Wildly Unsuccessful
Wild ARMs: XF attempts to take Media.Vision's classic RPG in a strategic direction but ultimately fails.
Published: March 20, 2008
If you've read either one of my last two Wild ARMs reviews, you'll know I have a serious soft spot for the series. It was something that was kindled from the first whistled opening in the original game, and despite some rough patches, the series has still managed to be one of my favorites on the PlayStation systems. Now, finally, it's made the leap to the PSP, but along the way, much of the adventure, the interesting characters and most notably the world itself were pared down to make room for a strategy game that bears resemblance to the console Wild ARMs in name only.
I'm no SRPG hater either, from Jeanne d'Arc to Final Fantasy Tactics to Disgaea to Field Commander, the PSP has enjoyed some absolutely wonderful strategy games, but something about adapting Wild ARMs 4 and 5's HEX Battle System just didn't hook me, and after bumbling through the grids, constantly moving forward and back through menus to check and then line up attacks, I found it all to be rather cumbersome.
On paper, Wild ARMs: XF (that's pronounced "crossfire" for the curious) has all the right ingredients to be a killer SRPG. You can freely change characters' classes at almost any time, allowing them to learn movies and abilities from each class without the usual penalties found in other games like resetting levels. You can team up with other characters to do double, triple or even quadruple attacks on enemies. You have a dog as a party member that doesn't suck. And yet at seemingly every stop on this list of reasons why the game should have been good, there's some kind of disappointment, most notably changing classes in that it un-equips everything from a character, even support items, forcing you to constantly play dress-up.
There's also the issue of the battles themselves. There are times when the odds are almost impossibly stacked against you, and the difficulty from one battle to the next can swing like a pendulum, letting you cruise through two or three fights before slapping you with one where enemies can do things like move anywhere they want on the map or saddling you with an escort mission. Yeah, an escort mission. In a strategy RPG.
Thankfully, if you die, you can re-start and play around with classes and equipment, but most of the harder battles in the game are literally a series of trial-and-error clashes where by process of elimination, you find out how to get through them -- or, in my case, you eventually give up and consult a walkthrough. The fact that I was probably doing that every 10 fights or so out of sheer frustration just shows how unbalanced the game can be.
One of the biggest reasons why I've liked the series in the past was that, despite often having some bright-eyed, overly-enthusiastic main character as the protagonist, the actual world was filled with the kind of people you'd expect trying to eke out an existence in a barren, resource-bare world. Inevitably at some point the old technology that caused the world to fall into such dire straights would pop up and things would go crazy, but it was the game's willingness to paint a drab, dusty setting filled with drifters and people living hard lives that made everything else fit.
XF, honestly, offers none of that Old West vibe. The music still offers the odd whistled background and guitars are definitely a primary instrument, but none of it feels as simultaneously wistful and charged with potential drama like the console games do. The voice acting for the most part is absolutely forgettable (thanks in large part to a script that never really gives the characters engaging personalities), and the sound effects... well, those are actually rather decent -- if only because they recall the console games on a regular basis.
The visuals, too, have elements of the other games; the garb is the same, the art style is obviously similar, and I am a huge proponent of keeping hard-drawn sprites alive and well, so the isometric view and tile-based arenas are fine, but still portraits and pretty painted backgrounds do not an interesting cutscene make. I don't know what it is, but everything seems designed by Media.Vision's B Team, and the graphics, while certainly passable, encompass that perfectly.
I realize this isn't a traditional Wild ARMs game -- it's not meant to be one of those games -- but it should at least carry the same kind of hooks, the same sense of a world that desperately wants to recover if people would just stop messing with it, but you never really get that with XF. The mistaken identity storyline could have been interesting, but the backdrop in which it takes place just never interested me, and after countless tries and re-tries on battles, I got fed up. I guarantee you that unless you're absolutely starved for SRPG mechanics, you will too, which is precisely why Wild ARMs: XF should be passed on.
I'm no SRPG hater either, from Jeanne d'Arc to Final Fantasy Tactics to Disgaea to Field Commander, the PSP has enjoyed some absolutely wonderful strategy games, but something about adapting Wild ARMs 4 and 5's HEX Battle System just didn't hook me, and after bumbling through the grids, constantly moving forward and back through menus to check and then line up attacks, I found it all to be rather cumbersome.
On paper, Wild ARMs: XF (that's pronounced "crossfire" for the curious) has all the right ingredients to be a killer SRPG. You can freely change characters' classes at almost any time, allowing them to learn movies and abilities from each class without the usual penalties found in other games like resetting levels. You can team up with other characters to do double, triple or even quadruple attacks on enemies. You have a dog as a party member that doesn't suck. And yet at seemingly every stop on this list of reasons why the game should have been good, there's some kind of disappointment, most notably changing classes in that it un-equips everything from a character, even support items, forcing you to constantly play dress-up.
There's also the issue of the battles themselves. There are times when the odds are almost impossibly stacked against you, and the difficulty from one battle to the next can swing like a pendulum, letting you cruise through two or three fights before slapping you with one where enemies can do things like move anywhere they want on the map or saddling you with an escort mission. Yeah, an escort mission. In a strategy RPG.
Thankfully, if you die, you can re-start and play around with classes and equipment, but most of the harder battles in the game are literally a series of trial-and-error clashes where by process of elimination, you find out how to get through them -- or, in my case, you eventually give up and consult a walkthrough. The fact that I was probably doing that every 10 fights or so out of sheer frustration just shows how unbalanced the game can be.
One of the biggest reasons why I've liked the series in the past was that, despite often having some bright-eyed, overly-enthusiastic main character as the protagonist, the actual world was filled with the kind of people you'd expect trying to eke out an existence in a barren, resource-bare world. Inevitably at some point the old technology that caused the world to fall into such dire straights would pop up and things would go crazy, but it was the game's willingness to paint a drab, dusty setting filled with drifters and people living hard lives that made everything else fit.
XF, honestly, offers none of that Old West vibe. The music still offers the odd whistled background and guitars are definitely a primary instrument, but none of it feels as simultaneously wistful and charged with potential drama like the console games do. The voice acting for the most part is absolutely forgettable (thanks in large part to a script that never really gives the characters engaging personalities), and the sound effects... well, those are actually rather decent -- if only because they recall the console games on a regular basis.
The visuals, too, have elements of the other games; the garb is the same, the art style is obviously similar, and I am a huge proponent of keeping hard-drawn sprites alive and well, so the isometric view and tile-based arenas are fine, but still portraits and pretty painted backgrounds do not an interesting cutscene make. I don't know what it is, but everything seems designed by Media.Vision's B Team, and the graphics, while certainly passable, encompass that perfectly.
I realize this isn't a traditional Wild ARMs game -- it's not meant to be one of those games -- but it should at least carry the same kind of hooks, the same sense of a world that desperately wants to recover if people would just stop messing with it, but you never really get that with XF. The mistaken identity storyline could have been interesting, but the backdrop in which it takes place just never interested me, and after countless tries and re-tries on battles, I got fed up. I guarantee you that unless you're absolutely starved for SRPG mechanics, you will too, which is precisely why Wild ARMs: XF should be passed on.