The main characters in RPGs are incredibly important. Cloud, Squall and even the mute in Dragon Quest all live on in your memories long after the game has fi nished and they’ve turned from sulky, grumpy sods into heroes who have saved the world and usually got some girl. In Wild ARMs 5 you play as the irrepressibly chipper Dean.

Dean. That’s actually his name. Dean. It doesn’t exactly conjure up the image of a wonderful hero whose destiny lies in greatness, he just reminds you more of the spotty guy in the chip shop who specialises in battered sausages. But instead of being some terminally bored youth, Dean likes to shout. He likes to exclaim! Lots! And that makes us want to turn the sound off so we don’t have to listen to him bang on about how brilliant he is at attacking things with a shovel. Not exactly the wildest of arms to use though, is it?

Thankfully, along for the ride is the equally spunky Rebecca. They share an intense relationship – they both think that the other sucks. And they’re right. It’s been a long time since we’ve had to suffer the inanity of the conversations between the lead roles in an RPG such as the ones here.

Eventually, Dean and Rebecca come across a young girl who, in true RPG form, has amnesia. All she knows is that she has to give Dean some guns, and so begins Wild ARMs’ story. Once Dean’s shovel is discarded in favour of these rubbish guns, that have absolutely no range, you really think that things are going to pick up, but, unfortunately, they don’t.

If you’ve played Wild ARMs 4 (we have and it wasn’t very good), then you’ll know about the HEX system and how you have to move about the grid to get next to an enemy to attack it. And that certain hexagons add status effects to attacks when standing on them. It’s the same here but this time it doesn’t take a turn to move so you might think this would speed things up a bit. It does a little but there are so many random battles that they just become so infuriating. Each dungeon you visit is made up of small rooms and it’s not uncommon to have to get through three or four battles just to get to the other side. And with save points far away from each other it takes incredible patience to put up with them all, while getting bored with killing everything and then madly stabbing the X button to try to get back to searching through the dungeons. But it takes so long and it’s one of those RPGs that you play out of the corner of your eye while doing something else. We suggest just turning the sound completely off and dragging another television into the room and watching something good while you crawl, oh so very slowly, through the dungeons. Which really just makes this an RPG you don’t ever need to play.

Tim Empey