Wild Arms 4 is probably the least liked game in the series, and not too long after release was already down at low prices everywhere. I got it for 24.99$ Canadian at the local EBgames. After hearing so many bad comments about it and seeing it at such a low price, I decided to see if it really was as bad as I heard. And in the end it wasn’t too bad. Maybe because I was expecting worse? I don’t know. But anyways it’s not such a bad game, but it does have some flaws.

Story
So there’s a young boy named Jude living in a city called Ciel, which is hidden fro the rest of the world. Some day, the village gets infiltrated. While investigating the enemy base, he finds a girl, named Yulie, imprisoned by the army and decides to save her. Then, he teams up with Arnaud, some Drifter who was working for the army for a contract, and go to save the girl. Back in the village, the army found a big box of white powder. Jude falls and his hands touch it, and somehow the powder becomes a gun, called an ARM. So because he can’t handle the power of the ARM, his village gets destroyed and everyone there escapes using escape pods. Then Jude decides he’ll go and destroy the army to protect the girl. That’s pretty much the basic of the story. There is some stuff involving evil geezers in colored armors planning to take over the world by becoming a super powerful government. The story is really nothing special. Actually, the characters are incredibly clich and not really likeable, and the story itself is clich and rather boring. Some of the characters aren’t too bad, but they die like 2 minutes after you see them.

Graphics
The graphics here aren’t anything really special. It looks like a 3D anime without cel-shading, and with slightly more “realistic” colors and sceneries. The character designs are pretty normal RPG/anime fare, although some of them look quite cool. The places you visit in the game… I don’t know, they look so…normal... You’re visiting a new place and the first thing you think is “Hey, didn’t I see this place in another game?” So the places you visit are not very memorable. Finally, the enemy design is rather generic as well. There are some cool looking enemies now and then, but again nothing really special.

Sound
The music is standard Wild Arms fare, so it’s pretty good. The sounds during gameplay are what you’d expect: gunshots and sword slashes sound the same in about every game now. There is some voice acting in the game, and it actually doesn’t sound too bad. The voices seem to fit the characters well and the sound quality is good. Not much else to say about how the game sounds really. It’s nice, but ultimately it’s just standard RPG fare nowadays.

Gameplay
Well now as you can see the game is awfully generic and doesn’t seem like it is much fun. But do not fear, the gameplay is here to save you from boredom…maybe.... There are 2 important parts in the gameplay here: platforming and fighting. First, the platforming. Well, I could say “exploration”, but there is barely any exploration involved, it is incredibly straight-forward, the game pretty much holds you by the hand here and tells you where to go next. So, basically, the “exploration” is mostly platforming, both 3D and side-scrolling. When you’re out of battle, you control Jude, who has the “powers” the jump, slide and use items he finds on the ground. He also has the power to slow down time which was activated when I got his ARM, and which he strangely can’t use in battle… The basic of the game is running around trying to get at the end of the dungeon by solving different puzzles. Sometimes it’s something simple like hitting crystals with a sword to open doors, while sometimes it involves lighting a pot on fire (you have to find out by yourself that the pot can be “fired” up) and throwing it on a statue, the use of bombs to activate many crystals simultaneously or slowing down time to make things move slower, enabling you to cross falling bridges and stuff like that. Side-scrolling parts are pretty much the same, although most of the time they aren’t puzzle-oriented, although they sometimes require you to slow down time. Finally, sometimes when you slow down time you will see money that you don’t normally see. Picking many bags of money or coins one after another without your accelerator bar being depleted gives more money. That’s pretty much all there is to the exploring in the game.

Okay, so the “exploring” isn’t really a redeeming feature in the game either. You must be starting to believe everything in the game is just average now, right? Well finally there’s something actually good in the game: the battles. The fights in this game are conducted completely differently than most RPGs out there. The battles are done in a grid containing 7 “HEXes”, which are hexagons where characters, enemies and obstacles reside, 3 which are colored differently as they have elemental properties (more on that a bit later). The turn order is displayed on the bottom of the screen, a bit like in FFX. Each turn you have 3 choices: attack (includes using skills, normal attacks, or special attacks), use an item or move to a different HEX. Attacks have different ranges, and they affect EVERYTHING in the chosen HEX. So if a poison attack is done on an HEX, anyone who enters it is affected by the poison, but it works the other way around too, so if someone on a poisoned HEX exit’s the HEX, he is not affected by the poison anymore. Same for normal attacks, if there are 5 enemies on an HEX and you attack it, all enemies on that HEX will get damaged. This works for healing spells and items too. Normal attacks, other than Judes’, only attack an adjacent HEX, while special attacks and skills can target far away enemies or more than one HEX at the same time. Also, each character has passive skills he learns through the game. Those skills are activated at random during battle, although a few are activated when a specific action is taken. For example, if Jude has the defender skill, if he gets attacked when there are allies on the same HEX as he is, there are some chances that he’ll get an instant defense boost for that attack and be the only one damaged, protecting the other people in the HEX. Or the Move & Act skill by Raquel, which happens every time you make Raquel move, which let’s you do a normal attack after moving. Finally, there are the elemental HEXes, called Ley points, that I talked about earlier. They affect most characters in some way. Jude’s LEV point ability changes effect depending on what color of HEX that he is standing on, Yulie’s “Material” ability does a different elemental summon depending on where she stands and Arnaud’s blast ability does a different elemental spell depending on where he stands.