DWGames

2019-09-202019-09-20

Game Ramblings #93 – Astral Chain

Further Reading: Game Ramblings #64 – NieR: Automata

Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: Switch

If you’ve played some of the recent games that Platinum has done, whether that was NieR: Automata or Bayonetta, or even something a bit older like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, you probably know roughly what to expect out of this one. Great action combat, over the top set pieces, a somewhat wild sci-fi story, and just enough anime tropes to not be annoying. In that regard, Astral Chain really isn’t any different. However, the combat in place shows a lot more finesse than I find typical of their games, while doing the rest of Platinum’s typical feature set as well as ever.

This game isn’t really a surprise from a setting perspective for Platinum. The tl;dr is that the world has gone through a near apocalypse, humanity is hanging on through a man-made island floating in the ocean, and demons constantly invade through portals into another dimension. This is all bits and pieces that Platinum has done before. Where they really lean into this is that the other dimensional beings are crucial to the combat, and that tie into the story is all they need to give you your core abilities that the game is centered around.

Right from the start, you’re given a controlled variant of these beings called a Legion. This is both a partner in battle, a practical RPG power curve element, and a way to hook into that story. Your ability to control Legions means you can see demonic corruption in the world (ties into XP gain), you can fight against the demons that are invading and enter portals into their dimension (main story hook), and gain some flashy as hell combat capabilities (let’s face it, this is because it’s cool as hell). All of this combined is super over the top levels of stupid, and damn does it work well. The game plays a fine line between being silly enough to be highly fun without crossing the line into boredom the entire time. In typical Platinum fashion, this ramps up slowly over time to give you bigger and badder set pieces and boss fights right until the end.

But let’s face it; combat is the most important thing going for this game. This has definitely got the usual run of hack and slash going on, but at its core that’s not really the most effective way to fight, and in practice there’s a lot of enemies that actively can’t be killed that way. Using the Legion is entirely the where combat ends up. The Legions sort of act on their own, but you’ve also got direct control over them. You can throw them towards and drag them through enemies. The chain that binds you to your Legions can be used to wrap up and stun enemies or trip enemies that are charging in your direction. Each type (Sword, Axe, Bow, Beast, Arm) have different special abilities that can be used as additional offensive or defensive capabilities both in combat and in environment traversal. Quick time events that flash up can also be used to allow your Legion to do combo attacks, defensive measures, and even parries against incoming enemy attacks.

All of this may sound complicated for a fast-paced action game, but it ends up having a really good flow to it. The Legion capabilities are all just different buttons on the controller, so you don’t have to do complicated things to activate them. It becomes more of a game of identifying weaknesses, having the right Legion out, and being ready to react when combat events are occurring. Rather than it becomes tedious to do all these things, different actions becomes second nature. A lot of this definitely comes down to fantastically well done combat tells – for example, charge attacks have a huge red line prior to attack to allow you to line up your chain trip, quick time events for parries have a visual flash and audio stinger as well as a bit of time dilation for extra activation time – but the combat pace is also really well balanced. It’s fast combat, but leans just slow enough to give you time to fairly react, allowing you to maximize damage output without turning into button spam.

By the end of the game, you end up just rolling through these things without stopping. That boss up there is only around the midway point of the game, so you can imagine how ridiculous it gets by the tail end of the game. I ended up finishing this one in about 25 hours, and there’s definitely some more to be pulled out of it. There’s multiple endings (also typical of Platinum titles), multiple difficulties, lots of side quests, cat collecting (!!!!! 11/10 game of the year), and generally just a lot of fun to be had. While I may not recommend getting a Switch for this one alone, if you’ve already got a Switch this should definitely be on your short list, at least until Bayonetta 3 comes out.

2019-08-302019-08-25

Game Ramblings #92 – Fire Emblem: Three Houses

More Info from Nintendo

Genre: Tactical RPG
Platform: Switch

I’ve got a bit of a history with the Fire Emblem series. Ya I’ve played a bunch of them, and ya I’ve been playing the more recent entries in the series. However, the bigger problem for me is that I was on the QA team for Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon on the DS. QA at Nintendo was one of my first jobs in the game industry while I was in college, and getting a summer assignment like Fire Emblem sounded great until it was 40 hours a week, finishing the game every day on repeat. The outcome of all that is that I got really fucking good at Fire Emblem games, and I really hate permanent death.

It’s not that I have anything particularly against permadeath; it just doesn’t feel like it pushes the gameplay in a good direction. My strategies start to revolve around slow pushes, exploiting weapon and terrain strengths, and really playing overly cautious. It’s slow, it’s boring, and it’s not a good experience. Because of my gameplay push, I miss the consequence of death and probably to some extent miss out on the stress that it causes as well. So give me Fire Emblem games without it like the past few? Hell ya I’m down for that.

Three Houses continues the push in the last few to really modernize the series. Permadeath is optional, which is nice, but it’s not the only thing that really feels fresh. This game comes with a lot more to do in between combat, giving a lot more depth to characters, the world, and the relationships you build. The weapon advantage triangle also felt a lot less present, which on the surface sounds weird, but ends up giving me a lot more flexibility in battle. While it’s taken a lot of years, this is the one that finally feels like it’s pushed me back over the edge from casual enjoyment to really wanting to see every piece of this series.

I think it’s important to start outside of combat, because it becomes important to the way I play the game. The super high level of the game is that you are a professor in a military school, you pick a house of students to teach, and you are in charge of their growth. You can basically make any character any class in a much more flexible way than normal for FE. Want to hybridize your mages to also provide healing? There’s classes for that. Want to make a dual spec archer swordsman? By all means. Want to concentrate purely on axe work to become some axe wielding badass? Have a ball. The freedom to steer your party basically meant two things to me – I could pick the characters I liked for my interactions with them instead of what their combat use was, and I could steer their growth in a way that fit how I wanted combat to play out.

The school aspects are also where you become attached to characters. In between story combat, you interact with the entire school and start to learn about all the characters, whether it’s the people they’ve got conflicts with, the potential love interests they share, what their likes and dislikes and in some cases some fears are. It provides a ton of depth to the characters in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

On the surface, the combat of FETH is going to look familiar. It’s still a TRPG grid, the weapon advantage triangle is still in place, basic magic and movement types of past games are still there, but this kind of feels like FE+. However, the flexibility of my party build throws a lot of this on its head. If I’ve got a dual-spec archer/swordsman, lance flyers are no longer a big worry for me. Having some magic skills scattered around means armored enemies are less of a danger. Adding some healing abilities to a few characters allows me to play more aggressively, instead of having to carry extra dedicated healers.

Not having to play with permadeath also really pushes this. In past FE games I would never go into a skirmish unless I had a near 100% certainty of being able to kill the group of enemies I was going after. Now? Let’s go after it. Does it make me play like a moron at times? Hell ya it does, and I’d have it no other way.

This game also brings in a bunch of much tougher 2×2 and 3×3 grid space enemies with some interesting mechanics. The player characters have Gambit attacks, which are effectively mini group attacks. Against smaller enemies, they’re just kinda convenient to use at times in the event they have some secondary effect. Against the larger enemies though? They provide both built-in stuns and aggro draws. Against enemies that may take 6-8 people to kill, these add a ton of flexibility to my toolbox in action. I can draw aggro to people I know won’t die. I can stun the enemy, then go in for high damage with low defense characters, since they will now not take return damage.

Overall, all of these things provided a lot of new depth to the series combat. It all fits into a state of feeling familiar, but deeper, and I suspect it hits a really good mark for both new and old players.

If there’s one thing that really surprised me coming out of all this, it’s that I really cared about the characters I met along the way. Ya it’s natural to become somewhat attached to the squad you create, but there’s a level of attachment that I got to people I didn’t recruit that really made the second half of the game memorable. The mix of Persona-style interaction and traditional Fire Emblem combat has been done so well that I can’t believe it’s taken them this long to go full in. The 3DS titles started moving in this direction, particularly with the relationships, but Three Houses has brought it to a spectacularly higher new level.

There’s not much else I can really say here other than go play it. It’s taken me a long time to get back to a point where I could beat a Fire Emblem game – I definitely played some of Awakening and Fates, but never finished them – but I’m glad it’s finally happened. It says a lot about the game that I can not wait to see where the story goes when the season pass story content comes out some time next year. This series really has pushed into a new era with both story and gameplay refinements that leave this game in a place of being familiar but refreshed, and I can’t think of any TRPG that I would recommend over this one in the past few years.

Also it has fishing. 11/10 GOTY again.

2019-08-252019-08-25

Game Ramblings #88.3 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – Kingdom Hearts 3

More Info from Square-Enix

Genre: Action RPG
Platform: PS4

I finally got around to KH3. Ya I skipped some of the side games, and ya I should go back and play Birth by Sleep on a TV, but frankly I was ready to get this one off the list. KH3 was a bit of an oddball – it combines bits and pieces of all the past games while adding a ton of cinematic flare now possible on current generation hardware. What comes out of it falls somewhere between great and complete disaster, which I suppose could be said for a lot of this series as a whole.

This is really the game that finally feels like a modern experience. If there’s one thing that really speaks next-gen to me, it’s not necessarily new complex gameplay elements, or flashy new effects, but of worlds that feel alive and cinematic scenes that look like the game world. Kingdom Hearts 3 finally delivers on that. Visually, it’s definitely a looker, but importantly the worlds feel believable. Whether it’s San Fransokyo from Big Hero 6 or the world of Toy Story, these worlds no longer feel reminiscent of the movies, but actually feel exactly like the movies. It’s completely uncanny. The style also lends well to spectacular cinematic elements in traversal, such as wall running up Mount Olympus during a boss fight, dodging fire and rocks, instead of simply being somewhere vaguely in the area.

It’s also worth noting that this is probably the best mix of pure new content and pure Disney fandom experience that I think I’ve seen in the series. As a fan of KH, it was great to finally have visibility on both the Keyblade Graveyard, as well as some of the worlds behind Xehanort, and they gave a LOT of time at the end to him. At the same time, they quite literally remade Let it Go within the lore of KH3, which is a huge shot of Disney fandom adrenaline to be hit by. Every moment felt like I was seeing some new cool thing that brought me back to a movie or character I wanted to see more of, and given the lore of the series I was frankly surprised at how well it pulled together.

What gets lost in all of this though is the Final Fantasy connection. The folks from FF10 are nowhere to be seen on Destiny Islands. The FF cast members in Radiant Garden no longer appear. There’s no resolution to the plot between Cloud and Sephiroth in KH2. While the progression of the game lore kind of forces it in this direction, this game is now more accurately described as Disney + Square, not Disney + Final Fantasy. It’s not a deal breaker, but it’s definitely a disappointment.

Combat is a bit of a mixed bag, and it’s definitely a mash up of past games.

Core combat is still how it’s been since KH1, and it still has its issues with targeting and lock ons. It’s straight hack and slash, but the combo count trends more towards KH2 so it’s generally effective and easy to pull off.
Your partners are still kind of useless, but now your party occasionally grows up to 5 characters, which is kind of neat.
Magic and mana regen has been pulled in from KH2, which is a huge perk.
The Flowmotion system from Dream Drop Distance is there again, but it’s been neutered by the removal of most of its triggers, so it’s kind of useless.
Dream Eaters have been merged into the Summon system from past games, and the summons use both a full mana bar and are still kind of useless.
The dark form from KH2 still pops up from time to time, and is still kind of annoying when it shows up. Since it now gets in the way of triggering other group attacks, it’s particularly flow breaking.
Fortunately the dark form is hilariously effective against bosses, so when it pops up in a boss fight it’s pretty much an instant win.

Basically, mixed bag.

However, it’s the special attacks like the tea cups above that are the most egregious. These are basically triggered group attacks that do a ton of damage and effectively provide you with immunity. They are hilariously overpowered and completely unbalance combat in most situations. There are encounters where it’s pretty obvious that things were balanced around these, so it’s particularly bad that they become a bit of a necessity. In Kingdom Hearts fashion, it’s another case of something that is flashy and cool that gets used way too much, and quickly becomes annoying and necessary.

In good news, the non-standard stuff is way better in this game. The Gummi ship sequence is now a pseudo open space experience. Combat is triggered by the player by chasing after Heartless ships, and some of the sequences turn into large scale boss fights. It provides a lot more gameplay than simply the annoying experience flying between worlds, and becomes an entire great change of pace after a bunch of RPG combat. Some worlds also provide their own entire experiences. The obvious example is the Caribbean world, which now has an entire Assassin’s Creed 4-style pirate ship gameplay experience, including ship upgrades, boat to boat combat, and plenty of small islands to hop off at and explore for treasure.

The improvements to the meta experience are really what make this feel like that modern experience. The game goes back and forth between extremely linear sequences and semi-open exploration, so there’s enough of a change in pace going on to allow for some breathing room as I went through the game.

So, many games and more hours than I care to admit later, I’ve gotten through the Xehanort story. I still couldn’t tell you most of what happened, because quite frankly the lore is batshit. I couldn’t tell you I really enjoyed the gameplay a lot of the time, because quite frankly the combat really isn’t that good. But did I enjoy it all anyway? Hell ya I did. These games are the most spectacularly stupid mix of Disney and JRPG aesthetic possible, and now that technology has caught up to that, it was a sight to behold.