I need to catch up a bit.
86. Wild Arms 3
Media.Vision, 2002: PS2. Points: 198 Votes: 5
Wild Arms 3 follows closely in the manner of its predecessors: a TV anime series-Western mashup with a tidy little battle system and puzzle-based dungeon exploration. It distinguishes itself from among siblings, though, by cranking the aesthetics up to 11. After two games of sampling at the cowboy core food trough, Media.Vision said consarn it and went whole hog.
What makes this approach so successful is that Wild Arms 3 owes as much to Trigun as it does to John Ford.
To this day I'm still unclear whether the original Wild ARMs was heavily heavily influenced by Trigun or vice versa, but with the sequels I mean... there's a poster of Vash in 2.
Heal Berries can only be found as treasures or, eventually, grown on your own little plot of land. That's okay though because HP is automatically refilled after battle from a team Vitality pool.
There's a lot of mechanical choices I like in WA3, and this was definitely the weirdest one. They very actively decided to favor storytelling over game balance with the whole gardening system, and it throws things off coming and going. Healing items are such an absurd rarity for such a long stretch of the game, and then become as free as things can get... and at the same time, force carrots, the items that essentially give you both full MP and a full limit break gauge ALSO become essentially free at that point, letting you absolutely break the back... half? Of the game over your knee. The only real flaw the game has is, like every game in the series, it's maybe a bit too long.
Also worth shouting out- Clive is a real outlier in playable RPG characters in that he has a wife and daughter and nothing at all tragic happens with him. You can just stop by this one town forever and have one of your party members spend time with family, read his kid a story and such. That's kinda great. Think that was the same town that also used the system clock to give a random NPC a different message for every single day of the real world year, too.
So let 64 represent both games. It couldn’t exist as the refined version without Ogre Battle’s startling vision of real-time strategy.
It is REALLY easy to write off 64 as just more of the same thing as the original, but the big changes it makes with having to grind up the little baby soldiers (... not like that, also I don't THINK they're actual child soldiers) and the concept that there are evil towns which would prefer to be liberated by evil units (presumably because a bunch of paladins are gonna burn down all the cool thieves' guilds and night clubs but evil wizards are chill about it) changes the mechanics from a really questionable puzzle where you're kinda forced to try this pacifist minimum level approach to needing the right tool for the right job makes it such a different experience.
Takahashi instead cites Silver Ghost, a PC-88 bump-em-up where you control a squad of soldiers, as the inspiration that led to Shining Force’s tactical systems.
Interesting. I think I probably mentioned how much I enjoy both 1 and 2 when 2 came up, but of them I do prefer the original because yeah they both have some wacky characters but the first one is the one with the cool wizard ladies getting promotions where their staves just hover next to them and the even cooler flying octopus inside a pot that is also a wizard just gets to have a completely unfair combination of traits and be a real game breaking weirdo. And the enemy UI remains the absolute weirdest thing ever.
Also since I'm getting the impression it didn't make the list, I know 3 has this mythical status as this amazing rare treasure on the Saturn where you can only play the first third of it at all, if you're so lucky that you can even find one of the hardest games in existence to get a copy of (... way less of a big deal because people are finally making pretty solid Saturn emulators finally), but... Shining Force 3 actually kinda blows. The sprite work is horrendous, the polygonal models for attacks are kinda nothing, and it tried to make a rotating 3D camera work and it just came out incredibly awkward and confusing, and bookshelves no longer contain a funny thing, another funny thing, and many more books.
Etrian Odyssey is such a surprise breakout hit,
All 3 games from the HD collection leaked into recent-ish Humble Monthlies, so I've been revisiting the whole series... on the original hardware because holy crap trying to manage the map is just absolutely terrible without an actual (3)DS, and I'm not a fan of how the art looks up-scaled.
Granted I'm also not a fan of how the art looks in general. Spoilered for dark subject matter.
I seem to recall a few instances where things on this forum/Parish's site got pretty heated over the fact that like... so far as I am aware the character artist does not draw child porn when not working on games, but sure does have an art style that simultaneously feels very "I do a lot of porn" and "I draw a lot of kids" and there's just this big ol' sword of Damocles hanging over the whole series as a result where it feels almost inevitable we are eventually going to learn something that makes us want to throw them all away. But on the other hand, damn do I know a lot of perfectly fine artists dealing with all kinds of awfulness because weirdos on the internet will constantly run witch hunts on perfectly moral artists and baselessly accuse them of all kinds of vile things just because the artist is gay/trans/a furry/takes commissions shipping different characters than they like/whatever. And I certainly don't want to be part of THAT problem if we're really just talking about someone who likes drawing pirate ladies with big boobs and small shirts some days and little red riding hoods other days. But then also it's still weird when they're side by side on the portrait select screen though.
All that being said, damn the class design and skill synergies are so good, and that first game in particular had such a neat late game reveal to it.
Praise the short JRPG! The lengthy adventure is an admirable thing, but there’s something to be said for a JRPG that gets in, gets out, all killer no filler. Parasite Eve might be the poster child for the 10 hour whiz-bang experience.
I love every 12ish hour horror RPG. Parasite Eve, Koudelka, Sweet Home, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. I hope I remembered to vote for all of them.
But yeah, amazing soundtrack. Probably the best effort from Square to do the action/RPG thing until... FF14? Spinning around that map is just neat. Cool shots in cars.
Shame about that walking/running speed though. Could have been a 6 hour game. Also a shame about using a tool to move x24 attacks off that uzi onto your good gun without realizing that for some damn reason it then divides the damage of every shot by 24 so you're just wasting ammo and animation locking yourself what the hell who here didn't ruin a save with that?
I also feel like Quintet's writing shines the most when it isn't about specific characters per se, but rather about broader themes, like the eternal struggle of good vs. evil, or the sentience of all beings and species.
