Wild ARMs / YMMV - TV Tropes

Awesome Music:
- The remake has too many to list, but three that stand out are "War Demon" (Boomerang's theme), "Destruction of All Creation" (Mother's theme), and "Windward Birds" (Zeik Tuvai's theme)
- The overworld theme "Lone Bird in the Shire" — made twice as cool after realizing that its also a Shout-Out to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (specifically, the very suitably epic "The Ecstasy of Gold" by none other than Ennio Morricone).
- The Remake Alter Code F has some awesome songs as well. Adlehyde Castle Town and Puzzle are two of the best.
- Adlehyde Castle from the original.
- Calamity Jane's theme(s), Not a Plain Child But a Young Lady from the original, and Big Entrance! from the remake. The Action Girl has arrived, losers.
Complete Monster:
- Alhazad had several inhabitants of a town abducted so he could test his parasite that horrifically mutates any living thing into a mindless monster, then sends the mutated citizens back to their town to slaughter everyone they could. Alhazad then threatened to unleash this parasite, which he calls the "Demon Seed", on a village almost entirely inhabited by orphaned children unless the party hands over a MacGuffin. He also manages to infect both a young Wanderer and a puppy with the Demon Seed, forcing the party to kill them both. Alhazad also turned Lady Harkan into a demon, because he had a fondness for her. Alhazad collaborates in resurrecting Mother and is an active supporter of her plan to destroy the human race.
- Alter Code F: Mother is the nihilistic force who leads the Metal Demons to destroy worlds for her self-grandiose role of destroyer of worlds. Planning to destroy Filgalia, Mother had her servants kill many, destroy kingdoms, and experiment on innocents to kill the Guardians to destroy the planet before disposing her servants afterwards to move to the next world. When she's betrayed by her servants, Mother possessed Ziekfried in a final effort to finish her goal, working closely with Alhazad in more ruthless schemes, using the resurrected Elmina to start a superweapon in Malduke to destroy the world in a symphony of natural disasters as she gloats above in the chaos.
Demonic Spiders: Raidbusters. Normally, they'd be easy to take care of, only having lots of HP and an above-average strength on their side. But they attack at a point in the game when the party is split up, and always attack in pairs (plus sometimes they'll arrive with a Gremlin who can lower your defense. Jack will have less trouble, since he can just one-shot one of them with Meteor Dive, but Rudy and Cecilia will be in for a world of hurt.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Boomerang. So much.
Game-Breaker:
- In the remake, Rudy gets his Gatling Raid cartridge a little more than 1/3 into the game. Use with 18 bullets and every non-optional boss in the game goes down in one turn. Combine with Lock-On Active and its auto reload for pure bullet spam. Exploiting this is practically a requirement for beating the optional end-game bosses without running out of resources in every battle.
- By putting Great Booster on Rudy, casting Offense Zone on the battlefield, and Fragile on the enemy, it's easily possible for Rudy to do over 100,000 damage with Lock-On (even more with Lock-On Plus). The only other one who comes close is Jack under the same conditions with Accelerator + Laser Silhouette and the most I've seen that do is 75,000. Most battles don't last long enough to set up both of those guys for that much damage.
- Play through the game until the Volcannon Trap mission, which is when Jane temporarily joins you. Go fight Rat Monkeys at the beginning areas and have her steal MP Repair skills from them. Not only do they sell for a whopping 999,999 gella (ONE will pretty much take care of your money problems for the whole game, even including the 600,000 gella required to completely rebuild Adlehyde), but the skill itself restores MP as you walk, which is insanely helpful for characters like Jack, who has very little MP and very expensive special attacks (until they're leveled up anyway).
Good Bad Bugs: The Game-Breaking item duplication glitch in the original PS1 version. All you have to do is have your first two characters use the same expendable item (Heal Berries are easiest), then have the third character switch the location of that item with something you have one of. At the end of the turn, the game deducts two from the number of the item in that slot... which, since there was only one, takes it from 1, to 0, back around to 255. Use it on apples and you can effortlessly max everyone's stats, use it on Crest Graphs and you can get all the spells easily, use it on Secret Signs and Jack will only ever have to use 1 MP for any of his skills, use it on Goat Dolls and abuse the ability to re-equip your characters in battle and nothing will ever be able to kill you.
Iron Woobie: Bartholomew. In both versions, he survives a plane crash that he was forced into flying against his will and also survives a shipwreck. The latter is much worse in the remake.
Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Rudy! Wild ARMs 5 even pokes fun at this by having a side-quest where you resolve a love quadrilateral between him, Jane, Cecilia, and Mariel.
Moral Event Horizon: Alhazad turning an entire town's population (save one blind girl) into monsters, and attempting to do the same thing to Jane's town. Keep in mind that the majority of her town's population are orphaned children.
Nightmare Fuel:
- Pretty much anything involving Mother. A fleshy pulsating thing, she's an Omnicidal Maniac who wanders the cosmos consuming countless star systems (making her a proto-Jenova). By far the creepiest scene with her is when Zeikfried is teleported to the destroyed Photosphere as the result of falling into a black hole. only to find the veiny, slug-like remnant of Mother that proceeds to rear up and consume him while cooing about how much she loves him, accompanied by sickening crunching noises.
- Not to mention Alhazad's true form. Or his special "Demon Seed" parasite that painfully turns living things into monsters. Made worse in Alter Code F. In the original, we only see a dog transform from the Demon Seed, and its instantaneous. Here though, we get to see the Wanderer who was helping Jane's town scream and convulse in pain before finally transforming. Brr...
Player Punch: The revelation of Lady Harken's true identity.
Scrappy Mechanic: Instead of learning Fast Draw techniques right away, Jack instead learns Fast Draw "hints" in the original game. He then has to use the technique repeatedly until he actually learns it (using an unlearned technique causes him to just use a normal attack.) This unfortunately leads to a lot of grinding, as learning a Fast Draw can take dozens upon dozens of usages of the unlearned technique. Fortunately, the system for learning Fast Draws was changed in the remake.
Suspiciously Similar Song: People who are familiar with the EarthBound Beginnings soundtrack may hear a bit of "Bein' Friends" in "Sense of Solidarity" in the remake.
Tear Jerker:
- The backstory of the Maxwell family that Magdalen tells in the remake.
- Rudy's backstory: Rejected during his entire life for his power, losing his father (the only person who loved him) and burying him in the "closest place to heaven", and living alone as a wanderer, until he met Jack and Cecilia.
That One Level: The Tri-Pillar, full stop. A dungeon that splits your party and has the characters go up three identical, entirely uninteresting towers. The best part? The Random Encounter table is just ripped wholesale from the previous dungeon, and thus spectacularly unsuited to a solo run. And a good chunk of those monsters are highly resistant to magic, making Cecilia's tower a Luck-Based Mission. It's really telling that it's the one dungeon ACF entirely removed, handing you the place's MacGuffin in a simple scene and turning the boss into an optional boss of a late game, different area.
The Un-Twist: It becomes obvious that Jack is Garrett long before the "big reveal" actually happens.
The Woobie:
- Mariel. Makes one almost want to give her a hug when she looks out of her door at the party when they first meet her in ACF. Same goes for her portrait when she becomes a temporary party member.
- Rudy counts as well. Treated as an outcast for most of his life due to his strength and ARM abilities, watching his grandfather (the only person who loves him) die right before him, wandering the wasteland while still being treated as an outcast, losing his left arm (after a brutal Not So Different speech from Zeikfried), discovering he's made of living metal like the demons he's fighting, retreating into a childhood dream world where his grandfather is there to comfort him — only to end up trapped by a dream demon succubus. Even the Guardians are hard on Rudy as shown when Raftina and Justine outright state they don't think Rudy will be able to summon Zephyr because he's an artificial being so therefore is incapable of having hopes and dreams.
Woolseyism:
- "Holmcross" is just about the only translation error very few people have a problem with (it was originally "Homunculus"), possibly because it sounds badass.
- Van Burace sounds more badass and American than Vambrace. C'mon, "Jack Vambrace"? What kind of name is that anyways, when everybody else has either English (Cecilia Lynne Adlehyde) or American (Rudy Roughnight) sounding names? Pretty sure Van Burace was intentional, as the literal "Vambrace" translation would not have fit very well. Nobody names their kid "Vambrace".

YMMV / Wild ARMs

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