Category: ARPG

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Game Ramblings #216 – Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: ARPG/Musou
  • Platform: Switch 2

This was a wildly fun experience, but as I played it I was left with a particular thought – this is not a particularly good musou game. In isolation, this is a much better combat experience than your typical Warriors game but so much of it occurs in either 1-on-1 boss fights or small scale combat encounters, which is completely the opposite of what I expect out of the genre. So if it steers away from the core gameplay loop that much, is it still worthwhile?

When I think of your typical Warriors title I think about huge multi-person battleground combat maps where I’m trying to capture and keep hold of multiple camps while fighting off enemy commanders, leading to fights where I’m easily eclipsing 1000+ KOs in a single round. The first Hyrule Warriors certainly leaned into that for the most part. However, that screenshot above is more typical of your Imprisonment battle with large ones reserved for a few very particular story missions. Generally speaking, the bulk of content here is a 5 minutes or less game loop where you finish a couple quick objectives on the way to a solitary boss fight. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t play much of Age of Calamity but it caught me off guard.

If the musou experience is what you’re looking for, you just aren’t going to get it here. Even in the large fights it feels mostly lost. Sure, I capture camps but very few of them are ever in future danger of being recaptured by enemies. Sure, some secondary commanders spawn but they generally bee line right for one of my NPC commanders. Sure I have a party of people that I can command, but they are wholly incapable of taking out enemies or capturing points on their own, leading to a lot of swapping who is active as the player. If someone were to hop to this right from Dynasty they would probably be very confused as to why it’s carrying the Warriors name.

But then you play some more and the combat against bosses in particular starts to grab you. Boss fights are quite simply not just hack and slash encounters.

There are elemental attacks to take into account and chaining that you can do. For example, you can freeze an enemy with a series of ice attacks, then hit it with lightning for explosion. You can combine wind attacks with other elements to create tornadoes capable of hitting large groups. you can burn an enemy then hit it with water or ice to open it up for critical damage. Dodging takes on a ton of importance here relative to other Warriors games as well. Executing a perfectly timed dodge opens up the enemy for a flurry attack where the player can lay in a bunch of large damage, as well as knock down its stun meter. Once that stun meter is knocked down all the way, it also opens up the boss for a large attack generally capable of cutting down a quarter or more of its health at once. This is then combined with the ability for pairs of player characters doing combo attacks together for similarly large damage.

These one-on-one encounters then feel a lot less like a musou experience and more like a traditional action combat game, and that is greatly to its benefit. Where I enjoyed the original Hyrule Warriors for being a musou game, I started to enjoy this game because it was not. What it ends up being for me is a game that feels like a Hyrule experience shrouded in war, rather than the more individual experience that Zelda games typically have. It feels like it’s leaning on the action combat of the series, but not leaving away the fact that in war things are often going to be faster and more chaotic. The game loop then generally being short 5 minute segments ending in a boss makes a ton of sense. You are being encouraged to quickly dispatch with unimportant KOs and focus on the small handful of big bads that are really tuned to be fun to fight within the combat paradigm that they built for the game.

So that gets us back to the question – if it steers away from the core gameplay loop that much, is it still worthwhile? I think the answer that I arrived at is that yes it is still worthwhile, and it took the game continuing to beat me over the head with spectacle to get there. As the game went on I stopped thinking about whether or not I was playing a musou game and thinking more about timing my dodges correctly. It was less important that I was KOing 1000 things and more important that I was KOing the one boss. It was less important that I was doing hack and slash chaos and more important that I was chaining elemental attacks. The combat fundamentals end up being so much fun that the things that I initially felt were missing ended up fading into the background. Yes, this may not be a typical musou game, but in the process they’ve crafted something else that is a lot of fun on its own.

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Game Ramblings #215 – Pokemon Legends: Z-A

More Info from The Pokemon Company

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch 2
  • Also Available On: Switch

This is such a strange game. At a glance it feels like it should be terrible – a Pokemon game contained to a single city with limited zones in which to catch Pokemon. However, they made a crucial decision to focus on combat and boy did that benefit the game as a whole.

If you’ve played the previous Pokemon Legends: Arceus, there’s really nothing to talk about except for combat. Simply put, combat is now done in real time in all situations. There’s no difference between fighting a wild Pokemon and fighting a trainer battle and they really lean into that. You as the trainer run around and avoid being hit by stray attacks while simultaneously hitting buttons for relevant attacks. Pokemon are quickly hot swapped so trainer fights don’t lose the real time feel as you go through your lineup of Pokemon swapping out to gain type advantages. It plays a really tight line of familiar but new for the series, even compared against the same feeling of Arceus. However, I do think it has some rough spots in their first attempt at real time.

The first obvious problem is that I think the player’s active Pokemon has too little agency of its own to actively fight. All ranged attacks are relative to the player and the Pokemon tries to follow the player around if they aren’t being actively commanded, and that’s frustrating as hell. As a player, I have to reposition frequently to avoid being hit by attacks, which then causes the Pokemon to get into spots where it has to wildly reposition just to throw a ranged attack which is always at a fixed spot relative to the player’s position, wasting a bunch of time while it repositions. The Pokemon then often gets into spots where its ranged attacks hit things that it should simply be obviously avoiding. It might be an edge of a fence or a tree or the top of a stair that will clip the attack, blocking it from hitting. It’s just consistently dumb as shit that this occurs, because a Pokemon should clearly be instinctively smart enough to reposition itself a bit to avoid this.

Where this gets particularly frustrating is that they very clearly designed the big PvE boss fights to avoid this. Those fights are all just against a Pokemon on a flat surface, and they’re spectacularly fun. These fights become some of the more chaotic avoidance situations in the game, ranging from anything like pool avoidance to bullet hell situations. Some of the early ones are certainly more straightforward damage checks, but later ones start to test the player’s ability to not just faceroll the attack buttons and actually stay moving more often. And they WORK because they DO NOT REQUIRE THE POKEMON TO THINK.

This is then compounded by the large amount of trainer battles that the game pushes you into. If Arceus was about collecting and not having trainer battles as much as possible, this is about as far opposite as you can get. There are entire segments of the game loop dedicated to trainer battles, where sections of the city are cordoned off each night just for trainers to battle in. This is where you get a lot of mileage out of having a traditionally setup party to counter as many Pokemon types as possible, but it’s also where I have my second real problem with the combat system.

Trainer battles in traditional Pokemon games largely involve you guessing your way through the first Pokemon then distinctly having the advantage to switch Pokemon simultaneous to your opponent, leaving you with a type advantage as long as you can generally know or guess the upcoming Pokemon’s weaknesses. That isn’t present here, but it’s also combined with an annoying delay when switching Pokemon where the Pokemon has to play a spawn animation before it can even begin to move for both the player and NPC characters. Generally it leaves the Pokemon open to being hit at least a couple of times before it can even begin to move. This leaves the defending Pokemon with an always present inherent disadvantage to having been put into battle, which feels generally off in the spirit of Pokemon fights. It’s not necessarily that I want to have the guaranteed type advantage of the turn-based games, but I want to at least be able to quickly get a Pokemon into battle and fighting, rather than watching it slowly spawn and be hit.

However, the bulk of the trainer battles in this are inherently more interesting because of the open world and real time nature. You can sneak up on people and knock out their opener Pokemon before they even know you are there. It’s such a dick move if this was to be happening in real life, but as a videogame power fantasy it’s spectacularly fun and effective.

The thing is, despite me having what feels like real core problems with combat I still found this to be so tremendously fun that it again represents what I think is a better path forward for the series. If Arceus represented a quicker paced capture dynamic with an open world, this represents the feeling of Pokemon in a way that more closely matches the TV series. This feels much closer to what I think Pokemon is, with more trainer fights and less capturing but done in a much quicker paced setup inherently due to it being real time. This keeps important things about the core metagame for me – forming a party tuned to type advantages, swapping them out based on what my opponents bring in, making sure that I’m tuning my move set to take advantage of things that aren’t inherent to the types of my Pokemon – and reducing overall user friction by making everything easy to get to.

If I then take combat at face value and assume that some iteration could be done to smooth it out a bit, this represents a future that I think should be core Pokemon and not side game experiment. This combat applied to the Scarlet/Violet world design would work just as well, and in particular would allow them to eliminate their time saving measure of auto result-battles in the open world that always felt like a grinding crutch to me. This combat applied to gym battles in Scarlet/Violet would make those feel like even larger spectacles. This combat applied to Terastallized Pokemon fights would make those feel like skilled battles instead of dice rolls around picking the right overpowered Pokemon. There is just a lot to be gained from Game Freak paying attention to what they are creating with these experiments, and the hope is that they do pay attention instead of throwing it away again.

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Game Ramblings #211 – Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

More Info from Level 5

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, PS4, Xbox Series, Steam

This game is the very definition of low friction. It has a ton of systems for crafting, a ton of systems for combat, a ton of systems for collecting, systems for building, and systems for customizing. From a high level view it looks like absolute chaos, but they all work together and they all work similarly so doing any particular thing constantly feels familiar. In building out the game this way they’ve created something that feels like Animal Crossing through the lens of RPGs and it just becomes an absolute joy to sit down and play.

If I look at the individual systems in place and tried to pull them out into its own game, it’s pretty clear that you’d have a series of pretty shallow games. Combat is fairly effective, but it’s clearly simple. You can do a set of different melee types and a couple of ranged types, but they generally play similar enough to be a preference selection. They have a handful of attack types for variety but largely play the same. The crafting side of the game is similar. Each crafting life has a whole huge list of recipes but they are all crafted the same way so 1:1 against each other it’s pretty irrelevant. Ultimately what really makes the game work is the loop tying everything together and how seamlessly you transition between the various lives.

To me the story is largely irrelevant. It’s something to push you forward into higher level zones – which has its use – but it’s not what had me playing the game. The Animal Crossing portion of this is really what did it for me. Like Animal Crossing, you’re essentially building a customizable town and recruiting people in it, but with more direct control over the things that you place. Rather than props coming up in the shop, you have to make them. If you want that fancy new staircase type to pull off a new block of housing? Go build it. You want that cool new wall art for your personal house? Go make it. What comes out of that is that each decision on what you’re adding to the town has a lot more impact than Animal Crossing. It’s a series of checklists to get to it. Do you have the recipe? Do you then have the materials? Do you then have the skill level to create it? If not, do you have a townsperson with the matching skill to assist you in creating it? That is where the simplicity ends up shining.

The individual lives that you work through to create a single thing don’t need complexity when the game loop is short. Recipes generally come out of quests of some sort, so completion of them is generally a small amount of item creation or enemy kills to complete. It doesn’t try to bog you down in a large grind. Each recipe has some handful of required items – maybe it’s some ore or some fish or some flowers or some wood, or some other craftable subitem like paints or boards or metal ingots. Rather than making that process slow and plodding, getting those items is relatively quick. Yes there’s leveling, but crafts or kills at the same relative level as you provide a ton of experience, so you aren’t grinding to earn new things. Each little piece of a whole item is its own couple minute game loop that is fast and fun enough without providing unnecessary friction to the player. At the end, you create your item, put it where you want, and move on to the next thing.

It is then helped that in the process of completing these mini game loops you’re also just generally grabbing other items as you go. On the way to some specific ore there’s probably some monsters or trees or any number of other things that you quickly dispatch to get more stuff that you can use later. It’s then easy to transition between all this because the fundamental controls are the same across the board. Each gathering life type has the same type of setup where there are weakpoints you can scan for and hit to more quickly dispatch the item. They all have the same setup of a critical finishing blow to gain more items. This extends to combat where the combat controls similarly have charge attacks on the same buttons for more damage to keep a similar sort of rhythmic flow to combat and gathering. On the crafting side, the setups are the same picture matching with the same clicks, hold, and button spam types so transitioning between woodworking and blacksmithing and cooking is all seamless.

This is ultimately what I mean by everything being low friction. The entire game is a series of small systems that are good enough on their own to be fun enough. They wouldn’t stand well over time isolated in their own game, but as the sum of parts to create a more advanced Animal Crossing experience they just all enhance each other. The systems have a short loop to keep you going to the next part of your checklist in a way that reminds me a lot of DS/3DS era games where everything was really tuned down to a 5 minute game loop that you can pick up and put down at any time, but can also just be played in hours long sessions because they are so smooth to get through. Creating your town is easy and fun but still requires enough effort to complete that it doesn’t feel trivial. It all just ends up working well in a way that makes this an easy recommendation for anyone looking for that Animal Crossing fix.