schenksmill

2017-04-24

Shelved It #4 – Persona 5

Genre: JRPG
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: PS3

Admittedly this is a shelved it, kinda sorta. I fully intend to play through the rest of this in some form, even if it involves just turning down the difficulty to get through boss fights. I’m at a point where my lack of patience for the boss fight structure makes me not care about spending the effort to get through the fights, but the world that was built for this game is so good that I still feel compelled to see it. However, given I’m bending the rules to move forward, I felt like it was worth writing about this as a normal shelving incident.

I’ve played a lot of the Megami Tensei games, whether it’s the mainline titles, Persona titles, or even tangentially related ones like Tokyo Mirage Sessions. It’s worth noting in particular that Tokyo Mirage is probably the best straight JRPG I played in 2016. The biggest core problem that I typically run into is that while the shared battle system encourages smart planning to chain moves in killing enemies, it simultaneously encourages the enemies to have extremely high damage and the same chaining abilities as a balance point. The end result is a mix of fights where the difference between an extremely easy fight and one where I get one turn wiped is one that doesn’t involve player skill at all.

In general I like the battle system that these games use. The general setup is that you have a collection of demons with varying stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities, as well as core physical attacks. By taking advantage of the range of capabilities at your disposal, you can maximize damage and knock down enemies through attacking opposition weaknesses. In doing so, you gain extra attacks for hitting these weaknesses, giving the ability to chain attacks through the entire enemy party. Once they are all down, the group can attack the entire opposition at once, generally resulting in a complete wipe of the enemies. This system works fantastically well for your normal trash fights, and I could generally do most trash fights without ever being attacked, let alone taking damage. First times against new demons up being an interesting puzzle-solving opportunity in figuring out what weaknesses can be exposed, then further fights are usually a quick mop up. Getting through dungeons generally then becomes limited more by a lack of resources, or a need to go buy more SP items, rather than a need to run away for safety reasons.

Boss fights in the game generally involve the same fight pattern, with the obvious difference of not being able to one shot the fight. I’d go in with some assumed set of gear that I kind of hoped would be close to functional, then either win with no trouble or wipe immediately to some form of chain attack. If I wiped, I’d reshuffle gear, make sure I had different Personas equipped, and generally get through the phase where I died. This cycle would continue until the boss ran out of new mechanics and I won. My problem with this is that at no point did I feel the challenge was actually in finishing the boss fights. It was entirely in getting arbitrary gear to block mechanics, and having no trouble once those were covered. Rather than wipes being something that were caused by lack of skill, wipes were something I fixed by changing my accessories. The cycle of discovery in this was not something I was doing for fun, but something I was doing because the battle system actively seeks to punish you for not having specific setups. Once that setup is achieved, the boss fights lose their challenge, and end up being simple rotation fights that are not any different than big number trash fights.

The unfortunate thing is that the world surrounding this is fantastic. Persona games have always been good at mixing relatively believable characters with the Japanese lore-based fantasy and this one is no exception. The cast of characters that I had seen thus far covered a pretty wide range of personalities from your jocks to the more reserved, as well as their typical animal that talks stand-in. The visual style, particularly within the dungeons, is also about as fantastically stylish as you’ll see in a JRPG. This is backed by another fantastic soundtrack that pretty seamlessly flows between rock and acid jazz to fit the situation. On its own I don’t know that we’re going to see another game this year that will be so iconic in its visual and audio design as Persona 5.

Ultimately I’m not that surprised I’m at this point. Since I’ve played this series before, I knew what my problems were going to be with the battle system going in. I guess if there’s anything I’m surprised about, it’s that I’ve already hit the point where I stopped caring without being anywhere near the finish.

2017-04-19

Shelved It #3 – Yooka-Laylee

More Info from Playtonic

Genre: 3D Platformer
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: Steam (Linux, Mac, Windows), Xbox One, Switch

Hit or miss is the best way I can describe Yooka-Laylee. The team of ex-Rare developers clearly recognizes what made Banjo-Kazooie a good game, but at the same time it feels like they never did anything to pass that mark, and in trying to aim at nostalgia, they also didn’t fix many of the original flaws. I got through the bulk of the first two worlds, as well as their expanded forms, and while there was definitely some fun to be had, the amount of boring fluff content, and somewhat subpar writing never really gave me a drive to plow through the slower areas of the game to see the better parts. The unfortunate thing is that there is some flashes of good here, but they tend to be balanced out by negatives at the same time.

While the various jump mechanics feel good and have a nice weight to them, the camera’s inability to not get in your way means a lot of missed jumps. Even in areas where the camera is fixed, the sometimes strange angles and FOV selection ended up causing severe depth perception issues. The most unfortunate thing is that the game is drop dead gorgeous, but I spent so much time fighting the camera that I never could really be at a point where I could fully enjoy it.

While the boss fights I did tended to be a lot of fun when I was doing them correctly, odd design choices on how damage occurs often frustrated me. As an example, the World 1 boss involved leaping over rolling logs on a slope, where hitting a log would have you slide back down to the bottom. All that was fine, but hitting a log at the top would still leave all the logs I had passed, and I could receive damage on my way back down while being significantly less controllable while sliding.

Individually some of the pages were in areas where puzzle or combat segments could be fun, but an equal amount simply involved using the duo’s powers to very slowly get up a path with little to no resistance. The fact that the worlds are leveled up, rather than simply doing a larger spread of smaller worlds means that there’s a significant amount of retread through the environments. Worst of all were the arcade games, which while curious, did not need to be given multiple pages to force replays.

I think if there’s anything that I found the most surprising, it’s that the writing was just not that good. Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, or Conker’s Bad Fur Day were all examples of games out of Rare that, while goofy, had entertaining and solid writing. The writing in this game seems to just lean on puns and self-referential one liners, a lot of which are not going to stand up 5-10 years from now. It feels like they turned the humor knob of Conker too far, giving a story that even in the section I played never coalesced into something worth pushing me forward.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that this game proves that 3D platformers are dead, but I’m not convinced. I think this game just missed the mark. Even if we just look at core 3D platformers since Rare’s heyday, we have games like Jak & Daxter, the Sly Cooper series, Mario Galaxy, or the Skylanders titles. We can even stretch from there and go into the heavy weapon action of the Ratchet & Clank games bringing new twists on the genre. I suspect there’s a lot of life left in this stlye of platformer, but sitting on nostalgia just isn’t doing it, particularly if the problems of the original games are just going to be ignored.

2017-04-172018-01-13

Game Ramblings #37 – Mass Effect: Andromeda

More Info from EA

Genre: ARPG/Third Person Shooter
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: PC (Origin), Xbox One

I’ll be the first to admit that I thought the original Mass Effect trilogy was not as good as most people thought it was. While I definitely enjoyed the games, they always struck me as being solid, but not overwhelmingly good ARPGs. Their combat was always the high point for me, but I never considered it up there with the quality of a typical Bioware title, let alone even being their best sci-fi series. With that being said, you can expect that I came into this with a lot lower expectations than a lot of the general internet public, and I suspect my impressions of Andromeda will also follow that.

It’s somewhat appropriate that this is the first Mass Effect that the newer Montreal team is working on, as in a lot of ways, this game follows a similar pattern to the original Mass Effect. It’s very distinctly a start to something bigger that will be established in future titles. The story starts to establish a lot of starting threads, but only hints at the larger problems that future games will definitely establish. The gameplay has also leaned back toward the original, with a lot more emphasis on exploration of open environments while travelling around in a vehicle, rather than the more structured linear levels that the later games started to head towards. At the same time, it shows a lot of rough edges like the original that I can only assume will be worked out as the team gets their feet under them on titles of such large scope. So, in the end is the game actually good?

The core combat is definitely a high point here. The core of the combat is still there from the original trilogy, with the core third-person shooter elements backed up by the use of biotic and tech-based powers. Like the originals, the skills are earned and powered up via skill points given when leveling up. Where I think things start to depart is that the Montreal team has leaned even heavier into the action elements that the first game sometimes had a tendency to avoid.

There’s no longer options at all to pause and aim mid-combat, so there is significantly less time spent in menus queuing up skills. These are now loaded into profiles that can be hot-swapped, allowing you to setup a number of preset configurations based on what style of loadout you need. It also felt like there was a much larger emphasis on dodge and cover mechanics, with enemies flanking me within encounters, leading me to jump between cover on the fly as I was picking off enemy targets.

Especially important is that the guns feel fantastic. The weapons I used felt like they were appropriately powerful, with steady but manageable amounts of recoil, stat-modifiable accuracy, and obvious power. I largely did a soldier main-class build, so most of my upgrades were in supporting weapon damage and my own defense stats, so my main emphasis wasn’t on heavy use of skills, but in finding weapons that I was able to quickly and efficiently remove targets from the encounters. While I ended up finding a handful of favorite weapon types that I was most comfortable with, each weapon category had a large variety of individual types. For example, assault rifles had anything from high rate of fire pray and spray weapons, to small magazine burst fire, to single-shot pseudo rifles. This variety extended through the other types as well, so I’d imagine it would be hard to not find some weapons you like, whether you want to use sniper rifles to pick off enemies from a distance, or shotguns to get up close for big damage. Also worth noting is that you can hybridize a lot of weapons through mods, adding anything from scopes to stabilizers to bring aspects of your favorites to other weapons.

Where things really started to lose their shine was when I was out of combat. While the core lore surrounding the Andromeda galaxy was interesting, the individual character interactions ranged from simply being decent to being downright bad. The voice acting in general was all over the place, with a lot of the larger moments accentuated by lifeless voiceovers. It’s also worth noting that the larger internet complaints about the facial animations are pretty accurate. I’m not going to fault the team that much for going with a more procedural-based animation system given the scope of the game, but it’s pretty clear the system could have used some more time cooking. It also didn’t help them that Frostbite games in general have never handled facial animation that well (seriously, take a look at Mirror’s Edge Catalyst), and you can really see the weakness of the engine in trying to handle heavily story-based content.

The lack of polish also extends to the UI. There’s a number of places where the UI flow just did not work well at all. Crafting was generally a chore, having to first learn recipes, then back out to a different screen to craft them. Comparing items within the inventory was a crap shoot at best. The scanning of worlds within the galaxy map was an extremely slow process, despite the inclusion of a cutscene skip button within the last patch. This is on top of the fact that pretty much any of the game’s soft locks that I ran into happened because the UI would get into a bad state and block input into other areas. I’ve heard from more than one developer that this is not an uncommon problem with Frostbite, so again this goes back to an unfortunate situation where the engine seems to not really be ready for this kind of large scale single-player experience.

In the end my opinion of Andromeda is really not much different than my opinion of the original trilogy. Without a doubt this game has some rough edges, and definitely should have had another 3-6 months to clean some things up. That said, I absolutely enjoyed the experience, and got 50 hours out of it before hitting the end of the game. If there’s anything that I think is unfortunate about the situation, it’s that the team was probably stuck between a rock and a hard place here. EA very likely mandated release in March to beat the end of their fiscal year. They also definitely mandated the use of Frostbite 3 over UE3 or UE4, so there was a complete loss of knowledge of the toolset used to make the original trilogy.

Hopefully by the time Andromeda 2 comes out, development will be a bit cleaner, but at least for now we’re starting off in a place where things can grow into something great. If nothing else, they can lean on the combat systems they’ve built and go from there.