Author: schenksmill

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Game Ramblings #21 – Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens

More Info from WB Games

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Also Available On: Android, iOS, PC, 3DS, PS3, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One

I’m a glutton for punishment when it comes to games with tiny little icons all over the map.  Assassin’s Creed and its glut of side missions causes me to spend hours doing chores every time a new one of those comes out.  Any open world GTA-style game I’m almost guaranteed to get sidetracked from the story while doing random shit all over the world.  In Lego games, I have to collect every single little damn character minifig, and enjoy myself doing it.  Lego TFA is no different, with characters and vehicles galore to collect, and I made damn sure to get my platinum trophy doing it.

If you’ve never played a Lego game before, they generally follow the same pattern.  Take a movie, twist it a lot with comedic reinvisioning of the story, make everything explode into lego studs that act as currency, and good to go.  They’re generally light hearted games, with good puzzle elements, and surprisingly fun combat for a simple game.  They also generally have a LOT of side quests in open hub worlds, and upwards of a couple hundred character minifigs to find and purchase.  Short version; this is a Lego fan’s dream, even moreso if they are a Star Wars fan.

All that said, as a standalone experience, this is still easily worth recommending.  The combat is typical short-combo action game combat, but the variety of characters and difference in melee and ranged combat gives some nice flexibility.  In addition, all characters can activate unique powers to help solve puzzles, so having a large crew of characters for post-game completion is also a big benefit.  By the end, most free play levels going for completion, it wouldn’t be too uncommon for me to be rotating between 10-15 different characters to grab everything.

In the end, whether or not you’d like this style of game is entirely up to whether or not you enjoy sort of light-action and a lot of collecting.  I wouldn’t lie and say it doesn’t get monotonous at times, but this is one of the best of this type of game that I’ve played of late.

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Game Ramblings #20 – Xeodrifter

More info from Renegade Kid

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: Action/Platformer, Metroidvania
  • Also Available On: PC, 3DS, Vita, Wii U

I’ve been grabbing a lot of the releases by Limited Run Games for my collection of late, and being a fan of Metroidvania games, this one was at the top of my list.  While this isn’t the best Metroidvania I’ve ever played, it’s one of best in terms of its raw mechanics, and that props up the main issues that I had with the game.  In the end, I really had two main issues with the game; it’s length and repetition of boss battles.

Unlike Metroid’s generally single open world, Xeodrifter takes place on 4 smaller locations.  While there is a bit of revisiting to each location, the small size means there is not much in the way of secret paths to visit.  There are a handful of spots in each world with hidden health or weapon upgrades, but not the breadth of secret areas that the Metroid games use to open up entirely new paths for core traversal.

Like Metroid, each core upgrade is also given after a boss battle.  However, the bosses in Xeodrifter all have the same visual design, other than a color palette swap.  Each battle also builds on top of the previous, with largely the same mechanics, with generally a single addition using the skill learned from the previous battle.  By the end of the game, this makes the boss fights quite a lot easier, as you’ve generally already learned the pattern of how to beat the boss, and can generally make a pretty good guess at what the new mechanic will be.

That said, mechanically this game really does shine.  It’s core shooting and movement is extremely fluid, and at a generally faster pace than would be expected out of the bigger names titles in the genre.  The upgrades also add a lot of flexibility to the game, with the standout probably being the upgrade that allows you to pass between different depths in the scene, not unlike the 3D gameplay used in recent 3DS Kirby titles.  Combined with other abilities, such as the submarine and dashing, you’ll often be juggling movement and shooting across multiple planes of gameplay at the same time.

Also of note is the gun upgrade system.  This game ignores the more standard straight beam upgrades from Metroid in place of a point-based upgrade system.  The guns can be upgraded in 5 ways; bullet size, bullet speed, fire rate, fire spread, and movement wave width.  Because of this, the guns can be upgraded in a way that suits the player’s style, rather than just being a straight upgrade.  For example, I maxed bullet size and fire rate, while putting a few points into the movement wave.  What this gave me was effectively a machine gun shooting large pellets, while moving in a small wave pattern.  I could have just as easily made a powerful slow firing shotgun, or something akin to a rail gun depending on how I wanted to play.  It was a truly fun way for them to handle the hidden upgrades typical of the genre.

Generally speaking, if you’re a fan of Metroidvanias, this is probably worth a try.  The game has its issues, but it has great core mechnicas, and is relatively cheap, so for a bit of a time filler, it’s worth the play.

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Game Ramblings #19 – Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE

More info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Wii U

I’m gonna start this off with some big words.  This is the best JRPG I’ve played this year.  This is also probably the best JRPG I’ve played on the current PS4/Wii U generation of consoles.  The only two traditional JRPGs I think have come close in that timeframe are Persona 4 and Shin Megami Tensei 4, which not too shockingly share a development studio and a lot of gameplay with this one.  There’s something in the water at Atlus, and if you’re a fan of JRPGs, this is one I would go as far as saying it’s worth buying a console for.

It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say that this is basically Persona 5, if Persona 5 wasn’t also coming down the pipeline.  It shares a lot of the DNA of that series, and will be largely familiar to fans of P4.  The main cast go in and out of an alternate dimension, they’re possessed by beings from that dimension, and they battle demons while in that dimension.  Sure, the alternate dimension is all Fire Emblem, but that’s the story covering taking place here.  There’s also the real-world interludes, this time showing the life of a Japanese entertainment agency, rather than a bunch of high schoolers, but when you aren’t battling, you’re doing a lot of relationship management similar to the Persona series.

The battle system also shares a lot with the Persona and SMT series, but starts to split away a little bit here in the specifics of how battles go.  The core of the system is the same.  The cast take turns attacking enemy demons, with order determined by built-in speed.  Hitting the enemy with an attack or spell they are weak to still gives a bonus.  However, rather than simply knocking over the enemy and gaining a bonus turn, the strength/weakness setup now initiates a chain attack among the entire party.  As the game progresses, you gain the ability to chain these together with duo attacks, as well as the ability for out-of-party members to join the attack.  Although the duo attacks are somewhat random, I’d seen up to an 18 chain, and suspect this could be pushed further if things rolled your way.  This has the effect of drastically increasing the value of knowing the weaknesses of your enemies over past SMT-series titles.  Doing anything greater than a 2 hit chain also gives bonus items and bonus money, increasing the need to take advantage of this further.  Because switching characters out during fights is free and doesn’t incur any delay, it also means that you’re constantly shuffling to take advantage of these weaknesses, even in trash fights.

There’s also a number of sub-systems that offer a lot of flexibility to how you build characters.  The short version is that any kill can drop an item type called Performa.  This can either be generic, or enemy-specific.  There’s also Performa that occurs from story events, or in treasure chests scattered around the world.  All of these can go into three different things.  The first is weapons, the second are character-specific skills and passive effects, and the third are Fire Emblem-style secondary class upgrades.

The most important of these really falls onto the weapons.  Weapons are the thing that gains skills, similar to demons in SMT or Persona skills in those titles.  The skills can either fall into main skills, combo skills, or passives.  Each weapon can give 4 skills, and can be upgraded once fully mastered to continue giving more.  Because of this, the main upgrade loop is entirely focused around maximizing the number of times you can get through weapon upgrades, and building out the individual skill trees from there.  Because each skill type is capped in the number that can be actively known, there is also a bit of a sub game in making sure that the combo skills in particular are setup in a way to maximize the amount and length of combo chains that can be pulled off by any party configuration.

In the end, there really wasn’t much that bothered me about this game.  To some extent it definitely has very SMT problems with bosses generally having one-shot mechanics.  This is definitely not something I’ve ever been a fan of, but there are plenty of options there to either force avoidance of the attacks, or in a worst-case, simply dropping the difficulty down to get through a fight, which has no penalty.  The game could probably be somewhat grindy if you aren’t actively doing the side story content, but the skill advantages of doing the side stories are so good that I don’t think it’s worth skipping that content just to save a few hours.  As it is, this is about a 60 hour game, which is perhaps on the longer side of a typical JRPG, but not by much, and I think JRPG fans will enjoy the experience throughout.