It all comes to the credits today, November 27, Panda Day. Draw a picture of a panda and pin it on your door. It brings you good luck today. Be careful not to slant his eyes or it’ll look like a mug shot.
Previously on Wild Arms 3: Virginia Maxwell is a young woman who is anxious to get out into the world and spread justice across the land. Jet Enduro is searching for a treasure that will restore his lost memories. Gallows Carradine is a man who is destined to be a priest, but wants to live a life without that responsibility. Clive Winslett is exploring the world, and keeping his expeditions afloat as a hired gun. They all meet on a dark and stormy night aboard a train, and, yada yada yada, now they are fighting the physical manifestation of a magical nightmare world.
So let’s get back to that nightmare.
This is the final phase of the final battle. You know this because it gets a rad intro.
Fight time!
Not 100% certain what Nega Filgaia here is supposed to be. Some kind of… plant? The Mana Tree? Nega Filgaia being a world tree fits with the environmentalism themes of Wild Arms 3, and the repeated Yggdrasil references.
It may be hard to figure out how to represent a world struggling to be birthed into a hostile dimension. It is not hard to shoot that thing, though.
Always happy to see as many weaknesses as possible.
As was mentioned back during our EX File Key roundup…
You must use Pickpocket on Nega Filgaia to obtain the final EX File Key. Previous forms of Nega Filgaia do not have anything to steal, so there is no reason to think this would be a good idea… But still! Always steal from the biggest bad you can find.
So here is the gimmick of the Nega Filgaia (final) fight. Every round, Nega Filgaia will summon a new tentacle.
Each of the tentacles are associated with two elements. When a tentacle appears, the associated weaknesses will disappear from Nega Filgaia’s weakness list. Oricoflagamus is Dark and Water, so Nega Filgaia is no longer weak to Dark or Water attacks. Note that Nega Filgaia does not gain a resistance to these elements, it is just no longer outright weak to them.
The tentacle summon order is always the same, so if you have advance warning on which elements will stay weak points, go ahead and hammer away.
Meanwhile, each new tentacle is not all that interesting, but…
They do use dual elemental attacks that hit the whole party.
Yes, a whole new wrinkle in the battle system appears in the final-final battle. Literally every monster before this point could only use one elemental attack at a time. Even Tiamat’s Final Disaster was six elements used in succession, not simultaneously. The tentacles meanwhile use concurrent dual elemental attacks, which means that a character must be protected against both elements to avoid damage. If you have a Water Ward active, but not a Dark Ward, you will still be damaged.
And while one tentacle is smacking you around, a second one arrives.
At least Wild Arms 3 is straightforward about what elements to avoid in the future.
Ohhh gettin’ Norse in here.
So that’s our ice/earth attack.
More tentacles!
Sound and fury signifying nothing.
Nega Filgaia (the core) gains general defensive buffs as the tentacles appear, too. At this point, Jet cannot do damage to Nega Filgaia.
Meet the light/thunder attack. Light lightning?
One more tentacle for the road.
Nothing like a warm breeze.
And here is “complete” Nega Filgaia with all its tentacles active. Since Fire/Wind is the last tentacle to be summoned, focusing on fire and wind attacks throughout is the safest move for the mages.
I am sure there is some significance to the names Vanda, Krukmer, Matricaria, and Oricoflagamus.
And here is Nega Filgaia all cleared of elemental weaknesses.
Enjoy a fire/wind attack while we’re here.
And once all the tentacles are summoned, Nega Filgaia starts unleashing a debilitating, non-elemental spell every round.
So this fight is practically impossible if you let every tentacle be summoned. Once the whole quartet is around, you must kill at least one tentacle to make some headway, and if you then hit Nega Filgaia with the related weakness, it will “counter” by instantly reviving the associated tentacle. And Nega Filgaia and the rest of the tentacles will be blasting you with their hit-all attacks all the while. It is practically impossible to survive that onslaught.
So do not let it summon tentacles. Do not let it live. The various bits of earlier Nega Filgaia phases where you were punished for letting the battle drag on (because a form could use Reset) were training you to kill Nega Filgaia as quickly as possible. Hit those weaknesses, use Finest Arts, do whatever it takes to murder Nega Filgaia immediately. If all the tentacles arrive, you are as good as dead.
Note that there is gameplay/plot synergy here. The party is trying to stop a whole new world from being born by killing it in its infancy. If they allow it to grow… Well… When was the last time you saw four fighters best a planet?
But once Nega Filgaia is in the ground, you’re in the clear. We’ll laugh about this later.
Hey! Got a trophy!
Only took all day…
“Heeheehee…My Filgaia and I have been defeated…But your Filgaia will come to an end as well…My Filgaia, and your Filgaia…Everything is composed of opposites: Day and night, positive and negative…Everything is structured to cancel each other out. Just like my Filgaia in the dream world, and your Filgaia…The connected world will also perish with my demise…They will eventually expel each other…Everything will come to an end…You…me… Everything will be engulfed in nothingness…”
Well, if we are in the habit of believing lying dream demons, we are in for a bad time.
And speaking of lying, Virginia is lying down on the job.
This seems familiar…
Oh yeah! This is the same white space where Virginia had her final conversation with Werner.
“Final” conversation.
Always found it funny that Final Fantasy 10 and Wild Arms 3 were contemporary, and they both had very different daddy issues.
One last nonsense term for the road.
Oh, super.
Virginia, he just poorly explained this!
Guess what, everybody!
The place between dreams and reality is the internet! You always knew this was true!
“I thought it would look like The Matrix.”
Voids aren’t so bad once you get used to them.
Well, you couldn’t accomplish anything you wanted. Transforming the world into Duck Amuck is accomplishing something.
“Hey, Virginia? Everything dies. Don’t worry about it.”
“We’re all just fake or something anyway.”
“And now they’ve all been whitewashed…”
… Yes?
Huh?
The Daddy Ball!
Ah-ha! If everything right now is memories, we’ll just focus those memories through the Hyades Terminal to manifest them as a physical reality.
And while we are at it, we can use any damn thing that has ever existed to power this process, because somebody remembers it (?).
“Beats hanging around this void forever.”
In case you do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of Wild Arms 3 at this point, this is an echo of a conversation Virginia had way back at the top of Chapter 2.
Let’s kick some metaphysical ass! Again!
Reboot the planet!
“Should work just fine as long as there aren’t four randos shooting the thing as it is born.”
Ugh, can we erase Jet?
Oh, wait. Jet remembers “old” Filgaia from when it was green. That could actually help! Jet can actually help!
Going to be a real downer ending if we don’t get reality back…
This is promising.
Woo! Not alone!
I ask this when I wake up, too.
It was all a dream ending!
Does this spaceship have windows?
Tackle hug!
Okay, everyone here remembers the battle against Beatrice. Only Virginia got the daddy-daughter save-the-world time.
Lamium is still dead, though.
Sorry, dude. Nobody could forget you died, apparently.
“Does that mean we are going to make this place fly?”
“No, that part of his dream was stupid.”
Uh-oh.
Oh?
Oh. Oh, this is not good.
Beatrice killed Lamium, but she barely existed in the first place. Now there are just four armed people and a corpse.
You can see how conclusions would be drawn.
Killing a cult leader in the middle of a cult never ends well.
“We could take these nerds.”
Or… not?
Everyone is quick to jump on the “kill a building full of people over a misunderstanding” train.
So you got a solution here, Virginia?
We can’t just memory at them hard enough or whatever.
I think Clive is tired at this point.
Hm?
Gobs?
“The first hurdle I had to overcome after becoming a Drifter was…the fact that my concept of what justice is doesn’t always hold true in the wasteland…But still, an unwavering sense of justice lies within me. It compels me to hold true to my convictions.”
Virginia has found her center. Despite how hard it may be, she will always take the just path.
“We did kill at least two noted demons.”
Damn right.
“Maybe serpentine a little…”
Here comes the cavalry.
So… like… ten years?
Hurricane Virginia.
Possibly the last time it rained in this world…
“I was just saying that to my dead dad.”
“Oh, and I just remembered we had a WMD airship dragon outside. We should be fine.”
“This your way of saying we’re not getting paid?”
Okay, just because you’re not going to shoot anybody doesn’t mean you should waste bullets.
“Except that time we sent Asgard into the past.”
And we close on what is going to be an epic jump kick.
Remember the future!
And that’s the ballgame, folks.
Credits roll parallel to random stills from the game.
The pictures are not necessarily chronological, they seem to focus on individual characters and relevant moments for said characters. Basically, you get sets for the whole party, the villains, and…
Maya gets her own highlight reel.
In fact, a number of the shots are Maya/Virginia-centric, with this one being one of the last. There is not a heterosexual explanation for this.
Thanks for playing.
Okay, one last denouement to set up The Avengers.
True to Virginia’s justice, no one was killed when the gang escaped.
But there is still injustice in the world! Martina is off adventuring again, and Janus’s old flunkies, Dario and Romero, are chasing her.
Note that you get this same ending sequence regardless of if you completed (or even started) Martina’s sidequest. She has plenty of reasons to swing by Little Twister.
But this trip is not going well.
Martina was running from one set of outlaws, and ran into another!
Sulky Boy!
We last saw Dario and Romero when they were blown off Ka Dingel at the end of Chapter 1. They presumably took the whole rest of the game to recover.
Such bad guys.
And gal.
Yo.
Remember when we beat you, like, a whole bunch?
Anybody ever tell them Janus was possessed by a demon/killed?
Meeting old friends.
And away they go.
The day is saved. Anybody wanna go get some churros?
Some things never change.
Apparently this little incident is happening immediately after escaping the Ark of Destiny. Those guys print wanted posters fast!
“Clive, you’re still married, right?”
Someone finally perfectly emulates their character portrait.
And we close on something we never saw before…
A small sprig of hope.
Back to the “granular” filter we have not seen since the introductory sequences…
And that’s the word on advanced third.
Next time on Wild Arms: I’m not going to lie to you. You have come this far, you deserve to know the truth: It is going to be me throwing 3,000 words at Wild Arms 3.