Locked and Loaded
How a trip to Electronics Boutique led to a lifelong commitment.
I’ve been playing Wild Arms 2 on my PlayStation 5 lately, which has led my family to ask some questions. My wife walked through the living room the other night, glanced at the television, and asked if everything was okay. My son was less diplomatic. He simply looked at the screen and asked why the game looked so bad. My youngest daughter happily plopped on the couch next to me when I turned on the console, but only because she thought I was going to load up Astro Bot.
Everyone is a critic, I get it. But in this case, the critics are on to something. Wild Arms 2 is not one of those PlayStation games that has aged gracefully. Nobody is going to mistake it for a timeless visual masterpiece. Character and enemy models are indecipherably blocky, the environments are crude, and the loading times grate. The less said about the abysmal localization the better. And yet I have been having a fantastic time despite (to spite?) myself.
The Wild Arms series are Japanese role-playing games featuring turn-based combat set against a Wild West backdrop that is an anime mashup of genres. You’ve got magic wielding royalty fighting against demonic space aliens in dungeons called things like “Emulator Zone.” I enjoyed these weird little games and fancy to revisit them now and again. I know the sheer force of nostalgia is what brings me here, powerless to the allure of starting a game I loved as a kid once more, with sincere if not serious plans to finish it. I always come back to the same thought when replaying these vintage games: Where did the time go? We never can go back home, even if we can physically return to the house.
I remember standing inside Electronics Boutique at Lakeside Mall sometime in the late 1990s trying to decide what RPG I was going to bring home. This was before you all made influencers a thing. This was during the era of Working Designs, y’all. We didn’t have YouTube reviewers or streamers ASMRing into our AirPods telling us what to like. Back then, buying a game involved staring at the box, reading the back, and hoping for the best…especially if you weren’t reading EGM or PSM Magazines.
Nope, back then I had about 15 minutes of browsing before I pissed off my mom. I used them judiciously, having scanned and reviewed the aisles before narrowing my choices down to Wild Arms and another game called Beyond the Beyond. What I find interesting is that I recall the choice itself so clearly, looking at the boxes and weighing my options and even opening the empty cases to look at the art inside. What I don’t remember is why I ultimately chose Wild Arms. Impactful decision, given that I’m still writing about the series nearly thirty years later.
Because I bought Wild Arms, I played it endlessly. I have memories of sitting on the floor of my sister’s room, playing Cecilia’s prologue chapter. I eventually played Wild Arms 2 for the Playstation a few years later and then again when the series transferred to PS2 with Wild Arms 3. There have been five mainline Wild Arms titles, a PS2-era remake of the first game, a tactics-strategy RPG for the PSP, and (ten years later) a JP-only mobile title that I did indeed play until it was shuttered a lifetime ago. The series, like other franchises over the last few decades, became woven into the fabric of my life in a way that probably sounds ridiculous to anyone who doesn’t play video games.
Meanwhile, Beyond the Beyond simply fell off the shelves of my mind, showing up intermittently (and overpriced) at resale shops or garage sales. I was lucky enough to get a very affordable copy of the game recently and finally decided to see what I had missed out on before Y2K was a thing. Ladies, we did not make it beyond the beyond with this game. We’re lucky we made it beyond the title screen.
I don’t think Beyond was ever going to have a fair chance. By the time I finally got around to playing it, Wild Arms had already spent nearly three decades building a relationship with me. Beyond the Beyond is just some kusoge-adjacent game from the people who would go on to make Golden Sun. Maybe in a Sliding Doors-like world where I’m Gwenyth Paltrow, I picked up Beyond the Beyond instead and you are reading a piece about why it deserves a follow-up.
I don’t think nostalgia is really about quality. At least not entirely. If it were, I would probably spend my evenings replaying nothing but the greatest games ever made. Instead, I’m playing Wild Arms 2 or loading up my save file in Legend of Dragoon, hoping to get past Disc 1 for the first time since my adult teeth have come in. It’s why I’m even uttering the name “Legend of Legaia” in a digital safe-space.
I love these kinda shitty games that hurt to look at and were arguably not that fun to play in 1996, let alone 2026. I love these games I may not have ever beaten but still recall fondly because of who and where I was at the time, even in the face of better games that came out during the same era. Nostalgia really is that bitch, huh? It is, because it also brought us three middling seasons of a Will & Grace reboot.
It would certainly explain why I feel a pang of pride when I look at a PlayStation-era jewel case, complete with a crack in the front. This little guy has been with me through the years, sitting on the shelf during college, law school, children, and more than a few moves. Same for Final Fantasy VII and countless other games I had the good sense to never sell.
When I look at that cracked case, I don’t just see Wild Arms 2. Instead, I see my childhood bedroom with strategy guides strewn about the floor on weekends that seemed like they would never end. I see the start of summer vacation as a reminder of a period of life when getting a new game felt like an event. The game itself is part of the memory, with the rest bundling up the sights and sounds of the time and place where I first experienced it.
That’s why I am unbothered if Wild Arms 2 looks terrible. It’s old enough to have a mortgage. Besides, the graphics are not what I want to revisit. Replaying the game allows me to, if just for a moment, occupy the same space as my child self. I don’t love Wild Arms 2 because I like it; I love Wild Arms because we found each other at the perfect time.
I could have chosen Beyond the Beyond or one of the many other RPGs I never got around to playing. Instead, I chose Wild Arms. Thirty years later, I still carry it with me. Who cares if it looks like shit?