Author: schenksmill

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Year End Ramblings – Things You Should Play From 2022

2022! The count this year was definitely lower for me – 14 ramblings, 6 shelved, and a couple of more retro look backs – but shipping a game does that to you, which brings me to my first one.

Go buy High on Life! Help pay my salary!

With that self-serving nonsense out of the way, what do I think I played that was actually worth the look last year? Unfortunately a couple big names aren’t on the list because frankly I haven’t gotten to them. Crisis Core and God of War: Ragnarok are both games I’d normally expect to recommend, but I just didn’t have the time. I’m getting to that early this year though, so maybe they have a catch up chance next year. There are some things that I think stood out though.

Game Ramblings #154 – Kena: Bridge of Spirits

This was just such a pleasant surprise to me. It’s not without some level of jank, but it gave me a Souls-like combat experience without feeling over the top difficult, and when I hit points where the difficulty was frustrating me it had a slider to turn things down for me to get to areas that I was enjoying more. Little things like that are so important to my ability to enjoy games with the limited time I have, and I applaud them for doing stuff like that. It was backed with great visuals and enjoyable lore to give me a pretty early surprise for the year.

Game Ramblings #156 – Pokemon Legends: Arceus

This is an incredibly janky game. It’s often an incredibly ugly game. The balance often makes no sense to me. However, it’s fun. Having the player focus on catching instead of battling is interesting. Having the player be able to be attacked by Pokemon and be in danger is obvious. Having a relatively open world is a huge change to the meta game of finding Pokemon. This feels like an important step for the Pokemon series as a whole, and while the new entries a couple months ago feel like a step backward intro traditional territory, I’m hoping Arceus is allowing the long term planning for the series to move in new directions.

Game Ramblings #160 – Xenoblade Chronicles 3

This is an easy selection for my game of the year. It’s got a solid story, fun characters, incredibly addictive combat, a neat class system, and spectacularly impressive environments. It’s the culmination of a lot of things that were learned across the previous titles, and feels like it takes the best of each entry to finalize the overall story arc for the series. This is a game that I recommend buying a Switch for.

Game Ramblings #166 – Sonic Frontiers

I expected to absolutely hate this game just based on how inconsistent the 3D Sonic games have been through the years. This also wasn’t helped by coming out of the gate with some really awkward trailers. However, in practice it was hard to put down. It feels like the Mario Odyssey of Sonic games where there’s always something fun to do around every corner. However, that does come with a heaping side of usual Sonic jank. Luckily it wasn’t enough to really put a damper on the experience, and this probably came in as my surprise of the year.

The common thread for me this past year is that I’m becoming increasingly unwilling to deal with annoyances. Between family time and trying to ship a game, I just didn’t have the time to waste on bullshit. That left me with far fewer JRPGs than typical with me saving that time for truly spectacular entries. That had me shelving a higher amount of games than usual, basically once I hit the first sign of boredom with what was in front of me. However, there’s still so much quality stuff being released that I was never without something cool to play. I’m entering 2023 still catching up on some big titles and I’m looking forward to cranking through those to start off the year here.

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Shelved It #19 – Sports Story

More Info from Sidebar Games

  • Genre: RPG
  • Platform: Switch

I really enjoyed Golf Story quite a lot, so I figured this was going to be an automatic home run. However, it just never hit for me. It’s not that the core game is really that different from the original, but some minor changes cascade into a lot of unnecessary-feeling drudgery. This then gets combined with day-1 performance, stability, and bug issues to turn into an experience that really just made me tune out. To say it was a disappointment would be a massive understatement.

I could probably forgive a lot of things about this game if it ultimately didn’t just baffle me with a lot of what was going on when I did end up in the golf portion of the game. The previous one had some pretty wild gimmicky courses, but they were fun because of the gimmicks. In what I’ve seen of Sports Story, the gimmicks are way reduced, so the golf is just kind of normal. However, it’s wildly inconsistent. Take these two videos from a desert course:

This first one shows what is effectively a shot from the rough in this course going completely wild. Does it have something to do with the terrain I shot from? Maybe, but it’s not entirely clear why that would be the result of a pretty good shot. Even if that is intended, why is that a good idea? It’s incredible player friction to randomly penalize them for doing things correctly.

This second video shows me hitting a mine on my shot. Again, am I hitting it purely because I’m doing a relatively low driver shot? Probably. Does that make sense at all from a gameplay perspective to penalize a player that much? Not really. I was taking an allegedly safe fairway shot and just got hosed from it.

That sort of decision making is present everywhere in this game. Where the original had some amount of RPGish mechanics to lead you through some fun interactions, this one leans way too heavily on fetch quests. Worse, the fetch quests are generally vague and offer no actual direction, so you’ll find yourself wandering around trying to find the right target instead of simply playing the game. It’s simply increased player friction that does nothing to serve improving the player experience.

So then this gets into another point of frustration for me. The couple of times that the game leans into doing dungeon-style experiences, it’s a lot of fun. There’s the one from the pic above where you go through a Zelda-style top-down dungeon playing minigolf to complete puzzles. This is complete with your usual assortment of keys to find and a boss fight at the end. Another one of them is an NES Metal Gear style dungeon built heavily around stealth mechanics. Both of these are really well-crafted homages to past games, so seeing the rest of the game around it falter is hugely disappointing.

That’s to say nothing of the other sports involved here. Tennis is the biggest star, with its own entire academy side story. Unfortunately, as seen above, the actual tennis experience is wildly inconsistent with reality. The core rules of tennis aren’t respected. Who gets points is sometimes hard to guess. I also managed to break the quest line in the academy, so I was never actually able to finish it.

In terms of other sports, cricket and baseball are lightly represented but aren’t more than single button mash to hit with timing being loosely important. I played volleyball once and never came back to it. I played soccer penalty kicks a couple times, but it was pretty much ball will always curve left so aim correct to win. There is a neat Excitebike-style minigame that comes up once in each world, and that’s probably the best of the bunch. However, none of them ever truly live up to the promise of this being a bunch of well integrated sports. They feel like they’re there for the sake of being there, rather than for improving the game.

I’m cognizant of the fact that it probably sounds like I’m being incredibly harsh on this game and there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. However, I want to make sure that I’m getting across how disappointed I am. This is easily my letdown of the year. It’s not even that new things didn’t pan out, but the core of what made the previous title so good also feels like it’s taken obvious steps backwards. The RPG progression is not as fun, the golf game is inconsistent, the game is not stable and has framerate issues that come up during shooting. It just feels like a game that missed the mark and I’m sad for that fact because I’ve so been looking forward to playing this one all year.

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Game Ramblings #166 – Sonic Frontiers

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Steam

This is such a strange game. It’s undeniably Sonic, but at the same time it’s not. It’s got little pieces of things like Sonic Adventure or Generations, but those are just hints. They trigger a bit of nostalgia but don’t lean into it. It’s got the speed of the series, but uses it in new ways. It’s still maybe not the best example of a 3D platformer, but it does a lot interesting, and importantly it stays fun.

A lot of the early discourse I saw on this one was that it was a Sonic game through the lens of Breath of the Wild. I don’t necessarily think that’s true. Ya it’s open world, and ya it has the overworld red moon reset mechanic, but I don’t really get the Breath vibe from it. What I do get is entirely Mario Odyssey. It has the same feeling that there’s something to do around every corner, and you’ll always be rewarded. It also has the same pace. Where Breath tolled out rewards infrequently through the shrines, Odyssey set moons down everywhere, to the point where you were getting moons sometimes at the pace of a few per minute. That is the feeling that I hit here.

The individual little actions are never that complex. It’s always some jump pad that gets you onto a rail, but they’re always fun. It’s almost always some little 15 second quick hit platforming segment, but it hits the manic Sonic pace and ends with some reward. Usually it’s something to collect to eventually push the story forward, but you end up hitting so many of these little things that you’re hardly ever prevented from moving the story forward if you want to. What generally ends up happening instead is that you start going towards the next story beat, find about 40 things to accidentally do along the way, forget where you were trying to go, and end up completely in the wrong direction while having fun the entire time. That’s the Odyssey feel to me, and it’s what made both games work so well for me.

How it all ends up tied together also works inexplicably well. The overworld has a bunch of little combat segments against minibosses that end up working well to show some combat variety. Some of them end up being dash target-focused, and feel more like traditional action bosses fights. Some of them are more focused on taking advantage of the more typical fixed Sonic camera and feel like more traditional gameplay for the series. There’s also a whole bunch of Generations-style Sonic levels that offer more of what the series was used to offer. I suppose in hindsight, these are a pretty good analogue for the Breath shrines, but they serve a different purpose. Rather than being puzzle segments, these feel like pace breakers. The rest of the game is short segments of fairly specific platforming elements. These end up being longer sections that are typically speed and spectacle with a reward at the end, allowing the player to have a high excitement break in the middle of smaller actions.

All of this is bookended by some extreme boss fights. These are all spectacle and basically involve you turning into a super saiyan and beating the hell out of a kaiju. Does it make sense? No. Is it challenging? No. Is it hilariously fun? Absolutely. There is nothing to these fights that actually ends up expanding the mechanics of the game. You’ve got a bunch of auto targeted weakpoints to hit while you have effectively close to infinite health, so long as you beat a soft timer in place. It’s all button spam and visual chaos and it’s incredible.

That said, the entire game is of a B-movie jank level that makes it simultaneously hilarious. The pinball minigame? Absolutely unplayable. The physics in less restricted movement sections? Shooting off in the wrong direction on a jump is not unusual. The story and voice acting and overall presentation? It’s there, but only to serve some minimum needed for the game to ship. Targeting reliability during large combat segments? As reliable as my internet was when I still used Comcast. The game often succeeds despite itself, which is something pretty normal for the series over the past couple of decades.

It’s frustrating that they continue to be unable to tie together a full package, but when the game ends up being so fun anyway I guess I’m not really too annoyed to care. The Sonic series has had so many ups and downs that when I get an entry that ends up being fun, I just roll with it. This is up there with Mania or Generations for me as games that prove the series still has some life in it. I also fully expect that for the next entry everything learned here will be thrown out and ignored, but I sure hope I’m wrong and we see more iteration on this idea. It’s got a lot of potential that has only started to show.