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Game Ramblings #126 – Replaying Ori and the Will of the Wisps

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch, Windows

I guess this is going to be a bit of a weird ramblings in that I don’t really plan to talk about the game, at least not directly. It’s been out for long enough that it’s been done to death. What I will talk about is the fact that playing this on the Series X redeemed the game for me. The first time I tried playing this I was incredibly disappointed. The gameplay was definitely there, and when it worked well it was really solid. But that was the problem, it generally wasn’t working that well. Framerate problems, load hitches, and crashes were all over, and it made getting through the game incredibly frustrating. Luckily we’re now back with faster hardware, not to mention a patch or two along the way. Now that the game’s unimpeded, it was exactly what I wanted – a Metroidvania with great flow, fun puzzles, and a lot of good reasons to re-traverse things as you gained new abilities. Simply put, this is now what I expected the first time around, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

I start here not because the screenshots are important to gameplay, but because I took damn near the same screenshot on the Xbox One and Series X, so it’s as good a visual comparison as I have. This level of change is indicative of the difference between the initial release and the one I played this second go around. It’s not just that things are clearer, but that certainly helps. Instead of running at 30ish, it now runs at flat 60 (or higher if your TV supports it). Instead of having load hitches all the time, there’s none. Where I was seeing crashes maybe every 30-40 minutes before, I didn’t see a single one this entire play through. It was such a completely different experience to play it without technical issues this go around.

The thing about me shelving the original one is that while it really came down to technical issues, it was ultimately a boss that did me in. The boss is against a large frog enemy in a sort of swampy area, and about half way through the fight you get sent underwater for good, which eliminates your ability to spend time healing in a pinch, adding a certain level of tension to the fight. Mechanically I knew the fight, but frustration absolutely got to me on it. The underwater phase just would not perform in a way that made the fight fun. In about a dozen deaths, I’d seen about a half dozen load hitches that would last for upwards of 3-5 seconds. The underwater phase itself basically guaranteed a framerate tank, which made fast movement difficult. At one point I’d gotten down to about 20% health remaining, and the game crashed.

Ultimately, frustration begets frustration. I get to a point when playing games where frustration at things just causes a landslide. Missing a jump can be frustrating in isolation, but is controllable. Dying to a boss is controllable when it feels fair. However, you start stacking these things up and I start losing those gaps where I have time to breathe and decompress. That causes impatience, which causes mistakes, which causes more frustration. When a game is crashing or having load hitches, all that’s happening is annoyances start to pile up that are not in my control, which just accelerates the problem. That is why I ultimately shelved it. It just wasn’t worth the cascade of frustration causing me to play worse.

This go around? I beat the boss on the third try, with the first two tries largely being me remembering the mechanics. No out of control frustrations, less annoyance, more patience, fewer mistakes. Now that I’ve beat the game completely, it turns out that for me that was by a long shot the most difficult fight anyway so doing it in the progression order I did the first go around was probably a recipe for disaster, but I did roughly the same progression this time and got through it. Not really because the game was different, but because it was now running great and I wasn’t pissed off about technical problems.

Cyberpunk was the big one this year that launched and had major obvious issues on console, but for me this one was my Cyberpunk months earlier. Metroidvanias are probably the one genre that comes close to JRPGs for me in terms of games that I will absolutely play above all else. Ori and the Blind Forest was such a spectacularly good game that shelving the sequel was something so unexpected that it blindsided me. Luckily, the current state of the game – especially on better hardware – has completely redeemed it for me. This is now the game I wanted to play, and not the game that crashed and burned. It’s now the mechanically fantastic game with incredible platforming flow. It’s now one of the flag bearers for the genre, instead of a game that wasn’t ready for launch.

It’s now a game that I recommend without question.

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Game Ramblings #125 – Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Rhythm
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch

I sat down to play the game and immediately got smacked in the face with a sense of having played this game before. The systems that I was going through; the interface at the end of songs; the way things were unlocking. I’d done it before. Then it hit me – this is a Theathrhythm game. I absolutely love the three Theatrhythm games on the 3DS and I don’t know why I never recognized what this was before its release. Ya the name isn’t there and they moved to a rear-camera 3D view, but it’s the same developer, the same systems, and the same pattern. Most importantly, it’s just as good.

Starting this as a comparison against Theatrhythm is really the place to start. The obvious change is the switch in view from side-scroll 2D to rear-scroll 3D, and that brings some oddities. Something about that change took me a long time to really grok, and I think it came down to a couple of main things.

The first is that there’s no mark to really establish the beat on the board. Looking at games with a similar viewpoint like Guitar Hero, having that scrolling beat indicator really just helps to establish some sense of depth to get some basic timing in your mind’s eye. It also didn’t help that the enemies popping onto the board didn’t have consistent timing. Some would be stationary as you scroll towards them. Some would walk towards the screen. Some kind jumped and weaved. Because of that I also couldn’t really depend on depth perception as a tool for timing the song out.

However, I hit a point probably about a third of the way into the game where I became less focused on hitting a beat, and more focused on hitting a melody, and that drastically changed how I played the game. There’s a tendency in these songs to use a bit of a Nintendo trick. The first time they introduce a melody, it’s a bit on the easier side. You’ve got enough of it to be able to hit the notes while listening to what is playing. The second and third time’s it comes around, it’s all-in and you’re responding to the full melody that you now recognize. They do this on even the highest difficulty, so you have an inherit ramp up in the song as you go through a couple loops of it. It works really well to allow you to learn on the fly, then really come back on a second go through fully knowing the song and ready to hit that full combo.

The rest of the core systems will feel familiar to players of Theatrhythm FF. Instead of directional swipes, you’ve got joystick flicks. Instead of screen holds, you have button holds. Instead of lanes per-character, you have attack buttons per-character. Instead of slide input segments, you’ve got in-air notes to catch while drifting Sora around on screen. There’s some nice additions there in terms of allowing you to do multiple attacks at once by pressing multiple buttons, but it still all feels familiar to me as a player of the Theatrhythm games.

If there was one last thing that really caught me off guard, it’s that this game did a fantastic job actually telling the Kingdom Hearts story. Ya, I’m not lying. This game covers the story of the entire franchise so far through cutscenes and voiceovers, and it does it in about 10-15 hours of gameplay. You’ve got coverage of all the main games, the important plot points from the spinoffs, and it’s all told in a concise way. In a series that effectively prides itself on being completely baffling, I retained more in one rhythm game than I did playing the entire rest of the series last year.

Now, because this is Kingdom Hearts, they couldn’t get away with not doing some stupid plot twist, and the end of the game has some important lore that ties the end of KH3’s DLC to whatever comes next. While I do recommend playing this one, if rhythm games aren’t your thing you’ll definitely want to catch up on the new lore via Youtube. It’s definitely a very Kingdom Hearts thing to have put new story into a recap game, just because they can.

I mean, I guess this is an easy recommendation. This is both really entertaining on its own as a Kingdom Hearts recap title, and a fantastic rhythm game. It takes systems that worked really well on the 3DS, and transforms them just enough to flow really well on a TV and gamepad, once I stopped trying to treat it like Guitar Hero. It’s also a great way to go back and hear how fantastically good the soundtrack of this series has been over the past 20 years.

Plus the game has One Winged Angel. That’s worth at least a +1 on the review scores.

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Year End Ramblings – Things You Should Play From 2020

So this year was a weird one huh? While reality was throwing us all down a shit slide, there was at least a bunch of good stuff to play. Over the course of the year I’ve managed a handful of mini ramblings, started branching out into a few programmer ramblings, and an unfortunate shelved-it for Ori and the Will of the Wisps which I intend to give a second try at now that the Series X is here. However, around all that stuff I managed to put up 24 main ramblings posts, as well as a .1 post for a replay I did of A Hat in Time. Through all of that there’s definitely a few stand out titles that I think were worth the play through, so let’s take a look at those.

I do have a bit of a caveat in that I haven’t really dove into much of the Fall 2020 titles yet. I was in the process of buying a house and moving in, so my backlog is a bit out of whack compared to normal. However, that does mean that I’ll have some interesting candidates for the start of 2021….

With that out of the way…

Game Ramblings #101 – Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order

This is the one that convinced me that there’s a future in which I like Souls games. It’s always really bothered me that I can see I’m about to get completely shit stomped in a Souls game, but am stuck in an uninterruptable animation and get killed. I get that that’s kind of the style, but I’m playing a videogame – I want stupidly powerful animation interrupts that let me do reactionary dodges. Fallen Order did just that. Part of it is that Jedis having quick dodge capability just feels right. Part of it is that it was just the way the game was tuned. However, in the end it leaned more towards combat that I can enjoy, while still really embracing the core of the slower 3P action combat that the Souls-style games really embrace.

Game Ramblings #108 – Control

This was the one the further convinced me of the genius of Remedy Entertainment. This is by no means a perfect game – the gunplay was frankly pretty average. However, the powers were just REALLY FUCKIN GOOD. Telekinetic and psychic powers are the type of thing that feel like they should be easy on the surface, but are so often screwed up. Control really just got it absolutely right. Grabbing and launching debris at enemies feels impactful. Seizing an enemy and turning them to fight for you just feels really important to shifting the balance of the fight. Flanking enemies via hover abilities feels really important to establishing an advantageous position when a group of enemies loses track of you. This is all combined with the continued fantastic world setting work of Remedy to craft a really special experience.

Game Ramblings #114 – Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition

In a year in which I played a lot of remakes, this is one of the ones that stood out. There’s definitely a bit of me that wanted this remake to use the Xenoblade 2 combat system instead, but there was still a lot of care put into improving this entry beyond just obvious visual changes. Grinding was significantly reduced over the original. Finding information on what quests are active and where quest items can be found was significantly improved. Even small things like cosmetic gear changes were added in a well done fashion. It helped that this one also had a new epilogue chapter added to close out some of the story for the character set. This was not as aggressive of a remake as a game I will mention in a bit, but it was still wonderful to go back and play it with a nice visual pass.

Game Ramblings #118 – Ghost of Tsushima

Under normal circumstances this would probably be a shoe-in game of the year for me. It combined an Assassin’s Creed style open world with a much better tuned focus on exploration with the feudal Japan setting that everyone has wanted that series to use for years. It then heaped on a really fantastic combat system that pulled in things like stances from Yakuza and cinematic 1-on-1 duels to give some of the best 3P action combat I’ve ever played. From a visual standpoint this is also flat out my game of the year. Ya, I’ve played some PC games offline that are technically more proficient, but no game this year felt like it has come close to hitting such a flat out gorgeous visual style. This is the kind of title that shows why Sony was so far ahead in sales this generation, and really is the type of showcase that makes owning a PS4 worth it.

Game Ramblings #110 – Final Fantasy VII Remake

I finished this game in May and I’m still baffled by how good it was.

It’s not just that they iterated on the game’s combat – it’s that they completely changed it. If any game will convince people that JRPGs can be fully action combat, this is the one that would do it. The inputs for the characters matched expectations – presses for sword characters like Cloud vs a hold for the machine gun attacks of Barret as an example. However, they didn’t lose the turn-based rhythm. Because you’re attacking to build up your ATB meter, you always have some rhythm where you switch to abilities. Do a flurry of attacks, throw a magic spell or heal. Keep an eye out for enemy timing and dodges, blocks, or parries. Ya, it’s action combat, but the rhythm is like a turn-based game, and it is fantastic.

Then there’s the story. Everyone thought they knew what was coming – it’s the beginning of the game in Midgar. You blow up some shit, you try to save Aerith, you leave with some of the party in tow. Ya, that does technically all happen. However, by the end of the game you end up in a spot where the next title in the remake series almost certainly can not be the same. People are alive that shouldn’t be. There’s hints of multiple timelines intersecting, as well as a specific party member being aware of that and its implications for knowing the future. I mean, there’s an entire section of the story devoted to a creature line called Whispers that are attempting to keep the party from changing the timeline and sticking to the original game’s plot. This game ended at a place where the second title in the remake will almost certainly be an entirely new plot, and that excites me more than I could ever describe.

If there’s any game that I think should be an absolute must play this year, it’s FF7R.

There’s a bunch of other games that I rambled about this year, and they can almost certainly be on what I would consider to be an expanded list of games to check out. However, these five titles are the ones that I think are must-plays from this year. Looking back, they lean a lot more action than I would typically expect given how many JRPGs I tend to play, but I also think that’s a sign of where the action and JRPG genres have gone in the past decade. You’ve seen more action games bringing in RPG elements, and more JRPGs leaning into real-time combat, so the line has tended to blur for me. These games all had that common RPG thread through them, with a much larger spread in setting so hopefully there’s something there that hit for you guys as much as it did for me.