Although the Wild ARMS video game franchise was never hugely popular in North America as it were in Japan, the dedicated fan-base will be celebrating on Dec 20, 2016.
Although the Wild ARMS video game franchise was never hugely popular in North America as it was in Japan, the dedicated fan-base will celebrate on Dec 20, 2016. The game’s release in Japan was twenty years ago. Recent news reports reveal Sony (the intellectual property owner) and former staff from Media.Vision (original developer) are involved in bringing the property back to life. It will be based on the original game and Sony’s mobile publishing division ForwardWorks is helming this latest entry.
Past cell-phone games used the name to dress up what was basically Tetris and a simple shooter. The hope here is that the new product will be a full-on J-RPG, and most reports hint at this direction.If this speculation is correct, Japan will be the initial audience. In the time being, I will hook up my PlayStation2 to the big screen to enjoy all the games all over again. My love for this game, inspired by the American Old West and Steampunk, will reignite. I will attempt to finish all these original games by the time Wild Arms North American Platinum Anniversary takes place in March 2017.
Creator Akifumi Kaneko left Media.Vision back in 2009 and some fans feared no more Wild Arms will be coming. Fortunately, Pixel Dynamo’s report on Kaneko’s Twitter post in early 2016 allayed those fears. He met with executives to plan the 20th anniversary. Since then, not many continuing reports emerged in the months afterwards about what is happening. In the coming days, I like to see the complete library of the past games be offered on via Sony’s PlayStation Network.
Continue reading “Wild ARMS at 20 Years and One Wild Hope (A Personal Retrospective)”
When I last wrote a retrospective that included the latest status of the Wild Arms franchise, not much has changed. Although the original is available on the PlayStation5, sadly no one is interested in continuing. There was a Wild Arms Mobile and Million Memories for smartphones, but sadly when it didn’t get translated and offered to an international market, the game died. Thankfully, executive producer Akifumi Kaneko is not letting the world he helped create fade. In its place is a spiritual successor titled Armed Fantasia, which is still in development.