Author: schenksmill

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Game Ramblings #209 – Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution

More Info from WayForward

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: GBA
  • Also Available On: Switch, PS4, PS5, Steam

It’s interesting playing a new GBA game that clearly benefits from lessons learned over 20 years of making games. While this is an “old” game revisited and completed it’s clearly been given a modern touch. This is simply a great game on GBA rather than a great GBA game and that modern feeling is surprising, even knowing how good this series has been.

Looking at this purely from a Shantae perspective, this leans a lot more toward the level focused gameplay of older titles than that of Seven Sirens but that makes a lot of sense. This was supposed to fall in between the original and Risky’s Revenge. It certainly has some Metroidvania elements like hidden treasures, upgrades, and small segments of paths that require revisiting areas. However, the focus is on core platforming gameplay and it is smooth.

The thing that I often find difficult about going back to a lot of older games is that they dealt with a lot of platform restrictions via brute force, and that often meant that there is jank or slowness built into the experience. You’ll sometimes see if with weird air control or slow movement in platforming gameplay. You’ll see it in slow usability of menus. You’ll see it in extreme levels of not explaining what the player should at least be trying to do. None of that is present here.

It’s a series of really small things, but movement here feels modern. In regular platforming movement is really fast. Normally I would expect that the limited screen space of the GBA would be a hazard here, but this is paired with what is really one of the best visual styles of any game I’ve played on the platform. Importantly, the thing that makes it work is that distinguishing enemies from the background at a glance is immediate so you don’t have to slow down to avoid danger. You run quickly, dispatch enemies quickly, and move on. This is paired with the movement being similarly smooth in transformations – climbing on spider webs is super agile, flying as a harpy is fast, wrecklessly dashing as an elephant removes a lot of danger – so that no matter what movement you’re in you just kind of intuitively go at it.

This bunch of little things also goes straight into overall UX. Transformations are linked to B+<something> combos and are super snappy, so you can switch to the right transformation quickly. Switching between magic types is fast and quick to use despite the overall lack of button options. There’s a whole upgrade path that you can steer your play time through, but they’re all obvious in terms of their use – some are power curve upgrades while some are simply ease of use, such as a purchaseable money multiplier. Talking to characters in the world is the primary way of getting clues about what to do, so it’s both not hand holding but also not vague. If you want to simply explore you can, but you can also be given instructions if you choose to dig for it. The primary meta game mechanic involves changing the background and foreground layers and moving between them, and that again is super fast but flashy enough to be impressive every time. Basically, it all feels like something that would be incredibly in-place in a modern retro-styled title, but as something played on GBA hardware is even more impressive.

That’s not to say that this is an all timer or anything though. While the original Shantae was unbelievably good for its time and this released 20 years ago would have been up there, we’ve seen a lot of progress since then. Where this falls is somewhere along the lines of really good game that is elevated by nostalgia and the reality of the platform it’s on, but on modern platforms it’s probably more of a curiosity for fans of the series. It doesn’t really do anything new or interesting now so separate from the story of its development delays and original cancellation it doesn’t necessarily stand out from the crowd.

But boy could I think of games that are far worse.

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Game Ramblings #208 – Shadow Labyrinth

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

For a game that has Pac-Man levels, I actually found those segments to be by far the least fun sections of the game. The platforming involved in there was just never fluid or interesting. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What is there most of the time is a melee Metroidvania that surprised me in how well it took simple combat and crafted it into something fun with a very limited set of mechanics.

I can’t really think of a boss fight in this game that had more than four or five attacks, and generally they had one or two. What that really meant was that learning and avoiding the attacks was the most important part of combat, and not actually doing damage. You could ultimately indefinitely extend a boss fight via well timed defense.

Where this came in for the player was dodging and a chosen defensive maneuver – parry, shield, etc. The dodge is really what made the game sing. It’s a very fighting game-style dodge where you get pass through and immunity frames. This pushes combat in a direction where timing is the most important element. During a new encounter I’d lay back, learn the attacks, probably die a couple times, then come back in and know my timing. You hit your defensive move, lay in a handful of attacks as necessary, maybe use some excess energy on bonus damage, then time the next attack. In action games that work for me I generally talk about how the combat has a good rhythm and this has that. Once learned, most of the boss fights have pretty reliable segments of two melee combos followed very quickly by an attack with little downtime in there.

So let’s go back to probably die a couple times. Normally that’s where I find a lot of issues and even going back to ramblings like Hollow Knight that was where the game fell flat for me. Shadow Labyrinth feels like it was designed to mitigate the downsides of death. For one thing, nearly every major boss fight had a save point immediately before its room, if not a full on teleport location. This allowed the boss fights themselves to be isolated in their difficulty and let you focus on going in, learning, and immediately executing on learnings instead of having to do a death run back.

The second thing that really stood out was how many places existed that could be opened as shortcuts through the world. The map when completed really feels like it’s a series of compact loops. There’s an obvious first path through an area that you run through and find a bunch of impassable doors. You then start hitting branches in that path that loop back and end at one of those doors. If I was to really visualize it, it would be like taking a winding river as the main path and a straight line through it as the path that gets opened once you finish all the loop backs. It highly encourages exploration, often leading to upgrades, while also encouraging fast retraversal. Combined with a really solid teleportation network, every time I earned a new traversal upgrade (hook shot, double jump, air dash, etc) was very quickly followed by me happily going back to past areas to find new stuff.

Where things weren’t necessarily as positive for me largely centered around progression. This is a game that just does not offer any progression hand holding. In some ways that’s good because it forces exploration. However, in a lot of cases I want to know vaguely what direction I should be going. At one point around the middle of the game I was tasked with finding two major power sources to move the story forward but it took me about 10 hours of gameplay to complete that. It’s not that I was having trouble, but that I just kept picking the wrong direction to go in. I would go down a path for 20 or 30 minutes and hit a wall, then have to wander back and find a new direction. This continued for a long time. It’s not that I was suffering for it, because I earned a ton of upgrades. However, what it generally meant was that by the time I found the right path to where I was supposed to go I was tremendously overpowered and had nearly completed the entire map in the game. The couple hours immediately following it were just a breeze. Had I had a little bit of direction to say “go roughly into this region” I think the flow of the overall game and my character’s power curve would have been more appropriately challenging and interesting.

I could also just do without the Pac-Man challenges and I think that really differs from a lot of reviews that I read. I just found these to generally be a chore. Platforming as Pac-Man was always some variation of stiff and inconsistent. Switching between the always moving default mode and player-controlled movement mode felt like switching between two modes with equally bad weaknesses – always moving had huge weaknesses in directionality of jumping and player-controlled really felt sloppy once in the air. Getting good completion times felt like it was just learning precise movement patterns instead of actually being good at the game, and later higher challenge levels felt more like fighting mechanics than actually having fun gameplay. It felt like a bad implementation of Pac-Man on the surface and a weird distraction from what was otherwise a really solid core Metroidvania game.

Wrapping Pac-Man into the wider Namco space force lore and turning it into a Metroidvania was certainly a bold choice, but I think more than not it worked out well. Combat was a real pleasant surprise for me in that it took a simple set of mechanics but did them incredibly well. Things around that experience may not have been as solid as other entries in the wider genre, but there’s enough that works out well here for me to give this a pretty easy recommendation.

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Game Ramblings #207 – Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon

More Info from PlatinumGames

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

This game surprised me in a lot of ways. Unlike Bayonetta, it’s a low slower paced. Unlike many action/adventure games, it’s focused more on puzzle solving. Unlike most Nintendo titles, it has what initially feels like a complicated and confounding control scheme but trusts that its players will put the pieces together. It drops the series’ relatively realistic visuals for a storybook painter feel while also dropping as much of the over the top bombastic elements as a game about witches, demons, and fairies realistically could. If anything could be an anti-Bayonetta yet still exist in the IP, I suppose it makes sense that this is what it would come out being.

The control scheme is going to be the thing that makes most people pause when they look at this and go did Nintendo really allow this? It’s not bad, but it’s decidedly weird. The left analog stick and shoulders control Cereza. The right analog stick and shoulders control her demon. This is active at all times and a camera restriction forces them to be within a reasonable distance of each other. The thing that is unusual about this is that in an action game, splitting focus is typically wildly dangerous. I’m not going to say that I didn’t get into situations where I totally lost a character on screen, because it happened. However, I was often moving the two as a unit because of the mechanics that were chosen.

Cereza’s not really a combat unit in this case. What her powers are focused around is crowd control. She increasingly becomes able to stun lock one to multiple units throughout combat via her magic. This then lets her demon deal out extra damage, or in a lot of cases for my play style allowed me to focus damage on units that were not crowd controlled. The demon also has elemental powers to help specific situations – rock to break shields, water to kill fire, etc – so most of my time in combat was really a minimal portion of my brain dedicated to using my crowd control, then most of my brain focusing on demon attacks.

It surprised me how often this just worked pretty well. The game generally didn’t toss a ton of units at you at one time so losing focus on one of your characters wasn’t generally a huge issue. High danger situations for attacks typically involved boss fights, and in those cases there are lots of tools to deal with them as well. You can re-summon the demon to Cereza at any time and with later upgrades allow Cereza to move quicker when they’re together. This is really what made boss fights click. In those cases, the focus was always just the boss and playing around with their tells to stay out of danger vs using the right elements to open opportunities for Cereza to stun them and get damage in.

Ultimately it feels like combat was crafted for the control scheme rather than around it, and I get that feels like a vague distinction. In this case though, the combat is very clearly tuned toward a situation in which the player doesn’t have as good of focus as usual, so all the tools in play are to reduce the speed of needing to think. CC gives the player more safety and time. Damage buffs reinforce the use of CC. Limited enemy counts allow you to focus both characters on one spot with independent movement. Element requirements give you something specific to action upon that doesn’t involve a change in focus. It is all crafted to enhance the experience rather than a 2.5D combat experience being grafted into a weird control scheme.

The rest of the experience surrounding this is just kind of the cherry on top. There’s a decent upgrade system here to grant the player some feeling of a power curve that they can choose the direction of. There’s some light Metroidvania elements in the environment to make retraversal both beneficial and fun. There’s some light time attack elements to optional dungeons to give some side content to hit. There’s a good mix and rhythm to changes between puzzle sections and combat sections to keep the player engaged throughout. It all just kind of works well. Is it anything mind blowing? Not really. It’s all just kind of done at a high enough standard to not be a detriment, and that’s perfect for what it is.

However, this does bring up a thought that I had the entire time. Why does this game not have couch co-op? All of the entirely practical development reasons for couch co-op to not exist – screen real estate and performance with split viewports, game balance, mechanical oddities, etc – have been dealt with here. You always have two characters, they always exist independently, their UI elements are always present on screen, and there are mechanical reasons for the camera to be forcefully restricted to keep them nearby. Couch co-op is literally a drop in for this design. There are a tiny handful of spots that don’t have both characters playable for story reasons, but even then the mechanics of one or the other player having a short solo experience are fine in context for people playing together. Co-op simply just does not exist, and it’s a shame. This is a theoretically great title for people to co-op since you have two characters with two wildly different mechanic sets to allow players to choose the play style – offensive or defensive – that they prefer.

I played this on a whim and came away happily surprised. I’m generally a fan of the Bayonetta series but this was obviously something very different. Where Bayonetta is thematically as anti-Nintendo as they come, this game is for gameplay reasons as anti-Nintendo as they come. However, despite that it all works very well which leads me to believe that this was more carefully considered than I’m imagining. The controls are relatively complex but the gameplay feels tailored toward them. It ends up being an experience that feels like a well thought out package, rather than a game grafted onto a weird control scheme. It ends up just being a really pleasant surprise.