Joining the role-playing game ranks is Wild ARMs 4 from XSEED Games. The game is not the best from a gameplay or story point of view, but it does enough right to at least make it playable with its flawed but interesting new combat system, and fans of anima-inspired RPGs will likely want to give it a spin.

Wild ARMs 4 opens with main character Jude Maverick enjoying a lazy day in his village of Ciel and skipping out on his sword lesson. Suddenly ships appear from what looks like a tear in the sky. It is only now Jude learns the world he has known is actually an artificial construct: a great sphere floating above the world of Filgaia. This sphere was apparently constructed to hide a great weapon known as ARM, which only a few can control. Thus enters Yulie, a young girl with the great power to temper the ARM weapon. It also turns out Jude has the power to wield the ARM. After a brief battle, the sphere is destroyed and Jude, Yulie and a drifter named Arnaud are ejected in an escape pod and land on Filgaia proper, a world that has been ravaged by war. Quickly our group adds it fourth (and final) member, Raquel, another drifter in need of friends. At this point all four teenagers set out on their quest for adulthood and the secrets of Filgaia.

Okay, it is standard Japanese RPG fare and the whole plot is pretty predictable with some of the worst dialogue you’ll ever care to wade through. Some of it is downright silly and you’ll want to button-punch through it as quickly as possible. The morality questions are about as subtle as getting clubbed over the head with a dead baby seal. It is not a story you’re going to be thinking about after playing.

Since this is a Japanese RPG, there are out-of-nowhere random battles aplenty. Sadly the creatures and people, who seemingly spring up out of the ground in front of you to do battle, are about as bland as they could be without putting you to sleep. What is worthwhile is the combat system you’ll employ to fight them. WA4 uses a combat arena with seven hexes to do battle. Unlike the older style of RPG battling where you simply line up against your opponents and then trade attacks and spells, WA4’s combat system actually cares where you position your characters. XSEED calls this the Hyper Evolve X-fire system, and it is far more complex than can be fully explained in this type of review.

A simple explanation is that within the seven hexes of the combat arena you and your questing party will be arrayed against your enemies. Friendly units may never occupy the same hex as enemy units, but more than one unit of the same side can occupy the same hex. Bunching or dispersing units have major effects on combat since attacks are not made on individual units, but rather a whole hex is attacked. This means that if you have all your units together in one hex, they can all be hit by a single enemy unit. The balancing factor is that units stacked together in a hex are mutually strengthened. If a hex is poisoned, the effect is on the hex and not on the occupying units. Therefore the unit(s) need only move away from the hex to escape its effects. In addition to standard hexes there are "Ley Point" hexes. These are three hexes randomly placed in the arena that have three elemental affinities out of the four possible affinities. These Ley Points change the power of attacks: water attack damage doubled while fire attacks halved in fire Ley Points and that sort of thing.

The combat system is really pretty cool and the most original thing this game has going for it. Unfortunately it has some problems that keep it from being a killer implementation. What really hampers it is the generally pushover difficulty level of the majority of enemies. It is nice that the combat system allows the player to maneuver, but it really does not matter much since you can usually do anything and win. Only the scattered boss battles offer real challenges. Hit points are also automatically restored between each battle, so taking a few blows each fight is not that big a deal.

Another major problem with the game has to do with the non-RPG elements that have been fused into the game. When we saw jumping elements incorporated into the first-person shooter genre with Turok on the Nintendo 64, many gamers were sure the resulting outcry of frustration would keep the bleed between genres to a reasonable level. Apparently XSEED did not get the memo: running and jumping has come to the RPG genre. As you make your way around levels you will have to use the "jump" button to get to higher levels or to clear obstacles. You also have a "kneel" command to get under tight places. In portions of the game it feels like some kind of half-implemented Pitfall game. Add in Jude’s "Accelerator" power that slows down time like a shooter’s bullet-time function, and you have a game that feels loaded with gimmicks just for the sake of being different without enhancing the gameplay.

Visually the game is nicely detailed with fully realized environments. The main character designs are rather generic and the enemy character design is downright blah. The soundtrack is an interesting mix of music types, but I can’t say that it really worked for me. The occasional cut scenes were attractive enough with decent voice acting. Too bad the dialogue often bordered on the silly.

In the end, even though I have great respect for the combat system Wild ARMS 4 employs, the game just has too many flaws to bring it above average. Perhaps we’ll see it all come together better in the next edition of the franchise. Until then, it’s only a sliver-above-dead-average C+ score for Wild ARMs 4.

Questions? Comments? Contact the author at willhill2600@charter.net .