Category: Platform

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Game Ramblings #137 – Spinch

More Info from Queen Bee Games

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows (Steam, Humble, GOG)

This is kind of a ramblings about Spinch, but also kind of not. On the one hand, this is the type of platformer I really enjoy. Mechanically it’s simple, but it’s extremely tight. It’s difficult because of design, but easy in execution so it all comes down to skill. On the other hand, it’s also the type of game that I increasingly can’t play. Rapid changes in direction on the analog stick and button presses cause flare ups with carpal tunnel problems that limit my ability to execute those mechanics. It puts me in a weird spot where I can basically enjoy the game up until the point where I can’t, but mostly because my hands refuse to let me.

At its core, Spinch is a simple game. You can run, you can jump, you can wall jump, you can dash. That’s it. It puts a simple rule set in place, then provides you with ways to puzzle out trying to not die. Sometimes the puzzle is simply to time out your movement to fit into a gap of hazards. Sometimes the puzzle is hitting buttons to change the path to get through to the finish. Sometimes the puzzle is simply being good at jumping from platform to platform without falling to your death.

It’s all your standard platformer fare, but it’s done so well. Jumping is the right amount of floaty so it doesn’t feel stiff but is extremely predictable in height and distance. Wall jumps are extremely sticky so you can reliably hit them on small edges but still move up a wall extremely fast. Dashes provide an instant speed boost so there’s not a weird sense of lag when you execute it. Starting and stopping has a bit of acceleration in general movement so you have a bit of a weighty feel to the character, despite its small size. It all just feels very good and rewards the player by putting their skill at the forefront, rather than making the difficulty based on complicating things.

However, the downfall of all that is that the tight mechanics often lead to quick and rapid executions. As an example, the water world above has a pretty constant rapid tap of the jump button to work your way through small areas. An ice world had me doing rapid micro adjustments on the analog stick to throttle my movement to avoid falling spikes on slippery floors. A plant-style world had me doing large wall jump sections, involving both micro adjustments on analog to stick to the wall AND rapid jumping to scale it. In a vacuum, these are all really well executed mechanics. However, as someone with carpal tunnel issues, it leads to an inability to play the game beyond a certain point.

These kind of mechanics cause weird problems for me over time. It starts as general fatigue, which is annoying but fine. My general APM starts slowing down as my ability to quickly move my hands goes down. If I keep ignoring it it starts branching into outright pain – generally pretty localized but obvious. If I’ve gotten to this point without stopping, then I already know I screwed up. If I keep ignoring it past that, I start outright losing feeling in my fingers and then I know the next day will not be fun. At that point it’s not just gaming that becomes problematic – simply spending the next day programming becomes a hassle.

Avoiding these kinds of repetitive motion mechanics is something that I’ve put a lot of thought in because I ultimately want to make games that the widest range of people can play with the best integration of skill. However, some games just can’t do that on their own. Skill-based platformers are one of those. Mario type platformers avoid these problems because they’re often more about the experience or player flow over tight execution. They have some flexibility in safe timing or stretches of minimal changes in inputs. However, games like Spinch? Super Meat Boy? Celeste? They don’t exist if you move them closer to Mario. They simply are as good as they are because they mechanically exist as they do. At this point I don’t know that I have a good path towards a solution here besides the obvious ones – get surgery and solve the problem, use something like an Xbox accessibility controller to get the motion away from my thumbs, or accept it as reality and play these games in small doses to get through that sort of videogame craving that comes up.

So far, I’ve leaned into the last option.

In any case, Spinch is another really tight skill-based platformer that I think is worth checking out, despite my carpal tunnel problems. This one hits that same need for me as Super Meat Boy does. I can jump into these games without thinking, quickly get back into playing shape, and hammer out a few levels before popping it back on the shelf. They exist in that place where they’re good because of simplicity and work because those simple mechanics were polished until they were perfect, leaving a game without fluff.

I just wish my hands were a bit more cooperative…

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Game Ramblings #136 – NieR Replicant ver 1.22474487139…

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Steam

Playing remakes – and not just remasters – is always interesting. How do they modernize the game without ruining what people liked about the original? Do they choose to add or remove anything to change the game at all? Playing remakes when you didn’t really play the original is even more interesting. I bounced off NieR on the PS3 pretty hard, though I don’t remember why. However, I really enjoyed Automata so I figured it was worth a revisit. As it turns out, I definitely enjoyed Replicant a lot this go around, although it has some spots where it definitely shows its age.

In hindsight, this ones feels a lot like Automata, and that’s probably what makes it work out so well for me at this point. My Automata ramblings cover the basics, but to be sure the ARPG systems still work great here. The mix of melee and ranged combat, as well as your occasional bullet hell chaos works really well still. It’s generally clear whether a boss is more susceptible to what kind of attacks, and you plan accordingly to get your big damage dumps. It just works well.

However, the thing that struck me is how overwhelmingly fair it is. There just aren’t big fuck you moments. If you execute your offense well, you won’t have problems taking out enemies. If you execute your defense well, you won’t have problems avoiding damage. If you’re paying attention to enemy tells you’ll be ready to dodge things. The game just isn’t going to punish you if you’re paying attention.

Having talked to a few people about the original release, this seems like a big change. From what I understand, the original wasn’t necessarily unfair, but leaned into difficult tuning more than it should have. To me this feels like a conscious effort to align the game with both Automata, as well as a larger mass market. You can go to a harder difficulty if you want to, but the game doesn’t feel designed around punishing the player even on that harder difficulty. It just feels tuned to be right.

However, that was something they could absolutely control when remaking the game. What they couldn’t control was the overall metagame that was there, and that part is definitely showing its age. The first thing that stood out to me was how minimal gearing was in contrast to Automata. You have weapons that can be upgraded and some basic mods that can be applied to your gear (+damage, +defense, +magic, etc) but compared to the chip system it feels pretty slim. I just didn’t derive much gameplay out of it, because I basically picked a weapon that fit my style then applied the best mods and didn’t really think about it.

The general story flow also just didn’t age well. There’s a lot of mindless back and forth between the same areas just to finish story quests (run to coast town -> go back to your village -> go back to coast town -> go back to your village) and with so few unique areas, it wears out pretty quick. The lack of quick travel for most of the game also exacerbates the issue. You just spend a lot of time mindlessly running in comparison to the original.

This is pushed way to the forefront in the design of the game’s endings. Ending B is a replay of the second half of the game with a few unique story bits added. Ending C and D are replays of the second half of the game accessible only after you collect all weapons, which then adds a unique selection to the end boss. The new ending is the sole new addition, but frankly it wasn’t worth replaying the game so many times to get to it, so I just watched it on Youtube. Automata definitely learned a lot from this one in terms of making the chase towards multiple endings more fun and more unique. Replicant, even in modern form, is a bit of a drag.

That said, this game is worth playing even if you only get to the first ending. Even with its problems the combat is just that good. This and Automata have a combat flow that I’ve rarely felt nailed so well in other games. The closest that I could really compare it to would be something like Bayonetta in terms of mixing the grand scale and tight action. It’s just consistently fun and exciting to get to and fight through bosses, and each one leaves you wanting to push through the story problems just to get to that next adrenaline rush. For that alone, this gets the approval.

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Game Ramblings #135 – Fantasian (Part One)

More Info from Mistwalker

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Apple Arcade

This is kind of an unusual one that ended up as a lucky confluence of a few factors. I generally don’t play mobile games anymore. After spending a bunch of time working on mobile games around 2011-14, I kind of was tired of the platform other than the necessity of owning a phone. Besides things like Pokemon Go or Fire Emblem Heroes, I really only use my phone as a web surfing device. That said, my experience on developing for Google platforms has always been overwhelmingly negative so as a result I also don’t own an Android device. Tie all that together and I have an iPhone, so when I see a company like Mistwalker release a JRPG through Apple Arcade, I’m somehow ready to enjoy it.

As it turns out, that’s a good thing in this case. Fantasian is a really good combination of things. It’s a classic turn based JRPG, but it throws in some interesting battle mechanics that keep it feeling fresh. The battle mechanics ramp up with some interesting bosses that really lean into on-the-fly strategy over simple number crunching. This is all backed by a diorama-based visual style that really evokes the PS1 era pre-rendered backgrounds in a much higher fidelity fashion.

Fantasian is at its core a spiritual sequel to early Final Fantasy games. It has a similarly silly fantasy JRPG plot. It has turn-based battles. It’s got the usual stats and buffs and debuffs typical of the genre. But it feels like more than that. It does some clever things with how it handles combat that set it apart.

The obvious one in-combat is that magic attacks can be curved while also passing through enemies. This puts a tremendous emphasis on positioning and maximizing hits to get through battle. Why take a couple of turns to kill one enemy with basic attacks when you can kill three enemies in the same amount of time with some pass through magic? This also allows for some interesting defensive mechanisms where enemies can activate a shield that blocks this pass through. As a result, bending around them to maximize your output becomes even more important. It’s a clever core mechanic that is both easy to use and incredibly effective, giving a nice layer of strategy to what are generally pretty basic trash fights.

There’s also a system called the Dimengion system that really plays into this. Once you’ve seen an enemy at least once, you can avoid it in random battles – at least temporarily. Those random battles are instead stored in a Dimengion, allowing you to cache up to 30 enemies to fight all at once. This brings a two-fold benefit. For one thing, the pace of the game is tremendously faster when you don’t have to go through as many battle start and finish transitions. However, the big benefit is that it’s a lot quicker to clear a bunch of trash at once with magic than it is battling them one at a time.

There’s been games in the past decade or so that have really tried to mitigate the typical JRPG grind – for example, Bravely Default letting you set the random battle chance – but this may be one of the most effective ones that I’ve seen. Battling a large group at once is just more fun than taking on smaller fights. Killing five or six things at the same time with a well curved fire spell is fun. Getting half a level at one time because you just cleared out 30 enemies is fun. Running through an entire world map screen without having to stop ten times for battles is fun. Ultimately, that increased level of fun ends up playing into the core mechanics of the battle anyway, so it reinforces the system while increasing engagement, which is always a win for the player.

The boss fights themselves are also setup in a way that encourages strategy with a mechanic that is specific to the fight that changes it in a way that discourages zerg rushing, and encourages careful planning of damage output. This works better in some cases than others, but I’ll outline a couple of examples.

In the fight above, the boss will occasionally go into a charge mode where his arms prepare lasers with large damage output. You’ve got two choices – use your turn to keep damaging the main boss and try to tank through the damage or damage the arms before they fire, thereby eliminating the threat. The more effective boss fights in Fantasian all work like that. Some mechanic will give you a few turns to react and let you take the choice of shifting your damage output in a way that prevents the boss’ attack, or try to push through – especially if you’re near the end of the fight.

This example above is one that didn’t work as well. Once this boss reached 50%, it throws a permanent poison field effect down, causing permanent poison to the party. The boss then eats the poison off the party members, and after a few turns throws a large AoE damage. You can only really tank through the damage, putting your party in a heavy heal rotation.

….unless you equip poison nullification gems, thereby eliminating the entire mechanic.

The boss fights that are trivialized via passive mechanics tended to be the ones that were less fun. You’d go in, sometimes win, and sometimes lose. If you lose, you now know the mechanic to watch for, equip to avoid it, and cheese your way through. Luckily, unlike Persona 5, this was pretty rare and wasn’t a thing that every boss had occur.

This game was a tremendous treat, or at least the first half of it was. The second half is supposed to be out by the end of the year, and move in more of a pseudo open-world quest-based direction. Given what I’ve played so far, I’m definitely looking forward to getting my hands on more Fantasian. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t hoping to see this come out in physical form on a more accessible platform once that second half is done, but until then if you’ve got an Apple device, this is the kind of content that proves the value of Apple Arcade, and is a must play.