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Game Ramblings #97 – River City Girls

More info from Arc System Works (Japanese)

  • Genre: Beat ’em up
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Windows

If there’s any game that was ever a no brainer for me, it’s this one. I’ve played the hell out of the Kunio-kun series, whether it’s in the brawler River City titles, or the off the wall ones like Super Dodgeball. This one tapped WayForward as a developer, and I’ve played the hell out of the Shantae series. Combine them into one place? You better believe I’m all in.

If there’s any place to start with this one, it’s that the game is so mechanically sound in a way that 2.5d brawlers somehow always seem to stumble on. As a developer, it’s easy for me to dismiss the complexity behind making a few combat buttons feel good, but a lot of games seem to get it really wrong. However, this one just feels really smooth in action. It’s really easy to tell where I am in my combos, allowing me to mix light and heavy attacks effectively. Enemy tells are really solid, but not super easy, so my ability to block always feels really fair and skill based. There’s enough weapons thrown in the environment (and easy ability to use your enemies as weapons) to give a bit of fun extra chaos to the combat. It just feels really solid the whole way through.

If there’s any real tripping point in the control scheme for combat, it’s that the left face button (X on Switch) is really overloaded with contextual inputs. It’s your light attack button, but it’s also the button to pick weapons up, and it’s also the button to go to a new zone or enter shops when near them. It’s pretty easy in the chaos of a lot of people to accidentally travel or pick up a weapon, leaving you open to be attacked. Luckily the boss fights tended to be 1 on 1 encounters, so it was never really a big hazard.

Speaking of boss fights, that’s where the game really shines. You’ve got a few standard face smacking combat bosses, but there’s some really different mechanics at play here. There’s a boss at about the mid point of the game that is almost entirely a bullet hell fight, with the ultimate goal being to direct the boss to hit themselves with a deflected projectile to allow the player to damage them. There’s also a really fun boss that involves avoiding the buttons on a Guitar Hero-style running board in order to get between combat phases. Overall, these boss fights allow for some breathing room in the core mechanics to where the game isn’t just a core brawler the whole time. They exist both as large challenges that definitely have to be learned, but also exist as a way to introduce fun new ways to think about the player’s skill set, and end up breaking up the game in a way I wasn’t really anticipating.

The rest of the game’s core is pretty standard, but well put together. There’s a light layer of RPG leveling and stat improvement, giving the player a pretty concise and obvious power curve. There’s a wide range of accessory items that can be used to help the player pad out skills or damage based on their preferred play style. There’s a dojo to learn new skills based on your level. Most importantly, and very much hidden, there’s food shops to buy health items. However, the first time a specific health item is consumed, it gives you a permanent stat boost. This is extremely important to the player’s power curve, and it’s curious that it is not mentioned in-game (or I’m dumb and missed it), but it works extremely well in practice, as the player inevitably will need to hop into a shop to get some health along the way.

I suppose this is a bit of a short rambling, but really there’s not much to say here that would be a surprise. It’s a great developer known for making 2d action games in a series known for great 2.5d action, and it follows the formula it helped establish in a very modern-focused way. If you like anything like Turtles in Time, Double Dragon, or River City Ransom, you know what you’re getting into and you will definitely be happy. If not, I couldn’t think of a better place to start.

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Game Ramblings #96 – Luigi’s Mansion 3

More info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is where the gameplay of the series has really come together for me. The original had clever mechanics, but was a bit rough around the edges, particularly with respect to the grind of catching a high health ghost. Dark Moon went a bit more mission-based and improved the mechanics a lot, but ended up feeling like a grind. This one feels like it’s finally hit a nice middle ground, and in doing so has probably finally proven that going a bit off-base with Luigi was a good call.

At its core, this one is still the Mansion gameplay that’s expected. You find ghosts, you zap them with your flashlight, and then you vacuum them up. That hasn’t really changed. However, there’s been a bunch of little additions that significantly improved the core experience. There’s a new sort of mini burst AoE move that can be used as a stun mechanic, and is occasionally used as a way to make certain ghosts able to be captured. There’s some good use of motion controls to make more precise vertical aiming much easier to pull off.

However, the most important change is the new slam attack. After having a ghost in the vacuum for a period of time (typically around 20 health), you can slam the ghost into the ground for 20 health damage. On its own this exists as a nice mechanic to more rapidly catch ghosts. However, it can also damage other ghosts, including ones that aren’t visible. This single added maneuver greatly increases the speed of capture in a general sense, eliminating a lot of grind. It also means that there are a lot of situations in which there are a TON of ghosts in the room, simply because there are now fun ways to clear a ton of ghosts all at once. It ends up being a huge boon to the fun of capturing ghosts that I wasn’t really expecting.

Despite this being listed as action/adventure, Luigi’s Mansion is really a puzzle game at heart, and there’s a bunch of cool new mechanics around that as well. The previously mentioned AoE burst can be used as a way to uncover hidden items. There’s also a new black light function of the flashlight that can cause hidden paths to appear. A plunger item has been added to the vacuum as a way to grab on and tear down blocked paths throughout the environment.

Again though, there’s one big important change that ties this all together – Gooigi. The hideous green goo clone of Luigi. At its core, this is simply a second Luigi, allowing for some interesting mechanics around two active vacuums (as well as a great built-in co-op mechanic). However, Gooigi can also slip through grates, fences, and more, allowing for the player to get to new areas that are simply blocked off to the more solidified Luigi body. In a lot of areas this plays heavily into the puzzle solving, with the player having to open paths and hold hatches for one or the other to traverse through the world. This also plays into a lot of the boss battles, where the player will be swapping heavily between the two to set traps for bosses that only one of the pair can get to at any time.

All of these tools together bring the puzzle element to a really high level, and it all works because of the changes to the overall game structure. While this is a “mansion” title, it takes place in a large hotel. Each floor has its own mini theme, and as long as you have the elevator button to the floor, you can go to it. In practice, this has a really fun cadence to completing the game – you get a floor button, go through and complete the core puzzle and boss sequence for the floor (typically around 30-40 minutes), then go on and explore a bit based on any new mechanics that you unlock. There’s always new things to find, whether it be Boos, gems, or simply more money, and there’s always a new floor on the horizon. It ends up giving the game a really good rhythm where you learn some new tricks, apply them in a strong floor, then go back and reinforce the learning by going back to old areas. It’s a rhythm that Nintendo and its second party developers have continued to show it does better than anyone in the industry, and it’s brought this game to a high point for the series.

It would be as easy to dismiss this title as it was either of the previous games in the series. After all, these aren’t Mario games, and after Odyssey, there’s a lot to live up to. However, dismissing this as a second rate title would be a huge mistake. I’d argue that this title has shown as much improvement as we’d seen in past mainline Mario titles, and it can now easily stand on its own as something worth playing. There’s a ton of really fun puzzle solving to do, and it’s wrapped around a really fun core ghost/vacuum interaction to give moments of high action amongst the moments of heavy thinking. I totally get that folks wanting a pure action platformer aren’t going to want to get after this, but those looking for a bit of that typical Nintendo magic will find a lot to enjoy here.

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Game Ramblings #95 – Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

More Info from ArtPlay

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

Typically speaking I tend to stay more towards the Metroid end of the Metroidvania genre. I definitely own a bunch of the Castlevania games, but generally speaking I’ve been way too impatient to deal with the high damage, high danger gameplay. As the series got older, the 2d entries definitely trended towards allowing a safer type of gameplay on the standard difficulties, but then the games just kind of stopped. In good news, Bloodstained definitely feels like it picked up right where the DS Castlevania games left off – nice amount of challenge, super solid gameplay, and upgrades galore – leaving me with the right mix to hammer on through.

This game is definitely a case of classic, but refined. If you’ve played a 2D Castlevania you know what you’re getting into. You explore around, run into blockers, find a boss to get a new power, and get through the blocker. You retraverse areas that you’d been in with your new powers to get through new doors, rinse and repeat. While doing it, you gain some levels in typical RPG fashion, get some new gear with improved stats, and generally just get better at playing the game. This is all typical of the genre, but it’s done in a really polished fashion here.

There’s food to cook to gain health back, which isn’t unusual. What is done well is that the first you eat a new food, you permanently gain some stats from that. This encourages the straightforward act of cooking different foods, but also encourages simply searching out new ingredients, reinforcing the exploration of the genre. You’ll for sure find weapons, armor, and potions just exploring, and these can also be bought. However, they can also be crafted, once again reinforcing the stuff above. There’s even little touches like side quests for killing things that you can get back at the base, which push back into reinforcing the exploration loop. It’s all little things, but the big gain in all of this is as you’re exploring for things, you’re just getting more and more comfortable with core combat.

However, the biggest thing that really pulled me into the game was that getting hit by general trash wasn’t a damning thing. Ya, you couldn’t be lazy as that would be a quick path to death. However, getting hit a few times wasn’t a death sentence. Part of this was just that trash damage wasn’t typically a huge detriment. However, the trash mobs were definitely also pretty generous about dropping health pickups. This meant that while I had to be careful in exploring, I wasn’t majorly penalized for every single hit. If I really got myself into trouble, I could use my food and potions as backup, but more often than not my skill could carry me through safely. This left me to really run into boss fights fairly prepared.

And boy are the boss fights a ton of fun. Two headed dragon that chases you up and down a tower? Check. Transforming train engine after running through the rest of the train taking out enemies? Check. The bosses are super over the top thematically pretty much 100% of the time. Functionally they’re the usual pattern recognition of the genre, but as is typical the difference between fun and not is whether or not the patterns feel fair. In this case, they hit on solid patterns. Generally speaking, there was a mix of solid tells from the enemies, some quick reaction moves, and really flashy finishers to push the type of fights that I love to see in this genre. Even as I got into end-game bosses where I’d die a couple times, things never felt unfair. I’d recognize why I was dying, adjust my strategy, and go from there. As far as difficulty goes, that’s the best kind of end result I can ever ask for.

This was kind of my rest game before picking up some longer JRPGs, and I’m glad that I ended up picking this. I was definitely hesitant, because I figured that the billing of this one as a spiritual sequel of the Castlevania series meant that it might really lean into the older form of the genre. Luckily, this one really took the modern touches in stride. The gameplay is as classic as ever, but its got modern touches in balance and systems, combined with the fluidity afforded by modern hardware to really feel like it belongs as a modern extension of the genre.