Haha - what a review! I just now entered the final stages of the game (party at Lvl91) and am about to hunt down the optional bosses (a trademark of the WA series). Then I stumbled upon this review. 2/5 stars - that's brave and mostly understandable, I guess.
I played on emulator with 2x speed in battle. The only way to get through such a game. A "speed up mode" here should be madatory anyways (like Chrono Cross did within its New Game +). I own and played all games of the Wild Arms series on original consoles.
My major complaints I have with "WA AC-F" deal with the overall visuals (towns, dungeons), which are the worst of the worst. Not only do surrounding "details" like twigs, trees, staircases, etc. get inside your view and block off relevant parts of the screen - those (stock) 3D assets (walls, stairs, etc.) also look awfully bland and lack any soul (everythings a mish mash). Many times I had no idea where I was on screen and fell into a lake - which put me back to the entrance of the screen again. I think they wanted to go with a more real look, and sadly got rid of the Wild Arms-esque comic look.
Also the camera is positioned at a top down birdeye perspective, which often makes the heroes look small like ants, tiny and unimportant (yeah, you can zoom it, but you will use the distant one for traversing more easily - you take what you get). At least the npc characters seem to look better than even in WA5! Cell-shading to the rescue. WHY do the main heroes look crappy then?
Also, the music departement also made some crazy decisions and made some great songs, well, not so great anymore. Generally, though, they did a good job remastering the ost.
The secrets are what make or break a Wild Arms game. And here it does many things right. I play Wild Arms for the music, the atmosphere, the puzzles and the challenge of finding and defeating the hardest bosses there are in a videogame. It did it well enaugh. I simply cannot forgive the soulless visuals, the bland characters and script...
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