Greetings folks, this is the NeatWeasel and this is my video game review of Wild Arms 2 for the Playstation 2. I bought this game while it was on sale well over 5 years ago during the summer of 2015. This game is the sequel towards the first Wild arms. I played that game over 3 years ago and stopped playing the sequels for reasons I’ll explain later.
Wild Arms 2 is a turn-based JRPG that takes place in the wild wild west environment. The western theme is all over the place. The towns/areas are in a world that is filled with deserts.
The game is about a terrorist organization called Odessa which plans to conquer the world. The main characters become part of a mercenary group that is in charge of pushing back the terrorists from causing misery upon innocent people.
What returns in this game are turn-based combat. The main characters have ARMs which are just guns that contain incredible power. Hence the name, Wild Arms. But when I run out of bullets, I have to go back into town and pay to restock.
The reasons why I stopped playing the sequels was because the first Wild Arms game left a sour taste in my mouth during the journey. Whenever a quest or objective comes to an end, the characters in this game barely give out any information on what to do next. Not to mention how the puzzles are supposed to be solved. The puzzles in Wild Arms 2 can be solved by a kid but later on, I find myself going on GameFaqs and looking up walkthroughs of how to solve puzzles. Because the game doesn’t give out enough information for me to solve it on my own. I guess this is how detectives must feel. As I played many video games throughout my life, I have gained detective skills on how to obtain information for myself based on little bits of tips that have been given out. What I meant by that is how when someone barely says certain things or makes comments but doesn’t properly explain who or what they are talking about, I have become intuitive in the way that I try to think of certain things that could be true based on what was said and how certain monsters fight.
If I attack monsters with one magical attack and it turns out that the magic was healing him, then I rely on physical attacks and vice versa. Plus, due to many years of playing JRPGs, I rarely use spells that affect the status of monsters, such as put him to sleep, poison him, etc. This is because if I use a status changing spell and it misses, I essentially wasted a turn when I could have just attacked and damaged the monster.
The soundtrack has some songs that’s pretty good but the majority of them are repetitive. This is because the tracks just last for less than a minute which paves the way for the player to become tired of the music because it's so short. As games become more advanced as the years go by, composers are able to give out lengthy sounds. This was a game that came out in April 2000.
In a nutshell, Wild Arms 2 is round two which is more of the same.
I’ll give Wild Arms an 8/10. I hate having to rely on outside help such as GameFaqs and walkthroughs but when games during the 90s are not helpful, then they give me no choice. I have time to play games that take over 60 hours to finish like Skies of Arcadia, Persona 3, 4, 5, and Grandia. But I don’t have time to wander around like an imbecile and try to figure out where to properly proceed on my own. That’s bullshit. I played this game on June 5th, 2020 and finished it on July 2nd, 2020. It has taken me over 55 hours to finish this game.
Video Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dgp6bCnqfA&t=1s
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