Wild ARMs XF

[Kevin Grey]

I think what's throwing off some of the reviews off on this one is people are expecting to play it like FF Tactics. That won't work well. You can't concentrate on building up a well-rounded team of your favorite classes and then throw them at everything. You need to balance for the individual mission, not the overall game. Have an escort mission?  Better load your team up with abilities that slow down your opponents and use a tough guy to cover your flank.  Need to wipe out X number of enemy units?  Use your mages to snipe at weaker foes and have your low-health characters to distract their heavy-hitters.

Yeah, this is where the different way that WAXF implements the job system than FFT is so important- in XF whenever you switch to a job you instantly have *all* of the skills available to that class so you aren't gimping yourself by doing the switch.   On the flip side, doing the same in FFT wouldn't do you any good if you hadn't already accumulated sufficient JP to buy the skills needed to flesh a class out. 

[Dante Rising]

Anyone else still playing this game?  Some of the later scenarios are absolutely brutal. There is nothing quite like a mission where:

1) If you kill an enemy- Game Over (only allowed to wound them down to 10% in the first stage of the mission)

+

2) After wounding three enemies, massive reinforcements arrive to block the area you must escape to.

+

3) The mission is timed, and the enemy has Geomancers, a class that can freeze your characters in one place for multiple turns (and their is no way to negate the effect).

Talk about a meat grinder....

[Gratch]

Anyone else still playing this game?  Some of the later scenarios are absolutely brutal. There is nothing quite like a mission where:

1) If you kill an enemy- Game Over (only allowed to wound them down to 10% in the first stage of the mission)

+

2) After wounding three enemies, massive reinforcements arrive to block the area you must escape to.

+

3) The mission is timed, and the enemy has Geomancers, a class that can freeze your characters in one place for multiple turns (and their is no way to negate the effect).

Talk about a meat grinder....

As much as I like SRPG's, stuff like that doesn't even sound remotely fun to me. 

[biggercup]

I loved most of the Wild Arms RPG and couldn't wait to play this game.
I played for about 5 hours and so far I am little disppointed.

Since when did SRPG got so hard to play? Learning curve is so much that I still don't know what's going on~

[Kevin Grey]

As I think I noted elsewhere, my time with WAXF inspired me to grab FFT:WotL.  Now that I've put 45 hours into beating FFT, I'm a bit SRPG'd out right now so I haven't come back to Wild Arms.  But I very much enjoyed what I played so it'll probably be what I go to the next time I get a SRPG itch. 

[kadnod]

Anyone else still playing this game?  Some of the later scenarios are absolutely brutal. There is nothing quite like a mission where:

1) If you kill an enemy- Game Over (only allowed to wound them down to 10% in the first stage of the mission)

+

2) After wounding three enemies, massive reinforcements arrive to block the area you must escape to.

+

3) The mission is timed, and the enemy has Geomancers, a class that can freeze your characters in one place for multiple turns (and their is no way to negate the effect).

Talk about a meat grinder....

I remember that mission.  I thought the reason why you're supposed to smack around the guards without killing them was pretty clever, but it was definitely a tough board to finish.    I think I made it through by bringing a few grapplers to throw enemies out of the escape path.   It's another instance where you really need to bring the right classes into the mission or else you're really going to have a tough time.

I'm still playing this one every few days and just made it to act 4.   The game gets a bit easier as you hire more "drifters" into the party and your characters get a wider variety of abilities.   For example, there's a few missions where you need to slow down or stop certain enemies in order to survive, but by Act 3 you'll probably have 3 or 4 different characters that can accomplish this in a few different ways.  There seems to be fewer missions with annoying victory conditions as you progress as well. 

If it weren't for the gimicky missions scattered throughout the game, I think this would be an A list title.  As it is, I still think it's a pretty solid B-lister.  The class system and the AI are pretty interesting and I like the storyline.