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Game Ramblings #49 – Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Turn-based Tactics
  • Platform: Switch

I hope you’ll pardon my pun here, but Ubisoft has managed to pull a Rabbid out of a hat.  This game seamlessly blends the Mario and Rabbid IPs into a single game, throws it into a turn-based game with some fantastic use of the Mario universe for its move set, and popped out a game that is one of the best I’ve played this year.  While there’s a few things that I’d have liked to see improved in the overall mission structure, the end result is still a fine example of what developers can do with the Switch, and an interesting example of a team making a Nintendo quality experience, without being Nintendo themselves.

The visuals would be at home in any of the recent 3D Mario series titles.

The biggest surprise to me is that this feels like a Mario title through and through.  While the gameplay is obviously different, the little details are all there.  It’s the sound of a coin when you pick it up.  It’s the vibrant and varied environments across four main worlds (and the Peach’s castle hub).  It’s the inclusion of red and blue coin challenges scattered throughout hidden areas.  It’s Mario’s jump attack straight out of the Mario series RPG titles.  Everywhere you look, there’s little details that make this feel extremely familiar, despite the huge differences in gameplay.

The nice thing about all of that is that it’s worth exploring every corner.  Scattered throughout the environment are series of small challenges, puzzles, and hidden crates.  While most of them contain little bonus art or music pieces, a number of the crates also contain weapons or power orbs.  Make no mistake, the underlying systems of this game are very traditional to the tactics genre.  Weapon upgrades for primary and secondary weapons are here, giving you obvious damage upgrades, but also adding secondary hit effects, bonus damage to specific enemies, and more.  While there’s no direct XP for killing enemies, the power orbs you earn in battle or find throughout the environment act as a functional replacement, being used to purchase upgrades in character-specific skill trees.  These skill trees act as a way to build out each character’s skill set, as well as provide more obvious passive bonuses like increased health and damage.

The facial animations in cutscenes are universally good, and usually play up the more slapstick comedy aspect of both series.

All of the skill upgrades compound into what ends up being a fantastic battle system.  The basics that are there are all solid, and work in a very XCOM-like fashion.  During your turn, you can run around and hide behind various pieces of the environment.  In a very Mario way, you can warp to different platforms via pipes, or hide behind blocks.  Also of note, brick-based blocks can be destroyed via friendly or enemy fire, and fans of the Mario series will know where not to hide if this is a concern.  However, where the battle system really shows its greatest potential is in its exploitation of movement mechanics, both as an offensive helper, and a defensive measure to keep enemies away.

On the weapon side, the two main mechanics I ended up leaning heavily on were bounce and push.  Bounce does just that; when you hit an enemy, it causes them to bounce in the air, taking additional damage, and also giving them the potential to get thrown off the level for further damage.  Push on the other hand causes the enemy hit to ball up and start rolling around the level.  They can then rebound off walls, blocks, and other enemies to cause a chain reaction of bouncing chaos.  In both of these cases, I could take advantage of the damage increase, but more often than not I was using these mechanics to push the enemies backwards, and control the flow of their movement beyond them just moving towards me.  I could also use things like the rebound on push to cause enemies to be knocked out of cover, offering more opportunities for large damage.

There were also some other traversal-based mechanics that were handy to use.  Each character could dash through enemies, causing damage.  However, each ally also had a special move for traversal.  Mario could also jump off an ally, and jump stomp enemies, giving both additional damage and travel distance on the hop.  Rabbid Luigi could dash and drop Vampire on an enemy, causing an HP siphon to be applied.  Peach could jump off an ally, and heal anyone within range of her landing location.  This all added up to each turn not just being about weapon damage, but in seeing how many things you could chain in one turn for maximum potential.

Even the ghost town still feels very Mario, with Boos replacing the normal lamps above houses.

Given all that, the only real criticisms I had were involved in the occasional parts of the mission structure.  There were a handful of escort missions that work about as poorly here as in every other game that uses them.  The escorted units had no attack, and typically moved slower than the rest of the party, as well as spawned enemies.  These missions usually just devolved into running forward to wipe enemies, then running everyone back to act as a damage sponge for reinforcements flanking from behind.  The other main problem was in the mission chaining within each chapter.  Rather than allowing healing between missions, you could only heal at the end of each chapter, and had to fight with the HP pool you had through multiple battles.  There was healing to alleviate the problem, but I felt like they could have played up to higher difficulty within a single mission if they’d gone with a more typical heal in between battle setup.  As it is, quite a few of the missions in place were simply too easy due to the chaining being in place.

You can never go wrong with an opera boss.

It speaks volumes to the skill of Ubisoft’s developers that they pulled this off.  They managed to seamlessly blend two franchises that have next to nothing in common, beyond a love of occasional slapstick comedy.  They put them into a genre that hadn’t been done for the two series, and yet made it feel like it belonged.  They turned what many gamers assumed was a joke, and made it one of the best games that has come out this year.  It also speaks volumes to Nintendo’s ongoing willingness to let external development teams have the keys to the kingdom, in a manner of speaking.  We’ve seen this with Metroid for years, Zelda with Hyrule Warriors, and a ton of great platformers out of the team at Good-Feel.  Is this worth buying a Switch for? I dunno, I’d save that for Breath of the Wild, but it certainly makes a good case for the console.

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Game Ramblings #48 – Nights of Azure

More Info from Koei Tecmo

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Japan Only – PS3, Vita

TL;DR

  • Solid combat with multiple fighting styles
  • Good exploration mechanics that encourage taking risks without huge penalties
  • Small demon collection aspect that ends up giving a lot of party flexibility, adding good depth to combat

Nights of Azure is one of those games that I can best describe as being entirely competent.  It’s a game with solid combat, an entertaining enough story, and some nice systems to flesh things out.  It ends quick enough that it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and in doing so doesn’t do anything egregious to piss me off.  The visuals were decent, and it was clear what was going on.  The soundtrack hit the emotional notes of the story’s current progress, and the battle music kicked into high gear when necessary.  Given it was developed by Gust, this should come as no great surprise.  The DNA of their other more famous series (Atelier series, Ar Tonelico/Nosurge series) is definitely in place here, and the game benefits a lot from it.

There’s a lot on screen during combat, but you learn to look at important info quickly.

Being an ARPG, the most important thing in general is going to be the combat, and Azure definitely brings some solid combat to this.  In a lot of ways it can be described as a sort of Tales-lite system.  You’ve got a small party, some core melee combos, and some SP-based skills.  However, the party members revolve around a Pokemon style collection system instead of being core NPCs.  The other main thing that adds a lot of depth is that there are 4 different combat styles, giving some flexibility in picking the style that works best for the user.

However, the best thing that came out of all of this is the leveling system.  While it’s definitely a consequence of the game’s short length (< 20 hours for the core story), I ended up finishing the game around level 8, and my demons at their max level of 10.  Because of this, getting a level felt extremely important.  Each stat bump that came with it, as well as skills gained from leveling all had an obvious impact on my character, which is a nice change from the usual 50+ level slog of more high budget ARPGs and JRPGs.  The resource used for leveling was also a nice touch.  Killing enemies results in Blue Blood being gained, which can be used for leveling, summoning new demons for your party, as well as purchasing items from demon vendors throughout the game.  This gave a lot more consequence to the use of the resource, particularly because you could not use the blood you gained until you returned back to home base.

While that last note may sound scary, the game has other systems in place to encourage exploration, rather than making the resource gathering feel like a huge risk.  The main bonus here is that you can teleport instantly back to base at any point, and most quests also typically teleport you back to base for story reasons after finishing the goal.  The second thing they do is checkpoint your progress at the beginning of a room.  If you die, you lose all the resources you gained specifically within the current area, but you don’t lose everything from your current exploration session, and can choose to immediately go home, or pick up where you checkpointed.  In general, this allowed me to be slightly gung ho about going down side paths, because I knew at most I was only going to lose a few minutes progress, with the potential for a huge payoff defeating something optional.

I suppose my final note is that this definitely felt like a portable title, rather than a typical console title, and it being released on the Vita in Japan points to that.  Exploration was done with a time limit of 15 minutes, after which you’d teleport back to base.  However, I never really got close to that time limit, and the tasks I was chasing were typically done within a 10 minute or less window.  This would have been a perfect amount of time for a typical portable experience, and the sequel being aimed at the Switch leads me to believe they’re sticking with the system.  However, even on console the game loop there worked pretty effectively, letting me jump in in short bursts.

The outfit choices were sometimes questionable, and generally got a laugh out of me for their absurdity.

In a lot of ways, this was definitely a very typical Gust title.   The plot was very female-focused, the interaction between the two main characters was personal and positive, and the end of the game left it open for the since-announced sequel.  The outfit choices in some of the cutscenes (as seen above) were also generally pretty hilarious in how little was being worn.  However, it was more often than not hilarious in its lack of care, rather than being risque or offensive in any way.  End of the day, this was a game that was a lot of fun to play, even if it’s not chasing the AAA titles for game of the year.

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Shelved It #7 – Hollow Knight

More Info from Team Cherry

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: Mac, Linux, Switch

TL;DR

  • Solid mechanics, solid visuals, solid audio all put together a great base that can be built on.
  • Small bits of lack of polish, rather than anything egregious led to frustration, and eventual shelving.

This is going to sound weird for a game I’m shelving, but Hollow Knight is really quite good.  It’s a pretty traditional Metroidvania in layout, using a solid short-range melee system and some occasional powerups to round out the move set.  This is complemented by a solid visual style, and great audio and soundtrack to put together one of the best themed titles in this genre I’ve recently played.  However, this was a case of a thousand cuts, where small lack of polish in the details led to a continuous pattern of one step forward, one step backward in my progress.  This was combined with a somewhat questionable use of the Souls death mechanic, to where body runs began to feel like a slog, rather than a good balance of penalty and learning reward.  In the end, the good couldn’t outweigh the bad for me to continue on.

Early example of some of the fantastic visuals you’d see in this game.

However, let’s start with the good.  As with a lot of recent Metroidvania games, particularly in the indie scene, this one is a fantastic looker of a game.  Like the recent remake of Wonder Boy 3, or other Metroidvania titles like Ori and the Blind Forest, this one has a fantastic visual style.  Everything has a great hand-drawn appearance, with thick painterly lines.  It’s a fairly distinct style, and works rather well.  This is combined with great use of dynamic lighting to give some dramatic areas.  The biggest problem with it all is that most of the areas share a similar color range, so things can begin to look rather samey as you continue on.  On the other hand, it never got old running through the environment and having all the little blades of grass in the scene explode into similarly styled particles as I swung through them.  As a whole, this was a part of the game that never really diminished in my time playing it.

The core combat is also really well put together.  The base of the combat are melee strikes, which sounds simple at its core.  However, there was a smart choice made specifically in the horizontal strike, giving some verticality outside of the swing’s hitbox, and allowing players to hit things both slightly above and slightly below without having to be super precise with jump heights. This was extremely nice for how small some of the hitboxes on armored bosses and enemies could be.  This was backed up by a strong set of spells and abilities that are earned throughout the game to fill out the move set.  Examples here include mid-air dashes and double jumps for traversal, or energy missiles and dive bomb spells for damage.  Generally speaking, the game gives you a bunch of tools to use, and its up to you to then figure out what is most effective for each situation.

However, as I continued on, the little details that didn’t quite have the polish of the visuals and core combat started giving way to more frustration than fun.

The first big place this showed for me was in their use of the Dark Souls death mechanic.  The basic system is that at death, your soul gets stuck in the world along side all currency you earned during that life.  If you get back to the soul and defeat it in combat, you earn all the currency back.  If you die before that, you permanently lose all of it.

Generally speaking, I’m pretty neutral on this system.  There’s a fine line where this system works well, and to me it requires enough save points in place that are both close enough together, as well as close enough to where players will die so that the game doesn’t heavily discourage exploration, and keeps game pace post-death high.  To me it feels like Hollow Knight fails on both of these counts.  Many areas had a bunch of save points clustered near the center of the zones, but fewer out towards the edges where a lot of boss battles or more dangerous sort of side dungeons were.  There were also hardly ever any save points actually immediately before or immediately after boss rooms, so deaths during bosses (which are extremely common) often resulted in a long run back to the boss.  It just felt like a lot of wasted time, rather than a good chance to learn and retry the boss quickly.  This was compounded by a number of times where my soul spawned out of reach, effectively ending my change to re-earn my lost currency, so I eventually just stopped exploring altogether, choosing to go the lower risk way of sticking to main paths and simply grinding out kills if I required more money or power for skills.

There were a bunch of other little details that also compounded on top of this core problem for me.  First and foremost, jumping feels awkward.  This is a game with purely digital left/right movement, and no in-air momentum.  If you’re jumping and let go of the stick, you fall straight down.  It just feels weird, and eliminates a lot of subtle movement flow that a lot of better examples of the genre have.  There’s also a really obnoxious backwards impulse after hitting an enemy.  This is combined with somewhat imprecise collision on platforms to put me in situations where trying to jump and hit enemies mid-air around small platforms was pretty much a death sentence if solid ground wasn’t below me.

The final sort of annoyance was in the mapping system mechanics.  Rather than mapping out rooms when you walk through them, you had to clear a couple of hurdles first to map out a zone.  First and foremost, you had to buy a map of the zone from a vendor within the zone, generally well within the zone and out of the way (see annoyance with losing currency when your body run fails due to spawning out of reach….).  This only opened the ability to map the area.  It then didn’t mark areas on your map until the next time you reached a save area (see annoyance with the location and frequency of save poiints….).  Otherwise you were basically flying blind, and have to remember your path through areas until you hit both points above.  Generally speaking, it just felt like an additional unnecessary money and time pit, where I’d rather be spending my currency on functional upgrades.

End of the day, the further I went into Hollow Knight, the more the small details outweighed the good of the core systems.  Could I have grinded through it without too much trouble? Sure.  Are the problems going to be something that bothers everyone? Nope.  However, I’ve got plenty of other games to play, and seeing lack of polish in the details just generally distracts the hell out of me.  However, for those with more patience than me can probably find a lot to love here, so if nothing else, I’d recommend taking a look the next time a Steam sale rolls on through.