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Game Ramblings #223 – Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series, Windows

This is an easy ramblings for me to write. In a lot of ways it boils down to one question – do you like traditional JRPGs? If the answer is yes, then frankly you’ve probably already played this game. However, for as good as the original and 3DS releases of this game were, the game is just unnecessarily long. That’s something that is incredibly common for Dragon Quest games in general, though it’s been getting better in recent years. That is really what my mind was focused on coming out of this.

I had put off starting this one for a while because I didn’t really want to tackle an 80 hour JRPG. I just don’t really have that kind of time to play games anymore. I’d heard some people recommend it and noting that it was shorter. I then noticed that its How Long to Beat page was seeing 40-50 hours as a more common time to complete. That kind of time investment is a bit more doable. That drop in length by about half comes about in a few ways. However, it’s not unfair to say that it’s simply because the game just loads quicker. Getting into fights is quicker. Getting into zones is quicker. Getting through the time portals is quicker. It just compresses the experience through lack of loading.

However, the more beneficial part was how much quicker leveling can be, and that’s entirely up to the player. One of the things that recent Dragon Quest titles have been doing is giving players more control over difficulty. It started with things like an “easy” difficulty that ramped up player damage, ramped down damage taken, and ramped up XP gained. It then added a lot more over world automatic battles when you as the player have gotten strong enough. DQ7R is the most granular control that they’ve given, and it’s much to the game’s benefit.

The way that I chose to play this title was with the following settings:

  • Damage: Normal for given and received
  • XP Gained: Increased
  • Gold Gained: Increased
  • Job Points: Increased

What this essentially is is a settings group that is the game at intended difficulty, but with significantly less grinding. I was essentially choosing to just have less combat for the sake of making the experience faster while preserving difficulty. This gets combined with the fact that battles are no longer random in recent titles, so you can choose to simply skip combat entirely if you’re at an appropriate power level.

This simply makes the game faster and it’s much better as a result. The pattern I like in JRPGs is to figure out the enemy setups, fight them a few times, then move on. I don’t need to fight things dozens of times to get my value. At that point it’s just boring. In a case like this where XP gained is high, I can simply fight things to get my entertainment, then move on.

There’s additional little gameplay things that are added like save/heal points that appear frequently right before bosses to act as safety and time savers for the player. There’s a weird side effect that comes out of this – I use MP-based skills far more often. Because I don’t need to fight as much, I can dump my resources for the sake of fun. Because I know I’ll heal before a boss I’m not preserving my resources for the boss. If I’ve used everything and don’t want to spend items, I can simply avoid fighting. The combination of these things further enhances the speed of playing the game because I can simply be aggressive on offense, which is something that a lot of older JRPGs didn’t really allow.

I’ve said similar things about recent JRPGs that have pushed into streamlining the experience for the player. A recent example includes Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. I just don’t buy arguments about JRPGs needing length to be of value. To me empty grinding is just fluff and I’d rather have a shorter experience. The DQ1-3 HD2D remakes and now this DQ7 remake show that Square is taking the idea of a cleaner experience seriously for the players. This is everything about the story and metagame that made the original great, now combined with modern sensibilities around not wasting the player’s time. It’s a far better game for it.

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Game Ramblings #222 – Pokemon Pokopia

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG/Sandbox Builder
  • Platform: Switch 2

Having played Dragon Quest Builders 2, I knew roughly what I was getting into and where my expectations were. I figured I would effectively be playing the sequel to that game with a Pokemon covering. That’s definitely the bulk of what I got and those things tied to the IP were well integrated. However, what I also got that I didn’t expect was an incredibly dark story backing the setup to get us into the game, but we’ll get to that.

A lot of what made the building aspect of DQB2 work so well for me was indirectly carried over and it really settled me into the flow of the game.

The big thing for me in DQB2 was that tasks could be automated – for example, you learn to farm and task a townsperson to continue doing that for you; you learn to cook a recipe and have a townsperson continue to do that – and that still exists in some respects here. Throughout the game you start getting Pokemon or placeable items that you can add resources to to automate production. For example, Scyther can turn wood into boards if you give them to him. If you create a smelter, you can add raw ore to it to get ingots if you have a fire Pokemon. If you give clay to a fire Pokemon they can create bricks. If you put limestone in a mixer you can have a Pokemon with the Crush ability make concrete. These are all little tasks that can be done to get advanced resources. The big change from DQB2 is that the player cannot do these on their own and must have recruited the Pokemon associated with the task.

There’s a similar aspect to building that comes over here, but again in a slightly less automated way. In DQB2 you can setup builds and apply townspeople to them, but the rest of automation allows things to kind of continue on in the background while you go do anything else. Here, you setup the build, bring all the resources, recruit Pokemon with specific specialties, then set them about building the thing.

It’s a little bit more player directed, but also less automated. In a lot of ways this kind of bugged me early on as it felt like I had to be a little bit too involved with my individual Pokemon and steering them to start things for me. However, over time I kind of got used to just bringing Pokemon resources and things to do and assuming that over time they would naturally get around to handling the tasks for me and being less focused on one specific thing to do now and more on doing a wide range of tasks over time. I can easily be running around building out habitats for Pokemon or cleaning up junk or building paths or shaping the environment and by the time I get back around to the resources I need to build some story thing they’re kind of just there. It ended up steering me more into the sandbox nature of the genre than I think I typically would have been comfortable with.

A lot of the systems are kind of that way. They’re similar to DQB2, but less automated and more player directed. Where the focus has instead changed is very well oriented with the Pokemon IP. Your focus is instead on creating environments to pull Pokemon into your towns.

Every Pokemon in this game has some habitat that it wants to live in. It may be a simple four square patch of grass, or maybe it’s flowers and a shade tree, or maybe it’s a vegetable garden, or maybe it’s a volcanic rock next to lava, or maybe it’s a perch on the edge of a cliff, or maybe it’s a patch of grass that is also next to the ocean, or maybe it’s a patch of moss that is also next to a hot spring. The point being is that the player’s focus is on very specific micro tasks to bring new Pokemon into your town, and specifically because you need a variety of Pokemon to get everything done.

There’s about 30 abilities in the game and having a wide variety of them is extremely important. Some are pretty generic and end up being used across all your towns. It may be something like Burn to light campfires used to recruit certain Pokemon or Chop to create Lumber or Fly to allow you to fast travel to specific Pokemon. Some are instead pretty directly tied to the story like Rotom’s DJ ability to play music for a town party or Tinkmaster’s Engineer ability used to build a large story-focused building. Making sure that you recruit a wide range of abilities ends up being a more driving factor for your towns than the automation of DQB2 as it makes it far easier to tailor your current needs to the area you’re in if you have the ability to task any Pokemon there to do something for you. It’s also the thing that is so obviously tied to the IP as the abilities at play, how to recruit Pokemon, and ultimately getting that “collection” of Pokemon in your towns is the most Gotta Catch em All tie-in that the game has.

The one omission that did surprise me is that there was no battling. Pokemon is about collecting but it’s also about battling and the lack of it kind of points right into the overall plot. Do Pokemon battle because they’re told to or because they naturally do? Without humans, is this coexistence kind of their natural state?

So then, let’s look at the story itself. It’s dark if you actually read into it.

Spoiler

The TL;DR version is that this is the world of Pokemon, largely taking place in Gen 1 ruined cities, and all humanity has left Earth because the environment was destroyed. Rather than taking their Pokemon with them to space, they left them in the existing PC storage infrastructure in the event they could ever return back to the planet’s surface. During this process a hacker put in place safety checks to automatically release Pokemon if the return to the surface took too long and the environment improved enough to support Pokemon existing.

This kind of implies a few things. For one, humanity left and never came back and it’s not really specified how long this has been. Everything being ruins implies at least decades, if not centuries, and humanity existing at all is only finally confirmed in the credits sequence. It also implies that Ditto is a freak and can kind of exist anywhere, and that it was kind of lucky that Ditto happened to come out around the same time that Tangrowth also did, leading into the player starting to improve the world. It implies that the player setting up habitats for Pokemon isn’t actually recruiting wild Pokemon because they all likely were killed by the natural disasters but instead is setting up habitats in a way that the PC storage system finds candidate Pokemon to release back into the wild. The fact that humans were not accessing their Pokemon in space also implies that humanity is far enough away that they literally cannot and do not have access to Earth’s systems and they kind of just left it all behind. All throughout the game it’s hammered into the player that the Pokemon miss their humans, and the game resolves by basically showing that humanity will not know about the Pokemon fixing the environment for long enough that it’s unlikely the Pokemon are still alive. On the surface this just looks like a cute Pokemon game, but the lore ends up being horrifying to think about.

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Like the Pokemon Legends games, this is a breath of fresh air for Pokemon. It’s very obviously Dragon Quest Builders 3 in a different IP, but it works pretty seamlessly. It takes systems that worked from that series, morphs them a bit to fit into collecting Pokemon, and hits a really good balance of IP nostalgia and solid core systems that are slightly pushed in a direction that fits Pokemon better. Frankly, it also fills a hole left by the lack of a new Animal Crossing game. It’s just a really solid game.

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Game Ramblings #221 – Minishoot Adventures

  • Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

Frankly I just needed a break from Pokopia and the new Warcraft expansion and this one was the winner. I’d seen it popping up a lot on social media as something that may be a hidden game of the year with its console releases, so it seemed like I shoudl at least give it a shot. Social media was absolutely right here.

I know that the genres up there and the screenshot don’t make any sense together. Just go with it. This is Link to the Past if Zelda was a twin stick shooter. It jumps back and forth between overworld and dungeon segments like that. Where it gets the Metroidvania aspect is that the upgrades are generally more tuned toward things that aid in traversal that allow you to go back through areas you’ve visited prior for more content in a way that feels more involved than was typical of 2D Zelda.

As an example, early on it becomes pretty obvious that you’re limited by things like gaps and water, both of which are blockers for the player traversal. The first few dungeons give you upgrades straight in this progression. First you get a basic boost to move faster, which you can use to clear gaps with ramps. You then earn a jumpy/teleporty/dodgy maneuver to clear gaps on your own. You then get an upgrade to allow you to hover on water. These are all things that are earned by completing dungeons, but unlike Zelda these aren’t things that you use to complete a dungeon. Frankly, the bosses are all generally able to be defeated without them – although dodging through bullets or using speed boost to get to weak points quicker is certainly recommended. However, the upgrades have their biggest impact in the overworld. Even the biggest direct offense upgrade – a charge-based overpowered set of bullets – is used more to break down walls than really push combat. It’s that use of upgrades as overworld capabilities that makes this feel more directly Metroid than I was expecting.

But none of that would matter if the combat wasn’t fun and that does keeps me drawn in. The combat is constantly fun to engage with. Overworld combat is quick and aggressive with enemies coming from all over as you’re running through the world between dungeons and small little reward areas. Stuff will pop in and come in from off screen, making you stay on your toes. Dungeons have much more controlled room-based segments where waves with specific patterns come in. Some force you to move around in ways to avoid bullet waves, some to avoid enemies charging you, some to force you to kill things fast or be overwhelmed. Bosses then lean full in to the bullet hell where it often becomes less important to quickly kill the boss, and more important to avoid damage as first priority. I could disconnect the Zelda/Metroidvania metagame aspects and this game would still be good and still be engaging to run through as just a straight boss sequence (…which they let you do in the post game!).

However, it all felt fair. I usually enjoy bullet hell style games in pretty small bursts because they are usually exhausting. I finished this one in two seatings. I died a few times here and there, but checkpoints were common so I wasn’t necessarily losing a bunch of progress. Health during fights helps give some padding when I simply couldn’t avoid everything, and health drops were common enough (and could be upgraded to be more common!) to allow dungeon wave fights to feel pretty isolated from each other in a way that allowed them to individually be harder, knowing I would come out the other side with enough drops to be near full again. This is perhaps where the game felt the most Zelda to me in a way where difficulty came out of individual challenges, and not in stringing together a long sequence of simply avoiding damage.

I suppose pleasant surprise is the best way to describe this for me, but frankly it was the breath of fresh air I needed. Pokopia is a ton of fun, but it’s specific and detailed and slow in a way that I kind of jump in and out of it. World of Warcraft is fresh from a new expansion pack but is a game I’ve been playing for near 20 years and something I need to disengage from after a couple hours of play. This fit right in the gap for me. It was fast and exciting and interesting and fair and low friction while still being challenging. It was the break I needed.