Wild Arms 3

Most role-playing games of the era gave you a world map dotted with towns and let you walk between them. Filgaia gives you sand. The overworld in Media.Vision's third Wild Arms is largely blank until you stop, spend a point of your Migrant Level and fire off a radar sweep, which either turns up a location or wastes the charge. It sounds like an obstacle, and sometimes it is, but the effect is that the dying planet feels genuinely unmapped. You are not following a trail of icons. You are prospecting.

The cast is four drifters rather than one chosen kid: Virginia, who leaves home looking for her father; Jet, who cares about payment and little else; Clive, a rifleman with a wife and daughter waiting; and Gallows, a Baskar priest who would rather not be one. All four carry ARMs, the series' name for firearms, and combat is turn-based with a hard emphasis on positioning your Force Points. Force abilities let you double-turn, snipe past defences or fire a shot that hits everything, and the meter fills through damage taken as well as dealt, so scraping through a fight badly can leave you stronger for the next one. Encounters are random, but Gella will buy them off — cancelling a fight costs money, which quietly turns the currency into a pacing dial.

Dungeons run on Tools, the puzzle items each character carries. Virginia's rapier cuts ropes, Jet's boomerang trips distant switches, and progress is mostly about recognising which of the four you need rather than executing anything difficult. It is the weakest strand. The puzzles are gentle and the dungeon layouts get repetitive across a long game, and the game is long, with an endgame stretch that keeps opening new obligations after you expect it to close.

What holds up is tone. Michiko Naruke's score whistles and twangs its way through a science-fantasy frontier where trains, six-shooters and Guardian spirits coexist without apology, and the cel-shaded look, restrained by 2002 standards, has aged far better than the era's attempts at realism. Filgaia is a desert planet slowly losing its ability to support life, and the writing treats that as an ordinary background fact rather than a crisis to be announced. Four people with guns, riding across a wasteland that mostly does not want them there — the game trusts that image enough to build a fifty-hour RPG on it, and it earns the trust.