[PSP] Today my day was made (Wild Arms for the PSP)

This is an incredibly old topic to be bumping up, however, that news is fantastic. My day is made, indeed.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Pretty nice box art, good to see that the english version is coming along well.

Seeing the screenshots, it looks like it's taking a FFT-like class changing system. It'll be an interesting new feature to the series, on top of changing to a full-blown S/RPG. I already know the OST is great, and being a huge Wild Arms fan I'll definitely pick it up when it comes out.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I picked up my pre-bought copy today. I'm in Act 1-6, been playing for roughly 5 hours. Here are my impressions.

The soundtrack is awesome. Of course, I had already listened to most of it before it came out, but that doesn't change the awesome factor any. The story seems to take itself a bit more seriously than previous games; The game starts out fast paced and keeps it up. The characters are enjoyable, although the voices leave quite a bit to be desired. Surprisingly, XSEED threw in the Japanese audio track, too! However, much to my dismay, the japanese voices weren't all that much better than the lackluster english track.

The battles are very fast paced for a Strategy/RPG. Everything flows smoothly with very little in-battle loading. Everything stat-wise seems very fair and balanced. From map to map they make sure you abuse the fact that your characters can switch classes.

Where I'm stuck at:

I'm at the Fallen Fowl Swamp, a stage that's a bunch of winding pieces of land through a poisonous swamp. At the very end is a plateau, with no way to get your characters on top of it, with four casters. Try as I might, I cannot get my single caster to take them all out. I may have to resort to changing half of my party to Elementalists and bumrush the plateau, trying to kill them all off before all of mine get wiped out.

Overall I'm very impressed, and feel it was a worthwhile purchase.

Edit: Oh, one thing that's disappointing me now about the series as a whole. Since 5 it seems like they've abandoned the old model of having an opening animation that played every time you loaded the game, and an ending one every time you saved and quit. They've been skimping on the opening sequences, too. I'd like to think it's a temporary thing, but I'm sure the future will prove me wrong.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.