overdrive's Wild Arms review

I like this review, and I love this game. If anything should be added in it, I think that for the Wild Arms games in general you should have maybe mentioned the soundtrack feature a bit more then in one line, but that aside it did carry the point across well.

Yeah, you cranky old coot -- Wild Arms has the best PSX soundtrack out there, as I say in my review of the game that's old, but not nearly as old as you!

Still, good solid review. More people prefer WA to FFVII than you might believe. I'm probably one of them.

I love Wild Arms. It's the only game in the series where the plot and characters didn't feel too retarded.

I know what you mean about the music. It's weird with me. I love music and listen to it all the time, but when it comes to gaming reviews, I think that just about anything I'm saying about a game's soundtrack comes off feeling forced and unnatural, so I usually wind up saying as little about it as possible.....such as just mentioning that it's good here. I just have trouble putting what I like about a soundtrack into words.

I think as a pure RPG, Wild Arms is superior to FF VII because it doesn't have a bunch of filler and the game just plays more tightly. On the other hand, FF VII does blow it out of the water as far as production goes and is essentially the game that made RPGs considered "big" in America, so we started getting more of them, instead of having 50-75 percent of them not leave Japan.

On a side note, it was cool to be able to take my team and beat the game (sans the Abyss and Boomerang Flash) again. I'd originally was going to use this game if we made the finals of the TT and play it just enough to refresh my memory on it, but then we got eliminated and I was having fun with it, so I decided to just beat it again.

I suggest incorporating music in terms of how it relates to or meshes with the game experience. For example you might say:

"As I entered the world map and the Morricone-esque fanfare kicked in, I jizzed my pants at the possibilities of this untapped frontier wasteland."

or

"The boss enemies are relentless, like their pounding battle music."

Lame examples, but hopefully they illustrate the idea and get those musical gears turning.

I ended up making a significant point about the music in a game for the first time on my Mana Khemia review, where it had stood out to me throughout the game how the story turns seriously darker two thirds into the game, and the music changes accordingly on many of the main areas. The review wasn't particularly well received but that was one part I was happy with, because until then, I had exactly the same problem really saying anything about music. It's not often that it really stands out to me even if I like it and realize, on some level, that it's probably a good soundtrack. But often it's just not the kind of thing that stands out to me in a game.

I also enjoyed reading your review. I do like that you mentioned the three different characters starting witin their own story. I found that to be very inovative at the time and I still like it today.

Not sure if this is proper (but some of you may not know) you can purchase 1 and 2 at the Playstation store.

I did enjoy the original Wild Arms to a point. It was decidedly difficult to make it past the terrible presentation, even harder today. You mention FF7. While that game may come off as having little more than blocky headed characters, it also had an appealing colour scheme, great character design (evidenced by their continuing popularity), memorable dialogue, and undeniably brilliant music. Wild Arms had one great musical interlude (the opening cutscene) and none of the rest. Whether or not the story is better is up for opinion, as are most RPG stories. The beginning is really fun, when you have to get the characters together and it lets you make your own spells, which is sweet. But the greys and browns got to me after a while and I had to put it down.

I disagree with only one good musical interlude. The entire game, from begining to end, be it the themes of various characters(Boomerang, Zed, the golem, Calamity Jane etc.)or overworld music/dungeon music/various towns music, I can honestly say each and every theme rocked. And that's more or less true in all Wild Arms games. It's their staple, powerful music.

As for FFVII, it was a great game, undeniably. Not my favorite, and objectively not the best rpg in my opinion, but it was great.

I do recommend trying out the Wild Arms Alter Code: F, which is basically a remake of the first game, though the fighting/equipment system is nothing alike.

Yeah, the music in the Wild Arms games is among the best I've heard in video games since the 8-bit days. It's insanely good across the board. Wild Arms is definitely one of the finest RPGs from the PSX era, but it's difficult to explain why to someone who hasn't played them or who can't look past their admittedly lower production values.

I find Wild Arm's pixel art to be cleaner and more appealing than the cluttered and confusing pre-rendered environments in Final Fantasy 7. The latter gets the edge when it comes to battles and magic effects, but that's because it had a bigger budget. :-p

On the subject of music, both games have great compositions, but WA had superior sound programming. As a matter of fact, one of the things that disappointed people when FF7 originally came out was how cheap the music sounded. It was like "SNES Sound Chip v1.5". The other two PSX Final Fantasy games suffered from this too, albeit to a lesser extent.

I think FF7 has a better soundtrack composition-wise, but dagnabit, Wild Arms riffs westerns' OSTs and that automatically makes it win. Everyone knows the overworld copies "Ecstacy of Gold," but I was listening to some Morricone soundtracks the other day and there was another that jumped out...forget the name...

Anyway, good review! Wild Arms is great...maybe even too great.