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.