Category: ARPG

Posted on

Game Ramblings #167 – Dragon Quest Treasures

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG / Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

When I’m travelling, I look for certain types of games to play. They don’t necessarily have to be the best game ever, and I’d honestly rather they not be since my play sessions are inconsistent. They should have a relatively short metagame loop so I can play in both 15 minutes and multiple hours as I can manage it. They absolutely need to be portable since I’m not lugging consoles or a desktop with me. Treasures ticked all those boxes. It’s definitely not going to win game of the year, but it’s a game that became so easy to fall into that I was surprised how fast I managed to complete it.

This game is the strangest mix of Pokemon and a treasure hunting game, and it somehow manages to work out alright. Your goal is ultimately to find treasure, but the other half the game can’t be ignored in the pursuit of riches. You use your party of typical Dragon Quest monsters to both fight things around, as well as to use their abilities to assist you in getting to and searching for more treasure. How that loop works out is really why this worked well for me as a vacation game.

The overall metagame is a series of treasure hunts where you go out, fill your inventory, and go back to your base. Each trip is capped by how much treasure your party can carry, and in some practical sense by the fact that the farther you get into each level the stronger the enemies are. During each hunt, you’ll eventually start getting attacked by rival hunters trying to steal your treasure. This ends up encouraging you to be fast in gathering treasures, and fast in getting back to base. As a loop this takes place in roughly 10 minute intervals and it’s incredible how infinitely repeatable this can be. If all you’ve got time for is one loop, it’s just a fun distraction but you still make forward progress. If you’ve got time for more, you can instead settle into achieving specific goals – grabbing specific treasures, finishing specific side quests, finding specific party members, etc – that you can focus on over longer periods of time.

In a lot of ways, the Pokemon aspects of it feel intentionally placed because this is one of the reasons that I really enjoyed Pokemon Arceus a lot. It never felt like my time in that game was being wasted and it also never felt like I had to really set aside time to make meaningful progress. Everything I did was valuable to my overall progress, and it allowed me to enjoy the game at any time in any situation. That is what makes a perfect travel game and this really nailed it, whether or not that was intentional on the developer’s part.

Because the core loop worked so well, the rest of the game just kind of had to not get in my way. Combat is simple, but effective. You basically attack and dodge, and that’s really all you need to worry about. There’s a neat slingshot secondary weapon that can be used for offense, but its more interesting use is to buff and heal your party on the fly. Your party have all of their own unique abilities tied to the monster design, but it’s all more or less irrelevant to the combat structure. The only one I really focused on was making sure I had a healer so I could focus my efforts on damage as much as possible. Monster collecting is more RNG-focused than I’d prefer, but you generally get monsters at a decent rate. Their ability to join your party is tied to a bit of a frustrating item trading system, but you end up getting so many items in a normal treasure hunt that it isn’t overly time consuming.

If there is one thing that I could point at as being incredibly frustrating though, it’s that your base can be attacked. It’s not that this was difficult, but the last thing I generally wanted to do after dumping my treasure back was to have to immediately be in combat. It was probably more frustrating that because it generally wasn’t challenging it just slowed down my pace and prevented me from getting back out into the field. There’s a similar annoyance while in the field where you can be attacked by random rival hunters, and it’s another case of not really being challenging and mostly just being something that slowed my pace. However, I didn’t really have major issues outside of those things.

This one I guess ends up being an easy recommendation in a lot of ways because it just kind of works pretty well. It’s got a fun core meta loop, a decent enough monster collection aspect, decent enough combat, and really tries its best to not get in your way. It’s no game of the year, but because of that I also wasn’t worried about trying to book large gaming sessions to dig deep into it. I just kind of hopped in and out as I could, and because I was having fun it became more hopping in than I really expected. Because it was a travel game, it also really just fit really well into some of the smaller gaming sessions that I had that were typical of my time availability. Given the holidays are over, there may not be an opportunity to play a kind of “travel ready” game for a while, but this is a good one to keep in mind the next time you’re doing so.

Posted on

Shelved It #15 – Horizon: Forbidden West

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4

I don’t typically shelve games that I enjoy, let alone sequels to games I enjoyed. There’s often enough of something there to keep me moving. For Horizon, that’s very nearly the universe they’ve created, which is still just as gorgeous and interesting of a sci-fi experience as any game out there. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just playing the first game again. Not a sequel with iterations, not something with fresh ideas. Literally the original game. I put it down for a few days to give it some fresh air while I played a bit of Gran Turismo, but I’m finding myself at a point where I don’t have a drive to pick it back up, so at that point I might as well shelve it.

I could literally post my ramblings about the original as well as my ramblings about The Frozen Wilds and you could basically figure out what my pros and cons list for this game would be, and frankly that was always in the back of my mind as I got further into Forbidden West. Obviously the core gameplay was there, but problems started slowly creeping in.

The most immediate sorta issue you run into is with climbing. I played the original game immediately after Breath of the Wild and the inability to climb on any surface was already a bit of a detriment at the time. 5 years later it’s now a glaring problem. You can basically climb almost anywhere in this game, but you hit enough small points where you inexplicably can’t climb for it to be annoying that they didn’t just implement BOTW climbing. It being glaring is not helped by the fact that the cliffs literally now glow with climbing markup.

I’m not exaggerating about that. As a developer, I get why they probably chose to keep the systems similar between the original and sequel. However, as a developer I also understand that they had 5 years and a AAA budget – something I’ve rarely had access to – to implement better climbing, and their answer is a UX nightmare. It’s weird.

However, as the game went on I came to be generally bothered by the pace of combat slowing to a crawl. This game has the same general curve as the original. You start off able to stealth kill almost everything, then a couple of bigger things need a stealth swing + maybe a bow shot. As you get a bit further, you start seeing more larger mobs that require a bit more melee to take down. You then get into higher level variants of small machines that can’t be stealth killed and require more attacks. You get into larger mobs that can’t really be stunned by melee, so it loses its effectiveness. At a certain point, you’re just fighting level 30+ groups where you have to range everything and combat falls apart.

In general, there’s still a distinct lack of feel to the power curve of melee. There’s a few general skill tree upgrades, but with melee it’s kind of WYSIWYG. You don’t get to purchase cool versions of the melee weapon like you do ranged. You don’t get to do workbench upgrades like you do ranged weapons. You don’t really get much in terms of stealth damage upgrades once you hit the couple of skill tree points early in the game. It doesn’t feel like you really have a choice to do a melee or stealth-focused track, because you just kind of a hit an effectiveness wall with them, regardless of your upgrade path.

The thing about melee is that is it also generally puts you in a hugely disadvantageous position. It’s surprisingly easy for things to blow past you and out of camera range. Sometimes it’s because you did a big melee attack and went too far. Sometimes it’s because you dodged to the side and the machine blew past you. The problem for me is that it never felt like I had the tools to then really keep track of what was going on off-screen. There’s not any sort of system to let the camera lock or quick pivot to nearby targets. There’s not really an effective way to mark targets and have them be obvious in location off screen during heavy combat. What it ended up meaning again is that for fights of multiple enemies, melee wasn’t worth the danger or hassle and I was better off going to long range and keeping the entire group in front of me in view.

Ranged at least alleviates the problems somewhat and is pretty obviously still the more focused development track. There’s still a large array of ranged weapon types from bows of different effectiveness distances to trap launches to boomerangy type things. The elemental attack system is still also a lot of fun, with different machines having different weaknesses and benefits to the player. The big problem in the end is that ranged also hits an effectiveness wall that grinds combat to a half. When you’re doing hundreds of points of damage with an arrow and seeing a health bar barely blip down despite hitting weak points perfectly, it’s kind of grating. It’s one thing in a Souls-like when you’re basically hopping from boss to boss, but in a game where that starts to happen with general overworld trash it really slows progress to an unfun level.

Ultimately what really did me in is that the game worked great for about 20 hours, then it just felt like I was slogging through it. It’s interesting to have a side quest about defending a town from raiders and machines for the first couple of times, but then it becomes uninteresting. It’s fun taking down a camp for the first half dozen times, but then it becomes uninteresting. It’s fun hitting the weakpoints on a Thunderjaw the first few times, but then it’s just the same. Since Forbidden West didn’t really separate itself from the original, this is a game that would have severely benefited from being a more condensed experience. Frozen Wilds was fun because it was a shorter experience separated by time from the original, so it was still fresh and fun when I finished it. As a sequel, this just didn’t work out the same way.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #150 – Monster Hunter Rise

More Info from Capcom

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows in 2022

This is the one that finally cracked the code for me in this series. It’s not that I haven’t tried the Monster Hunter games in the past, but they never really clicked for me. This one did. In past games I could never really grok the combat in a way in which I could remain effective. Ranged never felt that good to me in those past games and melee had a pace that I just didn’t enjoy, so I would play them for a few hours and put them down once the challenge ramped up. As a point of reference, I largely only played this series previously on the PSP and poked a bit at 4, but didn’t get far enough to really get anything useful out of it. Rise instead felt like a total package made for me.

The core loop of the Monster Hunter series was always what drew me to it, even with my reservations about the combat. I loved the loop of going out, getting some materials, then seeing what you could make out of them. That pull is still there. I was making armor simply because I could. I was trying to get complete collections simply because I could. I was rekilling past hunts simply because I wanted more. That pull is something that is very rare in games. Combined with a 15-20 minute loop, it’s also easy to fit in a hunt in small chunks of time, rather than having to devote large blocks to make notable progress.

Going out for a hunt never feels like a waste, because it’s either something new that you’ve never fought before or it’s something old that you’re fighting for a specific material purpose. In my last post about Bravely Default 2, I talked about the game not respecting the player’s time. Monster Hunter Rise feels like the opposite. They respect the player’s time greatly. Sure things are challenging, but they never make you do things simply for the sake of doing things and they never throw things at you that aren’t very clear. You’re doing x hunt for y reward. You make x weapon with y materials. You spend x money to upgrade y armor. You know what your goal is and you can go out and handle it, and you’ll always be rewarded for doing so.

Combat though was always where I fell off of past entries. I’ll be the first to admit that I tend to gravitate towards ranged classes in games when I can. I play hunter in WoW. I beat recent Tomb Raider games almost entirely with the bow and arrow. One of my big blocks in past Monster Hunter titles was that ranged was there, but never felt effective to me. The shooting mechanics weren’t great. Damage avoidance wasn’t that effective. Playing solo basically meant that you’d be spending most of your time trying to get at range to even fire, instead of being on offense. This one in particular does a few things that really build out the gameplay systems to allow those things to just work better.

The first big feature is the Wirebug. This is ostensibly a traversal feature in that it’s used to zip around the world quickly, as well as get up cliffs quickly. However, its best use is as an oh shit button. If you do end up getting knocked back by attacks, you can use this to quickly dodge at a long distance from the enemy. In past games, getting hit as a ranged character was typically a huge problem. You’d end up spending a bunch of time then trying to get away to a distance at which you could effectively fire while also having to deal with the fact that you had a pissed off monster on your heels. By being able to just one-button get out of the way you end up gaining a lot of time to simply shoot at things.

The second real big thing is simply that you have help. You get both a cat and dog helper with their own gearing and own capabilities. This alone changed everything for me in solo play. To some extent these work great just as aggro sponges. They won’t necessarily always be pulling the monsters, but they pull them enough to give you time to move and re-assess the situation. They also have their own skills that end up being useful in general. I had my dog geared more towards damage with a focus on being able to break the monster’s core areas. Breaking serves a dual purpose of generally slowing or stunning the enemy for a bit, as well as generally removing some attack capabilities. I had my cat instead geared towards defensive purposes. It had a skill to lay a pot that healed status effects (poisons, slows, etc) and a second skill to lay down an AOE health heal. By going that route, I could often focus directly on attacking rather than running through the complicated UI to find my specific healing items.

Those things all just made soloing easier. It’s not that the pals necessarily replaced humans, but it allowed me to play ranged much more effectively. I spent less time running or healing and more time attacking. I had more time to line up shots to critical areas. I had more time to lay down traps or explosives in spots that I wanted to pull the enemy into. It just made the entire experience more fun without necessarily making the game more complex.

This moved the series in an interesting direction. I guess ultimately it’s a little more friendly to casual players, but it doesn’t feel like it moved the needle enough to make it lose the existing fan base. It does just enough to allow me to play the game in a way that I’ve always wanted to without it feeling like it lost the core resource acquisition loop that I always wanted to love. Now that I’ve gotten through this one, I’m thinking it may be time to go back a couple years and check out Iceborne to see if that one can keep my attention as well as Rise did.