For some reason, whenever you have control of your character, the camera zooms way, way out, to the point where he, and any NPCs on screen, look like colorful little stick people. Sure, it's handy for seeing large portions of the map at once, but the tenth time I fell off a cliff because I couldn't tell which direction my guy was facing, I reached the conclusion that I could do with seeing a little less of the map. Once again, this seems like a step back from previous Wild ARMs games which always had just the right balance between seeing what's around you and being able to easily control your character.

   How many random encounters does it take to make a Wild ARMs remake tedious? The answer: however many are in this game. [Actually, probably even less than that. They just wanted to make sure they made it REALLY tedious. - ed.]

   Somewhat frustrated by the lack of advancement in the graphics department I turned my attention instead to the battle system, an area which was pretty solid in past games. At its core the system is the same as that in the original Wild ARMs but includes all the tweaks made in more recent entries. Encounters are random and upon engaging an enemy the game cuts to a battlefield where your three heroes face their foes. In a familiar scheme, you select each of your characters' actions from the menu and they and the enemy take turns performing actions depending on each character's speed rating, until everyone has acted. As the battle progresses your characters' energy gauges fill, giving them access to special actions. One interesting addition is that this time around, you may have more than three characters with you at a time. Only the three characters in the front participate in the battle, but you can switch characters in and out of the front each turn without wasting an action. While this is neat, most of the new playable characters feel somewhat tacked on, with their skill set not seeming nearly as complex or appropriate as the three from the original game. Once you've defeated your enemies, experience is awarded with some bonuses going to characters who landed more blows or were struck more frequently. Then you might get to walk another two feet before being attacked again.

Resident Evil

   Regretfully, Wild ARMs suffers from a disease that has plagued console RPGs since the days of the original Dragon Warrior: too many random encounters. The original Wild ARMs had a lot of random encounters, but it felt like this version had even more. Thankfully the game incorporates the Migrant System from the previous games - a gauge which allows you to avoid random encounters by pressing a button the split second before they occur, as signaled by an exclamation point over your character's head. Of course, this consumes a certain amount of points, and the only way to refill the gauge is to fight or pick up the white crystals scattered about on the dungeon floor, so you can't just avoid all the random encounters. This is a real shame, as the battles run a close second to public access television programs in the excitement department. Most dungeons contain only three or four different types of generic, boring looking enemies who only have two or three different types of moves. Your own characters don't have much to answer with either, as they can either slap at enemies with futile, pathetic-looking melee attacks or waste a few precious magic points to hit them with a powerful spell that will be total overkill. [Total Overkill - noun - a move that is powerful enough to eliminate not only your pathetic enemy, but also six generations of his yet unborn offspring. Encyclopedia Insanica. - ed.] Only Rudy, with his shotgun-like ARM is capable of dealing any real damage to monsters without wasting attacks which will be needed for the boss, so most random encounters come down to how quickly Rudy can dispatch the enemies. Plus, monsters in dungeons tend to hit pretty hard and give out only a pithy amount of money and experience, thus encouraging you to avoid most dungeon encounters and do most of your level building with the even more boring, generic looking enemies on the surface.

A tale told by the most eloquent non-native English speakers

   I'll be honest, my memory of what happened in the first Wild Arms is a bit fuzzy. Something about demons from space and weapons from an ancient war, I think. That being said, the story of Alter Code F seems to essentially follow the plot of the original with a fairly liberal dose of extra scenes and dialogue thrown in. This would be a good thing if it wasn't for the fact that the translation just doesn't feel right. There's none of the hilariously bad dialogue you would expect from games a decade ago. Most sentences are clear and coherent. The problem is more that these clear and coherent sentences don't make any sense in the context of the conversations taking place. A character will say something, then another character will say something that just doesn't follow what the first character said. [Now there is the definition of a non sequitur if there ever was one! - ed.] After a cut-scene you'll have a basic idea of what's going on, but the specifics will be lost on you. This being the case, all the extra scenes just serve to bog the already slow plot down to the pace of a really fat person climbing a huge flight of stairs. Or a really skinny person carrying another really skinny person up a huge flight of stairs. Take your pick.

   Overall, the game just feels sloppily mediocre. The graphics are passable but not attractive, the battles are functional but dull, and the dialogue is comprehensible but not engaging. After playing about fifteen, twenty hours [Mike is BY FAR the most patient person on the GameLemon staff - ed.] I came to the realization that I just felt no compulsion to play anymore. Dungeon crawling was tedious and the story was dragging some serious ass. The boss fights had become incredibly difficult as well, with bosses being capable of defeating one of my characters with a single shot. And since it took the other two to revive that one and bring him up to the strength necessary to survive even weaker attacks, it was very easy to get caught in the dreaded defensive loop, the bane of all role-playing gamers. I just had to fight smart and hope the boss didn't feel like killing me. The items that allow you to continue if you get killed are fairly plentiful, but if you use one you don't get any experience for that battle. Since the boss battles are the only source of significant experience, this also essentially guarantees that you won't have an easier time with the next one. Oh, and did I forget to mention that you can't buy any healing items, and your only natural healer has extremely low HP and defense, usually resulting in her getting killed almost immediately during boss fights? I should have, because that part really sucked.

   I suppose the fact that I simply couldn't bring myself to finish this game means that I can't say definitively that the game stays crappy straight through. Maybe at hour twenty-five the game suddenly becomes the greatest experience one can ever have and the player transcends to a higher plane of existence where his soul communes with the grand consciousness of the universe, but I kind of doubt it. From what I've seen, if you don't like what's going on for the first couple of hours, you're probably not going to have the patience to sit through ten or fifteen more in the hopes of things getting better.

   All that having being said, the game isn't unplayable. I can imagine someone who is a huge, HUGE Wild ARMs fan perhaps struggling through out of some misguided sense of loyalty to the series. Perhaps he'd even have a few moments of fun in the process. I suppose if you didn't have any other games to play, one could make do with Wild ARMs Alter Code F. But let's be serious. With games like Dragon Quest VIII and Radiata Stories out now, and Kingdom Hearts II on the way, why would you spend your time with this one? Only if your time, like mine, was totally worthless. I just hope that with Wild ARMs 4 (which may be out by the time you read this) the developers made more of an effort to give the game the spark that made the original so fun and unique.

       ... Mike Zeller