LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

Those are some bigass bugs.

Wild ARMs 1.

Go through the dungeon, on certain walls as you go are three plaques with poems on them. One describes the east wind as representing courage, another describes the west wind as representing love, and one describes the hope as coming from within mankind's heart. There is also a fourth plaque stating that you must free yourself from desire, for desire is the source of evil in the world. This is symbolism that comes up repeatedly throughout the game, and Wild ARMs the kind of game that has books and stone plaques full of mythology scattered throughout almost every area of the game, so it's not immediately obvious they're part of a riddle until you get to the final room and there are three switches on the ground and four pushable colored statues.

Wait, four colored statues? So which color is which? Well, there are key items you've picked up over the course of the game and subsequently forgotten about, which are small idols representing each of the three primary guardians. The idols of Zephyr, Raftina and Justine, the guardians of Hope, Love and Courage, respectively. The icons in your inventory are colored yellow, red and blue, respectively. So yellow is hope, red is love, and blue is courage.

There is a fourth guardian, Luceid, the guardian of Desire, who has betrayed the first three guardians and joined the demons. (He is actually the boss of this dungeon.) By process of elimination, the green statue must represent desire.

Push the red statue onto the left switch.
Push the blue statue onto the right switch.
Push the yellow statue onto the center switch.

Nothing happens. What the hell. Did I get this wrong? Just figuring this much out took like two hours of thinking and wandering around and trying to find clues. Argh, at this point in the game I'm going crazy.

But there's a fourth step to the puzzle. You have to let your desire crumble.

Put a bomb next to the green statue and blow it up.

After five hours I figure this out and am physically weeping. I am so fucking pleased with myself that I don't even bother to fight the boss. I am utterly satisfied, I save and quit and turn the TV off and go to bed without a word because no other experience can compare. I convert to Buddhism and become a monk and live in the snowy mountaintops for the rest of my life, meditating day and night, at utter peace with the universe. Best puzzle in the history of RPGs.

author=tpasmall
I think the general consensus is that whatever you decide, have a purpose for it.

This is pretty good advice for almost any aspect of game design. My only further input is that not only do you need to have a purpose in mind for your own method, but you need to know the benefits and purposes of doing it other ways, so you can know what you're losing out on. That's why I originally asked for other people's reasons for using world maps. It helps me see what the side-effects of my decision are, and weigh the pros and cons against each-other.

Clearly we need a thing like My Google or whatever the hell, where it lets users customize which items are shows on the page for them.

My front page would be Latest Articles, Latest Posts, Latest Scripts, and 80 random screenshots. And then I still would never visit the front page anyway and would continue to just have my RMN bookmark go straight to the forum.

How considerate of the ancient Ograrians to put big orange arrows pointing to the exit. They must have had strict fire code requirements when designing buildings.