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Game Ramblings #172 – One Piece Odyssey

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, PC, Xbox Series

I kind of played this one on a whim. I’ve watched some of One Piece here and there so I was familiar with the series, but I wouldn’t call myself exactly a fan of it. However, I am a sucker for JRPGs and it fit well within that. What it ended up being was a game that I enjoyed far more than I expected because of decisions they made around their core combat that really worked out to the game’s benefit.

This being a JRPG, the combat had to be good to make it worth playing. The series that immediately came to mind here was Shin Megami Tensei/Persona. It didn’t have that complexity, but the core feeling is there. The entire combat loop is around exploiting weaknesses to maximize effects. There’s the core unit type, which is a rock paper scissors mechanic that applies to most attacks. Most of the units then have some elemental attacks (ex: Nami has lightning, Sanji has fire, etc) that can be an additional layer of weakness against some units.

While this doesn’t have the same turn skipping functionality of the SMT series, the end result is similar due to the balance of the attacks. Simply put, you want to take advantage of these weaknesses because it’s effectively double damage. In SMT you’d add turns by attacking weaknesses, thereby getting you through more enemies safely. Here you’re just nuking enemies, again getting you through more enemies safely.

The other place this comes into play is with the regeneration of TP – this game’s mana stat. Most of the high end special attacks take up a significant amount of the player’s TP to the point where 3 or 4 attacks with them will often drain the entire TP pool. In a typical JRPG, I’d probably just hold onto those special attacks until a boss fight rather than spamming items to get the resource back. However, in this game TP regenerates on basic attacks. Because of this, you’ll often want to nuke as much stuff using AOE on turn 1, then finish off fights to regen TP as you mop up the rest of the enemies. Against bosses, you’ll do a bit of a back and forth where you go back and forth between heavy damage and regen phases, or in the case of the healer you spend time trying to determine when it’s the best chance to heal vs. regenerating TP to avoid running out. It’s another good way to really tie combat together.

The second piece of combat that I found smart was their use of a bonus XP mechanic. The short version of this is that a lot of fights ended up introducing some small mechanic to throw off the balance of combat – could be something like kill strengthened enemies before someone in your party dies, kill an enemy before it uses a strong attack, use a specific person to finish a boss, etc – that grants bonus XP if successful. The thing that threw me off initially is that this gave a ridiculous amount of XP, often being 400-500% of the XP of a fight. It seemed exploitative. However, over time it became clear to me that the balance of the leveling curve was actually built around achieving these to avoid grinding.

What these things do in practice is really just throw off your patterns and make combat more engaging. Yes, the enemies end up being the same as in many fights, but having to switch gears to figure out how to get people into the right position to clear out groups of specific enemies fast is fun. Having to figure out how to get just the right damage to make sure the very specific person kills a boss on next attack is fun. Having to suddenly have your party focus on something they may be weak to to get bonus XP is fun. It’s small constant tweaks to the core combat that make things just different enough to reduce repetition in a genre that is typically bound to repetition.

The final piece that just worked nicely was party hot swapping. During combat you can swap party members at any time as long as they have not yet attacked in the current turn. This could include just switching where party members are on the field, but it also includes swapping party members in from the reserves. It extends to hot swapping out party members that get knocked out, which comes in particularly handy against bosses. In practice what this does is always allow you to focus on having the right people in the right spots at all times. You don’t have to worry about figuring out what the best min/max party for an area is, but instead can just focus on having the right people for the situation. It reduces a lot of what is typical party stress in the genre and actually allows and encourages you as a player to try a bunch of different combinations. It results in the entire cast being familiar to you by the end of the game, because you’ll have been using everyone often throughout the game. It’s a smart way to integrate everyone into the experience while still only capping combat to 4 members and really goes against what is typical in a lot of JRPGs.

However, where the game nearly lost me was in the stuff that is tied to the narrative. It’s not that the narrative was bad, and honestly I enjoyed it a lot, but it was often forced in a way that didn’t feel right for the genre. There were long segments of 3-4 hours where I couldn’t explore. I couldn’t fast travel. I couldn’t go back to places that I had side quests in. I couldn’t really do anything but stick to the core narrative. In a lot of these places, there was also very little combat as it would often be sections of the game where you’re interacting with people in cities and dealing with One Piece-universe story segments that simply didn’t belong in the overworld.

As a pacing thing, this just felt off. It led to a bit of a weird situation where any time I was given the opportunity to freely run around, I felt like I had to do everything that was optional at one time. I couldn’t just go “ya I’m going to take 15 minutes to screw around” because I would often be stuck. The result of this was that a couple of the longer narrative-forced sections nearly had me shelving the game, simply because I wanted to be given a break to just do anything that wasn’t a fetch quest. This was another thing that felt a bit atypical of JRPGs, but in this case it felt like a negative to the experience.

Overall thought I was pleasantly surprised by this game. I figured it’d fill the gap between XB3’s DLC and Final Fantasy 16, but I ended up enjoying it enough to delay starting FF16 instead. It does a solid job of blending the One Piece IP with a really solid representation of the JRPG genre by borrowing combat reminiscent of Persona while doing a couple things here and there that broke some genre conventions, and it ended up being a better game for it. If you’re looking for something new to check out in this genre, I’d feel pretty good throwing this one out for a recommendation.

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Game Ramblings #160.1 – Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

Original Ramblings

This expansion is by all definitions for the fans. It’s got returning important story characters from past entries in Rex and Shulk. It’s got import returning locations like Colony 9 from the original Xenoblade Chronicles. It’s got the ancestors of some of Chronicles 3’s cast. Basically, it’s there to be a trip specifically for fans of the series, but in that way it feels like the perfect way to cap the series.

This is every bit an extension of the gameplay from XC3, with a few things that feel really tailored towards an expansion experience. The obvious thing is that you power level like crazy to the point that I finished the game around level 60 and maybe had about 20 hours of gameplay. This is all taking place within a single connected world with a single map that you can get through pretty quickly. There’s some environmental things that allow you to basically zipline through the regions, and by the end of the game you’ll have unlocked so many of them that you can get end to end through the entire world in a matter of a couple of minutes without fast travel. I’d actually like to see this explored more in a future Xeno title, as being able to get around between regions quickly without a map feels way more engaging and connected to the world than a typical fast travel system.

Besides that stuff, the big thing added was an affinity system where you earn points for doing normal things (exploring, collecting, etc) to get points to purchase upgrades. There’s been variations on this in the past, but it all feels very directly do thing -> get cool stuff that powers you up. XC3 was already a game that was light on gearing as a power curve, and this feels like it leans further into simplifying away from XC2’s mess of stats as it combines stats, ability purchasing, and ability upgrading into a single source of selection. It obviously benefits the speed of power curve for an expansion experience, but it also feels like it would benefit a larger game as a whole.

However, there’s also a bit of an ending thing that gets into the potential future of the series, and that’s where I’m going to hide behind spoiler tags.

Spoiler

The core plot of XC3 within the overarching series was that Earth had previously been split in two, becoming the worlds of XC1 and XC2. By the time of XC3, the worlds had drifted back towards each other in an attempt to recombine. The plot of XC3 then ends with the worlds re-separating. The end boss sequence and post credits scene shows this process, but it adds a few additional things that seem to imply the Chronicles series is more tied to the rest of the Xeno games than we’ve been led to believe.

One of the first things that catches your attention is a series of radio broadcasts while the cast is being led through a virtual Earth. The radio broadcasts mention a few things of note. One is humans being sent to Sagittarius, where Xenogears ends up taking place. One is Project Exodus – the process of sending humans away to other planets. This is directly the same name as a project from Xenoblade Chronicles X, as well as a similar project from Xenosaga. During these broadcasts Dmitri Yuriev is also name dropped, and he is directly one of the antagonists in the Xenosaga series.

The final set of things comes during the post credits scene. During this scene, you see the two earths recombining. However, they also are seen coming out of some sort of cloaking. I assume this was hinting at the plot of Xenosaga, where Earth is lost due to cloaking. This is then followed up by a blue object of some sort crashing towards Earth, which again to me seems to imply it’s KOS-MOS from the end of Xenosaga III falling to Earth.

All that is to say that this expansion really is for the fans. It adds more context to the Xenoblade series, but also seems to imply ties to the rest of the overarching Xeno series, even if Nintendo doesn’t own those IPs. It also puts us in a place where they’ve given a number of jumping off points for whatever comes next, whether that’s an XC4 or an entirely new branch of the Xeno games.

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If you at all enjoyed Xenoblade Chronicles 3, this expansion probably isn’t going to change that opinion. It’s still the same great core gameplay. As something that is simply more of a good thing, it’s enough to be worthwhile. As something for fans of the series, it’s even better. It clearly is there to both be a thanks to fans, as well as a nod towards what might come next and really puts an end cap on what I assume is the end of this set of Xeno titles.

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Game Ramblings #171 – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: Switch

It would be extremely easy to point at this game and just go “it’s a sequel, whatever”. It shares the characters from Breath of the Wild. It largely shares the overworld, which at a glance simply features the changes that come from progression of time. At a glance it looks to be largely the same mechanically. However, it’s just a bafflingly better game than BOTW, which was already a bafflingly good game.

One of the things that struck me was that it felt weird that they threw out the runes from the original game. That felt like such a core part of the gameplay of the original that removing them just felt wrong. When you get the new ultra hand and fuse abilities early on, they kind of feel like a weird replacement. But then you fuse a bomb flower to an arrow and you suddenly don’t miss the bomb rune so much. You start to realize that the utility of ultra hand replaces the use of the magnesis rune. You start attaching rockets to your shields and suddenly using stasis launches just feels like a slow part of the past. Then you’re busy building something stupid like the vehicle I made up there and by that point you’ve completely missed that the system has so well clicked in your head that you don’t miss the systems of the original game.

The thing that is so wild as a developer about the set of abilities in the game is how often I would try something and be surprised that it just worked. There’s obvious things like attaching an arrow and bomb together would do something cool because Zelda games have had that in the past. But attaching an eyeball to an arrow? Well of course it’s now a homing arrow because it can see. Attaching meat to an arrow? Now you’ve got something to lure enemies. Attach a rocket to your shield? Now you can fly. Attach a wheel to a rope? Now you can open gates. Attach a control stick to some fans? You’ve got a flying motorcycle. Those are nothing next to some of the crazy things the community has been up to.

It’s one of those things that I can understand conceptually how they pulled it off. Ultimately it’s more of an issue of scale of problem solving than anything else. However, I’ve never been in the position where I could simply make anything work simply because that’s the core idea of the game. Everything within these systems is so well polished because they’ve spent the last six years just perfecting every interaction that you can have. These interactions are also completely not accidental either, because most of them are covered in some place in some shrine in some corner of the world where it was clear that something was made simply because some developer along the way said “I want to make a puzzle, I want this mechanic, let’s get it working” and it became another potential tool in the chest for the team and ultimately for players.

All this is to say nothing about the fact that the game isn’t just a slightly modified overworld. Yes that’s there, and yes there’s a lot of differences that players of BOTW will appreciate. However, there’s an entire set of new sky islands to explore and puzzle through that offer unique challenges in terms of trying not to fall off of them. The introduction of the ascend ability that allows you to pass through things above you greatly enhances traversal in all situations. You then start going into the depths and quickly realize that there’s an entire second overworld as big as Hyrule to explore and find cool stuff in. The depths’ core change is that it’s completely dark until you light it up, and that change alone transforms the game into the strangest combination of survival horror and ARPG that drastically changed the pace of how I was playing the game. That alone is enough of a reason to warrant this being considered a full new experience instead of simply a retread.

All that said I do have some gripes about combat, which felt like the weakest part of the game to me. There was something about the timing of dodges/parries that just felt off to me and I could never really quite place my finger on what it was. So much of the combat once you get past the intro red enemies is about dodging or parrying to lay in maximum damage and it always felt like I was just a bit early or just a bit late. I would make adjustments and end up on the other side of that, never really getting to the point where I was really ever comfortable engaging in combat in the overworld where multiple enemies were around. I felt like I was often just taking a ton of what should have been avoidable damage, but just never could quite make it work.

The frustrating part is I never had this problem against bosses. I beat all the temple bosses first try and had similar results against Ganon, despite the fight feeling like a callback to Wind Waker in being so heavily based around specifically dodging to lay in damage. The fact that bosses tended to be fine while overworld combat was problematic for me made me think that I was battling some sort of input latency or frame pacing issue since overworld framerate tends to be less consistent than the tailored boss areas. In those situations combat just felt nice. Timing things felt fair and appropriate without being too easy. It was rewarding to nail your dodges and get a flurry rush while laying in huge damage. I guess ultimately my problem with combat was that things like late-game Bokoblins felt like more of a threat than Ganondorf which is something I can’t really reconcile in my head.

My combat issues didn’t really negatively impact my feelings on the game though. This is absolutely a game worth playing and if for some reason you still don’t own a Switch, this is game worth getting a Switch to play. It’s so fundamentally good across nearly the entire experience and just constantly throws things at you that will surprise you. It takes what was originally a top game of all time framework and enhances it in ways that sets a new standard for what open world ARPGs should be striving for.