The ultimate mix of classic RPG elements with a Wild West storyline
You control a party of four different characters throughout most of Wild Arms 3. These include a determined girl named Virginia, who sports a couple of high-powered six shooters; a well-mannered, well-intentioned sniper named Clive; a good-natured but somewhat thickheaded Native American-looking man named Gallows, who uses a sawed-off shotgun in battle; and your prototypical too-cool-for-you anime loner, named Jet, who's armed with a machine gun. Though these four by no means break the mold in terms of character design, and though the circumstances in which they decide to forge an alliance are pretty iffy, the heroes of Wild Arms 3 end up being likable. Over the course of the game's story, they'll often learn from each other and help each other out, and each character has his or her own unique abilities and well-defined personality traits. So collectively, they're a good gang.
Wild Arms 3 follows the RPG formula without much variation. There are lots of random battles to be fought, a number of towns to be visited, a number of dungeons to be explored, a number of secrets and hidden treasures to be found, and a number of powerful villains to be vanquished. Besides the fact that much of the game takes place in dusty, windswept regions reminiscent of the Old West, the twists in the game's combat and exploration sequences certainly help distinguish Wild Arms 3 from other RPGs out there. For one thing, though you'll often stumble into random battles, Wild Arms 3 gives you a chance to avoid some of them by timing a button press just before a fight begins. You can skip only so many random battles before your ability to do so is used up (until you rest at an inn), but it's still nice to be able to bail out of the occasional fight before it even starts. Still, this once-innovative feature now seems like a strange way of addressing the problem shared by many RPG players that, well, random battles in RPGs are getting to be pretty old.
