Category: ARPG

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Game Ramblings #224 – Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm

More Info from Cornfox & Bros

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: iOS, Mac, PS5, Xbox Series, PC

The first Oceanhorn title showed that an indie could tackle a 2D style Zelda game with a lot of success. It wasn’t without its faults, but it brought together elements of A Link to the Past and Wind Waker in a really successful way. This one I would argue is less successful. It’s still a reasonably fun game, but going fully 3D definitely shows where it can be difficult for small teams to scale up their ambitions.

There is no arguing that this is going straight after the dungeon-based Zelda market. The metagame flow is to get to a new location, gain access to a relevant dungeon in the area, and defeat a big boss. Along the way you generally get an item or upgrade relevant to traversal there – bombs to get through blocked areas, swords for more damage, hookshot for covering gaps. The one big change is that you’re often accompanied by AI companions that also can get into combat or help with puzzles, though admittedly their presence is often not that useful beyond forced opportunities to use them.

The main place where the 3D transition really shows an inability to scale is simply in scope. This game only has three core dungeons plus a bit of smaller side content and mini dungeons that you hit along the way. There’s simply not much there to play and if you really put your head down this isn’t much more than 10 hours. That can be padded out via collecting side stuff, but it all largely comes down to treasure chests with items that convert to gold and there’s not a very compelling reason to even have gold. You can buy ammunition from vending machines, but the bulk heavy costs are for small upgrades to existing items that really didn’t feel like they affected balance much.

So then we look at core gameplay. On the surface it’s pretty solid. Core sword swinging is fine and works pretty seamlessly. Enemies have good tells for when they’re attacking so the player can dodge away effectively. There’s a gun system that’s the equivalent of Zelda bow & arrows, including elemental bullets, that is well used both in core combat (ex: freeze enemies) or in traversal (ex: solid patch of ice to walk on in water). The AI companions attacking also means that there’s quite a few situations in which the player is mobbed in a way that feels fun, even if the AI companies and NPCs distracting each other means the player situation is similar from a gameplay perspective.

However, there’s a level of polish missing that is evident here that I think also ties back to this being 3D. The boss fights had kind of a pattern of exploiting a weakness then hitting weak points when the boss was dazed. In the example above, the player would use electric element bullets to hit a hook on the turtle and stun it, leaving open weak points on the legs and stomach. However, the pattern here was that you had to use bullets, which run out, which then resulted in me spending more time running in circles collecting more ammo instead of doing anything interesting. This was sort of fixed in the end game where the boss fight ended up just having a vending machine to use mid-fight instead of wasting time. It felt like a system leaning too heavily on limited resources with long grinding actions. This is accompanied by general lack of polish in camera use – for example, there’s no Z-lock – or movement where I was too often getting stuck on small collisions during combat.

That’s not to say I didn’t have fun though. The boss fights are legitimately cool. The overworld and story is legitimately solid. The companion system and elemental gun are both really good. Visually it even handles itself well on the Switch, with the bigger brother console and PC versions looking spectacular. It’s just not quite there, needing another iteration or polish pass in its current iteration. However, it does make me want to take a peek at Oceanhorn 3 now that it’s out on Apple Arcade and I suppose if nothing else, that’s a win for a franchise.

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Game Ramblings #222 – Pokemon Pokopia

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG/Sandbox Builder
  • Platform: Switch 2

Having played Dragon Quest Builders 2, I knew roughly what I was getting into and where my expectations were. I figured I would effectively be playing the sequel to that game with a Pokemon covering. That’s definitely the bulk of what I got and those things tied to the IP were well integrated. However, what I also got that I didn’t expect was an incredibly dark story backing the setup to get us into the game, but we’ll get to that.

A lot of what made the building aspect of DQB2 work so well for me was indirectly carried over and it really settled me into the flow of the game.

The big thing for me in DQB2 was that tasks could be automated – for example, you learn to farm and task a townsperson to continue doing that for you; you learn to cook a recipe and have a townsperson continue to do that – and that still exists in some respects here. Throughout the game you start getting Pokemon or placeable items that you can add resources to to automate production. For example, Scyther can turn wood into boards if you give them to him. If you create a smelter, you can add raw ore to it to get ingots if you have a fire Pokemon. If you give clay to a fire Pokemon they can create bricks. If you put limestone in a mixer you can have a Pokemon with the Crush ability make concrete. These are all little tasks that can be done to get advanced resources. The big change from DQB2 is that the player cannot do these on their own and must have recruited the Pokemon associated with the task.

There’s a similar aspect to building that comes over here, but again in a slightly less automated way. In DQB2 you can setup builds and apply townspeople to them, but the rest of automation allows things to kind of continue on in the background while you go do anything else. Here, you setup the build, bring all the resources, recruit Pokemon with specific specialties, then set them about building the thing.

It’s a little bit more player directed, but also less automated. In a lot of ways this kind of bugged me early on as it felt like I had to be a little bit too involved with my individual Pokemon and steering them to start things for me. However, over time I kind of got used to just bringing Pokemon resources and things to do and assuming that over time they would naturally get around to handling the tasks for me and being less focused on one specific thing to do now and more on doing a wide range of tasks over time. I can easily be running around building out habitats for Pokemon or cleaning up junk or building paths or shaping the environment and by the time I get back around to the resources I need to build some story thing they’re kind of just there. It ended up steering me more into the sandbox nature of the genre than I think I typically would have been comfortable with.

A lot of the systems are kind of that way. They’re similar to DQB2, but less automated and more player directed. Where the focus has instead changed is very well oriented with the Pokemon IP. Your focus is instead on creating environments to pull Pokemon into your towns.

Every Pokemon in this game has some habitat that it wants to live in. It may be a simple four square patch of grass, or maybe it’s flowers and a shade tree, or maybe it’s a vegetable garden, or maybe it’s a volcanic rock next to lava, or maybe it’s a perch on the edge of a cliff, or maybe it’s a patch of grass that is also next to the ocean, or maybe it’s a patch of moss that is also next to a hot spring. The point being is that the player’s focus is on very specific micro tasks to bring new Pokemon into your town, and specifically because you need a variety of Pokemon to get everything done.

There’s about 30 abilities in the game and having a wide variety of them is extremely important. Some are pretty generic and end up being used across all your towns. It may be something like Burn to light campfires used to recruit certain Pokemon or Chop to create Lumber or Fly to allow you to fast travel to specific Pokemon. Some are instead pretty directly tied to the story like Rotom’s DJ ability to play music for a town party or Tinkmaster’s Engineer ability used to build a large story-focused building. Making sure that you recruit a wide range of abilities ends up being a more driving factor for your towns than the automation of DQB2 as it makes it far easier to tailor your current needs to the area you’re in if you have the ability to task any Pokemon there to do something for you. It’s also the thing that is so obviously tied to the IP as the abilities at play, how to recruit Pokemon, and ultimately getting that “collection” of Pokemon in your towns is the most Gotta Catch em All tie-in that the game has.

The one omission that did surprise me is that there was no battling. Pokemon is about collecting but it’s also about battling and the lack of it kind of points right into the overall plot. Do Pokemon battle because they’re told to or because they naturally do? Without humans, is this coexistence kind of their natural state?

So then, let’s look at the story itself. It’s dark if you actually read into it.

Spoiler

The TL;DR version is that this is the world of Pokemon, largely taking place in Gen 1 ruined cities, and all humanity has left Earth because the environment was destroyed. Rather than taking their Pokemon with them to space, they left them in the existing PC storage infrastructure in the event they could ever return back to the planet’s surface. During this process a hacker put in place safety checks to automatically release Pokemon if the return to the surface took too long and the environment improved enough to support Pokemon existing.

This kind of implies a few things. For one, humanity left and never came back and it’s not really specified how long this has been. Everything being ruins implies at least decades, if not centuries, and humanity existing at all is only finally confirmed in the credits sequence. It also implies that Ditto is a freak and can kind of exist anywhere, and that it was kind of lucky that Ditto happened to come out around the same time that Tangrowth also did, leading into the player starting to improve the world. It implies that the player setting up habitats for Pokemon isn’t actually recruiting wild Pokemon because they all likely were killed by the natural disasters but instead is setting up habitats in a way that the PC storage system finds candidate Pokemon to release back into the wild. The fact that humans were not accessing their Pokemon in space also implies that humanity is far enough away that they literally cannot and do not have access to Earth’s systems and they kind of just left it all behind. All throughout the game it’s hammered into the player that the Pokemon miss their humans, and the game resolves by basically showing that humanity will not know about the Pokemon fixing the environment for long enough that it’s unlikely the Pokemon are still alive. On the surface this just looks like a cute Pokemon game, but the lore ends up being horrifying to think about.

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Like the Pokemon Legends games, this is a breath of fresh air for Pokemon. It’s very obviously Dragon Quest Builders 3 in a different IP, but it works pretty seamlessly. It takes systems that worked from that series, morphs them a bit to fit into collecting Pokemon, and hits a really good balance of IP nostalgia and solid core systems that are slightly pushed in a direction that fits Pokemon better. Frankly, it also fills a hole left by the lack of a new Animal Crossing game. It’s just a really solid game.

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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.