LogFAQs > #950433292

#32. Wild Arms 3 (PS2, 2002)



I feel like everyone who has played Wild Arms games has a different favorite. It's weird that there's so little concensus, but each one has different strengths and styles to appeal to different people. Wild Arms 3 is the one from the series that really clicked with me.

WA3 still leans heavily into the wild west setting, before the series toned it down a lot. That setting is one of the big appeals of Wild Arms to me. Michiko Naruke's soundtrack was at its strongest here and matched the setting so well. The western setting gets a little jRPG-ish later on, but not any crazier than any other jRPG from the time. Wild Arms 3 also went with a cel-shaded look, which was kind of a trendy thing at the time, but they added a sketched look over it, and I think it turned out well here.

The story starts off with four separate prologues, following each of the four main characters when they were solo. They all meet up on a train, during a train robbery and join together. All four are solidly good characters, there's not really a weak link here. Along the way, there are multiple groups of recurring rivals to bump into and sometimes fight, and those recurring characters are all lots of fun.

There are a lot of mechanics in this game that are unique or ambitious or weird or even antiquated, and I feel like they're all in my wheelhouse, even when they might not be for most people. Dungeons often have puzzles, and characters have tools specific to each for solving said puzzles. One real nice touch when inside dungeons, you get a limited number of cancels to random battles. Say you're running around, a little exclamation point pops up to say a battle's gonna start, but you think, nah, I don't want to do this fight so you hit a button, and the battle is canceled, and you keep moving around. It's great when you're trying to hit the next save point or when you've healed before a boss and don't want another fight. Battles rely strongly on buffs and weaknesses, which made for a lot of interesting boss battles. I felt like I could've just gone through dungeon after dungeon, battle after battle, and never get tired of it thanks to the amount of variety in what are normally repetitive activities.

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