Product Description

Return to the world of Filgaia, where you'll follow the rich story of three protagonists: Ashley, Liluka, and Brad. Ashley is a gun fighter with intimate knowledge of ancient technology. Liluka, a sorceress, is sweet and innocent but packs a powerful parasol that easily dispatches enemies. Brad, a pensive ex-soldier, roams Filgaia with a rifle and a rocket launcher.

Wild Arms: Second Ignition is a sequel, but you needn't have played the first to understand it. This role-playing game features all new characters and is packed with quests, side quests, and plenty of battles. The world of Filgaia is rendered in 3-D, and you can rotate the field map to help find traps and treasures hidden within the landscape. Also, the game allows you to avoid fights whenever you want, so you'll have the strategic benefit of picking your battles.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3295 in Computer & Video Games
• Platform: PlayStation

Features

• Join a three-person party in this Fantasy role-playing game
• Packed with quests, side quests, and plenty of battles
• 3D towns and dungeons
• Each character unique in puzzle-solving and battle abilities
• For 1 player

Editorial Review
The forces of evil are at work again, and it's up to a boy, a sorceress, and a rebel to turn the tide in Wild Arms 2, Sony's latest role-playing game.

Each character starts out alone and must fight bosses and enemies as well as develop his or her own personal set of special moves. Aside from the traditional turn-based fighting, Wild Arms 2 throws in a bit of action, and characters get weapons that they can use to solve puzzles.

The graphics in this game are fully 3-D with huge bosses, but the story is a little thin. It's your typical "beat the megalomaniac before he takes over the world" plot, which players familiar with the genre have seen far too often in games past. Still, there's a large cast of characters, with the playable characters eventually joining forces, and it's fun getting them there. For fans of action role-playing games, this one shouldn't be missed. --Robb Guido

Pros:

• Action blended into traditional turn-based fighting gameplay
• Three characters, each playable separately

• Doesn't emphasize story as much as gameplay

GameSpot Review
Released during the "Great RPG Drought of 1997," the original Wild Arms was an oasis of adventure in a world almost completely without alternatives. While it was a pretty generic RPG overall, players' standards were low and the title was welcomed. Wild Arms 2 is equal in caliber to the original title, and it suffers the burden of comparison in a market flooded with better alternatives. Welcome back to the world of Filgaia... sort of. While the world retains the same name and other similarities, Wild Arms 2 is not really a sequel but rather a separate story set in the same universe. A new army recruit, Ashley, is transformed into a hideous demon in a dimensional experiment conducted by unknown foes. As the experiment's only survivor, Ashley joins the war-hero-turned-criminal Brad and the bumbling magician Lilka in the newly formed ARMs special forces. Determined to uncover the evil that twisted Ashley's body and soul and prevent further experimentation with the dark parallel universe, the group finds a far greater conspiracy, which, of course, threatens the entire world. Ashley, Brad, and Lilka will be joined by other adventurers on their journey, and each will have unique powers and perspectives on the coming disaster. Like the original Wild Arms, Wild Arms 2 combines standard random-encounter-based RPG gameplay with Zelda-like dungeons and puzzle solving. Each character in the three-person party has a handful of tools and skills at his or her disposal for manipulating the environment and solving the plethora of simple puzzles. Dungeons are viewed from a 3D rotatable three-quarter view, and manipulation of the camera is required to find exits, chests, and puzzle elements alike. Beginning with the most blaring and over-the-top fanfare to grace an RPG, Wild Arms 2's combat system is, ironically, slow and unexciting, not to mention strategically nontaxing. The characters have a variety of attacks at their disposal, such as magic and the use of ARMs weapons. Magic and ARMs attacks require the use of force points (FP), built up by giving and receiving damage. Throw in the concept of magic as a virtually unlimited resource, and you've got an easy game. In a nod to the Final Fantasy series, Wild Arms 2 features a variety of interesting character-customization options. "Guardians," similar to Final Fantasy VIII's Guardian Forces, can be equipped to modify your stats and grant additional powers, including the ability to summon great beasts into battle. As in the first game, magic spells are scribed onto crests found throughout the game, and they let you fully customize a relatively small spell library. New to Wild Arms 2 are personal skills, which are status-enhancing abilities that can be purchased with a pool of skill points accrued throughout the course of the game. Personal skills include resistance to status effects and decreased FP usage. While character customization is always welcome, Wild Arms 2 just isn't difficult enough to really warrant this level of tweaking, so the point is fairly moot. Wild Arms 2 also features a logically questionable overworld map system, implemented to keep you on the straight and narrow. Locations on the map are not visible until two events have occurred: you've been told about the location by a nonplayer character and you "sonar ping" near its actual location. Why a giant castle is invisible is unknown, and searching for the locations is an exercise in pointlessness. Completely removing the motivation to explore removes any nonlinearity the game might have. Wild Arms 2's gameplay suffers from comparison to other, more original, modern-day RPGs, and its technology is completely destroyed by the same comparisons. While the 3D towns and dungeons look good enough, the battle engine doesn't seem to have changed one lick since the first game's 1997 release. While the character models are less "superdeformed," they are low in polygons, heavily jointed, and poorly textured. In addition to having the worst monster designs since Crave's miserable Shadow Madness, Wild Arms 2 also features terrible animation and spell effects. While it's unrealistic to expect Final Fantasy-style production values in every RPG, Wild Arms 2's technology is subpar and reminiscent of yesteryear's low-budget RPGs. The only thing helping the game's visuals are the impressively high-budget anime cutscenes, featuring smooth animation and far more appealing renditions of the game's characters. Obnoxious battle fanfare aside, Wild Arms 2's music is probably the game's highest point. From soothing town anthems to sinister bad-guy themes, Wild Arms 2 is, aurally, much better off than its predecessor. Wild Arms 2 isn't bad, but it doesn't begin to approach today's standard of good, either. While a number of RPG players have fond memories of the original Wild Arms, they'll most likely be surprised and dismayed by its dinosaur of a sequel. While this doesn't bode well for Wild Arms 2, it is pleasing to note how far the genre has advanced since the original game's release.--Peter Bartholow--Copyright © 1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

Customer Reviews

WIld Arms 2
I'm thankful to have this game in my possession and grateful with the delivery service of Amazon.com

Difficulty is fun, but...
Wild Arms 2 is a nice addition to the famous Wild West fantasy series, but many may not find this as western as the other two. The lack of wild west aspect (save for the wild west music and towns) makes it seem somewhat stale in comparison to the first one and doesn't even compete with the third one. The game's battle system is easy to follow, but the monsters are a step up from the previous game's creatures. More than not, many monsters are faster than your group and abuse that advantage to no avail. The equipping of Guardians to boost parameters and gain an extra ability in battle is a welcome addition to combat and the use of ARMS (special artillery like the ones Rudy used in WA1) makes for some nice gunmetal action. Crest magic is back and comes with more features, including special rare crests that can cut the FP cost for magic or increase the power by 1.5 times. That and the fact you have six members makes this a more engrossing WA than the other two. Each character develops nicely even though one might expect more considering the game's length. If you want to do EVERYTHING in this WA, you're looking to clock in over 70 hours of gameplay.

However, this game is not without its one major flaw: the translation. Practically every line uttered by Ashley and Co. sounds very strange. Why? The game was translated word for word from Japanese which many who know the language know it's going to come out sounding very unusual in English. This has been this game's biggest gripe for everyone and discourages some from even playing it. I admit it was bizarre at first, but that didn't stop me from beating the game. If you can get around this problem, the game is fine.

The music is top notch, full of the usual wild west you demand from this series along with sad, happy, goofy, mysterious, serious and dark themes. It's all in here.

If the translation won't bug you, I would recommend getting this WA highly, especially if you haven't touched it yet. You might miss out on one of the better PSX RPGs of its time.

Not as strong as the original, but still very enjoyable...
Wild Arms 2, like most sequels, would have the incredibly hard task of following the series dynamite debut back in 1997. While many think that sequels never attain the level of the original (thus the theory of diminishing returns) Wild Arms 2 holds up pretty well overall, but doesn't really break any new ground for the series.

Graphically, Wild Arms 2 pretty much follows in the path of its predecessor in that the game has it high and lows. Environments such as towns, dungeons and world map are now completely 3D, unlike the first game, and are very well done with lots of detail - as one would expect a last generation PSX title. Unfortunately, like the original, the graphics in the battle scenes are still behind the times (that's somewhat of an understatement). While they are better than first game's, you can tell that this element of the game probably recieved the least attention from the development team. While they're not horrible, it leaves you wondering what could have been.

Story-wise, Wild Arms 2 delivers another interesting and engrosing tale as the original did, even though this time it does take a little but longer for things to get rolling, but not to the point as in Star Ocean: The 2nd Story. However, once the story gets going, their is no turning back (the story is the main reason I like this game the way I do - it has some great twists).

Character development is strong as well, but not as strong as in the first installment. This is probably due to the fact you get 6 characters (1 is hidden) in this game in contrast to having just three characters in the first game. Having more characters means having less time to spend developing each one, but is a VERY welcome change from the first game and is a trade-off that works in favor of the game. I only wish that they empolyed this in Wild Arms 3.

As for battle system, Wild Arms 2 ditches magic points in exchange for the force point system. Overall, this works pretty well, but they're are more than a few occasions where you wish your abilties used MP instead FP. This is especially apparent when fighting the optional foes. Due to the fact a character loses all their FP when knocked out, their are points you'll find you can't defend or cast anything upon revival until you build up more FP. More often than not against the optional foes, they'll knock you into subbmission before you can build your FP back up. This isn't as big of problem with fighters as it is with mage-type characters, who rely on thier FP to cast spells.

Wild Arms 2 is also the hardest out of the three Wild Arms games. There is no duplication trick like the first game and you CANNOT buy Goat Dolls (an automatic revive upon knock-out item) as in Wild Arms. This and the situaution with the force points system makes the extra boss battles in Wild Arms 2 much harder than anything found in Wild Arms and Wild Arms 3. Basically, there is no easy solutions to some of the optional battles in WA2, you just gotta use pure skill, or dumb luck.

While not an amazing game or sequel, Wild Arms 2 is well crafted game worthy of any RPG freak or gamer's playing hours.