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Number Ten:
It was a dark and stormy night . . .
That's how Wild Arms 3 begins.
That's how a writing professor told me to never begin anything.
Elmore Leonard says "Never start a story with weather." I'd believe Elmore Leonard over the writing professor.
Then again, that writing professor had some other interesting things to say. Well, they weren't interesting to the me of 1997. I was kind of cocky, maybe, and kind of thought I was better than everyone else. This writing professor laid out the rules of genre fiction, quite oblivious to the fact that I wasn't a genre writer -- I was something else, baby.
A science-fiction novel, this guy told us -- it needs to have a good beginning. A premise to set up the adventure -- where it goes from there, it doesn't matter. Science fiction is about ideas, not stories. Take a look at Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, if you don't believe him!
A mystery novel needs to have a good beginning and ending. The crime needs to be interesting, the solution needs to be enlightening in such a way as to render the confusing middle "more exciting!" the second time around.
A suspense novel needs to have a good middle. A suspense novel has a hero, after all. You know the hero is going to win. You're simply in suspense as to how the winning will be won.
Wild Arms 3 helped me define a lot of things in the field of videogame storyline mechanics. I had a vicious cold when I played it, and it was something of a dark and stormy night of my own.
Preliminary analysis said: Holy hell, Wild Arms 3 had a good beginning. Every Wild Arms game lets you choose one of three characters at the start, each with his or her own motives. You then play each of these three players' quest, to see how they get to meet the other two characters. The game that commences is your standard-fare RPG.
Well, Wild Arms 3, despite the "dark and stormy night" part, shapes up to be pretty damned spectacular: we have four strangers on a train, one of them being the lovely Virginia Maxwell, our hero. Virginia is on her way from one place to someplace else when there's a commotion on the train. She goes to investigate, much to the frustration of a train guard. She pushes her way into the treasure room. The guard inspects the treasure chest. Seeing that "it" is still "there", he steps back.
And bang!
Three people bust into the room, pointing guns at one another!
FREEZE-FRAME!
This is where you choose your first character.
I was mighty impressed. I told friends it was the most effective RPG introduction scene I'd seen in a long time.
What I didn't tell them was how poorly the game progressed from there.
Now, granted, Wild Arms 3 isn't bad. It's just . . . long. And tedious. There are many, many battles. The story doesn't reveal anything, and when it does, it's dozens of hours after you guessed every detail.
It is one of three RPG offerings of any significance released in 2002. The other two, Suikoden III and Legaia: Duel Saga, have also been showered with cries of tedium as of late.
People have been saying: they just don't make RPGs like they used to.
I'm inclined to disagree: no -- they make them just like they used to.
Wild Arms 3 is laughable is the way it heaps genre clichés and multiple other titles' mythologies together into something too lumbering to be called organic, too bubbling with spare personality to be called stone-faced.
It all starts when the contents of the treasure chest are revealed once and for all. After a grand setup full of innovation and charm, we get a lousy payoff that leaves us thinking, "That's it?" The rest of the game doesn't ever try to top its intro; it's sliding downhill the whole time.
Some have said the motifs of trains, horses, and gunslingers are enough to save Wild Arms 3 as a game worth remembering. I'd say that's dead wrong. That the trains and horses and six-shooters are juxtaposed against monsters inspired by Norse and Chinese mythologies and "techniques" inspired by everything with "Fantasy" or "Dragon" in the title is enough to kill its credibility. A thousand times I asked myself: did these people know what they were doing? Did they want us to remember any of this, or just forget it pleasantly, and think: "I'll buy the sequel"?
If I remember anything about this game, it'll be the interesting use of textures superimposed on cel-shaded graphics. Hell, I can't even recall a single music track. It's been almost two months since I played the game. I remember it today, as a friend asks me if I ever beat it.
"It was just a rental, man." That's my answer.
I was going to review this game for insert credit. I didn't, because I never beat it. I gave up shortly after the party acquired a sand boat. I mean, really, a sand boat? As if the game wasn't long enough already, they threw in a sand boat.
I gave up the game when I first wondered: how was it raining on that first night, if there's not a drop of moisture in the world?
Though I personally shun "secrets" in fiction and film alike, and I believe mysteries (or other novels whose climaxes hinge on surprises) are the most shameless form of genre fiction, I will personally take a stand here: We need better middles in our Role-Playing Games. For a "fantasy" story in a "western" setting, Wild Arms 3 certainly does feel too much like science-fiction. Only without the research. The above example concerning rain and sand boats illustrates this pretty well.
I'm not saying I want RPGs to all contain big secrets from now. I'm just saying that games, as a different form of art from movies or books, are capable of releasing secrets in a more rewarding manner.
2001's Final Fantasy X was a great renaissance of RPGs. I would call that game's "Sphere Board" system -- an innovation which allows players to power up their characters by moving across a board-game-like board -- the "right direction" for "things to be revealed" in an RPG.
It's one of the Rules Of Miyamoto, established with the very first Legend of Zelda, that a game must, very soon, show the player something he cannot do. Dragon Warrior VII does this -- with a locked castle dungeon beneath a secret staircase. Eighty hours pass, and you still can't open that dungeon door. And it intrigues the hell out of you. You want to open that door.
In Lufia II, you want to solve that puzzle, because it's so damned hard.
Eighty hours pass in 2002's Pokémon Sapphire, and you've not even caught half of the available monsters. "Where are they?" you wonder. And you go looking for them.
Pokémon, great as it has been for enslaving millions of children into the genre of the hardcore RPG, is also dulling down the level of . . . sharpness that is present in the dozens of small revelations of any given Dragon Warrior title. Final Fantasy has tried, very hard, to keep up with these aspects of Dragon Warrior, and it has taken until Final Fantasy X for the developers at Square to really do something new -- the Sphere Board, the brilliant battle system.
As Final Fantasy hurtles toward what might soon be a great game (in XII, it looks like), there is this splinter faction of RPGs, reluctantly led by the don't-look-at-me-I'm-a-genius-really Pokémon, that apparently doesn't give a damn about growing up and taking risks. Wild Arms 3 files itself snugly into this group. And it's a shame.
I'd like to say there was potential. I can't, though. Because I don't know, really, what might have happened. I'm not a mind-reader.
2002, then, will be anti-remembered as a depressingly transitional year for RPGs.
I didn't finish Wild Arms 3, because I was bored as hell. The boredom reminded me of pretty much every non-Phantasy Star-Final Fantasy-Dragon Warrior RPG of the 1990s. And it made me think . . .
. . . I should play some Sonic the Hedgehog . . .
You've got to love Blast Processing.
Here's hoping Final Fantasy X-2 will give my gaming attention span a good kick in the junk, and say, "Sit the hell down."
[next: number nine: shoot groove revolution]
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