Wild Arms 4 Review


If you’ve played the previous Wild Arms games, you’ll find Wild Arms 4 to be a bit of a departure from its predecessors. Wild Arms 4 does not have as strong a Western feel as has been the hallmark of this sci-fi Western RPG series. The ARMs are still there – futuristic guns modeled on Old West weapons that bind themselves to their owners through gene fusion – but the world has more of an Orwellian 1984 feel to it than an 1884 one.

You'll need to do some platform style moves in Wild Arms 4.
In Wild Arms 4, a teenager by the name of Jude Maverick finds his idyllic life shattered when a fleet of military ships appear through a tear in the sky. He soon learns that his world is an illusion, a self-contained virtual world floating above the planet Filgaia. Filgaia is war-torn and under the control of a militaristic government willing to sacrifice everything in order to obtain the ultimate weapon. Of course, Jude and his companions embark on a quest to prevent this from happening and to give Filgaia hope for a brighter future. Joining Jude on this quest are Arnaud, a cowardly former soldier with a penchant for magic, Raquel, a young beauty with a penchant for swordplay, and the mysterious Yulie, a girl with mysterious powers that are somehow tied into the government’s quest for the ultimate weapon.

The game itself is played from a third-person, 3D perspective. There are light platform and stealth elements to the game, and some hardcore RPG gamers may be put off by this. Wild Arms 4 is still an RPG through and through, and you’ll spend plenty of time speaking with characters, watching cutscenes, and fighting battles, but it seems that the game relies on jumping a little too heavily in place of actual puzzles to be solved.

The world of Wild Arms 4 is broken up into areas divided into a number of rooms or scenes. The exits are clearly marked as are interactive items, and there are plenty of nooks and crannies to peek into looking for chests. Even though the areas are largely non-interactive, there’s a lot of detail to each one and this goes a long way towards bringing the world of Wild Arms 4 to life. There is also a good variety of environments in the game, both indoors and out. You’ll go from underwater to the heights of mountains and from desolate buildings to cities.

 

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