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Game Ramblings #216 – Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: ARPG/Musou
  • Platform: Switch 2

This was a wildly fun experience, but as I played it I was left with a particular thought – this is not a particularly good musou game. In isolation, this is a much better combat experience than your typical Warriors game but so much of it occurs in either 1-on-1 boss fights or small scale combat encounters, which is completely the opposite of what I expect out of the genre. So if it steers away from the core gameplay loop that much, is it still worthwhile?

When I think of your typical Warriors title I think about huge multi-person battleground combat maps where I’m trying to capture and keep hold of multiple camps while fighting off enemy commanders, leading to fights where I’m easily eclipsing 1000+ KOs in a single round. The first Hyrule Warriors certainly leaned into that for the most part. However, that screenshot above is more typical of your Imprisonment battle with large ones reserved for a few very particular story missions. Generally speaking, the bulk of content here is a 5 minutes or less game loop where you finish a couple quick objectives on the way to a solitary boss fight. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t play much of Age of Calamity but it caught me off guard.

If the musou experience is what you’re looking for, you just aren’t going to get it here. Even in the large fights it feels mostly lost. Sure, I capture camps but very few of them are ever in future danger of being recaptured by enemies. Sure, some secondary commanders spawn but they generally bee line right for one of my NPC commanders. Sure I have a party of people that I can command, but they are wholly incapable of taking out enemies or capturing points on their own, leading to a lot of swapping who is active as the player. If someone were to hop to this right from Dynasty they would probably be very confused as to why it’s carrying the Warriors name.

But then you play some more and the combat against bosses in particular starts to grab you. Boss fights are quite simply not just hack and slash encounters.

There are elemental attacks to take into account and chaining that you can do. For example, you can freeze an enemy with a series of ice attacks, then hit it with lightning for explosion. You can combine wind attacks with other elements to create tornadoes capable of hitting large groups. you can burn an enemy then hit it with water or ice to open it up for critical damage. Dodging takes on a ton of importance here relative to other Warriors games as well. Executing a perfectly timed dodge opens up the enemy for a flurry attack where the player can lay in a bunch of large damage, as well as knock down its stun meter. Once that stun meter is knocked down all the way, it also opens up the boss for a large attack generally capable of cutting down a quarter or more of its health at once. This is then combined with the ability for pairs of player characters doing combo attacks together for similarly large damage.

These one-on-one encounters then feel a lot less like a musou experience and more like a traditional action combat game, and that is greatly to its benefit. Where I enjoyed the original Hyrule Warriors for being a musou game, I started to enjoy this game because it was not. What it ends up being for me is a game that feels like a Hyrule experience shrouded in war, rather than the more individual experience that Zelda games typically have. It feels like it’s leaning on the action combat of the series, but not leaving away the fact that in war things are often going to be faster and more chaotic. The game loop then generally being short 5 minute segments ending in a boss makes a ton of sense. You are being encouraged to quickly dispatch with unimportant KOs and focus on the small handful of big bads that are really tuned to be fun to fight within the combat paradigm that they built for the game.

So that gets us back to the question – if it steers away from the core gameplay loop that much, is it still worthwhile? I think the answer that I arrived at is that yes it is still worthwhile, and it took the game continuing to beat me over the head with spectacle to get there. As the game went on I stopped thinking about whether or not I was playing a musou game and thinking more about timing my dodges correctly. It was less important that I was KOing 1000 things and more important that I was KOing the one boss. It was less important that I was doing hack and slash chaos and more important that I was chaining elemental attacks. The combat fundamentals end up being so much fun that the things that I initially felt were missing ended up fading into the background. Yes, this may not be a typical musou game, but in the process they’ve crafted something else that is a lot of fun on its own.

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Game Ramblings #215 – Pokemon Legends: Z-A

More Info from The Pokemon Company

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch 2
  • Also Available On: Switch

This is such a strange game. At a glance it feels like it should be terrible – a Pokemon game contained to a single city with limited zones in which to catch Pokemon. However, they made a crucial decision to focus on combat and boy did that benefit the game as a whole.

If you’ve played the previous Pokemon Legends: Arceus, there’s really nothing to talk about except for combat. Simply put, combat is now done in real time in all situations. There’s no difference between fighting a wild Pokemon and fighting a trainer battle and they really lean into that. You as the trainer run around and avoid being hit by stray attacks while simultaneously hitting buttons for relevant attacks. Pokemon are quickly hot swapped so trainer fights don’t lose the real time feel as you go through your lineup of Pokemon swapping out to gain type advantages. It plays a really tight line of familiar but new for the series, even compared against the same feeling of Arceus. However, I do think it has some rough spots in their first attempt at real time.

The first obvious problem is that I think the player’s active Pokemon has too little agency of its own to actively fight. All ranged attacks are relative to the player and the Pokemon tries to follow the player around if they aren’t being actively commanded, and that’s frustrating as hell. As a player, I have to reposition frequently to avoid being hit by attacks, which then causes the Pokemon to get into spots where it has to wildly reposition just to throw a ranged attack which is always at a fixed spot relative to the player’s position, wasting a bunch of time while it repositions. The Pokemon then often gets into spots where its ranged attacks hit things that it should simply be obviously avoiding. It might be an edge of a fence or a tree or the top of a stair that will clip the attack, blocking it from hitting. It’s just consistently dumb as shit that this occurs, because a Pokemon should clearly be instinctively smart enough to reposition itself a bit to avoid this.

Where this gets particularly frustrating is that they very clearly designed the big PvE boss fights to avoid this. Those fights are all just against a Pokemon on a flat surface, and they’re spectacularly fun. These fights become some of the more chaotic avoidance situations in the game, ranging from anything like pool avoidance to bullet hell situations. Some of the early ones are certainly more straightforward damage checks, but later ones start to test the player’s ability to not just faceroll the attack buttons and actually stay moving more often. And they WORK because they DO NOT REQUIRE THE POKEMON TO THINK.

This is then compounded by the large amount of trainer battles that the game pushes you into. If Arceus was about collecting and not having trainer battles as much as possible, this is about as far opposite as you can get. There are entire segments of the game loop dedicated to trainer battles, where sections of the city are cordoned off each night just for trainers to battle in. This is where you get a lot of mileage out of having a traditionally setup party to counter as many Pokemon types as possible, but it’s also where I have my second real problem with the combat system.

Trainer battles in traditional Pokemon games largely involve you guessing your way through the first Pokemon then distinctly having the advantage to switch Pokemon simultaneous to your opponent, leaving you with a type advantage as long as you can generally know or guess the upcoming Pokemon’s weaknesses. That isn’t present here, but it’s also combined with an annoying delay when switching Pokemon where the Pokemon has to play a spawn animation before it can even begin to move for both the player and NPC characters. Generally it leaves the Pokemon open to being hit at least a couple of times before it can even begin to move. This leaves the defending Pokemon with an always present inherent disadvantage to having been put into battle, which feels generally off in the spirit of Pokemon fights. It’s not necessarily that I want to have the guaranteed type advantage of the turn-based games, but I want to at least be able to quickly get a Pokemon into battle and fighting, rather than watching it slowly spawn and be hit.

However, the bulk of the trainer battles in this are inherently more interesting because of the open world and real time nature. You can sneak up on people and knock out their opener Pokemon before they even know you are there. It’s such a dick move if this was to be happening in real life, but as a videogame power fantasy it’s spectacularly fun and effective.

The thing is, despite me having what feels like real core problems with combat I still found this to be so tremendously fun that it again represents what I think is a better path forward for the series. If Arceus represented a quicker paced capture dynamic with an open world, this represents the feeling of Pokemon in a way that more closely matches the TV series. This feels much closer to what I think Pokemon is, with more trainer fights and less capturing but done in a much quicker paced setup inherently due to it being real time. This keeps important things about the core metagame for me – forming a party tuned to type advantages, swapping them out based on what my opponents bring in, making sure that I’m tuning my move set to take advantage of things that aren’t inherent to the types of my Pokemon – and reducing overall user friction by making everything easy to get to.

If I then take combat at face value and assume that some iteration could be done to smooth it out a bit, this represents a future that I think should be core Pokemon and not side game experiment. This combat applied to the Scarlet/Violet world design would work just as well, and in particular would allow them to eliminate their time saving measure of auto result-battles in the open world that always felt like a grinding crutch to me. This combat applied to gym battles in Scarlet/Violet would make those feel like even larger spectacles. This combat applied to Terastallized Pokemon fights would make those feel like skilled battles instead of dice rolls around picking the right overpowered Pokemon. There is just a lot to be gained from Game Freak paying attention to what they are creating with these experiments, and the hope is that they do pay attention instead of throwing it away again.

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Game Ramblings #214 – Ghost of Yotei

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5

For all intents and purposes, this is a perfect iterative sequel. It’s familiar enough to not be different from what I enjoyed about the original, but it’s got enough changes to feel fresh. In some ways that is probably something that people would criticize as feeling safe, but for me it’s hitting a fine line of moving the gameplay forward without losing what it was, and that’s a tough balance to hit.

If I put this up against what I thought of Tsushima there really isn’t a huge difference in my mind. They both do the Assassin’s Creed combat hub and free range stuff meta loop very well. They both have incredibly good combat aligned with some really effective stealth moments. They both have the same general discovery loop of looking for landmarks in the world (ex: steam -> hot springs, big fire -> inn, for all of them you can find a yellow bird to follow). Where this one improved for me really did end up being in the iterative nature of its combat.

In Tsushima I specifically mentioned that duels were where I felt combat really hit its stride, and while that is still largely the case here I do think that the wider group combat saw enough of an improvement to be of note. My problem with the previous title was that group combat never felt like I had a good way to focus on where to look, and a lot of that came down to what felt like a lack of obvious prioritization of incoming damage. That feels much improved here.

Part of it is that NPCs simply are better at taking turns. I know it sounds weird for a group of enemies to attack one-on-one, but from a gameplay perspective it makes sense for the player. Spamming dodge or parry buttons because multiple NPCs come after you more or less simultaneously is not a fun experience. Having the NPCs take turns – and more importantly giving the player time to attack the NPC that they successfully dodge or parry – is a big win in playability and letting the player feel powerful against a larger group of enemies. From a danger perspective it also felt like the NPCs would attack more quickly in succession if I wasn’t correctly dodging or parrying, so it encouraged me to be precise in order to not be overwhelmed. Another part of it for me is that rather than using stance switching to go against enemy weaknesses, Yotei uses weapon switching. From a result perspective this is exactly the same – you switch stance/weapon in both games to give yourself an advantage. However, recontextualizing this to something even more obviously visual feels better in a way that I can’t really place my finger on.

It also may just be placebo or fading memory, but it also felt like the general tells about incoming attacks were more obvious. Visually there were fewer large feints to make you guess incorrectly. The visual language of things that are dodgeable or parryable felt more clear. The audible tells of ranged attacks felt like they punched through the general noise of combat better. These are all things that were important to the larger group combat scenarios to make them feel more immediately manageable compared to the original title to really elevate that part of the experience to allow it to shine. It may not quite match the spectacle of duels yet, but rather than feeling like a negative of the experience I was generally able to enjoy combat in all situations much more easily in the sequel.

If there was one thing that I felt did take a step back here it would be the presentation of the story. The story is a generally non-linear set of sections sandwiched between a fixed start and end. What this means for the player is that once they get into the world, they can generally pick the direction they want to go. Each smaller region of the overall game world was its own self-contained experience where entering the zone triggers some story moment to occur, with the zone having its own plot line, side characters, and wrap up moment. However, that section of the game could occur in any order, so it had very little in terms of ties to anything else.

The practical impact for me is that this title felt like what would normally be a series of smaller independent expansion packs, rather than a whole new title. Each section kind of gets you an upgrade path of some sort and a character that ends up being important later-ish but because they have to work independently it often feels a lot like the zones are – for lack of a better description – nerfed down to just kind of be played through. Narratively it works well, but I’m not sure it was the best for gameplay purposes. On the other hand, when it does tie together for the final zone of the game, the toolbox as a whole works incredibly well so I’m not sure I’m overly fussed that each tool you gained had its own zone to learn the thing in with repeated use.

In some respects it also felt like this change might have forced a bit more simplification of side content, which was something I enjoyed about Tsushima over the larger Assassin’s Creed games. There is still some side content in place, but apart from a couple small specific places there isn’t side content that reaches across zone lines. It helps keep the side content locked to very specific upgrade-focused bits, alongside some side quest lines that deal with things specific to zones – for example, all upgrades for kunai take place in the zone where you earn kunai. I can’t tell whether it was an intentional change to match the narrative setup, but I do think the reduced stuff continues to be a benefit to reducing boredom in games of this scope.

I said this of Tsushima:

I certainly won’t sit here and claim that this is generally an original title, but it didn’t necessarily have to be. It takes the framework established by the recent Assassin’s Creed titles, and iterates enough on it to feel like its own thing.

I think that is particularly relevant here. Ghost of Yotei feels even less original, but I don’t think it needed to be original. Tsushima was a wildly successful and fun game. This takes the core put in place there and iterates on it, and in doing so didn’t lose what made the game a standout. Yotei is a wildly gorgeous game with extremely tight combat and that’s all I really needed it to be.