I don’t play RPGs all that often. This is mainly because, like a little girl and her daddy nothing can ever really measure up to my “daddy” of RPGs: Final Fantasy VII. Wild Arms 4 creates something quite different with an innovative combat system and hybrid of RPG/Platforming. But does it work?

In Wild Arms you play as Jude; a young boy who lived on a floating town in a bubble until an army invades and blows it up. It turns out Jude has the power to make a big-ass gun out of silver powder and you start getting pursued through all manner of locations along with your band of teenage buddies! With its simplistic dialogue and kids v. grown-ups storyline WA4 was clearly made for the younger audience. The story won’t win awards for originality but it pulls the game along nicely and doesn’t get bogged down in too much talking anywhere.

WA4 operates on a fixed camera but luckily things are placed so you can see everything on each screen, rather than the rather unhelpful cameras in games like MGS. In addition to moving from one place to the next and sneaking around behind soldiers there’s also a heavy platform element to the gameplay. Usually it’s not too tough; you’ll stomp on a box to activate stepping stones on the walls and hop to the top before they go back into the walls. Couple this with an “accelerator”, which slows down time and also reveals hidden treasure scattered around the place and you feel more like Rayman than Cloudor Squall.

The combat system is time/turn based over a series of hexagons in which enemies and allies are randomly spread. You can then move between the hexagons and double up with allies or deal damage to multiple enemies if they’re in the same hexagon. Any magical status change magic (poison, protect etc) will now fall on the whole hexagon, so it becomes a juggling act of whether or not to put most of your party in the same “hex”. The problem is that although the system is actually very good the enemies never seem to get any harder or use any tactics to exploit the weaknesses of the system (like attacking the hex with the most people in it): It’s like driving a McClaren F1 through the streets of London…

Usually games (especially RPGs) with slightly kiddie interfaces turn out to have an adult level of difficulty so I guess it’s good to see a game that’s consistent. Kids won’t have trouble following anything in Wild Arms 4 and it’s probably the first RPG since Pokemon that’s appealed to kids in the mainstream.

Wild Arms 4 has brought some new things to the RPG genre but nothing will seem particularly ground-breaking or challenging to the seasoned RPG nut; this one’s definitely for the kids, folks.