What in Blazes!? It's Wild Arms 2!

Whoa, this finished while I wasn't paying attention.

Let's talk music!

From the defeat of Vinsfeld at the end of Disc 1 there's no new battle themes until you fight the Kuiper Belt spawn in the Trapezoherpdyderpdydron, which uses Child of the Belt as its battle theme. All the new battle themes from here on out also come with unique victory themes as well, much like Ptolomea and his Fun Friends and Vinsfeld did. This battle theme has It's Clear as its victory theme.

Jumping back a bit, it's worth mentioning that the bonus boss Ragu O Ragula, has a unique battle theme as well, and it's nowhere near as memorable as the final battle theme coming up, but hey. I can appreciate the recurring bonus boss being worth more than the standard boss theme. Beating the lord of all supermarket pasta sauces has the appropriately titled WIN as the victory theme. Good job!

Then you get to the core and the final battle gauntlet. All the three single-character battles use the Child of the Belt theme, which makes sense since it's just that model again. The battle against the Kuiper Core is appropriately titled vs Kuiper Core, though every youtube video I could find of it is inexplicably titled 'vs Edgeworth Kaiverbelt', and now all I can think of is that monstrosity throwing an Objection at Phoenix Wright. Winning against Edgeworth the Kuiper Core has Trap and Path as a victory theme, which is just a touch ominous sounding and suggests things aren't quite over yet.

And they ain't! Fighting against Lord Blazer has vs Lord Blazer as its battle theme and, my gosh, this battle theme. Way back when I played Wild ARMS 2 I didn't know the actual name for the term 'leitmotif' but I knew what it WAS, partially thanks to games like FF6, but especially thanks to this track. You hear the main theme fairly often throughout the game, literally every time you load up a save on Disc 1 and various other moments throughout so the theme is a major earworm that sticks with you throughout the game.

But you hear it a bit less as you approach the end, Disc 2 has a different opening theme after all, but then it all comes roaring back for the big ultimate final battle and suddenly everything Wild ARMS 2 was trying to be comes into perfect clarity, the themes of heroism, what is considered a hero, what it actually means to be a hero, is all basically spelled out as Ashley appears to be shouldering the burden once more but it is in fact the united world doing the damage to Lord Blazer, instead of relying all on one person, one sacrifice, like with Anastasia. And all the while this truly heroic battle theme, using the same leitmotif you heard throughout the game, is triumphantly underscoring all of it.

Sure, the themes of WA2 are a bit simple, it's a JRPG after all, but damn if this one final moment is masterfully done. WA2 makes a lot of missteps, it's messy as heck, it's damn near incomprehensible at times, but this, THIS moment with THIS battle theme... it's all such a great payoff. There's a reason Battle vs Lord Blazer has stuck with me for all these years, even besides it being a pretty kickass battle theme. It's one moment of pure awesome after a messy, messy game that nevertheless tried it's darndest to get there and succeeded.

Oh and beating Lord Blazer has The New Sunset as the victory theme and, yeah, unlike Trap and Path this victory theme has a nice sense of finality.

Previously on Wild Arms 2: Everything. Every damn thing. It’s over now, but thanks to an Eskimo’s dying curse (I was unaware he would react so poorly to a hot cup of coffee), I am forced to spit out a few more words on the subject of Wild Arms 2. So let’s get to it.



Upon completing the game, Wild Arms 2 allows for the creation of a game clear file. This was fairly common in the Playstation 1 days… or at least it happened with Saga Frontier. I… can’t think of any other games that did that. Probably Chrono Cross? Hm…



This extra file is not a “playable” save file, though. This would likely make it first on the chopping block on your precious PS Memory Card that can only contain 15 save files.



The clear file is a way to “review” your final game data, and maybe rewatch a few cutscenes. Let me tell you: rewatching anime cutscenes was all we had back in the earliest 21st Century. Why, I remember when Lunar…



Here are the final stats on Ashley. And, incidentally, I’m going to use it an excuse to talk about Wild Arms 2’s Battle System.

Short answer: it’s not great.

Wild Arms 2 was the first title in the Wild Arms franchise to feature more playable characters than initially available in a battle party. Ashley, Lilka, and Brad form the preliminary trio, but Tim, Kanon, and Marivel eventually join the gang, and you can mix and match everyone at will. However, while options are always appreciated, it seems like no one had a practical idea of what to do with these “extra” characters. For their general differences, Lilka, Tim, and Marivel all effectively serve the same purpose with different means of acquiring skills. Lilka discovers Crest Graphs to create and utilize elemental abilities and buffs, Tim finds Guardians to utilize elemental abilities and buffs, and Marivel steals monster skills to utilize elemental abilities and buffs. In a heated battle, any one of the three can be swapped in… to ultimately do the exact same thing. Similarly, Kanon and Brad are primarily physical attackers, and your choice between the two seems to merely be strength or speed. Ashley is the boy in the middle of everything, ultimately, but he winds up being a Knight Blazer delivery system the moment that becomes available. Why would you do anything with Ashley save transform him into the monster-man that can do the most damage?

And, ultimately, that’s the other problem with the Wild Arms 2 battle system: it’s all about killing the monsters before they kill you. Okay, yes, that’s the point of pretty much every JRPG battle system, but WA2’s system is remarkably simple. As was exemplified during the big bonus boss battles, pretty much all WA2 has in its tool chest is throwing bigger and more damaging attacks at a player. In response, the only options available are preparing accessories that will mitigate or nullify that damage, grinding for higher levels/HP, or spending a lot of time guarding because an opponent might use a powerful attack this turn. Your mileage may vary, but practically all of those things sound anti-fun. Yes, preparing equipment and grinding are staples of the JRPG universe, but there are better ways to enjoy a battle, particularly in a title where battles are the only times there’s a “threat” (not like you can get a Game Over from talking to NPCs).

And the Force Point system is brilliant for making your mages actually useful without having to carefully conserve resources (and this should be lauded), but it’s rather trite in practice. No matter how much FP you have, you go for the attacks that do the most damage. You can figure out how much FP is going to be gained from your average attack about ten seconds into a battle, and, from there, it just takes a little math to determine if this is going to be a 25 FP encounter or one that requires 100. It’s a fun way to bypass the JRPG tradition of MP, but it’s still rather mindless once you get past the introductory bits.

And, yes, I might be a bit harsh on a title that was released approximately two decades ago, but we still see “throwback” JRPGs today. Learn from Wild Arms 2’s mistakes, designers of the future!



And the reason I am so critical of the battle system of Wild Arms 2 is because the monsters of Wild Arms 2 are awesome. The clear save file allows you to see a theoretically completed bestiary, and, man, it is good stuff. There is a lot of creativity on display in these monster designs, from bizarro cats to smoke monsters to whatever the hell was supposed to be the final boss(es). This is a breath of fresh air for someone that has been playing modern console JRPGs because, I swear to God, if I have to kill one more variant on a generic wolf, I am going to scream. And soldiers! I’m tired of common soldiers! Give me some weird frog creature any day!



And, yes, I am aware the only reason these monster designs are so ridiculous is that they don’t have to actually “operate” in a real 3-D environment. But, please, let me enjoy these tentacle beasts while I can.



And I actually mean that, by the way, as you can see I only completed 49% of the bestiary on a full playthrough. This sucks! There are so many creative monsters in this game, but very little reason to actually battle most of them. In fact, given there are very limited “rewards” for fighting these monsters (the usual experience, maybe a rare drop, at absolute most a skill for Marivel), cancelling the majority of monster battles is a perfectly valid way to complete WA2. And that sucks! You’re encouraged to miss one of the best parts of the title simply because it’s boring as hell.







See? That’s why I have an issue with a tiresome battle system.



Anywho, aside from rewatching the intros and endings again, we’re about done with this clear file. Wild Arms 3 would go on to iterate on this whole “postgame” menu in innovative ways, but, for now, smack that start button and head back to the title screen.



If you didn’t overwrite that end-game save file, you can reboot right before the final battle. At this point, you can grind around the final dungeon (it has the most powerful random encounters in the game), or you can make your way back to the surface to challenge those super bosses hiding up top.



Unfortunately, it is a long walk back.



While we’re heading up, let’s talk about Wild Arms 2 Puzzles. They’re… uh… there.

Hm. I can probably do better than that.

By and large, most of the puzzles in Wild Arms 2 are generally… noninvasive. They are certainly a thing to do in dungeons, but none are particularly inventive or groundbreaking (save when Brad uses the Earthquake tool). Calling them “speedbumps” seems too reductive, but, in general, they’re just kind of around and take up a little bit of time before moving on to the new thing. And the new tools introduced in Wild Arms 2 don’t particularly add anything innovative, either, so… uh… it was nice throwing knives around?

Puzzles: won’t you?



Here we are. Back up on the surface, and, if you’re all for 100% Let’s Play completion, here is the start of the Pyramid Boss Round-Up from two or three updates back. May as well talk about Wild Arms 2 Optional Content.

Fun fact: I’m pretty sure Wild Arms 2 handles bonus content better than a lot of modern JRPGs.

To paste the list from earlier in the Let’s Play, the hidden dungeons are…

Wind Tiger’s Den
Thunder Lion Cage
Abandoned Icebox
Meteorite Crater
Dark Reason
Shining Garden
Good Luck Zone
Werewolf’s Den
Crimson Castle
Promised Catacombs
Pirate’s Warren
Fab Science Lab

And there are the optional “town” areas of Odd Headquarters and Island Outpost. That is a lot of optional content, which, considering modern games seem to push every last super-rendered room on a player (whether they want it or not), seems excessive. But it’s not the (welcome) excess that makes the optional areas of Wild Arms 2 great; it’s that the optional areas naturally progress with the player.

I did not save the optional content entirely for some final “round-up” update like I did during the Xenosaga Let’s Plays. This was deliberate, as Wild Arms 2 “locks” its optional areas behind actual exploring. You got a flying castle! Now see what you can find. Hovercraft? Let’s look around again. The hovercraft can now go even further into the sea? You better believe there are some hidden islands around. And the final dragon airship grants the ability to go practically anywhere, so you can find the last few secrets, and hopefully track down any spots you missed along the way. It’s an innovative way to hide the cavalcade of extra equipment and Guardians across all of Filgaia, and a constant reward for keeping the spirit of exploration in your heart (note: Spirit of Exploration is not a guardian).

And all without some stupid “marks posting” in a hub town!

Wild Arms 2 really hits it out of the park with optional content. And some extra bosses to test the limits of your own skills are just the cherry on top.



Speaking of, this eventually leads to the final battle with Ragu you’ve already seen…



And here’s our final, post-battle statistic: it took 23 hours to reach this point. That is with massive cheating, and practically fast-forwarding through the first third of the game thanks to a hacking disaster. What is a normal completion time for Wild Arms 2?



Well, conveniently enough, I have my original Wild Arms 2 save file right here. I never actually completed every last super boss on this save file (Angolmois is a jerk), but my original clear time is approximately 39 hours.



Gaze ye upon a party of characters named for people I was friends with during my senior year of high school. Tag yourself. I’m Bob!

On a side note, I am still happy that I completely accidentally named Lilka after my friend Elyse, a woman that has an inferiority complex with her overachieving older sister to this very day. Elyse, if you’re reading this, I am really surprised.



Also amusing: I named Tony “Izzy” because of a friend of mine actually named Tony who was, at the time, strangely obsessed with Digimon. This is some recursive, never-ending anime ouroboros right here.



As you can see, on a “legit” run of Wild Arms 2, I still only saw 57% of all monsters. Lame!



Funny. It looks like I never found Asgard 1 in my original playthrough. That one is hard to find.



Here are some legitimate stats on a non-hacked, Level 55 Ashley.

While I’m thinking about it, let’s talk about Ashley Winchester. Ashley, as the main protagonist of the title, is basically the living embodiment of the narrative’s central themes. He’s a well-meaning “average joe” that is thrown into an unusual situation and is arbitrarily forced to be a hero… but pulls back so he can lead a happy life with his girlfriend and eventual family. Or, at least, that’s what the plot tells us happens. This is a JRPG, so Ashley is supposed to be an average dude in unusual circumstances who incidentally routinely kills gods. Wild Arms 2 has a major disconnect between Ashley the thesis on a hero that relies on the power of friendship and Ashley the guy who transforms into an unstoppable monster man at 100 FP and squashes the King of All Monsters (title pending review) beneath his heel while the rest of the party is dead. This whole story about how heroes aren’t necessary is fun and all, but given the swath of dead monsters littered across Filgaia, and a healthy 75% of them were killed by one guy, that central theme doesn’t exactly ring true. Yes, Ashley managed to come out of his heroism better than Anastasia (dead @ 16) or Brad (a lengthy prison term followed by… did anyone ever remember to remove his bomb collar?), but the guy still definitely qualified for “chosen one” status when he was swinging that “chosen sword” around. Yes, he lifted that sword with the power of his friends, but I didn’t see them helping out during the final-final battle.

Look, Goku might have just collected the Spirit Bomb with the power of everyone on Earth, but you don’t see anybody cosplaying DBZ Extra #5,216.

The thesis of “no more heroes” is a fine one, but maybe a JRPG that focuses distinctly on one super-powered hero isn’t the right way to spread that message.

And that brings us to Ashley’s natural rival for the entirety of Wild Arms 2 (whether he knows it or not): Irving Vold Valeria. As for that friendly fellow…

Next time on Wild Arms 2: The final, extremely wordy WA2 LP update! And an explanation for why I always felt like I owed Wild Arms 2…

As someone who never played past the first Wild ARMs, it's been a wild ride seeing this game that shares a very distinctive font but little else with that game. Thanks for the LP.

There's actually a ton shared with 1, but it's mostly in the realm of thematic underpinnings and the like that builds across the series.

Really, the biggest problem 2 suffers from is being hastily put together and shoved out the door to capitalize on FF7's massive success. Ashley and Brad are basically the two mechanical halves of Rudy's moveset, Lilka and Tim halves of Cecilia's, Kanon and Maribel being parts of Jack's. Switching over from MP to FP for everything didn't really do them any mechanical favors because they also changed the way FP works in 2 to basically resemble MP instead of being the faux-limit gauge it was in 1.

Hear hear. One of the things I miss most about 90s and early 00s jRPGs is the crazy monster designs. I mean, realistically I know that there's still a number of weird monstrosities to be found in modern games (Dark Souls 3 has a fat tree boss!), but I do miss how there used to be far more crazy crap.

I'm sure it's a lot easier to do that stuff when animation is minimal or nonexistent. Frankly it's a miracle that we're even getting a Final Fantasy VII remake with AAA visual aesthetics and real time-ish combat, considering how out there its bestiary could get.

And it's not just the Japanese stuff that's less weird, either. Currently I'm playing Sanitarium (a western adventure game from the 90s) and I recently finished a portion of the game where I was a four-armed cyclops with a satyr-like lower body and lizard tail saving his race from being wiped out by an army of cyborg bugs. Saw more creativity on display in that one sequence than I've seen in many modern AAA games, combined. And the rest of the game is delightfully bizarre as well!

I'm sad that so many of the best-selling games tend to fall under Angry Man With Gun 'cuz that is so boring when the digital medium allows for so much more.

Oh yes, I loved the sense of discovery in Wild ARMs 2, the li'l optional areas that you could find. None of this "follow the quest marker" stuff.

I would kill for a new exploration-focused jRPG. Too much stuff nowadays focuses on piles of too many words,* and as much as I enjoy the fighting I need more than a turn-based battling simulator.

* This would be less of a problem if the writing and pacing was better. Like, I enjoy cRPGs for the words-have thing.

Let’s Plays are inherently personal. Videogames are intimate experiences to begin with (how else would you describe a situation where you spend forty hours alone with your hands on your controller?), and expanding such an experience to include everyone willing to read/listen is immediately going to, strangely inversely, make that title more intimate to the Let’s Player. Let’s Plays, whether they be screenshots or videos, at least double the amount of time one dedicates to a game, so, assuming this isn’t a Player’s first rodeo, anyone going into a Let’s Play knows it’s going to be a long haul, even on a title as simple as Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles. On a JRPG, we’re talking about an experience that could literally take years.

This Let’s Play took years. Even if I were able to stay 100% on an update a week, these past forty updates would have taken nearly a full year. Why would I even bother?

Wild Arms 2 is a weird game. It is a late Playstation 1 JRPG that existed in that peculiar JRPG adolescence where everyone was simultaneously trying to chase the success of Final Fantasy 7, but also “advance the genre” in its own way. Many JRPG directors of this period had years of experience as being the audience for the likes of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, and an age of post-modern JRPGs was due. But everyone wanted that phat Cloud Strife dough, though, so we saw a number of titles that seemed downright at odds with themselves. A title where a chosen hero battles a group of anime villains but also eventually has to repel an encroaching abstract idea while disproving the very concept of heroism is exactly the kind of title you’d see in ‘99/’00. Wild Arms 2 has a narrative that is seemingly doomed to be bonkers right from the start, as it stands at the intersection of conflicting goals that is “make a Power Rangers game” and “say something meaningful about the world”.

And the translation doesn’t help. Wild Arms 2 is already toying with some intellectual concepts for a “typical” JRPG, and the fact that Irving might wind up explaining the same concept using three different incongruous homonyms isn’t helping. What’s more, the translation completely neuters characters’ voices, so the only characters that seem to get individualistic nuance are the heroes that have non-verbal animations that clearly convey their place in the story. Lilka has a tendency to “sound” like everyone else thanks to a dull localization, but her constant cycles of stomping her feet or waving her arms convey the emotions of an impatient young lady. Unfortunately, the majority of the rest of the cast doesn’t get such consideration, and thus characters that should be standouts like Brad and Ashley begin to blur together. This ain’t Persona 4: the localization of Wild Arms 2 is not only confusing for actual plot purposes, it also does an incredible disservice to one of the more unique casts on the Playstation 1.



So we come back to the same question again: why did I, the venerable Goggle Bob, star of stage and screen, bother to dedicate my precious time to Let’s Playing Wild Arms 2?

The answer to that question is a long one.

(Like you thought anything I would ever write would be short…)

NOTE: This section gets incredibly personal. I just started typing, and it happened. Also, general trigger warning for overwhelming grief.

Venture with me back to the bygone time of my college years. In fact, technically the absolute beginning of my time at college. I was to start my higher educational time at Montclair State University, a college chosen for the twin reasons of its affordability and great distance from my parents. It didn’t hurt that Montclair was a stone’s throw from the always-exciting New York City, either. Everything was going swimmingly until there was a snafu with my housing, which would make my college life difficult, as I was looking at a 2 � hour commute from home. After begging and pleading and straight up calling a senator (“Let me speak to this state school’s manager!”), I finally received some on-campus housing, and I was all ready to start my college career, albeit a few days later than expected. I was able to “commute” to my opening classes, but I finally moved in on campus on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.

It was September 9th, 2001.

Two days later, things got dicey.

Like most people at Montclair, I had a front-row seat for September 11th. My first exposure to the event was being in the campus library that Tuesday morning (thanks to my class schedule, maybe the only morning I was awake that entire semester), and having someone nearby get off the phone and shout to a nearby coworker, “Some idiot just rammed their plane into the World Trade Center.” That’s what had happened in that moment, too. It’s hard to describe now, but immediately after the first plane hit, it was just kind of assumed that this was some random accident. Some jackass had a pilot’s license, and did an unthinkably stupid thing. Regardless, interested in what was happening, I walked over to a nearby hill that overlooked New York City. I could see the already smoking first tower in plain view, and then, in a moment I’ll likely remember to the end of my days, I saw the second plane hit the second tower, live. Actually, strike that, I don’t remember that moment clearly at all. Over the years, and even there in that moment, my brain kind of recoiled at what was happening. In my memory, it’s practically some morbid comedy routine. I “remember” everyone immediately looking at everyone else there on that hill, looking at the nearby dorm “tower” that rose next to the hill where we all stood, and we all collectively stepped out of its shadow, generally fearful that that nearby building would be next. That, obviously, never happened. I’m still pretty sure 9/11 happened, though.

And it’s hard to describe to anyone that “wasn’t there” how 9/11 impacted the entire campus. For future generations and younger readers: no, there was not widespread panic and rioting on campus. We were mostly just… confused. Something no one talks about is that the World Trade Center was a broadcast tower, so nearby Montclair State completely lost its television for a solid 24 hours. Phones were still mostly land-line based at that time, but the local circuits were literally overloaded for obvious reasons. The only information source available was the internet, which was still fairly new as a “legitimate” news source. In that moment, we had collectively missed the memo on the coming War on Terror or the president urging for calm or whatever, it was just… annoying? Like, people were dead. The nearby New York commuter lots were filled with cars whose owners were never coming back. There was no one on campus (including myself) that didn’t know at least someone who could already be dead. In many cases, we were just waiting for those inevitably terrible phone calls. And, again, we had no real idea what was going on. It was generally assumed that this was a planned attack, but the full breadth of what happened (including the attack on the Pentagon) wouldn’t be revealed to us until that evening. Yes, there were rumors abound, but nothing was confirmed for hours, and, in such a situation, hours can last for years.

And that left a bit of an impression on the campus at large. I would say that literally the entire student body was a little shell shocked by the event. You would see it literally everywhere. When a plane flew overhead, people flinched. No one was comfortable living on the higher floors of the dorms. Visiting New York City went from a joyous event to what was seen as a risky, dangerous proposition. And one thing that seems to be rarely mentioned nowadays: the 9/11 “death cloud” hovered over NYC in thickest black for at least a full week, and looking at the skyline any day thereafter seemed… wrong. There was a constant reminder of death and destruction right there, always outside a nearby window. In the weeks and months to come, the world at large would mutate, but right there at MSU, every last student and professor had to deal with a tragedy that was much more up close and personal.



So, on that cheery note, I’m going to switch gears to talk about my freshman anthropology course.

I was an incredibly enlightened high school student, so I naturally figured that, having figured everything out, I would take the smartest route through college. My plan was to take all the superfluous/required general courses first, and thus get those all out of the way early, and then focus on my real major studies closer to graduating and getting a job that would actually apply these skills. NOTE TO ANYONE THAT WILL LISTEN: never do this. Fun fact: if you transfer to a different school, they’re going to have different superfluous/required classes, and you will have wasted your time. It happens. But, during the summer when I was barely past high school, my plan was to take courses that were ultimately required early, and if a side effect of such a plan was that I’d wind up inadvertently lumped in with a bunch of “seniors” just trying to graduate and get out, so be it.

So this anthropology course was pretty much exactly what I already expected: a large group of chunkheads of various ages that were only taking the class so as to graduate. Actually, the majority of the class may not have been chunkheads, but, given no one ever said a damn word, I’m forced to assume they were all maximum chunkheads. In that class, there was the professor, and there were exactly three people that participated in class. There was…
1. Myself
2. One random woman
3. One man, the younger brother of the one random woman

The siblings had apparently arranged to take this course together, as senior and freshman, and had that naturally intellectual thing going on where they wanted to discuss everything. I, as you’re no doubt already aware, cannot absorb any information without gargling out like a thousand words on the subject. Together, the three of us replied to practically every question the professor tossed out, and I’m moderately certain every other person in the class hated us. Or they loved us. I don’t know. They could have appreciated how we managed to railroad practically every topic into unknown, “this won’t be on the final” territory, and they knew they could just sit back and relax while we prattled on about comparing ancient tribal tattoo ceremonies to going to the mall and getting some fairy princess ink.

How ever the other students felt about us was inconsequential in the long run, though, as the professor apparently adored us. Later in my college years, I decided that this was because it was a once-a-week, 6 PM Wednesday course, and the professor assumed the class would be dead for a solid two hours. We livened up the place, and I suppose we were rewarded for our participation. The three of us collectively could do no wrong, and I personally tested this theory when I turned in a midterm essay about a week late, and received absolutely no punishment for my tardiness.

Which would be why I decided to push the boundaries a little further during the final. There was an in-class test, and a homework essay component. The essay was ridiculously vague: choose an anthropological concept, either from the book or an outside source, and apply it to modern humanity. Could be anything! Take your pick!

My pick? That turned into an essay titled “9/11 & The Odessa Effect”.



You have to understand that 2001 was a lawless time before googling for a source was something any old professor could do. Assuming you claimed a source was “foreign” or “contemporary” (or both), you could basically cite your cat as a valid voice on a term paper. Yes, there could be problems if you tried such a thing at the higher levels of learning… but for a generic anthropology course? You could get away with it with zero issues. And, while I am unequivocally stating that this was the only time I ever committed such a crime, I am going to admit that I may have gotten a name for a source from Gamefaqs…

The time after 9/11 was a time of seemingly impossible nationalism. The 9/11 incident allowed the leaders of our nation to whip the majority of the population into a righteous fury that justified invading at least one country that had nothing to do with anything. And that seemed almost impossible in those early days, given President Bush had previously been involved in one of the most divisive election victories in (then) recent memory. On the day that I moved into my dorm, Bush was seen by half the population as a passable leader, and the other half as a Saturday Night Live punch line that stole an election and was about as qualified for the position as your average toddler; yet, two days later, President Bush was lauded as the one man who could steer us through these turbulent times, and people on both sides of the political divide put their differences aside to hang cardboard flags on overpasses and buy action figures named “Freedom: The American Eagle”.

It wouldn’t last. While the Forever War would keep going until at least the end of this essay, people began to drift back apart and actually question the administration that demanded we rename our preferred potato side dishes. The Dixie Chicks were able to wake us all up (and not Evanescence, oddly enough), and, soon enough, we were back to a nation where a healthy portion of the population couldn’t stand to hear the lies about “WMDs” ever again. We were, in short, back to normal in just a few years’ time.



But there in that moment, in those scant few months after the attack, we were united. We stood together against any threats that might try to take away our Freedom. Particularly, there on that campus, collectively shell-shocked and flinching every time we heard a plane fly overhead, we were ready. We were together in the one singular goal of doing whatever the hell we were told just so long as nothing like this would ever happen again.

And if you told us to impregnate some random twin so as to trap an encroaching universe and then attack a giant monster fetus, we would have been all over that.

I am rather annoyed with myself that I did not preserve that essay in some manner. However, to relay the basic gist of the essay, I claimed that the current nationalism seen in the wake of 9/11 was described only a few years earlier by the modern philosopher Eitarō Nagano (one of the directors of Wild Arms 2 with what I figured was a foreign-enough sounding name), who described “The Odessa Effect”, a phenomenon whereby people would rally behind a heroic leader if a malevolent enough villain rose to power. The theory was so named for the example Nagano initially put forth, which would involve a hypothetical terrorist organization named “Odessa”, and an imaginary nation named Filgaia that would instantly unite against said Odessa. For a touch of flare, I added some random bits about Nagano being generally disliked in his home country for also using Hitler as an example, and seemingly calling out his nation’s former leaders for siding with the wrong side. However, the bulk of the essay focused on 9/11, and how our unity would inevitably lead to a potentially corrupt leader making broad changes with the uncontested support of the nation, just as Nagano predicted. Truly, this “Odessa Effect” was unambiguously applicable to our current situation.

And I got an A for that bullshit.



The professor sent me a personal email (it was the end of the semester, there was no reason for us to ever be in the same room again) about how it was one of the most interesting reports in the class, and she was going to miss my unique insight into current events. Given my interest in the class and the fact that I was obviously doing research on my own, she thought, if I was undeclared, entering the field might be a good career path. There was something in there about needing “more people like you”.

In the full scope of my life, am I proud of such a thing? Well, I can safely say I felt downright bad about apparently impressing my professor to such a degree through writing about a videogame (wow, what a shape of things to come). And academia is important and…. Phhhtt… I’m sorry, I can’t get through that sentence. Dude, it was complete BS from start to finish, but I managed to create an anthropological concept out of a random JRPG that I remembered from like a year prior. I didn’t even have the game handy! I would have much rather written about Super Smash Bros Melee! But, somehow, it all came together well enough to impress my professor, and, while I did legitimately feel bad for deceiving her, I very much enjoyed boosting my GPA with a little help from a Playstation game.

And, ultimately, that’s the reason this Let’s Play exists: I felt like I owed Wild Arms 2.



Wild Arms 2 is not the best JRPG out there. It is not even the best Playstation 1 JRPG. It has its moments, but, from a gameplay and presentation perspective, it could easily be lost in the sea of “wannabe Final Fantasy 7” titles that would flood the market until the dawn of “wannabe Grand Theft Auto 3”s. It has some memorable characters, but they’re drowned out by a slapdash localization. The puzzles are forgettable, and, while some monsters might be interesting, the actual combat is not. Wild Arms 2 is, at best, a mediocre experience.

But, like so much media out there, it can stick with you. It can shape your viewpoints. It can become an experience that is permanently a part of you. In this case, it was the strange intersection of current events and JRPG philosophizing. Was Irving right? Would his plan work in the real world? Or was it all the result of one JRPG writer reading Watchmen’s finale right before starting some plotting? Global peace through uniting against a common enemy? It’s been done before. It’s been done better. But Wild Arms 2 did it, too, and it stuck with at least one player. And that player utilized that thought for a college class. That player decided that that decades old game was worthy of further examination. And, it may have taken an ungodly amount of time, but that player wrote a Let’s Play.



Thanks for being you, Wild Arms 2.

Thank you to everyone that made this Let’s Play a success (and noted some [all] of the trivia I missed).

And thank you for reading.

Wild Arms Mission #30
Finish a complete Let’s Play of Wild Arms 2
Status: Success!
Notes: Well, that sure took a while.

Thank you for writing a lot of words about this game! I enjoyed reading them.

I agree. It was good (but didn't have enough Liz and Ard).

Yeah, this thread is great! Thanks for doing it!

I knew the big twist with Irving was at the end of the game, but I didn't remember it being literally at the very end like that. When I was following this thread earlier on, I think I was expecting it at like halfway through disc 2 or something.