Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow-Brick Road:
I've been wanting to play this game since I was in Middle School. I grew up as a big fan of the Oz books, and sometime around being introduced to Final Fantasy 6, the thought came to me that the Wizard of Oz story would make a great base template for an RPG. After all, there was a simple journey, a small party of plucky heroes with well-defined personal goals, and tons of perilous and adorable monsters/witches to contend with. Add a little more RPG logic like "Scarecrow is weak to Fire, but immune to Status effects like Sleep" or "Tin Man is afflicted with Rust status effect when hit by Water attacks" and you have the makings of an awesome little romp through Oz!
Of course, in -my- version of the game, there would have been a lot more references to the colorful characters actually -in- the Oz-books. Not to mention a slightly more in-depth look at the fairly archetypal characters in the Children's novels.
MediaVision decided to go the opposite direction - apparently the original story was far too complex, so they reduced it to the bare bones and just made everything REALLY REALLY pretty.
While I like the storybook setting they added, and I would have been fine with having the relatively personality-less PCs, the utter lack of world-building is unforgiveable to me. If you're going to strip the series of all complexity, at least replace it with something of your own! An original take on Oz is always a welcome change to me, honestly. I enjoyed MacGuire's Wicked series immensely, and the musical version was entertaining, too. Even that crappy Sci-Fi original series "O.Z." or whatever it was called was at least appealing in the ways it tried to reinvent the series (despite Zoey Deschanel's bad acting ruining pretty much the entirety of the program).
But no, Wild Arms of Oz manages to have a less complicated plot/world/characters than Dragon Quest 4.
Well, at least the gameplay's good! The ratio system adds a nice layer of complexity and the battles are competent all-around. Very nicely polished. I must add that the game feels a lot more like Dragon Quest than it does Wild Arms. "DQ in Oz" is a more fitting nickname, despite being created by the Wild Arms teams.
Also, the aesthetics all-around are quite fitting. The artstyle is charming (though Dorothy's character art is a little creepy, her in-game model is quite well rendered) and suits the story book setting. The graphics are colorful (man, when was the last time I got to say that?! Like... Chrono Cross?). And the music, while forgettable, is appropriately laid-back, though not as cutesy as I was expecting from the opening credits.
The track ball feels pretty gimmicky, but it makes running around the world map slightly more fun, I must admit.
I just beat Flora (man, that was rough), and the first 3 Father Dragon fights (even rougher). Game is very well balanced and somewhat challenging, so I give it props for that. I keep petting Toto, hoping something will happen. So far, he seems to have learned 2 "New Tricks", but I have yet to see what that does. Does he leap in Interceptor-style? Man, that would be bad-ass.
Overall, I'm quite disappointed with the story, but it's still nice to have a definitive Oz RPG after all those years of daydreaming about it.
