Wild Arms 4 reviewed

It's that time again where I torture myself with another Wild Arms sequel even though none of them can match up to the masterful first game.  And yet, I torture myself with these games to find something that even comes close, it may just be my unicorn so to speak.  But Wild Arms 4 is different in the fact that it doesn't suck.  It has a whole lot of problems but I wasn't bored or wanted to kill myself playing this.  Anyways, it's time to get into why Wild Arms 4 doesn't suck.

Jude Maverick is the only child in Ciel village with a whole bunch of other adults.  He does boy stuff like skipping his training and loafing around the forest for some berries.  But then some army crashes through the sky like it was made out of glass!  It seems some people are looking for the residents of Ciel for their knowledge of ARM's to re-activate The Divine Weapon but due to some WACKY HIJINKS they town gets destroyed as Jude escapes into the unknown, war-torn, desert wasteland of Filgaia.  Now Jude must find the answers to what's going on and where is everyone as he finds friends willing to help him and enemies willing to stop him.

The first thing that I noticed is how incredibly dumbed down the game is.   It's basically an RPG for beginners.  The game is incredibly linear in that you go from Point A to Point B without any deviations and not much chance for backtracking.  The overworld map is just a bunch of points on a map and you are just a cursor clicking on one place to another.  You can't explore the world and you can't even use the weird but extremely fun search function to find explore anything.  You also can't go into people's homes...well you can, but it's only going to show you a conversation.  They're not much to do outside of battles.

But while they may have dumbed down most elements of an RPG, it has flipped the usual battle system upside-down.  Instead of the usual one-line for heroes and another for enemies there's a HEX-system.  The heroes are on a few hexes and the enemies are on a few more and sometimes they bunch together on the same hex.  It leads to a nice sense of strategy that you have to position yourself just right to attack your enemies but there's only seven hexes so it's not that hard.  It's a great idea and it's actually implemented quite well in that it's really fun to play and much easier than it appears.
 
The cinematics are alright.  Most of the time most conversations happens with a portrait of the relevant character with the relevant emotions.  That's fine when nothing is happening but when it does this during an action scene, it gets rather annoying.  These guys should be doing something but instead they're just standing there and then a brief moment of them doing something.  It doesn't quite work as it should but I will say that it has portraits for everyone and I do mean EVERYONE!  The FMV's are much better because since the game is free of this comic book presentation, everyone is doing something and those scenes are pretty entertaining even if it does go a bit too over-the-top for it's own good.

Which is pretty much what the script does every time the game says something. it's always about "Adults rule, kids drool!" or "War is bad!  Things that hurt other people is bad!"  It gets really overbearing and preachy and by some miracle, it's not as bad as it could have been.  The voice-actors actually try to get emotion and nuances out of the dialogue which makes their characters much more appealing than they should be.  How I can be entertained by a script shallower than a dry puddle is a miracle.

The game has a lot of good things and a lot of bad things to it but on the whole, it's almost good.  The voice-acting and the battle systems are pretty good even if the script tries its best to sabotage things.  It's still doesn't even begin to touch the first Wild Arms but at least you won't suffer.

6/10