Yay, Wild ARMs 2 completed. Oh wait, I'm sorry, Wild ARMs 2nd Ignition completed. Why they decided to call it that I don't know, but I can place it along other stupid names like Dissidia Duodecim. Unfortunately I kept on mentally comparing this game with the first and considering I placed that as my fourteenth favorite game of all time,* that meant I was using high standards. I'm trying really hard not to be biased, but I think I can make the case why the first game was better.
Let's begin with the plot. The first disc is fine. There's a major terrorist organization trying to rule the world, so this man creates a special group called ARMs with no national allegiance to fight against them. So you spend time thwarting their plans, tracking them down, and eliminating the members. It's when the second disc started up that the madness began. From what I understand, this dimension is being attacked/absorbed by another dimension called the Kuiper Belt, which if you know anything about astronomy is the exterior of our solar system where lots of ice and terrestrial debris are, and I honestly interpreted this situation as Pluto getting revenge on us for downgrading it to a dwarf planet. Anyway, this really came out of nowhere. No one was mentioning this at all for the first half of the game. I think somehow the Dragon Dimension was absorbed by it and now it's attacking us, but that's as best as I've got. To solve this crisis, we had to somehow transform this dimension into a "being" (and they used quotation marks in the game for this) because you can attack a "being" and not a "dimension." By opening up the mana points in the world, it created this trapezoid dungeon that turned it into a "being," and... Yeah, I started losing it after a while. I'm trying to figure out if this is just poor translation work or if the plot is really this fucking screwy. And that's honestly why the first game was better: I fucking knew what was going on. There are demons, they're trying to kill us, we're going to take those fuckers out first. That's it. Easy to understand.
And I'm not covering all the other crazy shit I have to keep abreast of, like the main character having a demon inside of him (that randomly dominates your body at the final moment so you have to turn into a woman to defeat him), this nuke that was launched into the sky by the terrorist group that turns out to be a dragon, and these aliens that have some of the best fucking lines I've ever seen ever:
"Being impatient is a waste of energy. Be that as it may, the Shooting King's background has no close relationships. Let's go, Ard! The friendship cross."
"Don't leave me here! How about having a party to boost morale? The alternating events of joy and sorrow will taint future developments."
"I gave him a nosebleed, but no 'friendship' developed. My calculations on how something vital is missing? Could it be 'poetry'?"
"Gentlemen don't like violence but love the violence of words. Prepare for word torture! I can't keep quiet. I'm full of dangerous phrases that should be censored."
Phrases that should be censored indeed, because I could only understand what the hell they were saying half the time.
I feel like the developers were trying to expand from the first installment but were still stuck to it. I actually skipped this game and went straight to Wild ARMs 3 years ago, and I remember being completely thrown off by the fact there's four characters because the balance in the first game was absolutely perfect. Throwing in one more character completely destroyed it. So when I saw the cover of this game—
—I thought it would be similar to the past. Boy, was I fucking wrong. It turns out there are six characters in all, which is really confusing. See, this series starts out with all the protagonists separated, so the player has to first direct them through a dungeon by themselves and then group them all together. So this game did that with the three on the cover, and then late in the game gave us the other three. I've formed a deeper emotional attachment to the initial guys and girl since I've seen them grow and develop for longer. Plus these other guys seems superfluous in battle; I rarely used the assassin chick, the summon mage, or the vampire. The people on the cover were enough. I guess in terms of plot they're important (except the vampire), but I think they took the model of the first game and tried to develop it without doing it fully or successfully.
I mentioned before my hatred for lack of invisible walls, but that actually wasn't upset me most about this game. It was that you couldn't find towns or dungeons on the world map by sight. You were required to walk around, use a radar, and if you were close enough the town/dungeon would appear. It sounds okay in theory, but in practice that meant you were canvasing the landscape for twenty minutes, pressing the radar button every three steps, and hoping this was finally the time you'd find it. Why the hell can't I fucking see the thing with my own two eyes? I understand why the developers were trying to do: Oftentimes you'd go back to the same area but different dungeon and they didn't want you to be aware of its existence until then. But plenty of other games have the same situation but dealt with it. Many times someone's guarding the door, or there's a tree in the way, or you can't leave the town by a certain exit. Why waste my time making me look for something? They must've thought this shit was fun because that feature was in the third game, and that's the reason why I put it down and stopped playing it.
One thing I can say I fucking love is they still have the old school dungeons. Instead of just walking forward and occasionally have a split in the road, one of which is a treasure and the other to progress, this shit has actual puzzles. Even as an adult I frequently became stuck and had to really contemplate the solution. THAT is what a dungeon should be about. Admittedly not all games back in the day were like that, like Chrono Trigger, but I haven't seen anything like this in an RPG in a long time.
For what it is, I guess it's okay. The ultimate message was unique and interesting, that being a hero isn't a positive because you ultimately sacrificing yourself when everyone as a community should face problems together. The graphics for the time were pretty good (seeing youtube playthroughs blew me away because it's all pixelated on my TV), and the music was done by the same composer and of the same caliber. There definitely were better RPGs of that time period, but I guess if you wanna see how the series evolved this definitely is important to play to show how it moved on from its beginning.
* In case you've forgotten (I did), at the time my rankings were
That was back in 2010. I'd change it a bit now.
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