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Game Ramblings #24 – Thomas Was Alone

More Info from Mike Bithell

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Steam, PS3, Vita, Mobile, Xbox One, Wii U

Thomas Was Alone is ostensibly a game about colored blocks.  At its core it takes a relatively simple visual style, and mixes it with simple 2D platformer mechanics in ways that have been done before.  However, by being extremely mechanically tight, and by having a great atmosphere that happens along side of it, it becomes one of the best platformers I’ve played in recent times.

There’s really two things that stood out about Thomas Was Alone compared to most platformers, and both of them directly tie into how the blocks are treated as individual characters.  The title of the game is no mistake, as each block is treated as a separate character within the game’s story.  Each block has its own unique personality that is exposed as the story is told.  Whether it’s the titular Thomas who is always taking note of the world around him and really doesn’t want to be alone, or Chris, who is initially a bit of a grump, but eventually ends up falling in love, or any of the other characters that you meet along the way, each block is elevated to a full character simply through fantastic writing  and great narration.  The overall characterization that is gained just through passive narration is reminiscent of games like Portal, where the depth of the game’s universe is a lot more than expected at first glance.

The individual character traits then extend directly into gameplay, giving each individual character their own style.  The combinations of characters in each level then determine how the puzzles proceed in each level.  For example, Thomas is the base character, and simply jumps a normal height.  James has the same traits as Thomas, but has reversed gravity.  Sarah can double jump, Chris has a short jump, but it also much smaller size and can fit through gaps, Laura can be used as a trampoline, etc.  Each new character introduced adds another layer to the overall experience until you’re eventually completing puzzles using the entire gang’s unique abilities to finish up levels.

All of this is tied together in a package that is extraordinary in how reliable the mechanics all are.  There were no situations in which I felt like I was misjudging my jumps or unsure of where I was trying to get to.  New characters would seamlessly integrate into my puzzle solving experience as soon as I learned what their ability or benefit was.  The game, as is appropriate in puzzle games in general, was never about the where, but the how of finishing each area.

I think in the end the best thing I can really say about Thomas Was Alone is that I accidentally finished it in one sitting.  Sure, it was only about 4 hours long, but there’s not many games that I play for four hours straight, and even fewer where I don’t even realize that four hours had gone by.  I suppose I should have gotten to this one sooner.

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Game Ramblings #23 – World of Final Fantasy

More info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Vita

Given the month and year we’re currently in, you’d expect that the monster capture RPG that everyone wants to play is Pokemon Sun/Moon.  However, Square-Enix decided to launch World of Final Fantasy anyway, so here we are.  WoFF is decidedly a monster capture RPG at its core, but with characters and a story that blend a large number of past FF games, and a battle system pulled straight out of the SNES and PS1 entries in the series.  Overall, while it may not end up being the best monster capture title this year, it certainly is worth playing for any serious JRPG fans.

WoFF takes place in the world of Grymoire, where pretty much everyone but the two main characters are little chibi folks.  The story is your usual overpowered bad dude taking over the world nonsense, but it generally works and provides enough of a reason to move forward.  The even better reason to move forward for FF fans are the constant cameos from past FF stars.  The cameos run the gamut from FF 1 through 13, and tend to hit all the big protagonists, including the return of the voice actors for the titles that had voice acting.  If you’re a fan of the series at all, you’ll get a kick out of the constant barrage of recognizable faces as you get to new areas.  It’s a fun time throughout, and ends up working out well enough to provide an entertaining backdrop to the core gameplay.

The setting also provides the depth of FF monsters for you to capture. You’ll be grabbing everything from Chocobos to Cactuars to Tonberries on the low end, all the way up to recognizable summons like Ifrit, Bahamut, and Diabolos at the high end.  The wide range of sizes and styles all feeds back into the way that you build out your team, providing both the fun of capturing all the things you’ve fought in the past, as well as a huge amount of depth to building out teams that mask each other’s weaknesses while boosting their strengths.

That said, the battle system is the real star here.  The core of it is the instantly recognizable Active Time Battle system from the FF4-FF9 games, and it essentially remains the same.  What is different here is how the party is built out.  The general idea is that each of the two main characters exists in a stack consisting of a small, medium, and large NPC.  Because the main guys can be normal human form or chibi form, they can fill the large or small slot.  The rest of the slots are then filled out by the monsters you capture.  This stack then combines its stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities to form the unified character stack that takes its turn in battle.

What this ends up doing is providing a pretty large meta game to how you build out your party.  While you may want some fire attacks, this would expose the stack to a weakness against water.  To combat this, you can then also place a character strong against water, eliminating that elemental weakness, and providing an overall better prepared stack.  On the other hand, you can combine the stack with another fire user to really increase the strength fire resistance, as well as providing boosts to the strength of fire attacks used by the stack.  This mix and match continues throughout the game, to the point where I would typically have entire new rosters each time I entered a new area.

The other nice system that came in from other FF games is the way that the monsters you capture gain ability and stat increases.  Beyond just gaining flat stats through leveling, every species has a grid-based upgrade system very reminiscent of the Sphere Grid system from Final Fantasy X.  Some upgrades in this system are flat stats as well, but by and large you use the system to gain active and passive ability upgrades.  The system also is used to unlock the evolutions of monsters, where the upgrades earned from one variant of a species carry over as you evolve into another variant.  Of note, the monsters can evolve up and down to any variant of a species that you have access to at any time, so there’s never the question of whether or not it’s worth evolving a monster.  You just change it to what is most useful at the time.

Overall this was a really solid JRPG to be playing, especially in the lead up to the Pokemon series’ next entry.  It certainly wasn’t immune to problems; the end game in particular got really grindy.  However, it showed that there’s still a lot of life in the FF series, while still allowing for them to branch out into other interesting gameplay types that aren’t just the core series.  While FF15 is going to be an incredibly different game from this one, WoFF also gives me hope that Square is giving their Final Fantasy teams all the resources needed to pull off incredibly high quality games, with the time needed to make sure they are in the right place to succeed.

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Shelved It #1 – Paper Mario: Color Splash

More Information from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Wii U
  • Shelved At: Bowser’s Castle, basically the last couple hours of the game.

It may seem weird that I shelved a game when I knew I was near the end of the game, but for this game it was basically the point of no return for me.  Paper Mario: Color Splash was a frustrating experience.  Frustrating because it’s a much better game than the previous entry, Sticker Star, but also because the key story points generally introduced changes in mechanics that seemed to counteract everything that had been going on before.

One of the big things that really turned me off from playing Sticker Star was the need to collect stickers just to continue the battles.  This has unfortunately not gone away, but at least for the bulk of the game, is not a huge issue.  There are now a couple shops in the main town that sell standard cards, as well as the more special-case Thing cards that are the primary mechanic of most boss fights.  That said, the convenience of them being there is fairly heavily counteracted by the need for them to be there.  Going into a boss battle, you generally don’t know what you need to do to win.  You may know what cards you’ll need, but not when or how to use them.  Because of this, it was not uncommon for me to go into a boss battle blind, effectively expecting to die so I could actually prepare for the fight.

Because this entry is also not a stat-based RPG, the effective growth curve of enemies results in you needing upgraded variants of cards, and therefore a higher overall cost.  The cost is both coins if buying directly, or amount of paint used if using unpainted cards.  This ended up pushing me to a point where to get past where I shelved the game, I would have had to just grind through battles with cheap cards in order to buy the expensive cards I now knew I needed.  Because the first fight in Bowser’s Castle effectively starts out by removing your paint supply, then limiting you to specific colors of cards, simply stocking up on cheaper unpainted variants was a recipe for death.  While grinding then wouldn’t have been difficult, it wasn’t worth the amount of time needed given how many frustrating boss fights I’d already encountered getting to there.

If nothing else, there were some positive signs in this game if a future entry cleans up some of the less fun shenanigans.  The story itself was much more entertaining than either Sticker Star or the sort of related Paper Jam, and was definitely much closer to the quality of the RPG entries in the series.  While the battle system had some collecting issues, when I was just using the cards themselves, it was still a mechanically tight and fun to use turn-based system, with a lot of variety in the cards beyond the standard jump/hammer.  The visuals and soundtrack were also both fantastic.

At this point, I’m not really sure what this series needs.  My instinct is to say they just need to go back to making a straight RPG experience, and Paper Jam was certainly enough of an indication that a Mario RPG is still fun to play.  That said, they’ve shown that non-RPG Paper games can be a lot of fun with Super Paper Mario, but that was nearly 10 years ago at this point.  I suspect what they really need to do is just take a break and try some other things before deciding to come back, because their attempts at new things within this IP have become at best a mixed bag.