Wild Wild West
Wild ARMs 5 is the best game in the series since the first one, and arguably one of the best RPGs on the PS2.
Published: September 9, 2007
It all makes the tale of an amnesiac girl who crashes to earth held in the hand of a giant golem, a robot from 12,000 years in the past, that much more interesting. As leading man (er, boy) Dean and his little hotpants-wearing cowgirl friend Rebecca explore the world, they discover that the Veruni, an alien race that arrived back on the planet of Filgaia, may be having a direct effect on not only the humans, but the planet itself. Unfortunately, since they're treated as aristocracy due to their advanced technology, there's a wall separating humans and Veruni that Dean and pals eventually try to bring down. No, it's not especially new, but it is interesting, and gives the game an infinitely stronger narrative thread than the last entry to the series.
It's also a fairly pretty game, tapping the PS2 hardware to deliver a butter-smooth 60fps while exploring dungeons and towns, but cut to 30 during cutscenes, battles and the exploration of the overworld. Because the game sports a fairly clean, simple, anime-style presentation it all gels together quite nicely, though the textures are mostly smoothed out and almost painted-looking rather than going for detail.
With the exception of the overworld, which has a massive anti-aliasing filter on it that gives everything an overly-blurry look, the game looks and runs wonderfully, and some of the more elaborate team attacks that return from the last game allow two players on a hex to dish out serious pain to nearby enemies while performing impossibly complicated super-moves. It's fun stuff, and regularly pokes fun at both the series as a whole (including featuring some great takes on previous heroes from the past games in cameo appearances) and itself.
Excusing little girl Carol's meek, annoying vocal performance, the game also sounds quite nice, though the series' composer, Michiko Naruke sadly didn't reprise her scoring duties this time around. Still, the themes, battle music and intro and ending songs are pretty much in lock-step with the previous games, meaning plenty of Western-themed tunes with whistling backdrops, though there's more of an almost jazzy swing to many of the songs now. The sound effects seem more or less lifted from the last game, but that's not a knock against them, they're just familiar.
Special attention really needs to be paid to both the localization, which is some of XSEED's best, and the little touches that went into recording the characters' lines. I mentioned before that there are end-of-battle comments that fit in with the storyline at the time, but there are just as many mid-battle comments to help, and in on particular instance getting a Miserable status effect on a hex turns the characters into cats, at which point many of their lines are augmented with "meow" comments and their voices are pitch shifted higher. Hearing main character Avril go from "I'll do my best" to "I'll do my feline best" just clinched it for me.
Wild ARMs 5, in many ways, represents the pinnacle of this style of role-playing game. So many things were already right with the last game that the added stuff like allowing you to sacrifice HP to learn new skills with the Mediums in the game or Dean's ability to use his ARMs with a variety of special bullets to interact with the dungeons (it's no Accelerator, sadly, and I do miss the 2D segments from the last game, but hey, it's better than nothing) just make it that much better. In fact, from puzzle design to visuals to story to characters to voice acting to localization, this is probably the best American version of the game that's ever seen release here. If you've grown tired of tedious battle systems and can stomach the anime-style presentation and an abundance of clichés, Wild ARMs 5 deserves a serious look.