Compared to WA3, the Wild West theme has been toned down. This has a bit more of a sci-fi look and feel. The world of Filgaia is still being applied, although this is a completely new setting compared to previous game. According to the developers, this is a completely new story and you can think that we are sharing the Wild Arms and Filgaia names, but it is a new story and new set of characters. Items and such keep their name but it is a completely new story.
The reason they have moved forward this way, with each installment they want to keep Wild Arms fresh and new, to keep it from getting stale and to attract newcomers. If they want to make a series that is based on previous installments, there would be a lingering feeling of needing to know something that you don't. As a rule, they create a brand new story with a new game. To do a sequel story is kind of boring, according to Media.Vision's managing director, Akifumi Kaneko. That is also one of the reasons they created the new hex battle system -- but they also created to make a whole new unique battle system, and that's one of the key appeal of WA4, Kaneko feels. It's inspired from war games.
The topic of Wild Arms: Alter Code F came up. Originally, this remake of the original WA, which is still due out in the U.S. from Agetec, was announced alongside a new Wild Arms game known as Another Code F. That project was, in fact, Wild Arms 4. According to Kaneko, in his mind he always knew he'd use the title "Fourth Detonator," which is the Japanese subtitle of Wild Arms 4. Another Code F was a placeholder title from Sony. The original plan, at the conceptual stage, for WA:ACF and WA4 were proposed at the same time. In fact, WA4 may have even been presented first. They intended to do them simultaneously and ship them at the same time, but they ended up having to shift their timing and release them at different times.
When asked if the team would like to do action game, based on its history with early PS1 title Gunners Heaven, Kaneko remarked that he favors action games over any other genre and would like to create a new action game, but it's unclear when that might happen. RPGs are very strong in Japan and it happens that WA has done very well with the Japanese audience, so they have continued to develop the series. However, they would like to do a new action game sometime.
On that note, they wanted to make something exciting and dynamic, and with the new battle system they wanted to make it seem bigger and splashier with the summons, so they used FMV. The game takes about 30 hours to play, but there is actually a lot of content. The pace is of the story is much faster than other Wild Arms games. In terms of volume of content, it's comparable to Wild Arms 3. Towards the end of the game you have a plane that can traverse to get anywhere, and they got rid of the hidden place discovery system from previous Wild Arms games. The game has been shifted more story driven and up tempo, rather than on exploration or puzzle solving, so they got rid of gameplay systems that slow the game down.
