Wild Arms 5

List Price: $29.99 Discount Price: $28.46

Features:

• Wild Arms 5 is the newest chapter in the popular role player series
• Features a brand-new cast of characters in an all-new storyline along with a return of the acclaimed HEX battle system from Wild Arms 4
• Huge, fully explorable 3-D world has tons of hidden items, quests and mini-games to discover
• Dual-pistol wielding allows the player to shoot various types of bullets to solve puzzles
• Features dozens of cameo appearances and other surprises for longtime fans of the series

Customer Reviews:

A great purchase! [Posted on 2007-10-01]
Wild ARMs 5 is a good game and a whole lot of fun. It's not particularly original, but it takes some of the best elements from each game in its series and blends them together into a quality offering that should appeal to those who've long been a fan. For those who haven't, the fifth game is almost certainly their best bet for an introduction into the world of Filgaia. There's still a lot of room for improvement with this series, but after a few disappointing entries, it's refreshing to have one that gets things so much more right overall.

Major Disapointment [Posted on 2007-10-04]
This is my least favorite game of the series...a titled held by Wild Arms 4 up until this point. At least Wild Arms 4 ran smoothly.

Several problems with the game irritated me to the point where I put it down permanently. Aside from the cheesy music and mediocre voice acting, the game's frame rate on the world map is horrendous. The dungeon areas look great, but everything changes the moment you step outside. Also, whenever you enter a battle the game tends to freeze for a second or two during the transition from dungeon field / world map to battle field...it happens every single time. I've tested it on multiple PS2s so it's not a system issue. Finally, I can't stand how the characters mouths open and close during scenes that lack audio dialog. It just looks like they left the audio out.

This game had to have been rushed for two reasons: the limited lifespan of the PS2 and the 10th anniversary of Wild Arms. They should have spent more time refining it. I had high hope for this game and I ended up disappointed. If you are new to the series, pick up Wild Arms 3...you won't regret it. If you're along time fan, save yourself the agony and pick up something else.

Better than FF [Posted on 2008-03-23]
I am an avid RPG player. I had just gotten done playing the FF XII game, when I moved on to WildArms 5. At first I was like.. WTH is this? It seemed too simple and Lame. I got trhough an hour of it and started to get into the game play and battle system. Than I really got into the story. It is much more involved in story and actions than the FF game was. You feel much more part of the game. AS game play progressed, I had trouble walking away to do the other things I needed to do.. Like eat? I haven't had so much fun playing an RPG in a long time. The last game I played that I lost myself in play was FF X. Though if anyone hasn't played Bard's Tale.. Its good for a laugh.

A well developed story [Posted on 2008-03-24]
The story within Wild ARMs 5 borderlines on the last good story from the Wild ARMs series back when Wild ARMs 2 was released. This story involves a lot of things, comedy, drama and tragic events. The combat system is taken from Wild ARMs 4, which I didn't really care for since I mainly play JRPGs. The graphics are pretty good--similar to Wild ARMs 4 though yet faster--and the world map makes its comeback in this game.

If you want to get into Wild ARMs series, this one is a good start (if you play it all the way through.)

Wild Arms 5: Platformer RPG Goodness [Posted on 2008-04-07]
Wild Arms 5 is one of the few platformer RPGs out there. Your character has the ability to jump from object to object, you push items into holes, use different types of bullets to hit switches, and so on. What does this mean? The normal dungeon crawl becomes a fun experience and not as repetitive as many RPGs (does make you wonder though why whoever built all these structures made them so hard to get through!).

The game is all around fun and has some interesting aspects which make even some of the more annoying areas a pleasure to go through. One of which is the ability to turn off random encounters in areas you've beaten a special boss creature in. This is nice because you don't always want to have to fight the same weak enemies when you're just running through.

The battle system itself is different than most normal JRPGs. That being that you're on a hexagon matrix where certain spots have bonuses to elemental affinity which causes you to be more strategic especially when the enemy has a certain affinity and can use it against you.

Unfortunately, for the all the fun aspects of the game there are certain annoyances too. One of which is the fact that the game prevents you from going to areas you shouldn't go by using switches you cannot use unless you have certain bullets to get in. However, at one point in the game you have all the bullets and can, by mistake, progress the story by discovering places on the map important to the main quest. This happened to me while playing which is always annoying.

The worst part of this game, however, is the story and dialog. The characters are not really believable as well; Rebecca is one of the most annoying female figures ever to make it into a video game, for example. Her whole character motivation seems to be the fact that Dean, the main character, met Avril and she's jealous Dean likes her so she follows him on his adventure. The story (or lack there of) isn't that grand as well and it seems to be just a good versus evil keep walking because that leads us closer plot.

The only good part of the story is the ending but even then it's such a small piece of the overall story (although epic in nature) that you wonder what you got out of playing.

So, it's a fun Platformer RPG but don't expect anything wonderful. Just expect a corny character-bleh filled plot with an interesting dungeon system that relies on platformer like tendencies.

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