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Game Ramblings #90 – Super Neptunia RPG

More Info from Idea Factory

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam

I’ve played a bunch of the Neptunia games, and they’re always a nice breather from my typical run of titles. They tend to take a known genre, craft a story around it that makes fun of the genre, and still manage to make a game that more often than not is shallow, but fun. Unsurprisingly, Super Neptunia RPG is more of that style. In this case, they take the 2D overworld movement of something like Muramasa, give it a battle system like any normal 2D JRPG, and manage to spit out a game that works, even with some grinding flaws. In this case, the Neptunia gang get transported to a place in which 3D games are banned, and the entire world is now 2D – and that’s about as serious as this series is ever going to be.

This screen will become your friend throughout the entire game. It gives you everything you need to quickly clear enemies.

Combat is the real focus here, and the entire flow of the game is built around the combat system. The closest description I can come up with is basically this: take the ATB system from SNES Final Fantasies, apply that to your entire party so they share the pool, and have the weakness exploiting of Shin Megami Tensei recharge your ATB pool if you land a weak hit. That combination of mechanics basically has the game working in vastly different ways depending on whether you’re in a trash or boss fight.

For trash fights, the name of the game is completing the battle as quickly as possible by exploiting as many weaknesses as possible. Hit the weakness, keep your ATB, and immediately spam the next attack. By doing this, you can generally complete any weakness-focused battle in seconds. However, this does have a significant problem in the late game.

Ratasteam? Ratasnow? Rataspell? Definitely not Rattata.

Near the end of the game, a lot of the enemies simply stopped having weak points. Any trash fight without weak points plain and simply sucked. Your attack numbers were never really high enough to do large chunking damage on their own, and the ATB meter charging isn’t super fast. Because the meter is shared amongst the entire party, you’re never in a situation in these kinds of fights where you can attack with multiple people. The enemies themselves were generally never dangerous enough to make a risk/reward interesting in whether or not to save ATB charges, so the fights simply dragged out. My tendency ended up being to run from fights without weaknesses, avoid entire regions of battle, and then go to areas with known weaknesses to grind if needed. It just dragged the pace of the last 3-4 hours so much that I wish they’d have balanced the weakness system better to have it be used always at a cost of not being as powerful.

On the other hand, bosses generally had no weaknesses, but were often dangerous, so the risk/reward of saving ATB charges really came into play here. More often than not, I was saving nearly a full meter within a boss fight, then activating either a full attack combo, or some mix of buffs, heals, and spot attacks. This slowed the pace of the fights way down, but also brought them into a place where the strategy more typical of a JRPG was really combing into focus. I wouldn’t say the bosses were ever all that hard, but they were definitely the more interesting of the fights even without exploiting the weakness setup.

Mix Dragon Quest Slimes with Goombas and avoid getting sued? Sure why not.

Luckily, non-battle gameplay was also fairly entertaining. The traversal mechanics and level setup are basically a straight rip of the Vanillaware-style 2D game. Visually, the game has the same sort of hand-drawn-ish, but still very smooth Flash animated characters. The backgrounds are all super colorful with a bunch of parallax layers to fill out the scene. Movement is fast, and with the right amount of exploration you’ll find hidden items or entire hidden areas. As you play through the game, you end up earning more traversal abilities, so going back and revisiting areas has added benefits. If the combat had been in real-time, this would easily have fit in against Odin Sphere or Muramasa, even if it wouldn’t be anywhere on the level of seriousness of those games.

There’s also a bunch of added depth simply in gearing your squad. This game takes the modern Tales of approach of adding acquireable skills to gear, and once earned the skills can be permanently equipped. Their weapons are unique equips, but accessory gear is often shared between party members. In this way I was always playing a balance between finding skills that fit the character’s strengths, while also trying to rush skills that I knew would be beneficial to the entire party. As an example, by end game I’d earned a permanent HP refresh (1% heal per ATB bar generated) across my entire party, so rather than having to have a dedicated full time healer, I was able to craft my party into a mixed physical/magical damage rush party with only weak heals to fill out during burst damage times.

All that being said, there’s really not a whole lot of depth to the rest of the experience. The gameplay is all solid, but the game is less than 20 hours long. There’s definitely a lot of side quests, but they’re all of the gather x thing / kill y enemy variety. You could probably entirely ignore them and get by just fine. Even in combat, you could squeak by without paying any attention at all to the weakness system, although it would probably take a significantly longer amount of time to finish. However, as a breather between serious games this one really hit a good mark. It’s enough of a game to still be fun to play, strong enough mechanically to be interesting enough, and have a stupid enough story to let me just enjoy the comedy for what it is. Is this going to win any game of the years? Unlikely. However, it does exactly what it needed to do – be fun.

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Game Ramblings #88.1 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix

Read part 1 here.

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PS2, PS3

This is admittedly the first time I’d played Kingdom Hearts II. I’d played most of the spinoff games in the past, but given how little I kind of enjoyed playing through Kingdom Hearts in its original form, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to pay for KH2 at its release when I should really have been focused on paying for college. Since then going back to play it just never really happened. In continuing my path to eventually get to KH3, this was then the one real big game I had to get to, and it’s surprising in ways I wasn’t expecting.

The first surprise is in the drastic difficulty change between releases. Where the original Kingdom Hearts was artifically difficult because of bad mechanics, the second game is artificially easy because of good mechanics used too much. There were definitely a couple of times where I died to the usual KH blind damage nuke, but by and large I was able to brute force my way around those points once I knew what to look out for. However, this all came down to the fact that combat was significantly better than the first game in a couple crucial ways.

Combat is definitely better in KH2. This ends up being really nice when literally dozens of enemies are thrown at you.

The first big change to combat is the complete rewrite of how mana works in the game. The original game recharged mana per-attack completed. While this works alright in games like Tales of where there’s a bunch of safety space in absorbing damage, for KH getting up close had to be fairly specifically timed and often resulted in death by accidents. The entire process of using mana in that combat system just ended up feeling like a slow process, so I really leaned into items for healing and straight attack brute force. It’s a style that I enjoy anyway in a typical action RPG, so poor combat mechanics aside it worked out fairly well for me.

For KH2, mana is a fixed bar resource, magic attacks have a fixed cost, and once a mana bar is depleted it is set into a timer-based automatic recharge. This vastly improved the utility of magic as a whole. I knew that I could fairly reliably have a Cure spell if needed. If I was in a section where the enemy was stunned, I could unload a bunch of magic spells and know that I wouldn’t then have to play it safe while waiting for attacks to refill my mana. As a result, my entire combat tendencies went into a much more aggressive offense-first setup which ended up greatly benefiting the overall flow of the game throughout.

At this point in the game I’d already stacked up a 5+ chain combo, which made getting after tiny flying enemies really nice.

The combat flow was also helped by the second biggest surprise for me – just how many damn attacks they let you build into your combo by the end of the game. Additional combo skills were unlocked periodically, usually focused on some specific type of combat (on the ground, in the air, etc). Turning on these skills basically meant that your combo chain would get one longer and let you lean into heavy damage that much longer. By the end of the game I probably had about a 10 combo chain in the air, and at least 6 or 7 on the ground. The end result of this is that I could pretty typically go into a boss and do at least half a bar of damage per-combo, if not more. In any stun situation, I was easily doing 2 full bars of damage against a boss. This solved a lot of the problem of the first game’s bosses, where they mechanically sucked AND took forever, by simply having them die quicker whether or not their mechanics were really that good.

Besides all that, the overall game was definitely a cleaner experience. Boss arenas tended to be pretty simple box or circle affairs, which got rid of the collision problems of the first game. Your sidekick characters tended to be more on the ball with support healing, giving you more opportunity to be in the fight. The general balance curve was a lot less prone to difficulty spikes and flatline segments, giving a much more balanced progression path. Even the worlds themselves were setup in a way that more paths opened up on second or third playthroughs of a world, so going back never felt like it was done as a need to grind or search, but instead to learn more about what was going on. Attacking vaguely in midair did a much better job of homing in on targets around you, so there was a lot less waste in simply trying to get AT something.

It’s also worth noting that the Lion King costumes are the best costumes the series has had to this point.

Is this game without problems? Hardly. The things above all lead up to an experience that is simply way too easy overall, but it ends up being easy in a way that doesn’t detract from the experience. It’s also got some systems like the form-shifting Drive system that I quite frankly didn’t find at all useful beyond gaining some traversal passives. Summons were also technically still there, but again I didn’t end up finding much practical use for them. The story is also completely bonkers, and when combined with the KH 1.5 disc’s lore makes absolutely no sense. However, this game is a much cleaned up experience compared to the first title, and in doing so it goes from something that I play because Disney + Final Fantasy is an interesting quirky idea to something that I play because it’s actually a lot of fun.

Next in line for the KH replay cycle is going to be Dream Drop Distance HD, which actually is one of the games I’ve played through before.

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Game Ramblings #89 – Cadence of Hyrule: CRYPT OF THE NECRODANCER FEAT. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

More Info from Brace Yourself Games

  • Genre: Rhythm RPG
  • Platform: Switch

This is definitely one of those games that I assumed would work when it was announced, but you can never really be sure. Outside of the obvious rhythm gameplay of Crypt of the Necrodancer, it’s not that far off of Zelda. It’s still basically an action RPG with a bunch of inventory. It still encourages you to romp through effectively dungeons to progress. It’s god a damn good soundtrack. But still, this is Zelda. Somehow this has come out and feels great, feeling like each of their series at the same time without losing anything in the process.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a screenshot of a standard Zelda 2D title, but that little bar at the bottom is where it starts to separate itself.

The screenshot above does a good job of visually laying out how much things are the same, but totally different. On the surface, this looks like a 2D Zelda-series RPG. There’s some familiar looking enemies, a normal item wheel, hearts, rupees, keys, a slightly angled camera viewpoint. However, that little bar at the bottom and the specifics of the grid are where you start getting the Necrodancer gameplay.

Like Necrodancer, any movement or attack is most effective when done on the beat of the music. At the same time, enemies also move and attack on the beat, so you’ve got a play around keeping on eye on what you’re doing and an eye on the enemies to make sure you aren’t getting trapped. While it’s technically a turn-based game as a result, the practical pace is really close to an action RPG and it ends up straddling the line between familiar and new really well.

Combat is also a bit different than expected for a Zelda game, mostly due to a large unexpected variety in ways to attack. Each character that you control has its own specialty, and you can swap between Link, Zelda, or Necrodancer’s Cadence at any time once you reach them. You’ve still got your Link-style broadsword attacks that hit a wide line in front of the player. However, you can also use spears for extended range straight attacks, flails for L-shaped AoE style attacks, or daggers for real close-range combat. Even on defense you have more variety than just Hylian shields, with characters like Zelda able to activate a projectile-reflecting magic shield if timed correctly. You can even add modifiers to your weapons like health drain or poison to add some additional flexibility to your loadout.

The positive outcome of all of this is that I really spent time modifying my gear loadout and character selection based on what I knew would be most beneficial to me at the time. Early on I went more spear-focused in order to keep enemies at a larger range from me. As I gained some hearts and defensive items, I started moving into broadswords in order to take out more than one enemy at a time, even if it allowed them to get closer at range and occasionally hit me. As a whole it ends up in a battle system that has tremendously good flow due to the rhythm focus, but still has a ton of ways to play to your strengths at any time in a way very reminiscent of high end ARPGs.

It definitely helps that there’s a lot of familiar things in the gameplay though despite all the changes. You’ve still got to save up your rupees to buy things in shops. You’ve still got to visit Kakariko Village to move forward. Hell, you’ve still got to get lost in Lost Woods as part of your quest. However, through it all the focus on rhythm gameplay really feels like a fun fresh take on the Zelda formula.

And oh boy that soundtrack. The Zelda soundtracks on their own are really special, and really familiar to a lot of gamers. Living up to that alone is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. However, the need to really hit a music pace that allows for a good gameplay pace added a level of technical need that the team really nailed. The familiar Zelda themes are morphed into new genres – whether it’s jazzier takes on the main theme or Song of Storms, or more dance-based overworld themes, or even rock-focused takes on the Gerudo Valley theme – that really push a fast gameplay pace while still being fantastic takes on familiar themes. This is the rare game where the soundtrack alone is worth the price of purchase, but you still get a great game on top of it.

It also helps that the bosses are punny as hell.

This is definitely a game out of left field. While Necrodancer on its own is a fantastic game, the fact that Nintendo allowed for the Zelda license to run wild in the Necrodancer universe. What ends up coming out of it is something that just works fantastically well – as long as you’re comfortable in the rhythm style. Is this going to be a replacement for the upcoming Link’s Awakening remake? No not really. Is this better than I could have hoped for as a way to get more Necrodancer content? You better believe it.