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Game Ramblings #186 – Princess Peach: Showtime!

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

I’m not going to claim that this game is a must play. I’m not going to claim that it’s even a great game. However, it has something to it that kept me playing it. To some extent it’s probably just that it worked generally well. To some extent it was absolutely that I just wanted to see the next costume change. A lot of it was honestly probably just that it wasn’t as serious as FF7: Rebirth was. At the end of the day it was just kind of consistently fun.

That’s honestly something that could be said about a lot of the past output from Good-Feel. Their projects with Nintendo are a who’s who of consistently fun experiences. Wario Land: Shake It was a fun platformer with incredible hand drawn visuals tied down with an obnoxious Wii Remote shake mechanic. Kirby’s Epic Yarn again had incredible visuals and solid platformers mechanics. Yoshi’s Woolly World again had a gorgeous unique visual style tied to fun platforming mechanics, and the same could be said about its followup Yoshi’s Crafted World. If you’re sensing a pattern here, that’s not an accident. Princess Peach: Showtime! follows the same pattern.

This game is just easy to jump in and play, which is made more impressive by the fact that each costume was different. They really took advantage of the core conceit of costume changing to keep the gameplay fresh. Every single costume can jump with the A button or take an action with a B button, so figuring out what to do is less about learning how to execute mechanics and more what those mechanics do. Swordfighter or Cowgirl? The action is a straight up attack. Detective or Patissiere? Neither of them attack so it’s a gameplay action button instead. It’s that variety of some things being really action focused and more things being slow puzzle focus that really keep the game fresh. It has a certain fast/slow back and forth that really works well. Some levels are higher stress combat and some are straight relaxation.

This is all backed by what is again a very unique visual approach. This is probably the game in Good-Feel’s arsenal that is the least unique since it’s inherently tied to modern Mario sensibilities. However, what it lacks in a unique visual theme it makes up for in pure flair. It takes the stage play Showtime! very seriously. Each level is tied to a stage play setting connected to the costume of the stage, and it’s super obvious that this is a stage play. Background elements are obviously made out of stage dressing like wood, cardboard, or stage curtains. Secret areas take you backstage behind the scaffolding. NPCs are all based around puppetry with moving hinged sections instead of organic bodies, as well as their control lines extending down from the ceiling. There’s even nice little touches here where friendly NPCs typically have white lines while enemies have glowing purple lines. This is all a company taking advantage of the theme to make an incredibly good looking experience.

However, like I mentioned – this game isn’t great and it has obvious issues that keep it in simply good territory. The most consistent problem is that a lot of the levels are simply too long for no reason. Each costume is broken into 3 levels. However, it feels like the pattern would have benefited from being extended to 5 shorter sections. The game also places a heavy emphasis on collecting, which is exacerbated by the level length. The game often blocks you from going backward, so missing a collectable can often be a 5-10 minute complete replay of a level. This would probably be fine if there was more variety, but again each costume has three distinct segments of one way to do things so there is no real replayability to any of this. It’s fun the first time and distinctly not the second. This is then wrapped into some real technical issues with low resolution and low framerate, and it’s pretty clear that this is more of a AA effort. It’s a fun one-time experience, but that’s all it is.

At the end of the day this probably hit the points I needed it to anyway. After finishing a game like FF7: Rebirth, I did not want a long or complicated experience. This is the kind of game you’ll fall into, hit your two buttons, have some fun, and be done. It’s fast and gets out of the way, so for me it was perfect. Just don’t expect an all-timer experience here, because that isn’t what you’re signing up for.

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Game Ramblings #185 – Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5

This game doesn’t have the benefit of being the first in line. It comes on the heels of the astoundingly good FFVII: Remake and continues the ongoing story. However, that wasn’t really a problem for most of the game. It continued to really push the things I liked while adding a larger open world adding a huge, varied, and beautiful open world experience. However, finishing it left me a bit at a loss – the game was definitely extremely good and had I not played the final boss I would be higher on the game, but something about the way the game wrapped up left me at a place of wanting something different.

Note: This ramblings is mostly going to be spoilers, so I’m hiding it behind spoiler tags. Obviously, read at your own risk. My ramblings for the original game absolutely covers a lot of the good here, particularly with combat, so I’m not going to retreat that stuff here.

My disappointment was tied to both the final boss from a mechanical standpoint and the way the story wrapped up, but for now we’ll start with the boss fight.

Spoiler

The final fight is (unsurprisingly) against JENOVA and Sephiroth. Where Remake had a fun spectacle fight against Sephiroth and the Whisphers, this game had a slog. The final fight in this game is at least 8, or maybe 10 phases (honestly, I lost count) full of all the worst JRPG tendencies. The fight is too long, it has too many unblockable RNG attacks, it has too many party wipe elements, it’s not hard until you get immediately wiped, it changes your party without control too much. It was just not a fun fight. Spectacle, yes. Fun, no.

The party changing was really my biggest gripe with the fight, because it made a lot of the phases not particularly fun. After playing a game for 60+ hours, I kind of had some built-in likes and dislikes to my party. Aerith was always the right one for me to have in the background handling heals. Cloud was my main damage person due to his ranged/melee flexibility, but I was always comfortable swapping him with Red. Barrett and Tifa were pretty swappable for me in terms of decent damage but great stun build-up. I was never particularly effective with Yuffie, but I could make use of her as an NPC in the party due to her useful elemental switching. Cait Sith was always a black hole for me because of his ineffectiveness without the Moogle being present and the requirement to charge the ATB meter to bring it out. I’d say I could generally switch between 3-4 of them and be immediately comfortable as long as I had some of them around.

However, each phase of the boss fight swapped the party around without your control. Some phases were just Cloud/Zack solo, which is not really all that fun. Healing while also damaging while also avoiding incoming damage is a lot, and it resulted in me caching ATB charges in case I needed them for healing instead of burning the boss. Some phases had me in random combos of the non-Cloud cast, such as a phase of Rifa, Red, and Yuffie needing to take out wings that switch their magical weakness to stun Sephiroth. The unfortunate thing is….I really didn’t have the party setup for varied magic because my focus for that had been on Cloud and Aerith, neither of whom were available. Ya I could redo my materia with a reset, but I was already 40 minutes into the fight. The final phase was the real kicker though, and it wasn’t because it was hard. It was because it felt incredibly random.

I had a series of wipes that basically resulted from “lol bad timing sucker” that didn’t feel avoidable. One wipe I had just used my ATB to heal and it was followed by Sephiroth throwing out Heartless Angel, which reduces the party to 1 HP. Because I had just used my ATB, I didn’t have any leftover to heal and couldn’t avoid damage long enough to charge it. One wipe was caused by me using an ATB attack, which was long enough that Sephiroth started Skewer during my animation and triggered it right as I finished my animation, leaving me unable to avoid it. Cloud died, and Aerith didn’t have enough ATB or really much of an ability to dodge Sephiroth’s attacks long enough to build up charge to get Cloud back up and heal Cloud and heal herself. The final wipe of the night was me getting to the last phase, which involves dodging a deadly moving attack for a bit, while also requiring you to burn him down, while also requiring you to stun him before the move ends and he wipes the party.

Ultimately my problem with the last phase, and the fight in general, was that it never really felt hard but kept finding ways to just wipe my party with single attacks. It’s not fun when that happens in general, and it’s even less fun when the party setups have changed how you’re used to playing 70 hours in, and it’s even less fun when those attacks are unavoidable and you’re an hour into the fight. The way to get through the fight is to basically just not use ATB segments, keep them around just in case, then burn them when you’re hit with the big unavoidable things. For the last phase’s big final attack, keep them around, spam them when the attack starts, and just burn to the end. Chipping away with basic attacks and storing the ATB charges just made an unnecessarily long fight even longer. As I found out I was about one Thundara away from winning on my final wipe when I finished the game during my lunch break today, which is a really annoying way to have ultimately gone from about 80% health to 0 in an instant.

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On the story front, I was also kind of disappointed with how things wrapped up, though the jury is still out there based on whatever the third game ends up being.

Spoiler

It was obvious from the previous game that this one was going to end right at the point where Aerith died in the original game. I have no problem with the fact that she died here, but I do have a problem with how they arrived at that. The previous game’s entire core conceit was that the party was able to defy fate and set their own future. This entire game felt like it was doing its best to ignore that. This was as close of a step by step retread of the original game between Midgar and Aerith dying as possible, other than some sidetracking with alternate universe Zack. However, you get to the altar in the Forgotten City and Cloud blocks Sephiroth’s attack. It’s a huge moment meant to shock FF7 fans. It’s then immediately ended by a static screen that transforms it into Aerith being stabbed. That part felt like it was directly meant to evoke the same shock of the original game’s death scene, but when it immediately follows Cloud changing fate it feels deflating and unnecessary. It’s obvious that this is now Sephiroth having direct control over fate and returning it to what he wants. It makes sense. But it also feels unearned.

One of the big things about the entire ending segment is that it’s obvious that Aerith also has control over fate in some form – whether that be direct control or at least an ability to cross between different parts of the multiverse shenanigans at play. She’s able to bring Zack into the Sephiroth fight. She’s able to bring Cloud between multiverses. She’s able to join the Sephiroth fight despite dying, presumably by coming in from the Lifestream. It just feels like she died because she was resigned to dying because that’s the fate that is required to block Meteor in the original game. It feels like the hope of fighting against fate from the original game is gone because that is what was required of the story. It again feels unearned.

If the entire point of the original game was that the party can decide their own fate, this all feels wrong to me. Sephiroth being able to so easily set fate despite showing no ability to do so at this scale previously feels sudden. Aerith suddenly not wanting to decide her own fate despite being so for it previously feels sudden. My problem with all of this isn’t that these things happened, but that they feel like they were conveniently done to maintain the original storyline. Where Remake felt like it was setting up for a new future, this feels like it was purposefully to reduce new things from occurring. It feels like a setup for part 3, rather than something done to result in an interesting part 2, and in turn it weakens the impact of both Remake and the original FF7 because it all became predictable in the end. I guess I was ultimately hoping for Aerith to live, not necessarily because I wanted her specifically to live but just because I wanted part 3 to be something different. Now I feel like I know exactly what is going to happen. The excitement of possibilities I had coming out of part 1 is now just gone.

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I don’t really want all that to make the game sound like it was bad though. I was disappointed by how it was wrapped up, but ultimately I played it for 70 hours because it was fun. The combat is a refined version of what we saw in Remake and it’s still an absolute blast – as long as you’re in control of your party make up. At this point I’m now curious what part 3 will be. It feels predictable at this point to expect it to wrap up precisely how the original game did, but I’m hoping that they go in a new direction. The story team has laid enough potential places for story changes to occur instead of being a retread of the original. Remake gave me hope that we were going to get something new and interesting, and I’m hoping that they don’t miss the opportunity.

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Game Ramblings #184 – Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Windows

I was pretty thrilled with the series’ change to JRPG in Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon but I wouldn’t like if I’m still a bit of a sucker for the series’ action gameplay in 1-6. I thought that the series had kind of reached its peak and didn’t need to explore more in the genre. Gaiden doesn’t necessarily change that feeling, but as a much smaller and quicker experience than core games in the series, it feels like a nice place to fall back into for a little while.

From a story perspective, this is an interesting one as it fills in a lot of the time gap between Yakuza 6 and roughly the mid point of 7, but as seen from the perspective of the series’ previous protagonist Kazuma Kiryu. In doing so, the change back to action gameplay makes a lot of sense. It’s a Kazuma story. It’s only focused on his actions, and not the actions of the Yakuza 7 party. From that perspective, you get thrown into a nice tight game. From a core perspective, I finished this one with a very heavy emphasis on completion and getting distracted in about 20 hours, which was about 30 hours less than my playthrough of Yakuza 0 and about 50 hours less than my playthrough of Yakuza 7.

The slimmer nature also extends to combat. The stance switching is still there, but it’s now only two styles. There’s the yakuza style which is more brawling-focused, and is a bit of a combination of some past styles with an emphasis on bigger damage at a slower pace. Agent style on the other hand is a speed and gadget-focused style new to this game. Of real note to me was the inclusion of a spider gadget that works surprisingly similar to the Marvel Spiderman web slinging, allowing you to do things like pull weapons to you, wrap enemies as a stun lock, or throw enemies across the map. It’s a surprising addition to the series that just works extremely well at giving a stance that has potential at range, while still being melee-focused from a core combo perspective.

That said, where the story was pretty compact the game did not skimp on side content. These are again largely retreads of past games, which makes sense for a smaller side story, but there’s a lot of them. Billiards, darts, a number of board games, and gambling are all available as quick hitting distractions. The thing that’s surprising here is the amount of content available. Billiards has multiple types (9-ball, 8-ball, etc) AND a set of trick shot challenges. Darts has multiple game types as well as a range of collectable dart types that ultimately improve your throws. Gambling has multiple game types as well as different betting tiers to allow you to go against more difficult situations. There’s no reason for these side things to have any depth, but here we are. It’s a staple of the series and it’s been implemented to the standard depth even in a little side game.

Of particular note for me was the inclusion of pocket circuit from Yakuza 0/Kiwami. This is based on the mini 4WD RC car hobby where you can build out custom cars using a variety of different part types, and leave the car to drive through a set course as fast as possible. This as a side game was surprisingly deep, with track types built for different specialties like hill climbing, turning control, high speed, and more. Winning races was always a matter of figuring out what gimmick the track had, then testing a car configuration built around that, then going for victory. While it’s inherently a racing mode, the fact that you don’t have direct control of the cars made this feel like more of a puzzle game than anything else, which was hugely surprising.

However, the biggest distraction in the game for me was the Coliseum. While this is a huge part of the core story of the game, it later unlocks as a wide-ranging arena mode for both solo and team play. While it definitely has some aspect of climbing the ranks through harder and harder fighters (and frankly, being the best money-gaining option in the game), the team mode was the thing that really caught my attention. This allows you to recruit people in the world and add them to your combat team, which you can then train through the ranks. Each person has some core specialty (damage, defense, healing) and some activatable skills, allowing you to play a little bit of party building to create a team whose capabilities best match your own style of play. This is again one of those systems that looks simple on the surface but has a surprising amount of depth.

I’m not surprised that I enjoyed this game given the past entries of the series that I’ve played. However, I am surprised at the level of content that Sega put into this. This was supposed to be a little side entry, so there was no reason for it to be something that I ultimately spent upwards of 30 hours in. It’s absolutely a core Yakuza game to me. It has a great golden path through the story. It’s got fun little side missions to complete. It’s got a ton of non-combat side content with a huge variety. It just is Yakuza, and it’s got me even more hyped to play Infinite Wealth in the near future.