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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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I've been playing through Wild Arms lately. It feels pretty antiquated compared to basically any of SquareSoft's PS1 JRPG output, being essentially a standard tile-based top-down 16-bit RPG with 3D only being made use of in battles. It predated FF7 and playing it helps appreciate just how huge of a technical milestone that game was. Compared to games that looked like this
FF7's cinematic camera angles, 3D character models and FMV cutscenes FF7 must've felt like it was from another universe. Even the 3D battles aren't that impressive looking:
Though I will say that the battles do at least feature models with fully texture-mapped polygons as opposed to the flat shading FF7 mostly used.
Wild Arms feels and looks kind of basic and the storytelling and characterisation fall short even when compared to Square games from the previous generation, but the game has a quick, breezy pace to it that's kept me weirdly hooked. You move from town to dungeon to boss and back again very quickly and there's basically no annoying minigames or cryptic side content to slow you down. I actually played Wild Arms as a kid but I remember it much less clearly than Square's PS1 JRPGs. Playing it now I realise I must've made it at least a decent ways in but I have no memories of specific plot beats, boss fights and events, which can probably be blamed on the basic presentation.
My main memory of the game was of its FMV intro animation and the incredible song that accompanies it
The vibe of the intro might make you think the game has a heavy spaghetti Western influence but aside from a few Western flourishes in the soundtrack, there being guns and one character wearing a duster and another being named Calamity Jane that's not really the case- everything is fairly standard JRPG fantasy fare which feels like a missed opportunity.
I might check out Wild Arms 2 when I'm done with this
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I always wanted to play WA when I saw the opening anime intro on a preview disc that came with my preorder of FFVII. Although seeing footage of it years later on YT is like you said, rather basic.
The intro animation is easily the most memorable and well-made part of the entire game but it does set up expectations that the actual game just can't live up to. The game's beady-eyed chubby-looking little chibi sprites and the cutesy world they inhabit just don't match the atmosphere and mood of the intro.
The studio behind the game, Media.Vision, had only made two games prior to Wild Arms, Crime Crackers and Gunners Heaven/Rapid Reload, both of which were early PS1 games. When I say early PS1, I mean early. Crime Crackers came out in 1994 and looked like this:
(It's incredible how different stuff from the early years of the PS1 is from the later games I grew up with. It barely feels like it's the same console- I recently flipped through a PS1 mag from 1996 and recognised basically none of the games being shown)
With that pedigree it makes sense Wild Arms didn't quite measure up to RPGs from Square. I looked up what Media.Vision is up to these days and discovered they've been active ever since and actually worked on the Valkyria Chronicles series which I recently made a post about. Not the VC game I played but still, small world
Yeah it's crazy how some very very early PS1 games look so similar to 16bit outings. I swear some of the games used the super famicom soundfont too.
Worse, many of them look like 3DO games. Actually, 2D games on the PS1 do typically look a lot better than SNES and Genesis games. Pretty sure Rayman would look and sound much worse on either