I should have been playing WA4 by now, but my PS2 had another one of its fits and decided not to play it, so Wild Arms 5 it is. I’ve played an hour of it and finished the prologue. It’s a good game, so far. It doesn’t have as many immediately off-putting puzzles as Wild Arms 2 did, and the Hex battle system took me all of 5 seconds to get the hang of. The whole Hex thing seems like an unnecessary addition that I will almost certainly tire of before the game is up, but right now it’s not bothering me too much. Character-wise Vyse, Aika and Fina Dean, Rebecca and Avril are okay enough. Generic plucky hero, his generic prickly childhood friend/not-girlfriend, generic mysterious girl with amnesia. Some games make the formula work. It’s all about what they do with them and with the story from here on out.

Why am I shelving it, then? To put it simply, I’m not in the mood for a ‘decent’ RPG. It’s all about timing, and right now I feel like playing something either very, very good or very, very bad. I don’t know about the former, but I have some ideas from Idea Factory for the latter (dear, sweet Idea Factory) that will prime my mental pump and prepare the way for me to play more normal fare like Wild Arms 5.

Since it’s very early days yet I probably shouldn’t say anything, but I’m going to note two early problems with WA5 regardless. Problem 1: The opening theme pissed me off. I don’t know about 3 and 4, but Wild Arms 1 and 2 had fantastic opening themes, so good they literally made me break out in goosebumps. Fast forward to 5 and… what? Generic J-Pop? Nana Mizuki? Who what where? Oh, I know who Nana Mizuki is and she’s not fit to lick the boots of a Wild Arms opening theme, okay? Urgghhh… You know, I was wondering why they waited so long to play the opening theme and run the credits, but now I’m glad they held it back for an hour. If they’d played it immediately I would have thrown the controller and pissed on the PS2 in protest. The BGM and battle themes are great as usual though, so that helps.

Problem two: the voice acting. Once I resume I’m also going to have to mute the voice-acting henceforth. I can’t stand Dean’s and Rebecca’s voices. Dean is too ‘cheerful little boy’ and Rebecca is too ‘shrieking harridan’ for my tastes. If you’re wondering why I’m going to mute the VAs here even though I endured 40+ hours of unquestionably worse acting in Arc Rise Fantasia, again it boils down to the “not quite horrible enough” thing. ARF has to be heard to be believed. WA5 should be seen, not heard.

That aside, it seems like a game I’m going to like. I’ll come back to it in… June-ish? July-ish? Quite soon, once I’m desperate to play something good again.

Related posts:

Wild Arms 2 – 10 years too late for me Wild Arms XF – Too much strategy for me Wild Arms 5 – Picking up nicely Spinning my wheels in Wild Arms 5 and Avalon Code