Author: schenksmill

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Game Ramblings #41 – Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment

More Info from Yacht Club Games

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Vita
  • Also Available On: Windows, Linux, OS X, PS3, PS4, Wii U, 3DS, Xbox One, Fire TV

TL;DR

  • As mechanically tight and satisfying as the original Shovel of Hope campaign.
  • Fills a neat void as a prequel story to the original campaign.  Gives a lot of great backstory to one of the original bosses.
  • Changes to core mechanics greatly benefit traversal-based puzzle solving and bring a nice twist to combat.

Let’s get this out of the way.  If you’ve never played Shovel Knight, go grab the original campaign right now.  It’s one of the greatest examples in the past few years of a mechanically solid 2D platformer, regardless of the fact that it then goes even further and solidly represents an 8-bit style to great effect.  Specter of Torment is now the third campaign under the Shovel Knight umbrella, covering the prequel backstory to the Specter Knight boss from the original.  It brings some interesting mechanics with the change in weapon that really benefit the expansion overall.

The big obvious change here is that you’ve got a scythe instead of a shovel.  This has some pretty big ramifications to both combat and traversal.  Straight away the shovel bounce is replaced by a lock-on melee dash used for both traversal and combat.  For traversal, this ends up giving a lot more interesting and challenging traversal options.  Enemies, obstacles, and projectiles can all be used as traversal targets, meaning that entire rooms can be traversed without touching the floor.  This is used extremely effectively in getting the Specter through auto scrolling segments where falling down would mean death.  There’s also entire runs through boss fights where I would combo dashes the entire time without touching the ground.  While the original campaign was pretty quick paced, Specter had an entirely higher level of speed, and greatly benefited from this change.  While this will feel pretty immediately familiar to players of the original, at this point I’m leaning towards a greater enjoyment of this expansion purely because everything feels so fast.  It’s one of the best feelings a game can bring when I sit there comboing enemies while juggling them in the air, and it’s rare to see a game nail it so well.

Because of the emphasis on speed over safety, the items that are earned throughout the campaign also play into this.  Rather than being generally offense focused, a lot of the items are generally interesting helper items.  There’s a healing item that allows you to take greater risks and focus more on slash combos over a defensive play style.  There’s a hover item that lets you stay in the air to extend combos or get to a platform out of reach.  There are items that spawn a secondary clone of the Specter, as well as one that spawns a projectile firing skeleton.  In general, the items are used to effectively extend the speed focus on combat, rather than being used as purely secondary weapons, and all play into making sure the speed of encounters is kept as high as possible.

Overall this was a pretty solid expansion that I think ends up surpassing the original from a pure gameplay perspective.  Like Plague of Shadows, it’s also a nice touch to see the backstory to one of the original bosses, and give them more life than simply being a target of the Shovel Knight.  Given development of these campaigns seems to be continuing, with the King Knight’s campaign being up next, the Shovel Knight as a platform seems to have a lot of life.  We’ve now got three campaigns that all play fairly differently, and Specter of Torment shows to me that they are only improving as they go along.

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Game Ramblings #40 – I am Setsuna

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Vita, PS4, Steam (Windows)

TL;DR

  • Despite the story being thematically similar to FFX, holds its own well enough to make the game worth playing.
  • Battle system was well done.  Easily possible to break the game with certain skill and gear combos, but the positioning additions to the ATB system were well placed.
  • Doesn’t do anything egregiously bad, but there’s some obvious flaws in most parts of the game
  • Game in general showed signs of being either incomplete or rushed to completion, but the core that is there is really strong.

I am Setsuna is definitely a JRPG that points back to the kinds of games Square was releasing back in the 90s and early 00s.  It directly uses a very Final Fantasy styled ATB battle system, uses a very Final Fantasy styled story, and has the same sort of mage/healer/melee/assassin character archetypes that the Final Fantasy games used.  While there are some definite places where the game has some pretty major flaws, the base that is there shows a lot of promise for the next title by Tokyo RPG Factory, Lost Sphear.

Since it’s realistically the thing that any JRPG spends the most time in, let’s talk about the battle system.  If you’ve played anything between about FF4 through 9, you’ll recognize the ATB system in place.   The battle runs in real-time, filling a meter.  When it’s full, that person can attack.  Faster characters attack more often, rinse and repeat.  In general the system has worked fine for 25 years, and in this game it’s no different.

The big things that I am Setsuna really does well that are kind of atypical usually have to do with positioning.  Rather than being fixed on one side of the screen, both friendly and enemy characters can move around the play field.  This allows for some interesting setups in hitting multiple enemies at once, whether it’s with AoE magic, melee swipes, or pass through projectiles.  This also means that party buffs, healing, and more can also take advantage of the AoE nature in order to optimize spell use.  There’s also a number of combo skills with multiple party members that take advantage of this, allowing you to line up multiple enemies in one go for much larger damage.

However, the battle system also shows one of the biggest signs of lack of polish in the game.  In general, the boss fights were a lot of single mechanics.  Put on the right gear, find the right party members, and you’re guaranteed an easy victory.  Because skills are equippable, the amount of flexibility is astounding, but can lead to some extreme breaking of the game’s difficulty curve.  For example, the Counter skill blocks ALL physical damage, so phsyical-only bosses revolved around one party member doing nothing but staying in Counter, one party member casting a Taunt skill on the Counter person, and a third party member being there to grind out damage.  It got so bad that by the end of the game, I was using three very specific party members for everything.  The title character Setsuna had a skill that did massive AoE damage + AoE Heal.  I equipped her with MP drain on damage taken and MP drain on damage dealt passive abilities, effectively meaning she did everything at next to no cost.  The second character cast a party Protect spell, and the third just did damage.  It made the game trivial, but it also seemed like what the game was balanced for given the incoming damage numbers.

The game’s presentation was the next point where there were some big highs, and also big lows.

A normal view within the I am Setsuna overworld.

For one thing, the game is astoundingly gorgeous.  The overworld takes on a very painteresque feel, with billboarded mountains and trees over a simple 3D landscape.  The main problem here is that there are no battles in the overworld at all, so you’re just running through from point A to B as fast as possible.  The little details as you walk around in the environment, from the snow falling out of trees to the trails you leave in the snow are also always well done.  However, that’s the big problem; EVERYTHING IS SNOW.  There’s effectively no environmental variety, so the towns all look similar, the forests all look similar, the caves all look similar, and they are all frozen over.

In a nice touch, the snow trails fade over time as you wander through the environment.

The soundtrack was also a bit of a mixed bag.  While the piano-only focus of the soundtrack works fantastically well in emotional moments, high tension moments lack any sort of depth to the soundtrack, with a high pace and high volume piano not really ever being enough to carry through.  The fact that the battle music adds in a bass line and some light percussion makes this even more frustrating, because they clearly put at least some thought into expanding out the landscape of the music they were writing.  It definitely didn’t need to be fully orchestrated, but adding a bit more depth in places to the music would have greatly benefited the game’s exciting moments.

Having a pixel art styled developer thanks island was a nice touch in the end game.

The little details were the last place where things were a bit of a mixed bag.  Once you get the air ship, you can run into a developer island that shows a clear nod to the team’s past games.  It’s entirely pixel art, with classic 16-bit music and visuals.  However, there’s a lot of places where things seem like they were left unfinished, with numerous empty houses in the overworld, bath houses with no meaning, and worst of all, gaining a new party member quite literally at the door to the final boss room.  There’s also a number of high level dungeons and scattered encounters that would be great to fight post-game, but can be a big pain to get to due to some of the traversal back through long linear dungeons. I hate to say the game feels unfinished, but there’s some things that definitely give me the impression that the team’s budget couldn’t quite match their ambition.

In general, I am Setsuna is a game that JRPG fans should at the very least check out.  There’s better out there for people new to the genre, but for folks looking for an ATB-system throw back, this is a pretty solid one.  For a game that’s regularly under $30, you can do much worse.  However, don’t expect a perfect game.  It definitely has its flaws, but for me it was worth overlooking them to experience what had been done here.

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Game Ramblings #39 – The Swapper

More Info from Facepalm Games

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows/Mac/Linux PC (Steam, GOG), PS3, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Fantastically well crafted puzzle/metroidvania style game
  • Interesting sci-fi driven story presented with a light touch, invites players to connect a lot of dots on their own
  • Great visual style based on a unique clay-model construction

The Swapper at its core is a game that derives straight from its title.  You play a lost explorer that finds a tool allowing them to create and swap with exact clones of themselves.  This is wrapped in a set of pretty simple mechanics and a Metroidvania-esque traversal that expand out into a huge amount of puzzle depth.  This is combined with some good visuals, and a simple but effective audio backing to create a really fantastic game.

When dealing with a puzzle game, the obvious question is whether or not the mechanics work to create interesting puzzles, and in this case, the answer is a resounding yes.  The swapper tool that the player has can only spawn new clones (to a limit of player + 4 clones) and shoot a projectile to swap to a clone.  Clones then all follow the same inputs that the main player character is doing, moving as a largely controlled herd.  However, the lighting in the levels can disable these abilities; blue lights disable clone creation, red lights disable swap projectiles, and purple disables both.  On its own, these combine to slowly ease you into the gameplay, with some of the early puzzles being some clever mix, with the player creating and moving around to platforms that are out of reach of just plain jumping.

One of the first things I noticed when I got the tool is that when I was creating clones, the game would go into a super slo-mo state.  At first this didn’t make much sense to me, until the puzzles started requiring multiple swaps in mid-air, then it became another fantastically fun ability to use.  Later puzzles started introducing gravity manipulation and pressure pads, mixing all of them together into rooms where the control of your clone herd became the ultimate goal.  By the end of the game, the puzzles were becoming a devious mix of creating clones, warping between them, and finding ways to either recombine with or kill clones in order to keep up completion of the puzzles.

The puzzles are backed by a really strong visual style.  One of the things that brought this game so much acclaim was that they quite literally created clay models for their source art, and that’s very apparent while playing.  The lighting they used was typically extremely dark, allowing for a great use of a flashlight to lead the path in hallways, then the strong colored lighting for puzzle mechanics.  I’ve thrown just a few screenshots I took below to give an idea of what the game looked like, though it certainly looks even better in motion.

It’s also worth noting that this has one of the more hilariously fucked up story endings I’ve ever played.

Story Spoiler

Given the core gameplay concept, it’s not too big of a surprise that there’s the possibility of swapping with other people, and there were some hints throughout that it had already happened. The end of the game takes full advantage of that. After crash landing on the planet below, a rescue ship finally finds you, but cannot rescue you due to lack of quarantine facilities. The game presents you with two options, die on the planet alone, or swap with the rescuer without anyone knowing what happened. The second option then takes this a step further, and gives you control of the rescuer you swapped with, causing him to fall off of a cliff to his death. Because of the rescue ship’s lack of knowledge of the swapping device, they simply saw it as the player character jumping off a cliff as a suicide.

In the end, hilariously unexpected, and a pretty fantastic way to wrap up the core mystery behind how you were going to actually get home.

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In general, I was somewhat caught by surprise by how much I enjoyed this game.  I’m generally a fan of Metroidvania-style games anyway, but without combat I wasn’t sure where this would fall fgor me.  However, the game had a really smart difficulty curve, introducing one or two mechanics, then doing a series of puzzles to reinforce the new mechanics. Ultimately, there were probably 30 or so puzzles to complete, interspersed with general traversal where story elements were introduced, and it felt pretty appropriate in length.  As far as puzzle-based games go, I can’t think of another I’ve played lately that I’d recommend as much as this unless I go back to Box Boy 3, and I think that says all that I need to say about it.