It's been a very long time since I played any Wild Arms game, now I come back to the series with this. Again, RPGenius's blog played a big part in what I thought of the game when I played it, again I did not necessarily have high expectations. I gotta admit though, I wasn't really expecting to be done with this game as quickly as I did, and that's even with all the extra stuff like the arena and hidden bosses. Is it as bad as he says? Well...
There ARE some neat ideas, and many of them were so neat they end up being too weird. That hex battle system, honestly I guess it's fine, the only real problem is you can't move and attack at the same time unless it's Raquel. Speaking of, wow. Raquel is far too overpowered and makes the game way too easy, I was able to one-shot bosses with her, and the way experience gets distributed means she gets the most. Kinda problematic? Nevertheless, this battle system still allows for some serious strategy placement, especially given the elemental hexes (or ley points), as well as giving certain hexes statuses and buffs to do the important stuff.
Not too much of a fan of navigation. We really didn't need to have a "select destination" world map in hindsight, it's much less fun. Platforming mechanics aren't really that bad and puzzles are fine. The linearity of the game is quite a minus though, maybe this is the reason why it's too darn short. I actually did have an Alter Code F save, which, well, it just gives you more gella in chests and gives better starting levels for the characters (I sorta cheated with my ACF save because I wanted to get all Ex File Keys, and some require a character to be at Lv100 so what else but gamesharking to reach that, it then impacted the starting levels and power of the characters here in a way).
I'm not into the whole theme of the plot and characters though. I just don't understand things, considering how the children and the adults are always at odds, we see these Gazel Ministry-like weirdos who are creepily obsessed with retrieving Yulie, but are then killed off by Mr Bishonen bad guy Lambda who's still pretty meh on everything. Jude acts like a spoiled child and Arnaud isn't anywhere close to smart in my opinion. Yulie and Kresnik's sibling relationship is cliche as heck, and Tony is an annoying underling. While I was annoyed at fighting the same bosses over and over in 3, the Brionac lieutenants had barely any character whatsoever and you fight each of them once before they end up dying in various ways. And Gawn, well he is the kind of character you wished would be playable because he seemed to be the only one aside from Lambda and maybe Farmel who actually had a "character" in some sense. Instead Kresnik tags along only to rescue Yulie at one point and then later when he and Jude get separated, and neither of those times are really that long to justify whatever he even does.
If anything, Wild Arms 4 is a very political game in all the wrong ways. Children just don't understand politics at all, as well as what's at stake in just about any known world. What do children do when things don't go their way? They whine. It's so similiar to how kids with social media accounts always whine about politics that don't fit their favorite things. Adults had the time to grow and realize just what is wrong with things on different sides. Some like Lambda take stupidly drastic measures as a "solution", which frankly is reminiscent of how politicians come up with "solutions". Others are just trying to make a living doing their everyday jobs no matter how they struggle, somehow these people are sidelined for the main plot of "this crazy political crap is happening and kids are trying to stop it".
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