Category: PS5

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Shelved It #135.1 – Fantasian: Neo Dimension

More Info from Square-Enix
Original Ramblings

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: iOS, Xbox Series, Windows, Switch

My previous ramblings about part 1 are still 100% my feelings for the way the first half of this game went. Combat is generally incredibly fun, bosses are solid but can sometimes be a bit one-note, and the visuals work well. I never did get around to part 2 on iOS for whatever reason, but I’d seen some ramblings about it not being as good. I’d seen some ramblings about it having balance issues. I’d seen some ramblings about the open world changes not really working out well. And boy are those still the case.

The point at which you transition into part 2 of this game is incredibly obvious because you are just bombarded with new mechanics. The unfortunate thing for the game is that even though this is the effective director’s cut of the game, they couldn’t really fix these mechanics to be present in the whole game because they are so story related.

The first major one of these is the change from a linear game to an open world game. The end of part 1 has you having seen at least most of the major locations in the game, so structurally this makes sense. You’re revisiting old locations for new reasons – finding new items, searching out new people, etc. A lot of the progression through this section feels pretty arbitrary in terms of discovery, but that would be fine in isolation. It just doesn’t work out for the gameplay. Besides going to locations that you’ve already seen and ransacked, you get into awkward mixes of enemies that are at lower levels and enemies that now feel out of place from being high level. It ends up exacerbating what is already some weird balance to really slow down the pace of leveling in a negative fashion.

You are also granted access to the growth map system. This is essentially a skill tree tied to a story-important item for each character. The problem is sort of three-fold here. It feels like it was put in place to address power curve problems past level 30, rather than simply adjusting the power curve of core leveling to be better. It also comes in per-character, so you end up in places where some characters just feel underpowered relative to the rest of the party, relegating them to very specific uses. Finally, the system just doesn’t really give you any points to start with so it’s all based on growth from level 35 on, basically leaving you at an introduction point with no gains. Another mechanic that comes in around this time is gear upgrading. Again, it’s a system that feels like it was added to assist in the power curve above level 30 but because the items tied to the system only come in with the later game enemies and treasures you kind of can’t take advantage of it without grinding. This again continues to exacerbate balance issues.

So the thing that keeps coming up here is balance, and that’s tied to one simple change. Once your characters are past level 35, they gain less XP against “weaker” enemies. Again, in isolation this is not a huge deal and a ton of games do things along these lines. The problem as it were is that the levels of enemies in this section of the game just do not correspond to their power. At the point I shelved this, I was around level 40 going up against bosses that were around level 38 and they were doing AoE attacks that were doing 90+% of my health pool to the entire party in one attack. This just ends in a train of healing that is incredibly boring at best and generally just a slow slog to demise at worst. Assuming you then beat the boss, it’s “low level” so you get almost no XP from it. It’s all effort, no reward, and because of this very same system the walk to the boss also earns almost no XP because the trash are similarly low level, so even the fun Dimengeon mass fights don’t feel worth the effort. It ends up making the gameplay incredibly awkward in that you go to higher level areas to grind, then warp back to low level areas to progress the story even though you are “too strong”. It just does not work out.

Ultimately I suppose that is my problem. I wouldn’t mind a bit of grinding if I felt like I was being rewarded with progress, but part two gets you to a place where you’re just beating your head against the wall for small rewards to get past things that by level are “weak” compared to you, despite them obliterating the party. I just don’t have the time or patience for that anymore. There’s a gem of a game here if a few small changes are made – don’t reduce XP for weak enemies, increase the levels of bosses to make them “correct”, make gear upgrade items more common, grant a bunch of SP when gaining access to the growth map – but this just could not stick the landing. Given the potential shown in the original release of part 1 it’s really just kind of a bummer.

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Game Ramblings #202 – Stellar Blade

More Info from Shift Up

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PC

I’m not sure what I thought this game was and admittedly I was playing this entirely because it’s an Unreal Engine title on PS5, which is relevant to the fact that I’m largely working on console porting projects right now. In my head it was going to be slightly hornier Nier Automata, and I guess that isn’t entirely wrong. However, it’s generally got a much more deliberate combat pace. It’s got segments of ranged combat that feel far more like Doom 3. The boss fights are full of spectacle and challenge without feeling unfair. Frankly, this ended up being a far better game than I was expecting it to be.

A lot of what I’m going to say probably isn’t going to be much of a surprise for this type of game. When combat works the game is phenomenal, but it starts to fall apart when they throw multiple enemies at you. This has been the case for me in pretty much any melee action RPG – God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Breath of the Wild, etc. So many of these games work great in singular combat, but the systems just don’t scale up to multiple enemies. They try to UX their way through it with off-screen enemy indicators and things of that nature, but it really doesn’t work well because the enemies all just kind of attack when they want to, so it becomes dodge and parry spam with very few windows to attack. However, the upside of this is that fights like that don’t generally happen in pivotal moments and they start to give you so many tools to knock out multiple things quickly that it becomes much rarer as the game goes on. At that point, combat then gets into the big 1-on-1 fights where the game really shines.

The core tools at your disposal in a 1-on-1 situation are your two levels of melee attacks, parrying, and dodging. I’m going to ignore that you have guns because they are largely irrelevant to boss fights. The big solo fights end up being an incredible back and forth. You do a bit of damage, dodge/parry your way through an enemy attack pattern, then rush back in for the next set of damage. The style of it reminds me in a lot of ways of a slightly more frantic and over the top version of the Ghost of Tsushima 1-on-1 fights.

What these segments do is put a ton of trust in the player to learn and recognize attack patterns. Tells on basic attacks are super obvious, letting the player really lean into timing things properly. Larger attacks are preceded by color coded UI elements, but they aren’t things that can just be button spammed. For example, a blue enemy attack requires the player to dodge forward to avoid large damage, but if they don’t time it properly they will just eat the damage to the face. Some of these are warnings several seconds ahead of time, so it also really forces some patience into the combat pace where the player just should not be doing anything but paying attention to dodge timing. It’s easy during all of this to get tunnel vision on just doing damage, but the game will absolutely 100-0 your health if you get out of control so pulling back on damage in favor of a patient approach does wonders, and in practice it feels so good when you get chains of parries/dodges right to be rewarded with big damage opportunities.

The other part that really worked into this was how well gearing worked into combat. Traditionally I am awful at melee combat timing. However, the game has gear that extended the timing window for these to allow me to play it a bit more safe. Some gear gave me more shield to allow for a bit of safety. Some gear gave me back health on kills to allow trash segments to just flow better. However, the game absolutely gives you tools if you want to be a glass cannon. Some gear gives huge damage increases in favor of also receiving more damage. Some gear will only allow you to get increased damage if your HP is high. Basically, they give you a bunch of tools to play with and let you mold combat into somewhere you’re comfortable being based on your play style, but it all blends so well into the core set of capabilities that they developed from the start.

The rest of the game kind of just exists but worked well enough to push me forward. The overall plot is a pretty standard post-apocalyptic Earth scenario that isn’t frankly that different from a Horizon Zero Dawn where humanity created smart ass robots that inevitably realized that humans are the problem. Exploration and side quests exist as a way to get more upgrade materials, but for me they were largely there for me to find more optional boss encounters to go enjoy. The environment is mostly the same two sets of desert environments from Nier for exploration and city environments from The Last of Us for linear plot segments but both work well to push their style of game. Basically, the wrappings around combat don’t necessarily boost the game, but they also don’t drag it down.

I completely get if the main character’s outfits turn you off of the game because it can get pretty egregious with some of the options. However, for me it ultimately ended up feeling like an obvious marketing choice than anything else. Once I was in the core of combat, the outfit I had on didn’t matter to me and my focus was on the really good combat in front of me. There is a phenomenal action combat loop here that deserves to be brought into a different setting that isn’t blatantly sexualized, because in a lot of ways it felt like it was cracking the code of making parry/dodge based combat work for someone like me who is typically awful at these games without getting rid of possibilities for people who want to just glass cannon through the game with a completely different play style.

It’s pretty easy to read what I wrote and go “this sounds good, but not great” and that’s probably an accurate description. However, I was expecting the combat to also be good but not great and it so completely exceeded my expectations there. This one just ended up being a huge surprise.

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Game Ramblings #200 – The Plucky Squire

More Info from All Possible Futures

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

My initial instinct was to go “well this is an expanded version of Link Between Worlds” and….I guess that isn’t entirely accurate. This game absolutely pulls a lot of mechanics from the top-down Legend of Zelda games. However, it’s not simply a Zelda-style game. It pulls mechanics from all sorts of games of the NES and SNES era. This game is an absolute celebration of late 80s/early 90s games tied together in a modern package.

The core gameplay of the game is very much Legend of Zelda though it feels a bit simplified Link to the Past in terms of complexity. You’ve got some basic sword attacks (melee, charge spin attack). Rather than secondary items, you can throw the sword and use a basic jump attack. However, combat is often not the core focus of the game – or at least this style combat is not. It’s there for story reasons, but most of your time is spent elsewhere.

The first place it really strays is the 2D/3D switching mechanic. You can pop in and out of the story book, and the core gameplay doesn’t change much between the two. However, that switch is often used for what are puzzle types that feel unique to this game. Flipping pages to return to past parts of the game for items is an interesting mechanical use of this. Tilting the book to move things around in the book world is an interesting use of this. Pulling items out of 2D space into 3D space to use them in new ways (for example, a jetpack) is an interesting use of this. Adding stamps to the book in 3D space to stop the movement of things in the book is an interesting use of this. It’s all these little things where it becomes clear the book isn’t just set dressing but is instead a core integrated part of the game. These are all puzzle types that are directly in line with this being a “Zelda” experience but end of being completely unique to this game.

It was also visually impressive just how consistent the styles are. Enemy silhouettes are always incredibly important to combat so having these be immediately recognizable in multiple visual styles without thinking is an impressive thing to pull off, even with the simplicity involved. The green guys with pointy hats are obviously ranged in both cases. Yellow guys are obviously melee in both cases. Orange guys obviously throw bombs in both cases. Mice and snakes are obviously the same in both cases. You just look and know how to react despite the changes in gameplay between the two scenarios.

However, the boss fights were the thing that impressed me the most and were also the thing I was not anticipating. Put simply, the boss fights are not Zelda gameplay, and this was probably the smartest decision they could have made. By making the boss fights entirely different, the core combat in the rest of the game was able to be simplified and reduced to only a small necessary segment leaving room for puzzles and unique boss mechanics to shine.

So what do I mean by this not being Zelda gameplay? Well, there’s a boss fight that is entirely the mechanics of Punchout. There’s a boss fight that pulled in Puzzle Bobble mechanics with no direct combat. There’s segments that are side scrolling shooter gameplay wrapping around a bucket. There’s a bullet hell air combat fight. Basically, the bosses are uniquely tied to mechanics that are simultaneously some classic gameplay setup and tied directly to the boss’ visual and story design. It makes an incredible amount of sense to do it this way because each boss can shine independent of the rest of the game, while also allowing it to further reinforce the 2D/3D swapping. It’s something that I didn’t expect going in and completely blew me away.

This was a delightful surprise. It exists as the perfect combination of mechanics pulled from other titles tied together in a package that only makes sense because of the game they ended up in. Rather than feeling like it lacked originality, it felt like the originality came from the team putting together a total package that can only work because of how they constructed it. It’s the type of game that you just sit down and have fun with from front to back and wonder why nobody had ever managed to do this before. It’s simply worth playing.