Wild Arms 3

Great concept & style, with glaring problems that bring the title down

Reviewed by benkosar on February 22, 2008  |  report this review

Wild arms 3. I was really excited when I saw this game in play. I was even more excited when I found this at a local shopko for 7 bucks mismarked down from 35. (It was supposed to be 30ish on clearance, but rang up wrong on the self-checkout).

This game, annoys the crap out of me. It has such good qualities, that you WANT to play it. It nags at you to do more, but it's playable aspects are questionable.

The cel-shaded look, for the most part works extremely well. I wouldn't want to play every game in it, but it worked well on *this* game. Some of the characters seem a little loopy or overdone (*cough, Virgina, cough*). For the most part though, you can customize and re-customize each char. They all get super-powers at a point, and don't become terribly different from eachother fight-wize.

This game has a really unique premise, and I think they really put a lot of effort into it, they looked at Wild Arms I and saw what worked. They have an individual char-intro style like the first game. This really helps to flesh the chars out to the player. HOWEVER, on the world map you'll wander around. You hit a 'search' button, and a small radius goes in the immediate vicinity. That's right, nothing, even towns, show up without the map. So you'll run around finding crap when it's time. Great. Wander, wander, oh, that's what I'm supposed to do. The game isn't always the clearest about your next goal or location as well.

There's one spot where you need to use a horse, and jump over a small crevice, this isn't explained well, and just confused the living shit out of me for hours.

I didn't complete this game, but it's 'find your way' style, and some of it's conventions bring n otherwise innovative game down to mediocrity. You loose some of the sense that the characters are special and unique. It's a decently nice experience, but you might want to buy the illistrated guide to go along with it, so you don't waste any time looking for things on the world map.

Hardcore RPG fans only here. There's better and less frustrating games to recommend to casual RPG fans, or newbies to the genre. Wild arms 4 & 5 have a new publisher, and take the series in a different (Arguably fresher & better) perspective. If you love anime, move on to those.

Defeating Raftina

Hint by hagz on May 02, 2007  |  report this hint

During the battle with Raftina in order to get the medium Love Charm (after you defeat the prophets and have found the Goddess idol) all you need to do is at the begining of the battle (or before it) equip Gallows with the medium Flash Hit. Then on his first turn have him use extension-reflect on the party. Doing this will cause Raftina to cast weaken on herself makeing her weak to all magic which will cause her to take around 600 damage from any attack magic. After you do this attack with Jet and Clive (usually just get their FP up and use Gattling for massive damage on Rafrtina) and have Virginia and Gallows cast whatever attack magic is in their arsenal at her. Re-apply the reflect when it runs(Usually after about 3 or 4 turns but each character runs looses it at different times so watch out)out and depending on your level this should be an easy win. The only real trouble to look out for is her healing effect which does around 4000 healing to her so try to do more damage than that.

Note: When I beat her I was only around level 34 so anything above that should be able to beat her wth no problems at all, however it did take me a few trys to get it down right.