Wild Arms 5

A giant mechanical arm falls out of the sky and lands in the desert, and there is a girl asleep inside it with no memory of anything except a name that is not hers. That is how the fifth Wild Arms opens, and it is a fair advertisement for what follows: a dying frontier world littered with machinery nobody living understands, and a teenager who decides the sensible response is to become a gunslinger.

The reason this one still earns attention is the battlefield. Fights take place on seven hexes, three for your party, three for the enemy, one contested in the middle, and almost every ability cares about where things are standing. Area attacks hit a whole hex, so grouping your party saves turns and invites disaster in equal measure. Buffs and status fields attach to the ground rather than the person. And you can kick — knock an ally or an enemy clean out of one hex into another, breaking up a cluster before the enemy's sweep lands, or shoving a straggler into the range of your own. It turns a turn-based system into something closer to a positioning puzzle without ever slowing to the crawl of a tactics game.

Outside combat it is recognisably the series formula, for better and worse. Dungeons are built around tools used from the field menu, with block-pushing and switch-timing rooms that Media.Vision had been refining since the PlayStation. Some of them are genuinely clever. A few overstay. The overworld is more conventional than the sketch-a-map abstraction of the earlier games, and the visuals are plain even by 2006 standards — flat textures, sparse towns, cel-shaded characters that read as functional rather than expressive.

What holds it together is tone. This is an anniversary game and it knows it, stuffing optional fights and references in for people who had been with Filgaia since 1996, but the main cast carries itself lightly enough that none of it feels like homework. Dean is an idiot in the most likeable way, the localisation lets the supporting cast be funny, and the harmonica-and-whistle western scoring still does more for the setting than any amount of polygon budget could.

The last proper Wild Arms, and it went out understanding exactly what a hex was worth.