Category: Action

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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 #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.

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Shelved It #2 – Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors

More Info from the Dragon Quest Wiki

  • Genre: On-Rails Action / RPG
  • Platform: Wii
  • Shelved At: End of Chapter 5 of 8
  • Reason for Shelving: JRPG grind without the JRPG gameplay

This is actually a fairly curious game.  It’s absolutely a Dragon Quest game through and through.  All your standard enemies are there, the character design is very obviously tied to the series, and the world itself is the fairly standard fantasy-based setting typical of the series.  However, rather than being a JRPG, it’s effectively styled as an on-rails shooter, but with sword swinging instead of guns.

Going into the game, I was kind of suspicious the gameplay would work at all.  However, they were fairly smart with the design of the game to take advantage of the Wii controls.  Everything input-related uses the Wii Remote to activate actions.  Swingingthe Remote activates sword swipes, while jabbing it will stab directly at enemies.  Holding the B button activates a shield that can be moved around with the pointer functionality of the Remote.  Movement is on the D-Pad, and setting a swipe focus point is on the A button.  Overall it’s a very intuitive control scheme, and works fairly well.  The main downfall is the swipe functionality itself.  Since this game predates the release of the Wii MotionPlus and subsequent Wii Remote Plus, the actual accuracy of your swipes is fairly low, leading to some frustration in points where you need to be fairly specific with the angle of your swipes.

At the point where I ended up shelving the game, I had just gotten through a boss fight where I was fighting a constant refreshed party of 6 minions and the boss itself.  Individually they weren’t a huge issue, but taking out the minions efficiently to concentrate on the boss required much more precision with the swipe mechanic than I could reasonably achieve.  My closest comparison is really something along the lines of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, where swipe direction was also important, but was easy to manage throughout.

While in general this wasn’t a huge issue, boss fights became a bigger issue.  In most on-rails games, I tend to expect that increases in player skill are the driving factor in the difficulty curve of the game.   I would typically be getting better at the game to chase new high scores, or play at higher difficulties, but the NPC strength is relatively fixed. However, in this case, the player is also leveling in a fashion typical of JRPGs, as well as buying and upgrading your typical set of gear.  All that being said, it felt like the game was pushing me to grind in order to progress, rather than simply being better at the game.  The last boss I faced was effectively a health wall, and the damage I was doing was barely lowering his health for the amount of hits I was having to do.  While the high score system typical of these games was there, the scores necessary for the highest rewards were easily eclipsed via new gear or higher levels, which is pretty atypical of the genre.

Overall this is at least a curious experiment for Square to have pulled off.  While it definitely has its problems, it’s an entertaining side note in the Dragon Quest series, and one of the more curious uses of on-rail mechanics that I’ve seen.  While it’s probably not going to necessarily satisfy either JRPG or rail shooter fans, at the right price, it’s the type of game you can keep coming back to for short rounds, if for no other reason than to chase that illusive high score again.