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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion (at least in certain circles), Wild ARMs was that complete piece of garbage that calls itself an RPG with no redeemable qualities and it's UUUUGLY!
Legitimate Issues With the Game: Wild ARMs is the victim of circumstances. Specifically, the circumstances of being one of only two other RPGs available for the PlayStation when FF7 was released. Most of the people who played it at the time were looking for more games of this new unfamiliar genre they were completely unfamiliar with until being sucked in by FF7's ad campaign, focusing entirely on its pre-rendered cutscenes. What they found was essentially Lufia 2 with a primitive experiment with polygons in combat. I'll grant the graphics being less than stellar, but the rest of this all comes down to audience expectations.
Why I Like It Anyway: The original Wild ARMs has three main things going for it. First and foremost, much like Lufia 2, all the dungeons contain increasingly complex puzzles, solved largely with the use of an ever growing collection of Zelda-like tools. I believe we can all appreciate that sort of thing.
Next, we have the uniqueness and shared importance of the characters. Each of the three characters has their own variety of special ability, with decidedly different means of acquiring them (combining elemental runes, interpreting cryptic hints, and finding/customizing new high tech toys). More importantly, each character has an equal share of importance to the plot, with no real clearly defined main character. The game begins with a short segment controlling each of the three (playable in any order), until eventually they all meet up to properly form a party, and each of the three has their own general goal which tie in nicely.
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Finally, and to me, most importantly, Wild ARMs and its sequels maintain a set of core values which, once upon a time, were what RPGs were all about. Time to side track things with a bit of a history lesson. As far as console RPGs go, we have two very different eras, split up by the release of FF7. What causes this split isn't that FF7 was some ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting game. It's how amazingly well it sold.
Prior to FF7, RPGs were a serious niche genre. Publishers did well with them, less because of their broad appeal, and more because the people who were into RPGs would immediately buy any game that could be called such, and immediately dive in, spending months mapping the world out by hand, obsessing over stats and equipment, and in some cases, actually taking notes about the things random NPCs have to say because such things actually had a habit of being profoundly important down the road. Therefore, RPGs were, for a good decade and change, specifically tailored to this audience's tastes.
Part of that meant a lot of brutally hard challenge and level grinding, but that died off over the years here just like it did in every other genre. Much more important was the notion that any RPG worth mentioning was going to put that those stat obsessing/world mapping skills to use. One of the best ways you can see this play out is with a little something I like to call the constantly expanding world.
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We start off in a town surrounded by a bubble of nice open countryside. We kick around there until we aren't totally wimpy, then we can make it through the tunnel connecting our bubble to an area with a few more towns. Following along with the plot, we eventually get a canoe, letting us cross the river to the next town. If we're up for it, we can look around and find some other rivers we can now cross, leading to some secret caves with some neat new toys in them. Then we might get a hovercraft, letting us safely cross over poisonous swamps or small bodies of water. Again, this grants us access to our next destination plot wise, but if we look around, we're going to find some islands full of interesting optional dungeons and such. Then we get our actual, proper, ocean going vessel, and so on and so on. Believe it or not, this is the main reason that I (and everyone else who's been playing'em forever) really got into playing RPGs.
Then along came FF7. Now, FF7 has a perfectly good constantly expanding world. That series didn't drop the whole notion until 10. The thing is though, FF7 attracted a significantly broader audience than the standard obsessive RPG nerds. It was also purchased by a huge swarm of people who were mainly just there for the pretty movies, and a good many of these newcomers honestly had nothing but contempt for the whole concept of thoroughly exploring an ever-expanding world (and even more for mapping out dungeons). They just wanted to breeze through to the next pretty cutscene as quickly as possible.
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Normally, when you have people like this, you tell them to suck it up and deal with it, or play something else. Here though, the new cutscene craving people outnumbered us old school types enough for most developers to start catering to their tastes instead of ours. Imagine if you were an opera fan, and suddenly some new opera burst on the screen with such amazingly cool costumes and lighting effects that millions and millions of people watched it, despite otherwise hating opera. Now imagine that this sparked a wave of "Spoken word" operas with no singing at all, but lots of lavish costumes, and that on the rare occasion a proper opera went into production, it was critically panned for all that stupid singing and the lack of pyrotechnics. In our metaphor here, Wild ARMs would be a new run of Carmen playing across the street from the original big splashy number (and I suppose Xenosaga is basically a fashion show). I feel I should point out that I'm not saying I have anything against people who came into the genre with (or after) FF7 here (especially not those who dig exploring just as much as us old fogies). I'm just saying we have two very different audiences sharing one genre here, and you don't really have a right to complain when you grab a game that's actively not intended for you.
So, basically what I'm saying is this. Wild ARMs is a pretty darn spiffy RPG by the standards of people who appreciate SNES RPGs, which is really what you have to judge it as all things considered. The battle graphics aren't too pleasant, but quite frankly all polygonal graphics at the time looked awful. Later games in the WA series nail the visuals much better, and continue to embrace the oldschool values while innovating in other areas (and arbitrarily constantly changing what ARM stands for). WA2 I can't recommend in good faith, being dragged down by the most offensively terrible localization I have ever seen and some really unbalanced new game mechanics. WA3 is a real gem if you're into this sort of thing. 4 gave up its oldschool values and western theme causing me to pass. 5 in theory is the apology, but I haven't had a chance to check. So... play the odd WAs basically. If you're sufficiently grizzled, you'll like'em.
