Category: Platform

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Game Ramblings #95 – Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

More Info from ArtPlay

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One, Switch

Typically speaking I tend to stay more towards the Metroid end of the Metroidvania genre. I definitely own a bunch of the Castlevania games, but generally speaking I’ve been way too impatient to deal with the high damage, high danger gameplay. As the series got older, the 2d entries definitely trended towards allowing a safer type of gameplay on the standard difficulties, but then the games just kind of stopped. In good news, Bloodstained definitely feels like it picked up right where the DS Castlevania games left off – nice amount of challenge, super solid gameplay, and upgrades galore – leaving me with the right mix to hammer on through.

This game is definitely a case of classic, but refined. If you’ve played a 2D Castlevania you know what you’re getting into. You explore around, run into blockers, find a boss to get a new power, and get through the blocker. You retraverse areas that you’d been in with your new powers to get through new doors, rinse and repeat. While doing it, you gain some levels in typical RPG fashion, get some new gear with improved stats, and generally just get better at playing the game. This is all typical of the genre, but it’s done in a really polished fashion here.

There’s food to cook to gain health back, which isn’t unusual. What is done well is that the first you eat a new food, you permanently gain some stats from that. This encourages the straightforward act of cooking different foods, but also encourages simply searching out new ingredients, reinforcing the exploration of the genre. You’ll for sure find weapons, armor, and potions just exploring, and these can also be bought. However, they can also be crafted, once again reinforcing the stuff above. There’s even little touches like side quests for killing things that you can get back at the base, which push back into reinforcing the exploration loop. It’s all little things, but the big gain in all of this is as you’re exploring for things, you’re just getting more and more comfortable with core combat.

However, the biggest thing that really pulled me into the game was that getting hit by general trash wasn’t a damning thing. Ya, you couldn’t be lazy as that would be a quick path to death. However, getting hit a few times wasn’t a death sentence. Part of this was just that trash damage wasn’t typically a huge detriment. However, the trash mobs were definitely also pretty generous about dropping health pickups. This meant that while I had to be careful in exploring, I wasn’t majorly penalized for every single hit. If I really got myself into trouble, I could use my food and potions as backup, but more often than not my skill could carry me through safely. This left me to really run into boss fights fairly prepared.

And boy are the boss fights a ton of fun. Two headed dragon that chases you up and down a tower? Check. Transforming train engine after running through the rest of the train taking out enemies? Check. The bosses are super over the top thematically pretty much 100% of the time. Functionally they’re the usual pattern recognition of the genre, but as is typical the difference between fun and not is whether or not the patterns feel fair. In this case, they hit on solid patterns. Generally speaking, there was a mix of solid tells from the enemies, some quick reaction moves, and really flashy finishers to push the type of fights that I love to see in this genre. Even as I got into end-game bosses where I’d die a couple times, things never felt unfair. I’d recognize why I was dying, adjust my strategy, and go from there. As far as difficulty goes, that’s the best kind of end result I can ever ask for.

This was kind of my rest game before picking up some longer JRPGs, and I’m glad that I ended up picking this. I was definitely hesitant, because I figured that the billing of this one as a spiritual sequel of the Castlevania series meant that it might really lean into the older form of the genre. Luckily, this one really took the modern touches in stride. The gameplay is as classic as ever, but its got modern touches in balance and systems, combined with the fluidity afforded by modern hardware to really feel like it belongs as a modern extension of the genre.

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Game Ramblings #94 – The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Original Versions: Game Boy, Game Boy Color (DX)
It was nice seeing this again after all these years.

This was the first game I got on the Game Boy. When my family got me the Game Boy for Christmas, Nintendo wasn’t doing Tetris as the pack-in, and boy was that a lucky thing for me. I played this for way too many hours as a kid, wracked my brain over the puzzles, and I’ve loved the Zelda series ever since. Even at the time of its release, this was a special game, and now that it’s been given the modern treatment it’s worth playing more than ever.

From a high level, there’s not much of a surprise here – it’s a 2D Zelda game. You go to dungeons, you get an item, you use that item to get through the dungeon, by the end of the game you’ve got a tool set to take out the boss. It’s not that this one was necessarily breaking totally new ground, but that it was doing so in a handheld game, and was STILL as good as (and I’d argue better overall) Link to the Past.

There was just something about this one that always hit better for me, and I think I figured it out with this play through. Link’s Awakening plays a constantly good balance of both telling you what to do, and giving you a bunch of leash to go exploring on your own. There’s always a bit of a hint coming out of a dungeon about where to go next. That gives you enough of a bread crumb to go on. But those spots you walk past that you don’t have an item for yet? That item you just got in a trade quest and don’t know who the next step is for? You’re always going to want to go off and explore. Even on the Game Boy that always worked better for me than Lttp‘s somewhat more open ended nature, and it hasn’t stopped working well here.

It helps that the items here are still a ton of fun to use. There’s some of your usual suspects here (bow, swords, shield, weight bracelets, etc) to get you into the game – and boy doesn the inclusion of dedicated sword and shield buttons REALLY help this remake. However, this game also had its weird items that just WORKED. Roc’s feather to jump over things? Fun item at the start. Combine with the Pegasus Boots to really jump far? Now you’ve got a great combo. A shovel to give you more of an excuse to find treasure? Why not. Some magic powder that you can use to stun enemies or turn a raccoon back into a human? Why the hell not. This game really just embraced the weird in a way that the rest of the 2D games often didn’t want to do and it’s all the better for it.

The dungeons themselves are also really solid. I’m assuming it was due to the limited nature of the system, but these dungeons really lean on puzzles over combat. You’ve got your usual puzzles tied to the dungeon’s main item, but this one also does a bunch of puzzles that slowly build upon each other across multiple dungeons. A lot of these end up being some variant of switch manipulation that modifies where you can go throughout the level. These are typically tied into the item puzzles to add multiple layers of solving in one. It ends up really reducing combat to boss fights, which is a benefit for how simple the combat really is. It leaves the boss fights down to puzzle solving with the right item and sword spam to kill, and the rest of the game to swinging only when necessary.

All that said, fuck adding physics to this damn crane game.

This one’s pretty simple – this is one of my favorite games in the Zelda series in general made pretty for modern consoles. The gameplay that made it so good 25 years ago has been tweaked a bit to feel up to date, but not changed where it wasn’t necessary. There’s a lot to be said about not messing with what worked and Link’s Awakening is definitely a good example of that. Where Breath of the Wild proved that a rethinking of the formula was a good direction for the series, this one proves that it’s not always a bad thing to be a bit classic.

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Game Ramblings #93 – Astral Chain

More Info from Platinum Games

Further Reading: Game Ramblings #64 – NieR: Automata

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

If you’ve played some of the recent games that Platinum has done, whether that was NieR: Automata or Bayonetta, or even something a bit older like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, you probably know roughly what to expect out of this one. Great action combat, over the top set pieces, a somewhat wild sci-fi story, and just enough anime tropes to not be annoying. In that regard, Astral Chain really isn’t any different. However, the combat in place shows a lot more finesse than I find typical of their games, while doing the rest of Platinum’s typical feature set as well as ever.

This game isn’t really a surprise from a setting perspective for Platinum. The tl;dr is that the world has gone through a near apocalypse, humanity is hanging on through a man-made island floating in the ocean, and demons constantly invade through portals into another dimension. This is all bits and pieces that Platinum has done before. Where they really lean into this is that the other dimensional beings are crucial to the combat, and that tie into the story is all they need to give you your core abilities that the game is centered around.

Right from the start, you’re given a controlled variant of these beings called a Legion. This is both a partner in battle, a practical RPG power curve element, and a way to hook into that story. Your ability to control Legions means you can see demonic corruption in the world (ties into XP gain), you can fight against the demons that are invading and enter portals into their dimension (main story hook), and gain some flashy as hell combat capabilities (let’s face it, this is because it’s cool as hell). All of this combined is super over the top levels of stupid, and damn does it work well. The game plays a fine line between being silly enough to be highly fun without crossing the line into boredom the entire time. In typical Platinum fashion, this ramps up slowly over time to give you bigger and badder set pieces and boss fights right until the end.

But let’s face it; combat is the most important thing going for this game. This has definitely got the usual run of hack and slash going on, but at its core that’s not really the most effective way to fight, and in practice there’s a lot of enemies that actively can’t be killed that way. Using the Legion is entirely the where combat ends up. The Legions sort of act on their own, but you’ve also got direct control over them. You can throw them towards and drag them through enemies. The chain that binds you to your Legions can be used to wrap up and stun enemies or trip enemies that are charging in your direction. Each type (Sword, Axe, Bow, Beast, Arm) have different special abilities that can be used as additional offensive or defensive capabilities both in combat and in environment traversal. Quick time events that flash up can also be used to allow your Legion to do combo attacks, defensive measures, and even parries against incoming enemy attacks.

All of this may sound complicated for a fast-paced action game, but it ends up having a really good flow to it. The Legion capabilities are all just different buttons on the controller, so you don’t have to do complicated things to activate them. It becomes more of a game of identifying weaknesses, having the right Legion out, and being ready to react when combat events are occurring. Rather than it becomes tedious to do all these things, different actions becomes second nature. A lot of this definitely comes down to fantastically well done combat tells – for example, charge attacks have a huge red line prior to attack to allow you to line up your chain trip, quick time events for parries have a visual flash and audio stinger as well as a bit of time dilation for extra activation time – but the combat pace is also really well balanced. It’s fast combat, but leans just slow enough to give you time to fairly react, allowing you to maximize damage output without turning into button spam.

By the end of the game, you end up just rolling through these things without stopping. That boss up there is only around the midway point of the game, so you can imagine how ridiculous it gets by the tail end of the game. I ended up finishing this one in about 25 hours, and there’s definitely some more to be pulled out of it. There’s multiple endings (also typical of Platinum titles), multiple difficulties, lots of side quests, cat collecting (!!!!! 11/10 game of the year), and generally just a lot of fun to be had. While I may not recommend getting a Switch for this one alone, if you’ve already got a Switch this should definitely be on your short list, at least until Bayonetta 3 comes out.