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