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Shelved It #6 – Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom

More Info from Enigami

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One
  • Main Reason for Shelving: Questionable combat system decisions

I’m starting this one off with a screenshot, because it immediately gets into my theme here of wasted potential.  This scene is the first thing you see when you take control of the game, and the scenery you see continues to be at this level of quality.  This is a phenomenally beautiful game with good music, a good cast of characters, and an enjoyable, if simple story.  When the combat works, it’s also a ton of fun, with great pace, decent combos, and a nice mix of melee and ranged abilities.  However, as the game ramps up the difficulty, the combat very quickly goes from extremely fun to occasionally unfair to downright bad, and it’s really a consequence of one main issue; bad resource generation.

I guess first to set the stage, a bit about how the battle system actually works.  Base melee attacks are comprised of kicks and punches, which can be comboed together.  Ranged attacks are comprised of four sets of elemental attacks that use individual element-based resources.  For avoidance, the player can dodge or parry.  Parry uses the Tension resource, while dodge does not, which is a somewhat strange decision from a high level point of view, but makes sense in practice given how ineffective dodging is against melee attacks.  Finally, Tension can also be used to throw a set of more powerful combo moves, or stored to throw what is effectively an ultimate power move.

So then, let’s start with magic generation since it’s the less frustrating of the two.  While fighting in an arena, there’s a color-coded barrier that periodically changes.  By standing still, you can activate a recharge.  The element color that matches the barrier quickly recharges, while the non-matching elements recharge excruciatingly slow.  This presents two main problems.  For one, you have to stand still.  In a combat system that is heavily based around quick combos and high action, this means that you have to be at high range to even think about recharging.  It also means that characters have to be built for all elements in mind, as fights that don’t cycle between the elemental colors you want effectively negate the use of those elements.  While yes, non-matching elements recharge, it’s so slow as to be impractical in practice.

Unfortunately, Tension is an even worse resource.  It gets generated through melee attacks, but typically requires three or so hits to generate one bar of tension.  Unfortunately, this also puts you in range of enemy melee attacks, which means you’ll be in melee range of enemies, requiring heavy use of parry to avoid damage.  Unfortunately parry itself requires a full bar of Tension.  Generally speaking you can expect an enemy to start a melee chain sooner than you can get in three hits, so you end up generally just having to eat massive amounts of damage.  This is compounded by the fact that stronger enemies tend to have some form of stun lock-style maneuver with little to no tell, so you’re hoping that the moves you decide to parry vs. the moves you decide to eat damage end up being the right choice.  Worst of all, a successful parry does not give any Tension back, so you can very quickly run dry if you have to dodge two or three hits in a row by the enemy.  Changing this alone to give Tension for a successful parry could have saved the battle system, giving an advantage for well timed dodges through the system.

This is compounded by poor choices in the combo maneuvers.  Standard combos tend to only use one or two bars of Tension, but also tend to be short range and missable, so the price of using one is more than just the loss of a potential parry.  There is also then a super move which uses the entire tension bar, but can easily be interrupted by the enemies you’re facing.  When the super move is typically a 5 button chain, it’s simply not worth the price of admission to use them and lose all Tension for potentially no gain.  In general, I ended up avoiding use of the combo moves altogether, because they simply were not worth losing the resource that I could be using to parry and avoid taking more damage, particularly when one missed parry could be a 100-0 death chain.

The unfortunate thing is that a handful of changes could have been done to establish the quick pace while making things actually fair and challenging, rather than unforgiving.   Outside of the stun locks, enemies just were not challenging, so it felt like all challenge was put into catastrophically fucking the player over.  The stun locks should have been outright removed.  They’re just not fun, especially when a single miss can be a 100-0 situation.  Ideally parry should not be on a shared resource with combo moves, and realistically should not be a on a resource at all.  Even if it had its own resource, generating that for a successful parry would encourage well timed moves there instead of button spam.  With parry in a better place, and the 100-0 stun locks removed, the enemies could then have their overall difficulty adjusted up to make the skill of the fights all about constantly timing parry properly, rather than a guessing game of when you were about to be screwed the most.

I suppose I’ll close with an example here that basically killed the game for me.  The second real main boss that you hit is a multi-stage battle against some mobs, then a sub-boss, then a main boss controlling said sub-boss.  In between rounds of killing and reviving the sub-boss, the main guy would throw an orb of magic at me, which could be parried back to deal damage.  It was 100% the Ganon baseball fight from Ocarina of Time.  Unfortunately, it also meant that I needed tension to win, and the amount I needed inherently ramped up each time I hit the main boss.  Because I needed Tension, I had to eat damage, but mechanics started ramping up to include floor traps that slowed my movement and attacks, AoE magic, sub-boss throwing magic spells, etc.  In general it became more of a fight where I was dodging constantly until the opportunity for one or two hits arrived, while minimizing the damage I was taking as much as possible.  Sure I used healing spells and healing items to survive, but quite frankly the fight was just a chore.

The developer has shown some willingness to respond to feedback, so I’m hoping some things can be changed to ultimately rescue the game, but the things I suspect need changing may be too core to really do too much here.  The unfortunate result there is a lot of wasted potential.   This is the type of high quality ARPG that you usually don’t see from a small developer, because quite frankly they’re hard to make enough content for in a reasonable time.  Unfortunately a few highly questionable decisions in the combat mechanics ultimately ground this game, and prevent it from really reaching the potential it shows.

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Game Ramblings #41 – Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment

More Info from Yacht Club Games

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Vita
  • Also Available On: Windows, Linux, OS X, PS3, PS4, Wii U, 3DS, Xbox One, Fire TV

TL;DR

  • As mechanically tight and satisfying as the original Shovel of Hope campaign.
  • Fills a neat void as a prequel story to the original campaign.  Gives a lot of great backstory to one of the original bosses.
  • Changes to core mechanics greatly benefit traversal-based puzzle solving and bring a nice twist to combat.

Let’s get this out of the way.  If you’ve never played Shovel Knight, go grab the original campaign right now.  It’s one of the greatest examples in the past few years of a mechanically solid 2D platformer, regardless of the fact that it then goes even further and solidly represents an 8-bit style to great effect.  Specter of Torment is now the third campaign under the Shovel Knight umbrella, covering the prequel backstory to the Specter Knight boss from the original.  It brings some interesting mechanics with the change in weapon that really benefit the expansion overall.

The big obvious change here is that you’ve got a scythe instead of a shovel.  This has some pretty big ramifications to both combat and traversal.  Straight away the shovel bounce is replaced by a lock-on melee dash used for both traversal and combat.  For traversal, this ends up giving a lot more interesting and challenging traversal options.  Enemies, obstacles, and projectiles can all be used as traversal targets, meaning that entire rooms can be traversed without touching the floor.  This is used extremely effectively in getting the Specter through auto scrolling segments where falling down would mean death.  There’s also entire runs through boss fights where I would combo dashes the entire time without touching the ground.  While the original campaign was pretty quick paced, Specter had an entirely higher level of speed, and greatly benefited from this change.  While this will feel pretty immediately familiar to players of the original, at this point I’m leaning towards a greater enjoyment of this expansion purely because everything feels so fast.  It’s one of the best feelings a game can bring when I sit there comboing enemies while juggling them in the air, and it’s rare to see a game nail it so well.

Because of the emphasis on speed over safety, the items that are earned throughout the campaign also play into this.  Rather than being generally offense focused, a lot of the items are generally interesting helper items.  There’s a healing item that allows you to take greater risks and focus more on slash combos over a defensive play style.  There’s a hover item that lets you stay in the air to extend combos or get to a platform out of reach.  There are items that spawn a secondary clone of the Specter, as well as one that spawns a projectile firing skeleton.  In general, the items are used to effectively extend the speed focus on combat, rather than being used as purely secondary weapons, and all play into making sure the speed of encounters is kept as high as possible.

Overall this was a pretty solid expansion that I think ends up surpassing the original from a pure gameplay perspective.  Like Plague of Shadows, it’s also a nice touch to see the backstory to one of the original bosses, and give them more life than simply being a target of the Shovel Knight.  Given development of these campaigns seems to be continuing, with the King Knight’s campaign being up next, the Shovel Knight as a platform seems to have a lot of life.  We’ve now got three campaigns that all play fairly differently, and Specter of Torment shows to me that they are only improving as they go along.

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Game Ramblings #40 – I am Setsuna

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Vita, PS4, Steam (Windows)

TL;DR

  • Despite the story being thematically similar to FFX, holds its own well enough to make the game worth playing.
  • Battle system was well done.  Easily possible to break the game with certain skill and gear combos, but the positioning additions to the ATB system were well placed.
  • Doesn’t do anything egregiously bad, but there’s some obvious flaws in most parts of the game
  • Game in general showed signs of being either incomplete or rushed to completion, but the core that is there is really strong.

I am Setsuna is definitely a JRPG that points back to the kinds of games Square was releasing back in the 90s and early 00s.  It directly uses a very Final Fantasy styled ATB battle system, uses a very Final Fantasy styled story, and has the same sort of mage/healer/melee/assassin character archetypes that the Final Fantasy games used.  While there are some definite places where the game has some pretty major flaws, the base that is there shows a lot of promise for the next title by Tokyo RPG Factory, Lost Sphear.

Since it’s realistically the thing that any JRPG spends the most time in, let’s talk about the battle system.  If you’ve played anything between about FF4 through 9, you’ll recognize the ATB system in place.   The battle runs in real-time, filling a meter.  When it’s full, that person can attack.  Faster characters attack more often, rinse and repeat.  In general the system has worked fine for 25 years, and in this game it’s no different.

The big things that I am Setsuna really does well that are kind of atypical usually have to do with positioning.  Rather than being fixed on one side of the screen, both friendly and enemy characters can move around the play field.  This allows for some interesting setups in hitting multiple enemies at once, whether it’s with AoE magic, melee swipes, or pass through projectiles.  This also means that party buffs, healing, and more can also take advantage of the AoE nature in order to optimize spell use.  There’s also a number of combo skills with multiple party members that take advantage of this, allowing you to line up multiple enemies in one go for much larger damage.

However, the battle system also shows one of the biggest signs of lack of polish in the game.  In general, the boss fights were a lot of single mechanics.  Put on the right gear, find the right party members, and you’re guaranteed an easy victory.  Because skills are equippable, the amount of flexibility is astounding, but can lead to some extreme breaking of the game’s difficulty curve.  For example, the Counter skill blocks ALL physical damage, so phsyical-only bosses revolved around one party member doing nothing but staying in Counter, one party member casting a Taunt skill on the Counter person, and a third party member being there to grind out damage.  It got so bad that by the end of the game, I was using three very specific party members for everything.  The title character Setsuna had a skill that did massive AoE damage + AoE Heal.  I equipped her with MP drain on damage taken and MP drain on damage dealt passive abilities, effectively meaning she did everything at next to no cost.  The second character cast a party Protect spell, and the third just did damage.  It made the game trivial, but it also seemed like what the game was balanced for given the incoming damage numbers.

The game’s presentation was the next point where there were some big highs, and also big lows.

A normal view within the I am Setsuna overworld.

For one thing, the game is astoundingly gorgeous.  The overworld takes on a very painteresque feel, with billboarded mountains and trees over a simple 3D landscape.  The main problem here is that there are no battles in the overworld at all, so you’re just running through from point A to B as fast as possible.  The little details as you walk around in the environment, from the snow falling out of trees to the trails you leave in the snow are also always well done.  However, that’s the big problem; EVERYTHING IS SNOW.  There’s effectively no environmental variety, so the towns all look similar, the forests all look similar, the caves all look similar, and they are all frozen over.

In a nice touch, the snow trails fade over time as you wander through the environment.

The soundtrack was also a bit of a mixed bag.  While the piano-only focus of the soundtrack works fantastically well in emotional moments, high tension moments lack any sort of depth to the soundtrack, with a high pace and high volume piano not really ever being enough to carry through.  The fact that the battle music adds in a bass line and some light percussion makes this even more frustrating, because they clearly put at least some thought into expanding out the landscape of the music they were writing.  It definitely didn’t need to be fully orchestrated, but adding a bit more depth in places to the music would have greatly benefited the game’s exciting moments.

Having a pixel art styled developer thanks island was a nice touch in the end game.

The little details were the last place where things were a bit of a mixed bag.  Once you get the air ship, you can run into a developer island that shows a clear nod to the team’s past games.  It’s entirely pixel art, with classic 16-bit music and visuals.  However, there’s a lot of places where things seem like they were left unfinished, with numerous empty houses in the overworld, bath houses with no meaning, and worst of all, gaining a new party member quite literally at the door to the final boss room.  There’s also a number of high level dungeons and scattered encounters that would be great to fight post-game, but can be a big pain to get to due to some of the traversal back through long linear dungeons. I hate to say the game feels unfinished, but there’s some things that definitely give me the impression that the team’s budget couldn’t quite match their ambition.

In general, I am Setsuna is a game that JRPG fans should at the very least check out.  There’s better out there for people new to the genre, but for folks looking for an ATB-system throw back, this is a pretty solid one.  For a game that’s regularly under $30, you can do much worse.  However, don’t expect a perfect game.  It definitely has its flaws, but for me it was worth overlooking them to experience what had been done here.