Wild ARMs

 

Review by · February 2, 2025

Passing decades are not kind to games, and if developers and publishers do not continually maintain and update the classics, they become lost to all but those few players willing to do their video game homework. While playing Tokyo-based developer Media.Vision’s JRPG classic Wild ARMs sometimes felt like I was eating my vegetables, and certain mechanical aspects of the game have spoiled with age, I was inexorably charmed by its many strengths and compelled to see its trio of heroes’ stories through to the end.

Wild ARMs takes place in the world of Filgaia, a 2D stretch of plains, canyons, deserts, and mountain ranges drawing visual inspiration from the American West, with a healthy dose of medieval castles and villages one might expect from the first six Final Fantasy titles. Despite the seeming primitivity of Filgaia, peppered throughout its several continents are traces of ancient, magical societies and, treated even more fantastically, ancient technologies like the defunct robotic golems and their mechanical weapons, known as ARMs. The blending of fantasy with tinges of science fiction was nothing new in JRPGs even at the time of the game’s original Japanese release on the PlayStation in 1996, but the game’s real selling point should be its Wild West elements.

Unfortunately, if not for the incredible and evocative score buoying the game’s cowboy atmosphere, Wild ARMs easily forgets to deliver on the promises of its own setting and leans too often in the direction of a lukewarm medieval fantasy, which is a shame considering the potential of cowboy-fantasy more fully realized in games like Natsume’s Wild Guns (an easily confusable title) on the Super Nintendo in 1994 or the 1995 manga Trigun. Graphically, too, it is only serviceable, and rarely uses its spritework to make said mountains, plains, and deserts feel distinct from one another, except in a few major dungeons. The Western aesthetic feels more like an excuse to deliver plain, featureless environments.

From the start of the Wild ARMs, players can hop freely between the prologues for each of the three protagonists. Rudy, the blue-haired gunslinger featured front and center in the game’s marketing, is a lonely orphan ostracized from his simple farming village, in part for his rare ability to wield the mysterious ARMs. Jack, equipped with his cowboy hat (+1 DEF) and aided by an adorable and mouthy blue mouse named Hanpan (who deserves more screentime than he gets), is an Indiana Jones-style treasure hunter desperately trying to fill an emotional void from his past with his vague dream of finding true “power.” In Jack’s case, don’t miss one of the two opening cutscenes that will only play if you linger on the title screen long enough. Cecilia, a student of magic and princess of Castle Adlehyde, seeks to unlock the secrets of the mystical Tear Drop left by her late mother and prove herself as an individual beyond just her royal blood. Within hours of gameplay, the three join forces in the city of Adlehyde just as it is ravaged by a demon army led by a group called the Quarter Knights, who seek the ancient mechanical golems and Cecilia’s Tear Drop magic as a means of reawakening their leader, referred to only as “Mother,” and ostensibly ruling or decimating humanity.

Though visually none of the four Quarter Knights nor the demons they command seem to fit any consistent style beyond “miscellaneous polygonal beasts” during the 3D-rendered battles (which, graphically, look very bare and economical), the main villains are surprisingly vicious and give the game’s story a continual sense of urgency and, at times, dread. This is especially true of the sadistic mage Alhazad, with his twisted form hidden beneath white robes and his craving to conduct human experimentation or else see the world burn. Without delving into spoilers, I wish that “Mother” and the Quarter Knights’ leader Zeikfried (who looks and behaves like a poor man’s Golbez) had as much on-screen intimidation as their underlings do throughout the game’s sizable second act.

After the impressive opening prologues and exciting first act, our trio of heroes begin traversing Filgaia… at which point Wild ARMs begins its slow decline into mundanity. That is to say, the story devolves into racing against the Quarter Knights for one MacGuffin after the next, which puts more and more emphasis on the weaknesses inherit in the gameplay of an aged turn-based RPG. By now, players will likely have several dozen or perhaps hundreds of random encounters under their belts, primarily with the trading of plain attacks.

Rudy, with his overpowered revolver ARM, only has ten bullets to start, which must be refilled in towns or with rare ammo drops, meaning his best and most unique attacks are best saved for boss fights. Sword whacks it is, then. Strangely, it isn’t until nearly three-quarters through the game that he suddenly begins collecting a slew of other more interesting ARMs weapons—why not give us those toys sooner? Jack is another sword whacker, though he collects blue mage-style attack techniques earlier and more often from story beats and challenges hidden in dungeons, which made him the mainstay anchor of my party. Even Cecilia, expected to act as both white and black mage with healing and offensive spells, starts with so little mana that she mostly has to whack enemies with her staff for the game’s first half. In her case, however, Wild ARMs makes the inspired decision to allow players to learn magic by finding “Crest Graphs.” These are cashed in to teach Cecilia any of the many spells to heal, attack, buff allies, or debuff enemies, with the added benefit of being able to rename spells freely; thus, my “Escape” spell to instantly leave dungeons was forever “GTFO.”

The slow trickle of combat mechanics wouldn’t feel so starving to the player if not for the game’s mightiest detractor: the encounter rate. I have played my fair share of classic RPGs with overly frequent random battles, but Wild ARMs felt relentless. Be it on the overworld map screen, or in its many, many labyrinthian dungeons, nowhere in the game did I feel safe taking so many as eight steps before I was in another two-minute battle with some blotchy goo monsters or giant scorpions. Considering that many of the abilities that make combat more fun are locked behind late-stage story beats, and how the XP given by these many battles makes each one only simpler and easier, the game neuters its core gameplay and serves it staler and staler over a ten-to-fifteen-hour slump that is finally, thankfully, broken by the more stellar endgame.

One of the game’s biggest strengths is its creative dungeon design and fun puzzles, making use of A Link to the Past-like tools: bombs, grapple hooks, lanterns, and so on. However, even puzzle solving is bogged down by random encounters—try remembering which way to go in a dark cave or which switches you’ve already flipped while being constantly interrupted by rats, ghosts, giant ants, and other 3D-rendered abominations I struggle to find names for. Add to this the near-impossible chance of escaping even a low-level random battle, all dependent on your characters’ luck levels.

The frustrating thing is that all these complaints about gameplay could have been easily remedied in one of Wild ARMs’multiple rereleases. I played the 2022 PS4/PS5 version, which brought PS5-remaster standard quick save and rewind features, but lacks options to speed up gameplay or turn off random encounters that have been a staple in past rereleases of many of Wild ARMs’ contemporaries like Final Fantasy VII through IX. For this reason, and to lessen the annoyance of the battles whilst trying to continue the rather obscure pointers guiding you around the map, I recommend having a guide ready, just in case.

Despite many gameplay speedbumps in the second act, Wild ARMs’ music and characters kept me hanging on until the final hours and post-game super bosses when the game became fun again. Cecilia even gets a spell that temporarily reduces the encounter rate to a reasonable level! Moreso than the plot of saving the world, I was drawn into Rudy, Jack, and Cecilia’s tightening friendship and their intertwined bildungsromans. Rudy, as the only silent protagonist and the most prototypical story of the bunch, may have been better served with dialogue. Jack and Cecilia, however, shine in some very emotionally satisfying scenes in the game’s final act, coinciding with the battle systems finally coming together. Throughout, too, is Wild ARMs’ hilarious cast of side characters, from the snappy engineer Emma, the bumbling pirate Captain Bartholomew, and the aloof femme fatale Lady Jane.

The Quarter Knights appear before the party and friends on a ship in the ocean.
The Quarter Knights ambush our heroes.

While later games in the series may better realize the cowboy flavors of the setting in terms of visuals — trading 2D sprites and 3D chibi renderings of our heroes for new casts and new Filgaias unique in all but name — Wild ARMs stands as a unique gem nestled in the shadow of PlayStation JRPG giants, waiting to be explored by the more patient of players. For all its constant availability across five generations of PlayStations, Wild ARMs deserves the quality-of-life enhancements of its peers to make it feel like less of a chore.


Pros

Fantastic Western-influenced soundtrack by composer Michiko Naruke, vibrant cast of heroes and side characters, legitimately intimidating villains, cleverly designed puzzles and dungeons.

Cons

It takes far too long to unlock the potential of the relatively simple combat system, second act feels inflated with ceaseless random battles while lacking character growth.

Bottom Line

JRPG fans with a patience and resilience for retro flaws will find in Wild ARMs a solid story, likeable characters, and one of the genre’s greatest soundtracks. One can enjoy the good if they can stand the bad and the ugly.

Graphics
65
Sound
90
Gameplay
70
Control
80
Story
75
Overall Score 77
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Matt Wardell

Matt Wardell

Matt is a writer who dreams of being the next Hideo Kojima or Raymond Carver, whichever comes first. He lives in Chiba, Japan with his lovely wife, and loves small text on screens and paper. His hobbies include completing sphere grids, beating coins out of street thugs, and recording his adventures in save logs.