So the battle system is quite fun, and becomes more fun as you level up and gain new skills, since it will become more strategic and will involve using your skills properly to try to get more turns and do more damage to the enemy, as well as using HEXes in a way that will advantage you. There is one thing that people might not like here though: Unless they died in battle, characters get back their FULL HP, so they are always fully ready for the next battle. If they die in battle, they get their max HP lowered a bit, but it can be recovered after some time or if you use nectar. But the full healing isn’t exactly a bad thing. The enemies do so much damage through the game it can sometimes be hard to keep your characters alive for 1 battle, let alone for a whole dungeon. So fighting in this game is actually quite fun, and as you go on requires more and more strategy as the game goes on.

The last important thing here is the way of powering up your characters. The characters here, like most RPGs, level up normally by gaining experience points. But the number of experience points gained in battle changes depending on what the character does. Basically, each character start at X1.0 experience points, so if a battle is supposed to give 100 experience points, it multiplies it by 1, giving 100 XP to each character. Now, in battle, there are some actions that give extra multipliers, which means more experience points. Hitting enemies gives a bonus, killing enemies gives a bigger bonus, using the lucky card item and the random use of passive skills occasionally gives a bonus (depending on the skill that was used). So in the end a character could have X2.4 experience points, meaning instead of 100 he would get 240 experience points. Other than leveling up, there is one very important thing about the powering up of characters here: learning skills. Each skill has a number of points that they need so they can be learned, up to 100. At each level, ALL skills get 1 point, plus the character gets extra points he can allocate to the skills he wants, which basically means he can learn skills before being high level enough to use them. There is one drawback though: using one of those “skill points” lowers your max HP and your max MP, so it’s good to make a good balance between skill you learn and skill points you use, since you don’t really want your members to be weaker just to get a new skill you probably won’t use. All in all the leveling/skill system is quite intuitive and fun to use, although I don’t exactly like the fact that some characters (Jude and Raquel) are always advantaged over the other 2 because they do some much more damage and tend to kill a lot more enemies than Yulie and Arnaud.

Conclusion
Wild Arms 4 isn’t a bad game. But it’s not exactly great either. For an RPG, I would expect better characters, something mildly interesting in the story and original landscapes, but here this is pretty much as average as you can get. The redeeming feature here is the gameplay. Well, the battles/leveling in particular since the exploration isn’t that great. The battle system here is completely original and is unlike anything I’ve seen before in a traditional RPG. The only element gameplay-wise that might be a drawback to some people is the fact that HP is fully healed after each battle, but it’s really a good thing considering how strong the enemies are through the game.

Pros
-Cool fights
-Good leveling/skill systems
-Not expensive at all

Cons
-EVERYTHING is clich
-RPGs don’t get much more average than this