Wild ARMs 5: New Years Eve Completion

Interesting. I finished Wild ARMs 4 two years ago on the SAME DAY. Funny coincidence. Alright, how wild was this one...

Story: 3/5
Gosh, what is going on with the Wild ARMs stories now? 4 was a total bleh but 5 was a BIT of an improvement. There were a lot of cliche and corny moments. I extremely disliked how they had this futuristic, highly advanced technological city. Also by the end, we were suddenly offered this retarded mix of Power Rangers / Transformers aspect with the golems. However I did like the individual stories of the characters and how that brought them together. The [spoilerish] time paradox with Avril [/spoilerish] was saddening.

Characters: 3/5
Dean as a cliched, brainless main character with nothing but justice and golems in his brain is dumb but he didn't bother me as much as, say, Rebecca. The idea of having her voice her feelings in her diary did not really help deepen the story nor her character much. What she did voice was already pretty obvious, oh Dean I'm so jealous, I'm such a bad person for being jealous of Avril so I hate myself for it blahblahblah.

I felt that Carol was the weakest character (development wise). Her voice was the most annoying as well.

I also did not understand how a "sword gun" (not a cough gunsword) that Avril uses is even considered to shoot bullets when all she does is swing it like a sword. That goes the same for Dean's ruler guns.

Riding missiles is lame, Mr. Captain guy.
Oh and Duo is such a fugly mofo.

Gameplay: 4/5
Ok, so they brought back the HEX system. It felt more or less the same as the one in WA4, but the battles were still really fun.

Load times were annoying and long. World map traveling isn't as bad when you get your monowheel. The fact that you could kill Sol Nigers to turn off encounters was a lovely.

Asgard was a useless addon side game. Speaking of Asgard, there was no explanation as to how to properly equip the guy's algorithm. It was only after reading through some Asgard rants on gamefaqs, I figured out the numbers at the top of the cart means TURNS. The hardest battle turned out to be the easiest after that.

There was a lot of platforming in this installation. Pole climbing is insanely frustrating.

The number of sidequests and cameos were a wonderful touch to the game. Seeing that it was the anniversary version, it would make sense they included so many.

Music/Sound: 3.5/5
There was no Naruke Michiko! Blasphemy to the Wild ARMs series. Some of the tracks didn't feel very "video game"-appropriate at first, but after listening to it a few more times, they eventually grew on me.

I remember saying there wasn't enough whistling in WA4. There's too much whistling in WA5. It was whistling overload.

I enjoyed how each part of the world map had its own tune... it really kept it fresh. There were a few memorable tracks so I can't say I hate it completely for not having any Naruke in it. The composers for WA4 didn't come back either... and they were so good too.

Oh and the last boss song was the vocalized theme song "Justice to Believe" by Mizuki Nana. It made the whole game feel like a frickin' ANIME. It was... different. I can't say I like it though.

Graphics: 3.5/5
The character models for the important characters were really well made. At some angles though, the characters kind of don't look like themselves.

Again, no animated sequences is a super letdown.

Overall: 3/5
Seeing that this was the 10th anniversary, I felt it didn't quite live up to it. Firstly it missed its animated opening sequence. It feels incomplete without one. It's kinda like the Tales of series without an animated opening, that's preposterous! That's the reason why the anime version of Tales of Hearts sells better than the CG version!

I imagine the animated sequence was removed in favour of putting that budget into something else (more development of the game, etc) because I ended up finishing at 85 HOURS, and that doesn't include finishing Ragu (setting up and preparing for it) and finding all the treasure chests for opening the Black Box. I have no patience for those last two.

Like I mentioned before, an anniversary game WITHOUT Naruke is not an anniversary dammit. But seeing that she only did the lyrics for the vocal songs for XF, I imagine she's pretty much off the team already.

Overall! The story felt rather dumb, but the characters helped saw it through. The music was good at times, but it was lacking the wild arms touch. Everything else was decent.. that explains the amount of time I ended up spending on it.

I'm tackling Legendia next. And Wild ARMs XP on the side. A nice mix of actionish and strategy to change up the pace a bit.