Category: Adventure

2017-08-172018-01-13

Game Ramblings #46 – Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

Genre: Adventure
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: Steam

TL;DR

Fantastically gorgeous environment and great soundtrack
Main quest line that’s entertaining to play, and gives you the right amount of push to continue seeing the new environments
High end crafting and side quests are fundamentally problematic with the game loop as implemented

Yonder is a game that at its core feels like it was made by a group of artists. The attention to detail in the environment is up there with some of the best games available this generation. The soundtrack backing it is the right level of ambient orchestral music without getting in the way. All of this is tied into a fantastic implementation of a day/night cycle very reminiscent of its use in Breath of the Wild. However, once you go beyond the core story quest line, the lack of real depth to the game systems in place, and a crafting system that is more menu and resource frustration really shows the problems that come out in the game loop that’s available.

One of the first areas you see in the game.

Right off the bat, it’s clear that this is going to be a beautiful game experience. After an initial intro scene and cave crawl, you immediately get out into an open field that gives you a vista of a large part of the island the game takes place on, and it’s astoundingly beautiful. The characters and animals around have a simple but effective style, and everything is fairly recognizable right off the bat. Each area that you go to throughout the game then has its own core visual theme, whether it’s the snowy areas as you climb the central mountain, the palm trees near the beach, or the sparse rock formations in the desert. Each area is just as great looking as the one you just had left.

Things look just as great when you hit night time. The sky grows dawk, constellations fill it, and the player’s character breaks out a torch to give some local dynamic lighting around. At the same time, the music drops in intensity, and you really feel the encroachment of night time around you.

The core gameplay itself is built around an effective set of collection and crafting quests. The main line is pretty straightforward, with a series of quests that basically lead you into visiting each area, collecting Sprite creatures to clear off the Murk attacking the island, and collecting parts to fix the Cloud Catcher from the title. By and large these serve as a way to get you to the towns that hold the various crafting type masters, and allow you to expand your repertoire or skills, which lead into further use through side quests. While there are some systems in place on the side dealing with farming, it’s not deep enough to serve as a long term distraction. This along with the nature of the side quests really starts becoming the main problem in exposing the larger issues with the core of the game’s systems.

The side quests take the core collect/craft mechanic of the main story line, and ramp it up to 11. The problem is that the crafting system in general is just not that good, and the collecting of resources in the environment is kind of a hassle.

Materials used to craft a single bridge…

As an example, I created the above list to try and wrap my head around what I needed to craft a single bridge. At the highest level, this thing required somewhere around 300 stone, and a bunch of other various ingredients. The big problem is that stones can either be found solo on the ground, or in groups of 4 that can be mined out of a single boulder. Just from a length of time to collect, this then becomes rather time prohibitive. It also means hopping around to a ton of different areas in the crafting menu to craft individual pieces, then larger pieces, then larger pieces where each tab in was another level down in the crafting sequence. For me, there was also the fundamental problem of not really understanding why something that uses parts made out of stone then requires MORE stone. Even as it currently exists, being able to pick the high level item (say a stone arch), getting a total list of ALL resources needed to build it, then being able to one shot complete the project would have significantly improved the experience, as opposed to the current mess of crafting large items.

Scenes like this pushed me to keep playing.

End of the day, the main reason why this was not another entry into Shelved It has more to do with the fact that the game was abrupt in finishing, and I wanted to see what else the environment team had put together. While the base that is there has potential, there’s too many fundamental problems with the crafting and collecting systems that are the core of the game to really consider this one worthy of high praise. On the other hand, given the lack of content, a few changes to the way these work could fairly quickly elevate this one to a pretty entertaining and relaxing adventure title. However, if you really want to see a gorgeous game, it may be worth taking a look at anyway.

2017-08-142018-01-13

Game Ramblings #45 – Yakuza 0

More Info from Sega

Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: PS4

TL;DR

Excellent combat with multiple styles to fit different fights
Swapping between characters worked well due to how the story timeline worked between the two
Difference in tone between serious story missions and almost 100% non-serious side missions somehow didn’t cause issues

The Yakuza series has always been more of a Shenmue than a GTA, and Yakuza 0 doesn’t change any of that. This one provides a new starting point for the series, providing some back story to the events before the original entry in the series. It takes the same mix of combat, light puzzle solving, and high levels of drama, and modernizes it a bit as the first PS4 entry in the series, giving us another great entry to play. Despite being played across two characters, the story manages to send enough clues cross-character to weave together a fun narrative, with plenty of action and violence expected of the genre.

The combat in place is similar to past games, taking place in small areas walled off by onlookers, where enemy groups of varying size can be attacked. Combos of attacks can be grouped to knock down enemies, building up secondary resources to do more spectacular (and powerful) attacks. From a high level it’s fairly simple, but different variations of button holds, character placement, environmental interactions, and most importantly, multiple fighting styles add a lot of depth. Of note, the fighting styles all feel fairly different, and bring advantages to different fights. Both characters have a fairly standard brawling style and legendary fighting style, but the real fun is in one of each character’s other styles.

Kiryu’s Beast mode allows for slow but heavy attacks in a wide range, as well as a number of wrestling-inspired finishers. More importantly, it also allows for automated grabbing of environmental objects to swing at enemies, including things like motorcycles. On Majima’s side, the real standout is Break mode. This uses a series of breakdancing moves to quickly and heavily take out large groups of enemies through effective AoE attack and dodge maneuvers. In general, I was able to switch to a mode that made sense for each fight, whether I needed to do heavy damage to individuals, or keep it safe while whittling down a large group.

On the story end, there’s not too many surprises here, but it’s definitely entertaining. The more surprising thing for me was the mix of the serious story with incredibly non-serious side missions. The side missions typically had similar gameplay, but the characters you meet during them were generally absurd, whether it’s Mr. Libido being unable to contain himself, helping out fake Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg make Thriller, or Kiryu mixing up visas and pizza when helping an immigrant, I could pretty much expect side missions to go straight for the absurd. Given the seriousness and level of chaos that most of the main story had, it meant I could use the side content as a way to unwind between places where I knew I could get into big fights. This is backed by a surprisingly entertaining set of real estate content for each character to add even more depth to the things to do on the side; Kiryu runs a full real estate company and Majima runs a cabaret club.

Totally not Spielberg stares into your soul.

If there was anything I would directly point to as a severe negative here, it’s that at a number of points the story missions simply don’t tell you what to do. You’d be given a vague goal (find somewhere to hide!), with no map marker, and no obvious place to go, and be forced to wander around until you hit the magic trigger. More often than not these places would be triggered in areas where you had no NPC contacts, no reason to be in the area, and would never revisit the place for any other reason. While filling gap time between story missions doing side content allowed me to accidentally wander into these from time to time, I was still forced to effectively blanket the map covering all roads until I found the specific spot. Any sort of minimizing of the vague nature of these would have been a great help, but luckily these types of missions were the minority in place.

Overall though, Yakuza 0 was a ton of fun to play. The combat was solid, the story was enjoyable, and the side content had a lot of flat laugh out loud moments. If you’re wanting to play a Japanese GTA, this is not the right game, but if you’re looking to rekindle memories of playing Shenmue, this is a great place to start.

2017-04-092017-04-17

Game Ramblings #36 – Horizon: Zero Dawn

More Info from Guerrilla Games

Platform: PS4
Genre: Open World Action/Adventure

I really felt like I need to hold off on posting this for a while. It’s not that the game was bad; realistically it’s already likely to be top 5 for the year. It’s not that I was necessarily unexcited to finish; I really felt compelled to keep going through the story missions. It’s just that the end of the game so entirely infuriated me that I didn’t think I could give this one a fair shot right in writing if I didn’t let things settle for a while. If there’s any crime that this game was actually guilty of, it was coming out the same week as Breath of the Wild, which at minimum provided a hugely good benchmark to compare it against. Luckily Zero Dawn didn’t stumble, even if their launch timing was pretty poor. So with that said, let’s get the good out of the way first, because there’s two main things I really want to rant about, but are ultimately unimportant to the quality of the game.

This game really nailed the future post-apocalypse setting in a way that a lot of games fail to do. It mixes a fantastically beautiful open world landscape with very obviously hi-tech robotic enemies to fight against to provide a great starting background for a people that are obviously not the ones in control of the technology. As the story unfolds, it becomes a fantastic telling of an AI clearly gone wrong, and how the world came to be in the state that it’s in. By mixing in obvious landmarks, scannable audio and holographic logs, and ruins of cities of the past, the world’s depth grows in a way that I’ve only rarely seen in games like the Metroid Prime series.

This world is backed by an open world gameplay style that definitely hits more than it misses. There’s definitely some typical trappings of open world games – towers that reveal the map, optional items scattered around to collect, hidden dungeons to explore – but it’s nothing that gets in the way, and the developers at Guerrilla definitely minimized their use to avoid some of the tiring grind that I would typically see of the genre. The real highlight though is the robots that you fight. These start as small as small as elk, big cats, or hyena type robots that can be stealth killed. From there things grow tremendously until you’re fighting gigantic crocs, T-Rexes, and huge eagles.

The larger monsters themselves greatly depend on the use of ranged weapons, and this is where a lot of the weapon upgrade path is focused. There’s things like your typical bow and arrow, providing decent damage on the run. There’s more focused heavy-damage bows that trade much slower reload for heavy damage or heavy part stripping capabilities. There’s slings that can throw various grenades with different elemental, sticky, or proximity attack characteristics. There’s even a set of crossbow-style weapons that let you lay rope traps in preparation for taking down an enemy. Despite all being ranged weapons, the tremendous breadth of capabilities means a normal fight may have you switching between three or four weapons on the fly, stunning an enemy, laying some traps while it’s down, then taking out pieces of its armor until it’s dead. There becomes a pretty strong rhythm to the normal fights that gets hit here that most open world games have never really gotten this right.

The unfortunate thing is that my overall enjoyment was clouded realistically by two things that should not have been a big deal.

The first problem I ran into was the lack of melee weapon progression. You gain your first melee weapon right at the start of the game, using it for close-in attacks, as well as single shot stealth kills. This becomes a tremendously fun way to get kills early on in the game, luring enemies into tall grass and killing them in one blow. However, beyond a handful of small skill point upgrades, there is no melee weapon upgrade until very nearly the end of the game. As the enemies you face become stronger, even smaller enemies can no longer be one shot, so I ultimately started avoiding packs of enemies because the risk vs. reward was no longer worth getting into multi-enemy fights.

The second main problem was the general design of the boss fights. Pretty much without exception all the boss fights were just kind of boring. The fights pretty much all followed the pattern of

Cluttered circularish arena with too many things that block dodge rolls
Giant enemy with predictable patterns
No reason to move into melee range because the melee weapon sucks against bosses and ranged is much safer

Ultimately though, I would get through the boss fights because exploring the rest of the world around me was just so much damn fun, and it made it worth playing the game. At least it gives them some things to clean up for the sequel.