Category: ARPG

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Game Ramblings #53 – Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

More Info from Falcom

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Vita, Steam (Windows)

TL;DR

  • Great continuation of the Ys series, and one of the best RPGs of the year
  • Fantastically fun action combat
  • Serviceable story, but island systems that come out of it are great motivators for forward progress

The Ys series has routinely been a lot of fun, even if the actual releases have been extremely sporadic.  In the past decade we’ve only seen Ys 7 and Memories of Celceta, and internationally speaking the release of Origin.  However, the gameplay has continued to improve in quality, getting us to the point we’re at now.  While this is still definitely a game that feels like it was made for the Vita, it moves up to the console quite well, keeping fast paced combat, a great soundtrack to back it, and some really good systems involving the growth and maintenance of a town.  As usual, we’re left with Adol Christin being left in a bad situation, but this one works out as well as any game in the series before it.

Despite targeting the Vita, the visual style holds up well when scaled up to the big screen.

Going into an Ys game, the combat is obviously going to be the core focus.  The last few releases in particular have really strengthened their action RPG core, and VIII is no different.  The basic combat system is a main melee button, four mappable skills on a regenerating resource, a dodge, and a jump.  However, this simplicity hides a lot of depth.  One of the biggest pieces of the core combat is the timing of dodges.  When executed close to the point of taking damage, the game slows down the enemy combat, giving the player a period of time where they can lay into the enemy they’re facing with little risk of damage.  On the other hand, if they time this with their skill activation button, they gain a damage blocking shield and increased critical damage for a short period.  In addition, there’s a small weapon weakness system in place, giving the player an incentive to swap between characters to maximize damage, which can be done at any time with the press of a button.

Overall the system works really well to keep up the pace.  When taking on trash enemies, I often found myself dancing around spamming abilities to hit packs at a time.  When I moved up to larger enemies, it became a bit more of a tense chess match, where I’d lay off watching for reads on the enemy attack, then dodge and lay into the enemy while I had my small advantage window.  This was particularly evident during boss fights, where damage tended to be pretty fair, but could very quickly stack up into trouble if I started getting sloppy with my dodges.  There is a small wrinkle here where flashback sequences involving the title character Dana leave her to fight on her own.  However, as the flashbacks progress, she gains the ability to change forms, giving her the effective weapon triangle in the past without having to worry about the lack of party members.

Some bosses are impressive, others are just a good way to let dinosaur fans get a laugh.

On the story front, things aren’t as great, but they’re serviceable.  In general the story is pretty by the book.  Adol and the ship he’s on run aground, get stranded on an island, and adventuring hijinks ensue.  The cast all have their own motivations to getting off the island, but generally speaking they aren’t explored too much.  The story around the title character Dana, and why Adol was having dreams about her goes a bit further, but mostly only to provide a bit of reason to move forward.  However, because the story is so focused on survival and getting off the island, it forces the use of one of my favorite parts of the game, Castaway Island.

While you’re busy exploring the island of Seiren, you’re looking for a couple things; people and resources.  Finding the members of the ship you were on allows the village to grow.  Each person has their own little role to play.  Some people join your party as combat members while others open up shops for gear and potions.  Because the island is deserted there’s also no money system, so everything is received through a bartering system.  This heavy use of resources found in the environment enforces a really strong need to explore every little corner of the world, finding points in the environment where resources can be gathered, or that specific monster you need to kill to get one last piece of hide to upgrade your armor.  This system works fantastically well in practice, and provides a much more interactive system of gearing than your typical pattern of new town; new gear that so many RPGs fall into.

Side activities like fishing provide a nice distraction, as well as further resources to put back into the village.

In any normal year Ys 8 would have been the type of game that would push to the top of my list of favorite games, and as it stands it’s easily one of the better RPGs I’ve played this year.  The combat is fantastic, the story does well enough and pushes some great side systems, and the soundtrack really drives the game when it’s needed.  While this definitely won’t appeal to the Final Fantasy audience, anyone who’s a fan of the Tales game is going to find a lot to like here.

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Game Ramblings #48 – Nights of Azure

More Info from Koei Tecmo

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Japan Only – PS3, Vita

TL;DR

  • Solid combat with multiple fighting styles
  • Good exploration mechanics that encourage taking risks without huge penalties
  • Small demon collection aspect that ends up giving a lot of party flexibility, adding good depth to combat

Nights of Azure is one of those games that I can best describe as being entirely competent.  It’s a game with solid combat, an entertaining enough story, and some nice systems to flesh things out.  It ends quick enough that it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and in doing so doesn’t do anything egregious to piss me off.  The visuals were decent, and it was clear what was going on.  The soundtrack hit the emotional notes of the story’s current progress, and the battle music kicked into high gear when necessary.  Given it was developed by Gust, this should come as no great surprise.  The DNA of their other more famous series (Atelier series, Ar Tonelico/Nosurge series) is definitely in place here, and the game benefits a lot from it.

There’s a lot on screen during combat, but you learn to look at important info quickly.

Being an ARPG, the most important thing in general is going to be the combat, and Azure definitely brings some solid combat to this.  In a lot of ways it can be described as a sort of Tales-lite system.  You’ve got a small party, some core melee combos, and some SP-based skills.  However, the party members revolve around a Pokemon style collection system instead of being core NPCs.  The other main thing that adds a lot of depth is that there are 4 different combat styles, giving some flexibility in picking the style that works best for the user.

However, the best thing that came out of all of this is the leveling system.  While it’s definitely a consequence of the game’s short length (< 20 hours for the core story), I ended up finishing the game around level 8, and my demons at their max level of 10.  Because of this, getting a level felt extremely important.  Each stat bump that came with it, as well as skills gained from leveling all had an obvious impact on my character, which is a nice change from the usual 50+ level slog of more high budget ARPGs and JRPGs.  The resource used for leveling was also a nice touch.  Killing enemies results in Blue Blood being gained, which can be used for leveling, summoning new demons for your party, as well as purchasing items from demon vendors throughout the game.  This gave a lot more consequence to the use of the resource, particularly because you could not use the blood you gained until you returned back to home base.

While that last note may sound scary, the game has other systems in place to encourage exploration, rather than making the resource gathering feel like a huge risk.  The main bonus here is that you can teleport instantly back to base at any point, and most quests also typically teleport you back to base for story reasons after finishing the goal.  The second thing they do is checkpoint your progress at the beginning of a room.  If you die, you lose all the resources you gained specifically within the current area, but you don’t lose everything from your current exploration session, and can choose to immediately go home, or pick up where you checkpointed.  In general, this allowed me to be slightly gung ho about going down side paths, because I knew at most I was only going to lose a few minutes progress, with the potential for a huge payoff defeating something optional.

I suppose my final note is that this definitely felt like a portable title, rather than a typical console title, and it being released on the Vita in Japan points to that.  Exploration was done with a time limit of 15 minutes, after which you’d teleport back to base.  However, I never really got close to that time limit, and the tasks I was chasing were typically done within a 10 minute or less window.  This would have been a perfect amount of time for a typical portable experience, and the sequel being aimed at the Switch leads me to believe they’re sticking with the system.  However, even on console the game loop there worked pretty effectively, letting me jump in in short bursts.

The outfit choices were sometimes questionable, and generally got a laugh out of me for their absurdity.

In a lot of ways, this was definitely a very typical Gust title.   The plot was very female-focused, the interaction between the two main characters was personal and positive, and the end of the game left it open for the since-announced sequel.  The outfit choices in some of the cutscenes (as seen above) were also generally pretty hilarious in how little was being worn.  However, it was more often than not hilarious in its lack of care, rather than being risque or offensive in any way.  End of the day, this was a game that was a lot of fun to play, even if it’s not chasing the AAA titles for game of the year.

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Game Ramblings #42 – Ever Oasis

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: 3DS

TL;DR

  • Simple, but entertaining combat reminiscent of developer’s previous work on Mana series
  • Nice city management/maintenance systems based around shop upkeep through resource gathering
  • Tedious party swap system made questionable by ability to warp back to town at any point

This is the latest game by Grezzo, a studio let by the the creator of the Manas series.  It’s easy to see the influences of those games when playing Ever Oasis.  Ya, it’s in 3D, and ya there’s a city management layer there, but the core of the game is still killing things and gathering resources in real time.  The battle system is a simple affair, based largely on minimizing damage instead of doing flashy combos, and it generally works really well.  While there’s definitely some tedious problems when swapping in and out characters for specific skills while exploring, the game largely ends up being a fun affair throughout.

Since this is an ARPG, combat itself is the obvious focus, and it’s here that a lot of the connection to the Mana series shows up.  Like that series, the actual combat is pretty simple, in this case having (effectively) only a weak and strong attack button.  Ya there’s some basic combos to throw, and some passive skills that can be gained, but the core is based around just laying in some attacks.  Where this really separates from its base source is the addition of lock on and dodge rolls, both things that are to be expected in 3D games at this point, but add a lot of life to the game.  Particularly in boss battles, it becomes a quick job of learning the handful of attacks, then consistently executing on the appropriate attack->dodge sequences to minimize damage taken, while maximizing how far into your combo you get for the best damage.  In that sense, the combat is more about reducing damage to a optimizing DPS while keeping damage to a minimum, rather than just simply wailing on enemies like a lot of ARPGs tend to go.  While it is ultimately simple, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and each little fight has its own nuances to learn.

Killing enemies and finding resources in the environment via this system then feeds back into the second core part of the game, the oasis management.  This is a pretty hefty system that players can either dip their toes into for progression purposes, or really get deeply involved in as a main task.  This basically breaks down into three sections; finding new residents, opening new shops, and growing the shops through resource gathering.  The systems in place here end up in a pretty satisfying loop.  You’ll gather a clue about the whereabouts of a new potential resident, find them while out exploring, have them visit your town, hit some checklist of things for them to move in, then in many cases working with the resident to start and grow and maintain the shop.  Where I really dug into this was in the eventual use of non-shop characters to maintain my resource gathering.  Groups of non-shop owners could be sent out of monster kill or resource gather missions, supplementing the exploration I was doing and allowing for me to rapidly grow my oasis without falling behind on maintaining the shops that already exist.

The resources also supplemented the gear system, which is entirely based around crafting.  While there are some options to purchase some base weapons from merchants, the vast majority of gear is crafted via specific resources.  This further positively reinforced the need to invest in the shop and resident systems, giving you more potential AI explorers, more reason to keep resources, and most importantly more reason to be out exploring new areas.  Unfortunately, the exploration is where the biggest flaw of the game came into place, specific to the party management.

The short version here is that other than the main character you can only bring 2 residents out of the oasis at a time, and the party can only be changed while in the oasis.  The problem here is that each character has a skill that allows them to take a specific action in the field.  There’s ends up being about 10 different skills that can be used, ranging from resource gathering (mining, digging, etc), traversal (clear cobwebs, hammer through boulders, etc), or puzzle solving (turn into a ball to fit through holes).  This means you often have to pick between having practical traversal groups over resource gathering groups.  Unfortunately, it’s often the case that you need more than the two skills allowed.

The fact that the party swap mechanic is in place is questionable given the main character has a teleport back to town that can be used at any time.  This is further confusing in the fact that the player can then immediately warp back to the exact location they just left once the party swap has been done.  While there are benefits to returning to town at any one point (Ex: XP is only gained when returning to town), the party swap could have been something done at any time, eliminating a serious drag on the game pace, while still keeping the other benefits to returning to town in place.

Fortunately the tedium of swapping party members did not present a huge barrier in completing the game.  Combat was still fun.  The oasis building mechanic and areas around it were still engaging.  The fact that I had to actively go after resources to build out my gear set also meant that I was actively engaged in exploring for specific things while out in the field.  Overall it seems like a fairly natural progression to the gameplay present in the Mana series, even if there are some things to be smoothed out in the next title.