YMMV / Wild ARMs 3

• Accidental Innuendo: Maya's Gatling Gun attack. She stretches forward, shakes her dress, and a gatling gun falls out of her dress.
• Awesome Music: Numerous bits of the soundtrack. Consistent composition also makes the soundtrack as a whole qualify, even if a number of the songs are merely above average by their lonesome. The mere fact that this game has a Theme Song with a Old West whistle version should tell you how amazing the music soundtrack is.
• Complete Monster:
  • Beatrice is a Dream Demon who was responsible for driving Filgaia to the brink of destruction. Manipulating and sabotaging the Yggdrasil project, Beatrice turned Filgaia into a deadly desert, using the dire condition and the desperation of people to survive to create the Ark of Society, a religion made to worship her as the "Dream Girl" and the bringer of utopia. Manipulating them to gather artifacts for her plans, Beatrice also manipulates Gallow's younger brother Shane to get the Drifters to eliminate the Prophets and Siegfried before launching her own ambitions to turn Filgaia into her twisted paradise. Brainwashing Shane and absorbing the life energy of the planet, bringing disaster all over the world, Beatrice ultimately attempts to absorb the existing Filgaia as the foundation of her new Neo Filgaia, and trap the Drifters into an eternal nightmare for defying her and in defeat attempts to delete the existing Filgaia with her in a last act of petty revenge.
  • Leehalt Alcaste, leader of the Prophets, is a self-grandiose madman who plans to turn the world into a demonic hellhole for the sake of his god complex. A former researcher of the Council of Seven who gained power when Yggdrasil exploded, Leehalt teamed up with fellow researchers Malik and Melody as the Prophets to reshape Filgaia to their image. Spending the next decade masterminding the Demon Summoning Ritual and hiring Janus to help his fellow Prophets in their crusade, Leehalt acted behind the shadows to bring back the demons and rule alongside them. Successful in resurrecting Siegfried after putting the world in turmoil, Leehalt pledge allegiance to him for a bid for more power before using it to help launch a plague of nanomachines to turn the whole world into a demon where he can thrive like the god he believes he is.
  • Melody Vilente is a member of the Prophets who plans to turn the world into living hell for the sake of vanity. A formerly plain woman, when Melody use her powers to turn into the perfect woman, she decided to work with the Prophets to keep her new form, even at the cost of the planet. Wanting to flaunt her new looks, Melody made a system in Little Twister where she seduces unsuspecting travelers to the Unclean Mark, where she would trick them into falling victim to the ruins' traps for indulgence. Turning Little Twister into a near-Ghost Town, she attempt to do the same thing to the Drifters, becoming furious when it failed because of Clive. Resentful, Melody tries to retaliate by creating the golem Asgard and the airship Deus ex Machina to brutalize them and poison the group, particularly Clive, before using her last moments to launch Deus ex Machina to spread nanomachines to turn Filgaia into a demon, all while taunting the party.
• Foe Yay Shipping: There's also a LOT of fans of Virginia and Janus. During the prologue and the first chapter, Janus flirts with Virginia a few times, even inviting her to join his team. Virginia, however, only finds him despicable. It's due to their differing ideologies as well as his own ambitions that he's quick to lose interest and has no problems kicking her around and even trying to kill her and her teammates.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Equip Finest Arts on Clive (or Jet) and then reset his ARM so there's only two bullets in it. Let destruction ensue. Notable in that the Final Boss seems to be built on the assumption that you will do this, as they're a bitch to kill otherwise, and the superboss fights absolutely require you to do this. You can beat Kraken and Ragu o Ragla without Finest Arts, but it is a very slow process otherwise.
  • The "Valiant" buff, which puts your physical damage through the roof as long as you don't heal to full, is available early in the second act.
  • The Virginia Nuke: Upgrade her ARM to fire as many bullets as possible in a single Gatling. Load her up with Def Null, ATP Plus, Weakness and an Attached element. Let her loose.
  • The fastest way to grow healing items at the Secret Garden is to sleep at an inn. Each item needs 25-100 points to grow and sleeping at an inn yields 20. Utilizing the free healing at the nearby Baskar Colony is an incredibly quick way to fully breed and max out every item in just a couple of hours. Add on the Dried Flower when any plant is maxed to 100% success rate and staying healed becomes trivial.
  • In general, because the game is all about options and tailoring the party to suit your needs, it's not entirely difficult to break the game in half once you start filling out your mediums. Because the game is so generous about your customization, you can readily modify each character's entire build short of their firearm specs midbattle. Going further, this means you can suit your party to utterly counter any enemy it comes across given some patience and ingenuity. If you know to prepare for an elemental onslaught going in, even the Superboss can be made a joke given you can set up party members to be entirely immune to elemental damage. Tropes Are Tools, however, in that while you can break the game fairly easily by abusing mediums, to get the items and skills you use to break the game takes a lot of exploration, so the player is still engaging with the game to get to the point where they can trivialize fights.
• Genius Bonus: The game's mythological references are surprisingly on-point, from major plot details to regular enemies and minor bosses. For example:
  • The game's take on the kobold is in the style of an earth spirit (as they were in their Germanic roots) rather than the yapping dog/lizard people of modern RPGs.
  • Various demon bosses have some gimmick that relates to large and small details of those demons' descriptions from the Ars Goetia, such as the Ose boss being a shapeshifter that turns into a panther.
  • Meanwhile all the Norse references culminate in Werner turning out to be an Expy of Odin complete with floppy hat, sacrificing of himself for knowledge from Mimir's Well and upon Yggdrasil. Only Werner's not a god, and the sacrifices were rather more significant for him.
• Goddamned Bats: The owls who steal your stuff and run away, especially because you can't just buy more healing potions. Made even worse by ones who can steal and run in the same move.
• Heartwarming Moments: Clive's daughter unknowingly breaking him out of his Heroic BSoD after he explains his new job will be to protect her and her mother, so she gives him "her most favoritest thing" as payment.
• Les Yay: Virginia and Maya. It's subtle at first, but around the third time they meet you wonder why they just don't admit it already. Even the creators were aware of it!
• Moe: The artists and model renderers made sure to make Clive's daughter, Kaitlyn, and 8-year old Virginia as cute as possible. They succeeded.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The repeat firing of a character's ARM that signals a Critical Hit. Doubles as Most Wonderful Sight with the camerawork at the same time.
• Narm: Can be forced by the player using the item that can rename any NPC in the game... and there's one instance where you can do this to Leehalt. Have fun taking his final scenes seriously when you gave him a very stupid name.
• Squick: Show of hands; who else was freaked out to high heaven by Malik's...devotion to his mother?
• That One Sidequest: Finding all 15 Ex-File Keys. Some of them are ridiculously tiresome, such as:
  • Defeating Ragu O Ragla on the last floor of the Abyss (twice). The Abyss being a 100-floors Randomly Generated Levels where Gimel Coins don't work and that is stuffed to the brim with the strongest enemies in the game. On each floor, you have to collect five gems scattered around, and while it's not necessarily difficult to reach them, the tediousness is exacerbated by the difficulty of the enemies (one of which has a special attack that warps you back to the entrance) and the fact that you'll lose track of which floor you're on long before you reach one of the mini bosses that serve as checkpoints.
  • The Arioch sidequest. Arioch being a Zero-Effort Boss found at the Den of Miasma that, after being defeated, will start appearing during Random Encounters and you have to find and beat him more 99 times to get a Ex-File Key. To make things worse, not only he moves to another dungeon after each defeat but also becomes gradually stronger after each defeat. This one is so notorious that the PS4 version did not include it as a trophy.
  • Unlocking the Secret Garden requires completing a nearby dungeon. After defeating the boss, the party has to escape the dungeon while carrying a cursed artifact that locks their HP at 1. Even when doing the quest at the recommended level requires a bit of luck to escape alive, and it's a quest that's best done sooner rather than later to reap the rewards that last for the rest of the game. It is better to not pick up the artifact right away and use a Gimmel Coin beforehand to avoid unnecessary frustrations.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Gallows has rather prominent lips in his portraits that resemble blackface.
  • Virginia's prologue depicts her uncle smacking her right across the face in an act of Anger Born of Worry. This is acceptable in the 19th century-like timeframe the game emulates (and since Japan didn't frown upon corporate punishment as much). Some may find it odd that he did this because Virginia is actually 18 - though she might be 17 at the time this event takes place.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Shane Carradine, Gallows' cute, borderline-loli little... brother?! Also counts as an In-Universe example, as the party gets a reaction shot after Gallows initially refers to him as his brother. Clive and Jet look entirely unfazed. Virginia is stunned. Other people continually comment on how pretty Shane is.

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