Category: PS5

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Game Ramblings #183 – Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, PC, Luna

I wanted to say that this game was a huge surprise but given the fact that this was made by the studio behind the fantastic Rayman games of the last decade, I probably shouldn’t be surprised. This is a game that just nails so much of what make Metroidvanias something that I go after. It combines a great sense of that side of the platformer genre and mixes in some really gratifying melee combat to make an experience absolutely worth playing.

For me it was the little things that it did right that make this such a memorable thing as a Metroidvania.

On the traversal front it doesn’t simply have retraversal like most games in the genre. What it often instead does is have a little puzzle/platforming loop that ends with a door opening a shortcut for later use. It’s a level beyond the usual changes brought about by gaining new powers that I really found interesting. It made core paths and side paths really obvious and allowed me to focus on filling out the map in areas along the core path, with the knowledge that I very likely had completed an entire section of the map when it ended in a loop. These areas were also very well marked on the map, where the end of these loops were generally marked by a one-way door. It gets rid of the sort of missile door typical of Metroid games and makes it obvious that you will just unlock this area when you’re done and be good to go.

Speaking of the map, the game is both a little less automatic but also incredibly more flexible than recent Metroid titles that I’ve played. This game doesn’t really automatically place much in the way of iconography when traversing new areas. Yes, it will unveil the areas you walk through but beyond one-way doors you’re kind of on your own for placing icons. What it does have is a particularly good tool for doing so. Beyond manual placement of various icon types – which is greatly appreciated – it has a very specific thing you unlock early that lets you add screenshots to the map. These are hugely important to retraversal. See some weird looking area you can’t get into? Add a screenshot. Chest out of reach with your current set of tools? Add a screenshot. Suspicious door? Add a screenshot. What you end up doing is scattering the map with these things and as you come back later for various reasons, you can get a very obvious visual representation of your own past with the areas and be reminded of the specific thing you wanted to check later. It’s such a nice built-in note taking aspect that feels very natural in the genre.

The other thing I found really good was how well the traversal moves actually integrated into combat, keeping flow between the two really natural. For example, one of the early moves you get is a horizontal teleport. This has obvious uses to clear large gaps in traversal. However, they also start having you face enemies and bosses that encourage using the teleport as a dodge mechanic to get behind and break protections. A later upgrade is effectively a grapple hook, which is useful for grabbing onto spots in the world but is also useful for pulling enemies to you/pulling yourself to enemies at range. This is pretty universal for all mechanics. If it can be used for combat it likely has a traversal use and in practice it means you are constantly reinforcing mechanics at all times, allowing for the player to naturally fall in and out of combat in an engaging way.

However, the thing about combat that surprised me is that the game got significantly easier as the game went on. To some obvious extent this is the natural state of the power curve. You get more powers and more tools in your tool box, and things will get easier. However, to me it felt like the mechanics of enemies didn’t get more complex at the same rate as I was upgrading. Sure, I was gaining things like heals on parry that helped me out, but the bosses weren’t throwing out crazy amounts of new stuff causing me damage. Yes, I was gaining more effective dodging mechanics, but the bosses weren’t necessarily causing me to dodge more often. What it meant was that as the game was getting marginally harder I was getting significantly more powerful, and the most difficult bosses were really the ones near the start of the game when I didn’t have the tools to compete as well against the mechanics. By the end of the game I was having little difficulty, even accounting for the fact that I was getting naturally better as time went on.

I do want to also shout out the flexibility of options here, which admittedly does lead to the game potentially being easier. Early on I noticed that I was missing a lot of what I thought were parries that I was timing correctly. It didn’t really feel like I was missing them, so much as the game was eating my parry inputs – kind of a weird battle against inherent input and screen latency. I dug into the difficulty options and noticed that I could adjust the parry window independent of all other difficulty options. A little bit of extra flexibility here completely solved the problem for me. I didn’t necessarily want an “easier” experience, but one that matched my expectation of timing with what was happening on screen and I was able to fix the specific thing that was causing me issues. That level of granularity is something I really love to see in place because it lets the user tailor the experience to the specifics of both their play style and their play setup without needing to just globally make the game easy.

I’m pretty happy that this is the game that brought the Prince of Persia series back, rather than the seemingly doomed Sands of Time remake. I don’t necessarily have an issue with the 3D entries in the series, but this feels so much more like the natural extension of the original games. It expands upon the open platforming of the original and goes with a very good modern combat layer on top of it to end up in a place where the series now feels pulled into the modern day, without really sacrificing the original vision.

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Game Ramblings #181 – Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

More Info from Team Reptile

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series

I’m not really sure whether I liked this game. Fundamentally I guess I do, in so much as it’s a carbon copy of Jet Set Radio. However, it’s one thing to pay homage to a series that’s been ignored and another thing entirely to outright copy the formula and not actually change much about it. It’s then even more egregious that it pushes one of the worst features of the original series to the front, much to the game’s detriment. So I guess, this is a strange one.

This is a game made to satisfy a very particular niche – people who wanted a sequel to Jet Set Radio. In that regard, I guess I’m that person. That series is basically the only reason that I bought the Dreamcast and the original Xbox. What is in place here satisfies that very need. It’s got the visual style down precisely, feeling retro without being kitschy. It’s got the strange mix of inline skating (or BMX or skateboard) and platforming that somehow works despite the jank. It’s got an unbelievably good soundtrack. All of the good of the original game is there. On the good side, the camera is definitely improved in a lot of cases, which makes the overall flow of the game much better.

However, that also comes with all of the bad still generally being there. The platforming is still imprecise in ways that can feel unpredictable, particularly in spots where your camera is changing quickly. For example, going off a quarterpipe has a really smooth camera to follow the direction of movement, but jumping hard snaps the camera in your new direction of movement. It’s both somewhat unpredictable in direction and totally disorienting. There’s still points of vague collision where you’ll bonk off a rail instead of capturing it, which can make longer trick chains pretty inconsistent to pull off. Tricks are there, but there’s no skill to the timing of them and there’s very few of them, so it’s just generally button spam when scoring is in place.

The worst part is that they took the bad combat and cop mechanics and somehow made it more present. On the combat side, it’s still just button spam to attack. Ya you can boost for more damage, and it’s effective. Ya you can do jump attacks and what not. However, it’s all just garbage combat with bad shot avoidance and very little indication of the damage state of the enemies. This would probably be fine if combat was restricted to story segments, but the cops are always there. The second you lay your first tag in general traversal, you have cops after you. Nearly every tag after that brings it up in threat. This is compounded by the fact that every time you increase threat you get stuck in a cutscene. That you see every time you hit that threat. That you keep hitting because you keep dropping threat. It’s miserable. You can drop threat by changing outfits, but the spots to change are often out of the way and can’t be immediately reused. It’s a bad version of the GTA star system in a game with bad combat that you’re always going to be activating. It’s baffling.

As a dev it’s not that I don’t have sympathy for this being such a carbon copy. The Jet Set series has had some internet cache as a series that deserves a sequel, so I totally get the reason that an indie team would go for something that has high likelihood for sales. That provides a ton of potential for stability for a small team. However, I guess I also think that if you’re going to do that you should be providing an experience that is….less blatant? There’s so many things that could have been improved here over the original. Combat could have been better. Collision could have been better. The police system is miserable and should have been better. It just feels like a missed opportunity. Ya, totally take the core gameplay that is there but at least respect the fact that games have improved a lot in 20 years.

Which I guess brings us to the point where I think you’d expect me to say not to play this game, but I can’t. It’s frustrating as hell that this is a game that wasn’t modernized, but it’s still fun. Despite the problems this proves that the Jet Set series has legs to it. This may not be a modernization of the formula, but it at least provides more to the formula, so from that perspective I guess I totally recommend the game. However, do go into it with the knowledge that you’re playing a game that for better or worse did not try to improve upon where it’s coming from.

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How’d It Age #8 – Star Ocean: The Second Story R

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Switch, Windows

In a year of wonderful remasters and remakes I’m finishing the year on another wonderful remake. This one is very similar to Super Mario RPG in that it left the gameplay largely intact while overhauling the visuals, but it took a decidedly more retro approach. Luckily, like SMRPG, it is also similarly still a ton of fun.

Having somewhat recently played some Star Ocean I apparoached this kind of knowing what kind of game I was getting into. I knew that combat wasn’t going to be overly complicated, but I knew it was going to be fun. What surprised me was how well this one scaled between low and high enemy counts, which is something that newer entries don’t necessarily do.

One of the big things that separates this entry is that there’s a very well telegraphed attack tell, which you can combine with a dodge button to knock away at a stun meter. You can also do that through normal attacks, but the dodge is way more effective. In a one-on-one or party-on-one situation, this is INCREDIBLY effective at knocking down the meter and stunning an enemy. However, you can also play a game of prioritizing attack cancels and just preventing the enemy from attacking nearly wholesale. This works great in multi-enemy fights as you can spread your party to focus on individual one-on-one fights. However, there are some fights that really penalize this and force you to set the party into full focus. Figuring out the fights with different strategies really works well to push some variety and keep combat from getting stale. It’s surprising to see how well this is achieved in such an old title, as the newer Star Ocean games really failed in this regard.

However, you start to see the age of the game when it comes to balance. It happens sort of slowly throughout the game, but over time the game’s intended balance of what you’re fighting and the practical balance of the bosses got clearly off. I never really narrowed it down to what I was doing wrong, but to not be one-shot by the end game bosses, I was ending up about 15-20 levels higher than the game was telling me was “appropriate” for my party, but it got me through. Luckily the game compensates – intentionally or not – with some grind reduction systems. Once an enemy icon changes from red to green, there’s a system to auto complete the fight in the overworld. This basically runs stretches of getting a level from minutes to 30 seconds or less, so the time to actually level up and move up is pretty forgiving. If you aren’t at the right spot in power, you just run around and auto battle a bit, adjust strategy a bit, and good to go.

This was ultimately probably a problem of me not digging deeper into the underlying crafting systems, partly because I’m lazy and partly because they are just too deep. There’s a three-page menu of crafting and helper-style stuff that you can level up per party member. It runs the gamut from actual equipment crafting to item creation to cooking to buff creation to stat up creation and more. It’s just so deep that unless I had time to really invest in a strategy to min/max my party, I was always going to fail on doing it right. As it stood I did it well enough to get decently high end items, but I think there was a clear path for me to do better and get more out of it to make my overall path through the game far more efficient.

The rest of the remake from a visual and audio perspective is extremely impressive. It’s obvious that Square is really leaning into the HD2D style that they started pushing in Octopath Traveler, but this one is a bit different. The environments are still pretty low-tech, but they’re a lot more traditional 3D with really good 2D character sprites to create a fairly interesting mix in styles. From an audio perspective it’s still the pieces you’d want with modern orchestration and voice acting. Where HD2D feels like a fun idea that can be a bit kitschy at full scale, this feels like a more practical middle ground that allows for them to be a bit separated from the environmental restrictions of the full HD2D titles. This is mixed with some modern UX touches (thank you wonderful maps) that really feel like they’re pointing at a way to do a SNES/PS1 style sprite RPG in a modern wrapping.

I guess if nothing else I’m glad this exists and I’m glad that it’s good. Star Ocean has had a pretty rough draw since the 360 era (and I know some people would also tell me that Star Ocean 3 was garbage). This one proves that there’s a place that the series should maybe go that’s a bit lower budget and a bit lower scope and really just make a fun sci-fi story that isn’t trying to reach to AAA status. The Divine Force felt like it was moving in that direction, but in full 3D. This title perhaps offers another path they could go. It feels like a game that is still worth playing despite being 25 years old, and that’s something to celebrate.