Editorial: Okay, so maybe I almost shed a teardrop

Emotions are an odd thing. So are memories. Often times these two aspects combine and form nostalgia, a very powerful and very entrenched position on a given object. Sometimes it crashes and burns after the years wear down the allure and sometimes it continues on uninhibited. I want to talk about an experience that has remained in full bloom ever since I first experienced it.

A few weeks ago I started up the Wild Arms for the original PlayStation. Sitting down and actually playing Wild Arms is a bit of an oddity because before buying a PlayStation 3 I really didn’t have a system capable of playing the game. My slim model PlayStation 2 seems to hate the game, oftentimes freezing at the beginning of a battle and my PS1 has a hard time running anything after my friend baked it to death after putting a PS2 on top of it when he borrowed it. Okay, so I had it downloaded on my PSP and could have played it at anytime, but there’s something about playing a hard copy of a given game I’m super fond of (and I need to test out many of the games I have given many of them aren’t the exact copies I played through years ago). Anyways, long story short, while I enjoyed my nearly thirty hour play through of the game more than enough, the impact the game didn’t strike me until the ending.

As far as endings go, Wild Arms has a pretty standard one as far as RPG go. The evil’s defeated, the world’s saved we all live happily ever after, but watching Cecilia talk to the downed Earth Golem (which would go by Asgard in Alter code:F) I couldn’t help but get a little teary eyed. I tried to shrug it off by thinking “oh, I have something in my eye” or “yawn, I’m so tired from doing nothing all day” but those we’re as baseless as the whole “it’s a man tear dammit” excuse. Still, I don’t think it was so much the ending as much as what the ending represented. What did it represent? Despite the fact I couldn’t in all consciousness give Wild Arms a prefect ten out ten in a review, the game is just damn beautiful man. Where others may see a by-the-numbers RPG that’s obscured by first-generation PlayStation graphics, I see much more. I see heart, something that’s oddly missing from the 2004 remake. Okay, so Alter code:F isn’t that bad but it still doesn’t have anything on the original, a game which is still more than okay in my book :)