Category: PS5

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Shelved It #22 – Spirit of the North 2

More Info from Infuse Studio

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series

I so badly wanted to like this game more than I did. The first game is a perfect example to me of a sit and chill game. It had some puzzles along the way, but it was largely just a relaxing walking simulator that looked fantastic. This one made some major leaps in its iterative choices – it’s open world, it’s got a lot more lore to discover, a much longer length, and it even has some combat. The problem for me was that by and large the iteration just did not hit.

The first obvious change is the move to an open world. For the most part this didn’t really change how I approached the game that much since linearly wandering and completing puzzles doesn’t feel that different to me than aimlessly wandering and completing puzzles. However, there’s a few things that snuck in to compensate this design that really dragged the experience down for me, both of which are tied to needing to find things in the environment.

One of these was the collecting of soul wisps. These are dotted around the environment or purchaseable via shops and are used for other things. In some cases, it’s things like ancient trees for skill points or for unlocking gates to get into other puzzles. The problem I had with them is that they are not marked at all on maps like the puzzle areas are, so finding them is either luck of walking past them or a need to wander in a very precise manner to cover the whole area. This is compounded by your ability to carry a fairly limited stock of them (I was up to 7 by the time I shelved) so you could easily cap them out and not really be in a position to remember where new ones are to pick up later when you need them. It ends up being an incredibly tedious system where to really be smart with it, it made sense to immediately just go wander around dumping them into things when you cap out instead of taking the game at your own pace.

There’s also a number of situations where you have to carry things to specific places, and that almost always feels like a drag. Sometimes it’s a need to find a torch to light a thing to let you into a puzzle area. This requires you to a) find a torch, b) light the torch, then c) walk to the spot to use it. Sometimes this is crucial story items at the end of puzzles that you then have to carry to some temple and place down. Until you do that (often a pretty significant walk) you also can’t really pick up other things without the risk of losing the key item, so you can’t even always complete other puzzles along the way. In these cases it just feels like the game is dragging you down to slow the pace in a negative way. This is compounded by the lack of fast travel potential. The handful of portals and the ability to fast travel to your last den are not really sufficient given the scale of the environment.

What this really results in is that the game feels open world for the sake of open world with a lot of the design decisions compounding negative feedback for the player experience walking around completing puzzles. Compared against what was essentially really enjoyable linear wandering in the first game, it feels like a big step backwards.

The new boss combat also feels like an unintentional misstep. Where boss fights feel like a good idea on the surface to get a bit more of an action tie-in to the story, these fights end up feeling slow and unforgiving.

The screenshot above is an encounter where you have to avoid attacks while tethered to the center of the arena for 30-45 seconds before spirit walking to the pillars in the background to activate them. This fight had a few problems. One was practical – some attack tells were simply below the visuals of the arena making it impossible to see them. Another was balance – I could avoid getting hit for most of a phase, but then get hit once (see previous problem…) and I could easily be juggled from 100-0 health being bounced between attacks without an ability to get out of them. It never felt fun and finishing the fight was a relief instead of a triumph.

The last boss fight I did before shelving this was a set of two wolves. Each had their own attacks, but it was basically a very slow progression of them choosing a bite attack that I had to dodge, then a secondary attack that was a bit more randomized. Finally, they would move to a phase where they shot out rings of fire after which I could attack them. This was a case where I was able to again get through the fight completely unphased at full health, but a mistake in the last hit of the last phase of the fight meant that one of the wolves got its bite attack (which locked me in place) while the second wolf activated a fire beam (which I couldn’t avoid) and got knocked from 100-0 health without a chance to do anything.

As a developer this feels like a classic case of the team not compensating for their own skill at playing the game. Once you do a fight 5…10…100 times in development the fights become second nature to the point where it’s easy to forget what the experience will be like for a player getting to it for the first time. These are all cases of that for me. Stun locks are not fun. Being juggled without invulnerability after being hit is not fun. Randomized attacks that can flood the entire arena and sometimes just not allow dodging are not fun. However, these are things that are easy to miss when the fights are muscle memory, and that’s what it feels like happened here.

At its core this game didn’t really lose what made the first game enjoyable. The wandering and puzzle solving and beautiful visuals are all there. The problem I ultimately had was that that new things never felt like they stood up to the original game, so the experience kept feeling dragged down by them. The new things to support open world gameplay weren’t fun. The scale of wandering between things with nothing to do wasn’t fun. The boss combat, despite being well tied into the story, was not fun. It kind of just feels like a step to far for the series, where maybe a third title could have ultimately ended up here with a bit more of an iterative step in between.

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Game Ramblings #219 – Yooka-Replaylee

More Info from Playtonic Games

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox Series, Switch 2

There’s a quote often misattributed to Shigeru Miyamoto that goes something along the lines of a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is bad forever. This game is an example of why that quote exists in the first place. I didn’t particularly like the original Yooka-Laylee release, but this one was easy for me to sit down and just play. It was a huge transformation.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I couldn’t really point at many specific things that were improved. If I’m looking at the things in my other ramblings, I can definitely get a sense of where iteration occurred. I didn’t noticeably have problems with the camera this go around – it largely just worked and didn’t get in the way. I didn’t have problems with the writing, and frankly it felt minimally present compared to my recollection of the original. I didn’t have problems with odd mechanics in boss fights – they generally felt obvious and appropriately challenging, but without some of the oddities I saw in the original game.

I didn’t really have problems with how many pages were supposed to be collected or it feeling overboard. The pages that were there generally felt attached to some objective or getting to the end of a specific puzzle/platforming segment instead of simply being there. This one alone was surprising because there are double the page count from before, making this more in tune with how Mario Odyssey was handled. If I were to guess at what actually changed here for me is that the total sum of improvements elsewhere just made the experience of existing in the world more fun, so collecting more stuff happened naturally while I was having fun.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that all of these things are signs of iteration done right. Every part of the original game has clearly seen some amount of work done to it to improve it from the original launch. Going back to the original quote, these were all things that felt bad and rushed that now are simply good, and when things are simply good they are out of the way of my interaction with them. What I was left with then is a game that was simply easy to play.

That said, there are two very specific things that I can point at that I know improved things. World expansion is gone and all platforming moves are unlocked from the start. These changes allow for open exploration from the start, removing what was a hugely frustrating progression blocker in the original. The original game was very obviously not meant to be a Metroidvania, so running into progression blockers was never a fun thing. Seeing a grapple point in the original without having the grapple power was a signal that I was going to have to come back later. Having to choose whether to expand the current world you are in or unlock another world was a sign that I was just going to have to do both anyway.

A lot of what ended up happening with these two changes is that the game just got rid of friction. I could certainly see arguments about games needing some friction to push players forward, and I largely agree. However, I also absolutely hate manufactured friction. In a 3D exploration platformer, both of those felt like manufactured friction. They both restricted the player from exploring in a way that felt negative in the genre. Not having explosives to take out specific doors feels appropriate in a Metroidvania where you’re starting from nothing and slowly building up your arsenal. Not having a grapple in a game where you play as a lizard with a very clearly extendable tongue that will be used for grapple felt out of place. Retraversing an area with new abilities to find more stuff feels appropriate in a Metroidvania. Unlocking an entire section of the world via magic pagies to find more stuff felt out of place.

This is probably as close to the game they intended to make as possible. Sure, it’s very clearly the culmination of a lot of effort on their part. However, it’s also the culmination of a lot of feedback. The changes made here are obviously targeted at things that reviewers and players of the original did not enjoy. They are changes clearly targeted at making the game better to play, easier to get through, and reduce negative friction for the player. This is now a game that should be celebrated for what it is, rather than a game that is negatively compared against the past. This is an example of the delayed game will eventually be good, even if there’s a slightly asterisk of it having been released once before.

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Game Ramblings #218 – Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter

More Info from Falcom

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, Steam

I played the original release of this game on PSP but admittedly it’s been long enough that I don’t really have much of a consistent memory of the experience. I do know I enjoyed my time with it, but I feel vaguely not enjoying the grind of leveling. Going into this I was a bit suspicious of whether that would happen again. Luckily what I found was a game that felt like a heavily modernized JRPG in terms of how it respects the player time, but this is definitely not a game without problems.

The thing that increasingly makes JRPGs live and die for me is combat, but not necessarily how good it is. It’s more often than not how much I need to engage in combat at this point. In particular, how much I need to engage in useless combat. I hate combat for the sake of combat because it feels like wasted time to me. The remake of Trails 1st really does a lot of good things to reduce that.

Similar to PSP, enemies are visible in the overworld, which on its own does a lot to reduce my need to engage in combat. However, there’s a number of things that reduce my need to be in combat. For one, there’s XP scaling based on level. At a surface level this allowed me to simply avoid combat with enemies that are lower level than me by knowing that the rewards are no longer relevant. On the opposite side though, this meant that I could effectively power level by engaging in combat with things higher level than me. What this really meant is that I was always in a level band that was relevant to the gameplay of the story around me. As a balance point it reduced my need to be in combat to just when it was important or worthwhile.

This is combined with the fact that you can do some basic real-time combat in the overworld, allowing me to mow through weak enemies simply to get rewards without being in the slower turn-based combat. If I needed specific items for cooking or Sepith, I could quickly dispatch a bunch of weak enemies and get them. This change also meant that running past enemies allowed me to simply run past them because the game no longer has the JRPG mechanic of battle starting immediately on first contact. It’s a small mechanical change with huge implications to the flow of the game.

Once in combat, there’s then a highly enjoyable system in place. It’s the same type of combat on PSP where the player has a mix of skills and magic. However, it leans into two things that I don’t think are seen as much as I would prefer – positioning and turn order.

The player has a wide variety of shapes of attacks from AOE circles to lines to cones, as well as bonuses for some attacks from the side or back. All of this allows the player to enforce positioning as a benefit. There were many times where I would knowingly drag some of my own units into different areas in an attempt to pull mobs into the line of fire and increase total damage output. The flip side of this is that defensively it’s also important to pay attention to where magic attacks from enemies will be so that you don’t leave your own party in range of attacks.

The reason this is important is that turn order is not static and magic attacks are not always immediate. Under normal circumstances magic attacks require a turn to start and a turn to execute. While that is happening, it’s obvious where the attack will go due to targeters on the ground. This gets into turn order manipulation. Some attacks can delay turns or reduce player “speed” that leads to determining turn order. Attacks can be cancelled by executing some moves that impede the target. Stuns can cancel a target’s turn if timed correctly. Basically, combat becomes a balance of getting damage out while also attempting to delay or cancel the enemy’s turn as much as possible, allowing the player to get through any battle with as little damage taken as possible.

Generally speaking, this all works great – right up until it doesn’t. That gets into my one big problem with the game. The boss fights in the game are just not tuned well, and it all comes down to the rage mechanic. Pretty much every boss in the game has some rage trigger where they gain a ton of basically every stat in the game. They gain speed to attack more often, typically several turns in a row. They gain attack and defense to be tankier and hit harder. They gain healing buffs to get their HP back up. It’s a good idea to make boss fights more dynamic. The issue comes in with the fact that the rage mechanics are universally able to send the player’s party from 100% to dead without the player even getting a turn to mitigate the situation.

It’s incredibly frustrating to be 5+ minutes into the fight, feeling like you’re in control, then having a rage turn kick in and send the party to its death. If it was generally avoidable that would be one thing, but a lot of them simply happen because of health drop. What ended up being my go-to was to just save all of my big attacks up until I had nearly stunned the boss, then dump them all at once. In a typical boss fight, I could get the boss to around 50% health, let it have a turn, then just absolutely nuke it with every attack I had – full 200 combat point attacks, party combo attack, etc – and get it to 0. That would generally avoid the rage mechanic, whether it was health based or due to killing off one of the enemy’s party members. However it was slow to grind out to the point where I felt comfortable doing that attack dump and when it didn’t work and I would be sent from 100 to 0 with no ability to do anything to prevent it, it was infuriating.

The nice thing is that unlike the original release, I could immediately retry the fight with lowered enemy strength. Boy did I take advantage of that option to just get through fights without the time spent on it again.

So I suppose at the end of the day this is a really good and generally fun JRPG that feels tuned to inherently screw over the player specifically during boss fights. I don’t remember that of the original, but I suspect that’s just a consequence of time since I played it. It’s so close to being a great game if a little more care was put into the tuning of boss fights. They can be difficult normally and still allow the player to actively avoid being nuked. It’s a thing I hope they look at before 2nd chapter comes out because it felt like the one thing heavily holding this game back.