Since the launch of the original Wild Arms title in 1996,[2] the series has gone on to encompass several media, including toys, manga, mobile phone applications, and a 22-episode anime.

[3] Supervised and designed primarily by Akifumi Kaneko and Takashi Fukushima, 1996's Wild Arms, while still retaining traditional two-dimensional characters and backgrounds, became one of the first role-playing titles released to showcase 3D battle sequences.

Drawing inspiration from manga such as Yasuhiro Nightow's Trigun, Kaneko and Fukushima crafted a video game world that resembles the contemporary fantasy environment seen in similar titles.

[4] References to seminal role-playing game elements influenced by European fantasy such as castles, magic, dragons, and monsters, were added to attract players to a familiar concept, as well as allow scenario writers from other projects.

The groundwork for the series' music was laid by composer Michiko Naruke, who had previously only written the scores to Super Nintendo Entertainment System titles.

The practical usage of ARMs, either to protect or destroy life, is left to the user's discretion, and serves as a plot point within each game to establish a character's true motives.

The governing forces of the planet are personified as "Guardians", spirit-like anthropomorphic creatures who act as the gods of natural aspects such as water, fire, and wind, along with human traits such as love, hope, and courage.

The primary heroes of each game often ally themselves with these Guardians to defeat technology-reliant or ecologically unconscious villains who would either subjugate or destroy the world to suit their respective goals.

[13] Filgaia is a fantasy world containing a variety of terrain, including deserts, red rock canyons, plains, forests, mountainous regions, grasslands, and Arctic tundras, though their predominance varies from one game to the next.

[3] Though human towns and cities are plentiful, the wilderness that encompasses most of the landscape is riddled with monsters and other beasts, as well as ruins or dungeons from earlier eras that house ancient treasures inaccessible to all but skilled adventurers.

When the Guardian Blade was activated, it sucked the vitality out of part of the planet and started the decay that would slowly turn Filgaia into a barren wasteland that would soon be impossible for the Elw, who were dependent on nature, to live on.

[30] The game takes place in a world afflicted by desertification and governed by the Order of the Sacred Key, which fights creatures known as Anomalies using powerful ARM weapons.

[31] Flower Thieves takes place thousands of years after a war between humans and demons destroyed much of the life on the planet, turning the world into a scorched wasteland.

Set in a dystopian future, the manga features a large group of humans on their last legs, living in the overcrowded city of Upper Hose where flowers and other flora are rare and valuable.

When a plant-eating monster known as a "Flower Thief" attacks a mysterious girl named Jechika, a young boy, Maxi, must use a forbidden ARM weapon to save her, and is subsequently expelled from the city for using illegal technology.

Traveling into the wilderness with Jechika and a florist named Gi, Maxi sets off on a quest to restore the balance of nature throughout the world and make the earth habitable again.

[32] Wild Arms: Twilight Venom is a 22-episode anime series originally broadcast on Japan's WOWOW network from October 1999 to March 2000 produced by Studio Bee Train.

[33] Directed by Itsuro Kawasaki and Kōichi Mashimo, the series follows the adventures of two treasure hunters—Loretta, an aspiring sorceress and Mirabelle, a Crimson Noble—who stumble upon the body of Sheyenne Rainstorm, a warrior from the past reborn as a 10-year-old boy.

The first album, Feeling Wind, released August 2006, contains piano interpretations of various songs performed by Haruki Mino and Fumito Hirata and arranged by Yasuo Sako,[38] and came packaged with a special edition songbook entitled Piece of Tears featuring liner notes for each track as well as interviews with long-time series composer Michiko Naruke.

[53] Cebulski stated his opinion that Wild Arms 2 was the "black sheep" of the franchise, featuring an unusually mature and ambitious plot and themes that resembles the game Xenogears and the later works of Yoko Taro, but a narrative which is "confused, at times even totally incomprehensible".

[55] He called its successor a "jarring change" to a more heavily sci-fi "mecha anime" setting, but one that was needed and welcome due to its older mechanics having peaked and run out of new ways to explore.