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Game Ramblings #25 – Shadow Complex Remastered

More Info from Epic Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows (Steam, Windows Store, Epic Games Launcher), Mac App Store, Xbox One, Xbox 360 (XBLA)

Back before they spawned the mobile juggernaut known as Infinity Blade, Chair Entertainment released a nice little Metroidvania title called Shadow Complex.  In honor of why the hell not, a remastered version has come out for PC and current gen consoles.  With the great folks at Limited Run Games releasing a physical version, I figured it was as good a time as any to make a run through this one again, and as it turns out, the game is still damn good.

If there’s one genre I’m a sucker for nearly as much as JRPGs, it’s Metroidvania-styled Action/Adventure games.  If you ignore the setting, this one definitely strays much closer to Metroid than a lot in the genre.  It’s got upgradeable guns and pickups that unlock ways to get through new doors, a computerized mech suit that tells you where to go, and eventually a chargeable dash that breaks through even more doors.  Basically, a lot of what is here is straight out of Metroid, but grounded in a somewhat more believable Earth-based setting.

That said, all its similarities are definitely not a detriment to this game.  They’ve captured a lot of the exploration magic that the Metroid series, and in the roughly 3-5 hour adventure, you’ll traverse a lot of the same areas multiple times, but always in new ways.  The pickups and upgrades are scattered all over the place, so returning to old places always brings side paths to grab things that were just taunting you out of reach before.  To some extent I was even going out of my way once I got some of my larger weapon upgrades just because I’d remembered a handful of upgrades that I wanted to get right away.  In addition, unlike some games in this genre, ammunition for secondary weapons (grenades, missiles, etc) are plentiful, and available for recharge at all save stations, so you never feel crunched into not using some of your more powerful arsenal.

That said, there’s definitely some things that are missing that I wish were explored more.  There’s really not much in the way of memorable boss fights in this game.  For the most part, you fight the same spider mech a handful of times, with a couple other fights that can be mechanically exploited to avoid difficulty.  As an example, one fight has you up against a giant mech wheel that is jumping around the walls of a ring-shaped room.  By positioning yourself just behind one of the corners of the room, you could avoid all damage, while still being able to easily shoot at the boss’ weak spot, giving an easy victory.  In addition, there’s some points, particularly in the final battle, where I would get shot at and effectively instant killed without much of an idea where damage sources were coming from.

All that being said, when this originally came out in ’09, it was one of the best Metroidvanias that had come out around that time.  In 2016, I’d still say that it’s one of the better Metroidvanias out this year.  While the upgrade didn’t bring much new to the table, other than some improved visual fidelity, the game itself has not lost anything in its age, and should definitely be played if you missed it the first time around.

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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.