) it makes you want to turn off the sound and put generic wild west music on in the background. Or re-runs of F-Troop, for that matter.
We’ll see how far through the game I get. Based on the table of contents of a Gamefaqs walkthrough, I’m about a quarter of the way.
(Suikoden had a similar problem in that the first and second games were excellent, then they tried to be increasingly “innovative” with the third and fourth, which translated to lousy game mechanics and less fun games. When they made the fifth game, they were smart enough to make it really close to the first two games, just with better graphics and a few pleasant system additions.)
The first three games had a bunch of defining features: A prologue for each of the characters who form your main team, a world map where you needed to “search” for the next town or dungeon, magic that didn’t cost MP but instead relied on an FP gauge (kinda like a limit gauge—it grew when you attacked or took damage), a set of “tools” (grapple gun, boomerang, freeze ray, etc) used to solve puzzles in dungeons, and an “encounter-cancel” system that let you see how powerful a random encounter was going to be and choose to fight it or not (though you had a limited number of cancel points per dungeon, and strong enemies cost more to avoid).
Wild ARMS 4 didn’t have prologue chapters, brought back MP, removed the world map, had limited use tools only available in a few dungeons (with annoyingly simple puzzles, or luck-based ones), dumped encounter-cancel, and added in a lot of “filler” screens and rudimentary platforming. They also had too little plot for the amount of talking in the game, which meant the characters angsted over the same things over and over. Also, the main character of 4 was a whiny little boy, as compared to the strong and confident adults of the first few games. Compare:
The angst of 4: “My hometown was actually a hidden enclave of research scientists and I’m the only person who can control their secret superweapon and now I need to destroy their other superweapon before it destroys the world!”
The angst of 2: “The demon who almost destroyed the world 1,000 years ago was bonded to my soul and forced me to kill all of my friends; meanwhile terrorists are trying to destroy civilization and an encroaching parallel universe is going to destroy the planet.”
There’s a layer of depth they seem to have lost, there.
They seem to have gotten some of the message with Wild ARMS 5—there’s a world map and search system again; there seems to be a variant of the tools system (different cartridges for the main character’s gun that have map-screen effects), and the puzzles seem slightly more involved. They kept the hex map based battle system from 4, with a few alterations, but I can deal with that. I can’t comment strongly on the plot yet, though the main character seems very similar to the one from 4, and the tone is definitely closer to that. (In short form, it appears that 100 years ago, aliens came to Filgaia, took over, and now consider humans to be their slaves. And there are several groups of these aliens working at cross-purposes, with your character unknowingly stuck in the middle.)
What really gets me, though, is the voice acting. It’s much easier to deal with the character’s annoying traits when you can just click through them. When you have to hear the main character make a speech about “That’s bad, I just know it is!” for the seventh time, or endue their awful battle call-outs, (“We can do this…together!”) it makes you want to turn off the sound and put generic wild west music on in the background. Or re-runs of F-Troop, for that matter.
We’ll see how far through the game I get. Based on the table of contents of a Gamefaqs walkthrough, I’m about a quarter of the way.
