Wild Arms XF is not very fond of the series RPG origins, bringing to us a strategy game with a basic story and some clichés like a sacred sword, empires that became evil all of a sudden, a princess look alike and characters getting involved on the biggest wars for the lamest reasons.

The concepts have a good start with a strategy game that is fast enough, something kinda essential on a portable machine, but soon you’ll get stuck into gameplay problems that will sure upset players, specially because of the portable nature.

Instead of a traditional isometric map with squares, we have hexagons, in theory, this adds more depth since you can be targeted by more enemies at the same time. The decision of making the game in hexagons is already questionable cause it gets hard to keep track of some units relating to others, it’s harder to picture a straight line on a hexagonal field.

The game as some interesting mechanics, like the Formation Arts, a bonus when you attack an enemy from opposing sides. There’s also a class change system that unfortunately takes all your itens away so that you can equip yourself again with the right ones for that class, this can be tiring when you’re just looking for a quick game.

However, what really makes Wild Arms XF fail is in its battles. While your first battles will be pretty easy, soon you’ll get punished, and by soon, I really mean in the beginning of the game. We’re talking about a strategy game that works almost as if it was scripted, because if you don’t execute a specific action with a specific class at a specific turn, the consequences are so certain that the game feel truncated.

The presentation also leave a lot to be desired, while there’s the beautiful song "Lies of Truth" on the background, the lack of an animated movie and leaving all the work to stactic artworks gives a certain impression of low value, which gets harder to fight against when even artworks from the prologue are reused.

The graphical part shows everything relatively simple, the backgrounds are nice but not impressive, at least showing some atention to details. The characters are 2D, something fairly common in the genre.

There are some voiceovers on important scenes and they are great to give some soul to the game, but they could have been better. Sometimes there’s a lack of emotion and other times too much emotion for something too simple. All in all, they are good and work well with the sound effects to put some life at the static scenes. The original japanese voices are also available, that’s sure a positive point.

In the end, Wild Arms XF is disappointing to say the least, while it does keep itself on technical levels, an unexplainable decision in the making of the game made it so little friendly that takes away all the fun that you could have from battles. Hardcore strategy fans might find a nice challenge but usual Wild Arms fans should wait for a game that’s more related to the franchise’s origins.