They Don’t Do Like This Anymore: Wild ARMs

What the hell am I trying to do, you ask? Shucks, I don’t know. A lot about games changed with the introduction of the Playstation and although the change came quickly, it didn’t happen all at once. Once in a while I’d like to look back at that strange transition, if you’ll let me.

See, the first CD-based game consoles were exciting at first, but they were turtles: plenty of storage space was available, but the system’s processors didn’t exceed the sixteen bit consoles’ power by much.

“Oh dear,” said Sega CD Developer #1, “our games play like their sixteen bit counterparts, except at the speed of a sloth wading through raw sewage. What shall we do?”

“Easy!” smiled Sega CD Developer #2. “We’ll open each game with a low-budget anime clip and everyone will be too dazzled to tell the difference until they compile “Worst Console” lists on their websites ten years from now.”

“Great!…What’s a websites?”

And the gamers of the world exclaimed, “Hourrah, the new generation of gaming is born!”

The Playstation was a pretty tough little workhorse, meaning it had both storage and processing power. Regardless, there was a sliver early in its life wherein developers still preceded games with full-motion anime.

Wild ARMs by Media.Vision, was the Playstation’s first celebrated RPG until Final Fantasy VII obliterated it five months later. Its graphics, a curious mix of primitive sprite work and primitive polygon-based battle scenes, weren’t very pretty. Luckily, game retailers merely had to run the opening anime sequence, which is by far one of the nicest to come out of that awkward era.

Wild ARMs did have other merits. The music was fantastic (that opening Western piece deserves an award on its own) and you could change your spell names from “Fire” to Something Else that starts with an F. I also liked Cecelia, the game’s female sidekick. She was the obligatory bookish spell-wielding backup, but there was a sense that she was trying really hard to be something other than pampered royalty. Rudy was endearing in that mute RPG protagonist sort of way, and at least his friends all had names suitable for normal human beings. Nobody was trying to add depth with “Squall” or “Cloud.”

Wild ARMs had something like fifty thousand sequels that I never got around to playing, including the recent strategy-based Wild ARMs XF. I’m kind of curious about Agetec’s Playstation 2 remake of the original, Wild ARMs Alter Code F. Word is that a lot of fans didn’t care for it, especially the more generic anime introduction.

(Oh good, Hanpan went from being a plain rat to a Pikachu ripoff. Thanks for that, Agetec, it was completely necessary.)

Image copyright Sony and Media.Vision.