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Game Ramblings #30 – Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse

More Info from WayForward

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Also Available On: 3DS, Fire TV, Steam, Wii U, Xbox One

The Shantae series has been around for a while, whether as one of the most valuable Game Boy Color games, experimenting with digital distribution on the DSi, or getting Kickstarted for its latest entry.  This time around I played the third in the series, Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse.  As the series has evolved, it’s generally followed a Metroidvania style, with some key twists to stray a bit from the formula.

One of the key differences typical of the series was that Shantae gained Genie transformations, rather than the more typical weapon upgrades of the Metroid series.  However, that went away for Pirate’s Curse for some relatively valid story reasons.  This one uses the more typical gear upgrade path, but with a bit more themed variety.  Since this is ostensibly a game involving pirates, the gear upgrades end up being things like a pirate hat to slow falling, a cannon to allow multi-jump, or pirate boots to allow for speed boosts.  It all ends up feeling much like the Metroid upgrade path, with a very appropriate theme for the game.

Where this game highly differs from the typical style of the genre is that it is level based.  Each piece of gear is found within a dungeon hidden within a themed level.  The typical path is to get to a new level, explore and do some story quests to open up the dungeon, then head on in for an upgrade and a boss fight centered around the new piece of gear.  In a lot of respects, the game feels like it brings in a very Zelda-esque focus there, where the boss fight is clearly themed around the particular item you got.  There is some back and forth going to levels that were already finished for side quests and upgrades, particularly in picking up the effective replacement for health tanks, as some are out of reach without later upgrades.  Overall while the setup is very familiar to the Metroidvania genre, the breakup across different themed levels brings a nice change of pace to each new area as you get to it.

In general this is one of the mechanically better Metroidvanias in recent years that I’ve played.  Traversal is rapid, but easy to control.  Jumping feels extremely tight, and mixes in some of the Mario-style jump height differences based on how long the button is held.  The upgrades all serve noticeable purposes in enhancing the skill set available to get around the environment.  Generally speaking, the core melee attack is going to be the 90% usage, but there’s also upgrades available for it, so there’s a noticeable power curve as the game goes on.  The bosses are all pattern based, and by and large have some amount of challenge, but are fair and typically obvious in their weak points.  Despite its relatively short length (avg 7.5 hours), the time spent in the game will go fast due to its fun play.

All that said, the last dungeon nearly made me shelve the game entirely, and did stop me from completing a 100% run.  The tl;dr here is that its a multi-level dungeon with each level having its own mechanic to complete.  However, they were more often than not based around memorization, rather than pure skill.  One level had me using the boots dash to traverse across a set of spike traps.  Due to the speed of traversal, I basically couldn’t see where I was going, or which path was the valid one until I hit a wall and died.  Another level had me using the multi-jump cannon and destroying blocks in my way as I went through another series of spike traps.  However, there were a few spots where I couldn’t see ahead, and basically had to blindly jump and die until I shot out my perfect path to get through.  Once I got to the boss, everything was fine, but for a game that had to that point been so skill based in its traversal, it felt like a really strange turn right at the end of the game.  My as spoiler free as possible recommendation here is to finish the 100% run as much as possible before entering the last dungeon, as you need to be there to get the true ending.

In the end, the game was still worth playing, especially for fans of Metroidvania style games.  It’s mechanically sound, has a good story and soundtrack, and is visually fantastic.  Given the recent rarity of the genre outside the indie space, you could definitely do worse than to give this series a try.

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Game Ramblings #29 – Final Fantasy VIII

More Info from Wikipedia

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS1
  • Also Available On: Steam, PSN

For the first game of the year, I went with…..an old game?  It’s been a while since I played something that I’d really describe as a straight JRPG.  Pokemon Moon was probably about as close as I’ve been recently, so I pulled this one out of the pile.  Having never finished it, I went into it a bit nervous.  The last time I tried replaying a PS1 FF game (FF9), I shelved it almost immediately due to the slow pace of the battles and slow progression of the story.  While this one certainly suffers some of the slow battle pace, mostly due to the summons system, a lot of the other systems that the game was built around have ended up aging incredibly well compared to many of its peers.

I guess I’ll get this out of the way first; the story of FF8 has held up very well.  The core group has a wide range of different personalities that don’t end up irritating me.  The world the game lives in has a nice variety of different settings, and a generally well put together overarching plot.  There’s a relatively well put together love story between two of the main party.  In general, this is still one of the better stories in the Final Fantasy series, and it’s held up pretty well.  It’s also worth noting that this is probably my favorite soundtrack in total in the series.  There’s obviously the high points in other games, but the FF8 soundtrack has always impressed me throughout in how consistently good it is throughout the game.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the game itself.

Let’s start with the core of the game, the battle system.  While at its core it definitely is a Final Fantasy ATB-style battle system, the removal of mana from this game has a lot of interesting ramifications.  Instead of using mana, spells are drawn from enemies and the environment and stocked per-character.  These drawn spells also then act as a replacement for equipment typical of most FF games, and can be applied to characters for boosts to all stats.  For my playthrough, this vastly increased the value of typical trash fights, as I’d be paying attention to what magic was available in each area in order to stock up on useful spells that I could not depend on being available further into the game.

The other significant change is that levels, while potentially important to a standard play through, function entirely different from the rest of the series.  Leveling up is straight out 1000 EXP per level.  While this may sound kind of strange, apart from a handful of areas that are fixed level, the rest of the enemies (including bosses) scale with the player’s level.  For me, this basically gave me an expected flat difficulty throughout the game, which tended to minimize the amount of grind that I needed to do in any area.  This also means that the game can be cheesed in curious ways.  For example, the game could theoretically be finished with 0 exp, as bosses don’t give experience.  I suspect the group can also effectively start the game at level 100 if enough grinding is completed in the starting area of the game.  The end result of all this is that the game became a lot more about a per-fight strategy, instead of the typical back and forth of hitting a difficulty spike and grind wall that FF games were usually prone to.

All that said, I was kind of surprised by how well this one has aged.  It’s certainly not without its problems.  Boss fight strategy can often be vague, resulting in the need to get entirely wiped at times to figure out the specific set of things needing to be done.  The actual summon animations are also incredibly unnecessarily long, though the dependency on using summons is typically tied to specific fights.  However, this is still a JRPG that I’d recommend to fans of the genre that haven’t played it in the past.  With it now easily available on PSN and Steam, there’s not much excuse for gamers on modern platforms to skip it if they feel the need to scratch that JRPG itch.

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Game Ramblings #28 – The Last Guardian

More Info From Sony

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4

The Last Guardian is about as niche a recommendation as I can ever give to a game that I highly enjoyed.  This is definitely a game that has taken the things that were learned on the related Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to make a great experience.  However, it also brings most of the negatives along with it.

The thing that stands out to me the most having completed this game is how realistic the actual character of Trico feels.  Despite being a giant flying dog thing with the attitude of a cat, it feels like a creature that would not be out of place in our world.  It was typically the little things that Trico did that brought this out.  When going into tunnels that it can’t fit through, it sticks its face into the hole and sulks like a dog that had been punished.  When you call out to it to follow after you, it will bark back at you.  When its facing enemies, it will growl and roar at them while attacking.  The realism that they’ve brought to the character is fantastic, but it also leads to some of the game’s biggest problems.

Like Ico, this game is effectively a long chain of puzzles surrounding an overarching protection quest.  Like Ico, this also brings a lot of the same AI-related problems with it.  While in a lot of ways the somewhat catty behavior is often purposeful, I spent a fair bit of time simply fighting with Trico to go to the right places.  Since a lot of the spots I would end up could only happen while on Trico’s back, there were sections where I’d be spending 5+ minutes simply trying to get the AI going back in the right direction.

The Shadow of the Colossus influence comes in with how the game plays.  Interactions with Trico are very similar to interactions with the colossi.  You jump up onto the soft areas of Trico, and can climb around all over its body.  However, you aren’t stabbing Trico, but giving him commands about where to go, healing injuries sustained in fights, or simply using Trico as a leg up to get to higher platforms within puzzles.  However, like Shadow, the climbing is also extraordinarily clumsy, to the point where Trico’s movement was often throwing me off his body, many times to my death.  Climbing through the environment also has a lot of the same difficulties.  In the end the game’s animation is both its blessing and its curse here.  While the character animation for this traversal is spectacularly good, its reliance on IK solving means that all motion is realistically paced, which for games translates to slow and often unpredictable.

The rest of the problems from the past couple of games are sort of scattered throughout as well.  The art style itself is going to be hit or miss for a lot of people.  There’s a lot of work put into the real-time feathers covering Trico, but the rest of the environment is generally fairly simple and visual the same throughout.  Outdoor scenes are a mixed bag of scenes lit spectacularly, and scenes suffering from severe overbloom.  Performance in general is pretty unreliable, particularly outdoors.  Puzzles can often be fairly vague leading to a lot of guess work, particularly when they’re relying on Trico’s AI doing things to solve them.  The camera is also a mixed bag, often getting stuck on scenery, particularly when riding on Trico’s back.

So all that said, if this sounds an awful lot like a combination of things seen in Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, that’s because it basically is.  For better or worse, the things the team learned in the first two games, and the problems that existed in the first two games are both here.  Fans of either of those are largely going to find that this is the game they’ve wanted for the last ten years, but if you don’t find yourself in that group, this is going to be a pretty rough place to hop in to the line.