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Game Ramblings #89 – Cadence of Hyrule: CRYPT OF THE NECRODANCER FEAT. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

More Info from Brace Yourself Games

  • Genre: Rhythm RPG
  • Platform: Switch

This is definitely one of those games that I assumed would work when it was announced, but you can never really be sure. Outside of the obvious rhythm gameplay of Crypt of the Necrodancer, it’s not that far off of Zelda. It’s still basically an action RPG with a bunch of inventory. It still encourages you to romp through effectively dungeons to progress. It’s god a damn good soundtrack. But still, this is Zelda. Somehow this has come out and feels great, feeling like each of their series at the same time without losing anything in the process.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a screenshot of a standard Zelda 2D title, but that little bar at the bottom is where it starts to separate itself.

The screenshot above does a good job of visually laying out how much things are the same, but totally different. On the surface, this looks like a 2D Zelda-series RPG. There’s some familiar looking enemies, a normal item wheel, hearts, rupees, keys, a slightly angled camera viewpoint. However, that little bar at the bottom and the specifics of the grid are where you start getting the Necrodancer gameplay.

Like Necrodancer, any movement or attack is most effective when done on the beat of the music. At the same time, enemies also move and attack on the beat, so you’ve got a play around keeping on eye on what you’re doing and an eye on the enemies to make sure you aren’t getting trapped. While it’s technically a turn-based game as a result, the practical pace is really close to an action RPG and it ends up straddling the line between familiar and new really well.

Combat is also a bit different than expected for a Zelda game, mostly due to a large unexpected variety in ways to attack. Each character that you control has its own specialty, and you can swap between Link, Zelda, or Necrodancer’s Cadence at any time once you reach them. You’ve still got your Link-style broadsword attacks that hit a wide line in front of the player. However, you can also use spears for extended range straight attacks, flails for L-shaped AoE style attacks, or daggers for real close-range combat. Even on defense you have more variety than just Hylian shields, with characters like Zelda able to activate a projectile-reflecting magic shield if timed correctly. You can even add modifiers to your weapons like health drain or poison to add some additional flexibility to your loadout.

The positive outcome of all of this is that I really spent time modifying my gear loadout and character selection based on what I knew would be most beneficial to me at the time. Early on I went more spear-focused in order to keep enemies at a larger range from me. As I gained some hearts and defensive items, I started moving into broadswords in order to take out more than one enemy at a time, even if it allowed them to get closer at range and occasionally hit me. As a whole it ends up in a battle system that has tremendously good flow due to the rhythm focus, but still has a ton of ways to play to your strengths at any time in a way very reminiscent of high end ARPGs.

It definitely helps that there’s a lot of familiar things in the gameplay though despite all the changes. You’ve still got to save up your rupees to buy things in shops. You’ve still got to visit Kakariko Village to move forward. Hell, you’ve still got to get lost in Lost Woods as part of your quest. However, through it all the focus on rhythm gameplay really feels like a fun fresh take on the Zelda formula.

And oh boy that soundtrack. The Zelda soundtracks on their own are really special, and really familiar to a lot of gamers. Living up to that alone is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. However, the need to really hit a music pace that allows for a good gameplay pace added a level of technical need that the team really nailed. The familiar Zelda themes are morphed into new genres – whether it’s jazzier takes on the main theme or Song of Storms, or more dance-based overworld themes, or even rock-focused takes on the Gerudo Valley theme – that really push a fast gameplay pace while still being fantastic takes on familiar themes. This is the rare game where the soundtrack alone is worth the price of purchase, but you still get a great game on top of it.

It also helps that the bosses are punny as hell.

This is definitely a game out of left field. While Necrodancer on its own is a fantastic game, the fact that Nintendo allowed for the Zelda license to run wild in the Necrodancer universe. What ends up coming out of it is something that just works fantastically well – as long as you’re comfortable in the rhythm style. Is this going to be a replacement for the upcoming Link’s Awakening remake? No not really. Is this better than I could have hoped for as a way to get more Necrodancer content? You better believe it.

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Game Ramblings #88 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – HD 1.5 Remix

More Info from Square-Enix

Long story short; I want to play Kingdom Hearts 3, but for the life of me I can’t remember the lore. I could just look the story up on the internet, but frankly I’d rather play the games again and in the process remember why each one had it’s own set of problems. For the time being, we’re starting off with the HD 1.5 ReMIX games of KH1 and Re:Chain of Memories

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • KH1 Also Available On: PS2, PS3
  • Chain of Memories Also Available On: GBA, PS2, PS3
This combo of series totally makes sense right?

Kingdom Hearts was always a weird combination love letter to both Final Fantasy and Disney. It mixed the two series in a way that never should have worked, but somehow doesn’t feel weird when in action. Each individual world has its own chance to shine and give focus to a specific set of Disney or FF characters. Despite its gameplay problems, the game did well enough to now be a series of more games and video tie-ins than I can keep track of. However, going back and replaying the original is definitely a weird gameplay experience.

This is an ARPG, so combat is important. Unfortunately it’s also kind of bad.

Even at release, the combat in Kingdom Hearts wasn’t fantastic, but it definitely shows some lumps now. Moment to moment, it has some fundamental problems relative to modern games. The camera isn’t great, so the game really leans into both soft and hard locks for attacks. Attacks can be pretty inconsistent in their ability to hit, but you end up gaining so many variations in ranges that by the end of the game you can really spam attack from anywhere to hit something. Donald as a character more or less just sucks, but you gain a ton of world-specific characters to replace him, and by end game he’s gained so much magic capability that he’s pretty useful.

This is also backed by a wildly inconsistent level of difficulty. What I’d consider the two hardest bosses in the game are the Tarzan world boss (roughly world 3) and the Little Mermaid boss (roughly the mid point of the game). The Tarzan boss is difficult entirely because of poor design. You can take immediate damage coming out of two cutscenes unless you’re spamming dodge. The arena that the fight takes place in has multiple points where dodge rolls can be blocked on bad collision, despite the fact that the fight is incredibly heavy on dodging to avoid fast damage, including instant-trace ranged attacks. Basically it’s a fight where the core mechanics of the game fight against the setup in place in a hugely negative situation. On the other hand the Little Mermaid boss fight is a pure damage nuke situation, and fought straight up is unnecessarily heavy in healing. However, the mechanics of the fight allow you to easily get behind the boss into a place where you take significantly reduced damage while easily hitting the main target point.

This pattern in particular is a common exploit in boss fights. I’d say probably about 50% of boss fights have a “safe” location behind them where the boss can neither hit you or turn to eventually hit you, while allowing you to lay in full damage. The friendly AI is also pretty good at following you into these locations, so you can often have a full party rotation simply unable to take damage. There’s signs that this was attempted to be fixed (fight adds, homing attacks, etc), but the attempts were pretty meaningless, and the fights just weren’t fun when not taking advantage.

Even if combat doesn’t stack up, seeing moments like this makes the experience worth it.

If this all sounds pretty bad, it’s because it is. This game simply hasn’t aged well from a gameplay perspective. Luckily it has aged well from a universe perspective, even if the lore is a bit nonsense. Without spoiling too much, KH1 basically exists to establish how all these Disney and Final Fantasy worlds are connected, but then future games go through and completely ruin any ability to make sense of the overall story. However, seeing moments like your party all dressed in-character for Nightmare Before Christmas or The Little Mermaid, or seeing Cloud fighting in the Olympus Coliseum makes it all worth it. It’s completely batshit crazy, and somehow it just works.

I didn’t get much further than this. If KH1 didn’t age well, then Chain of Memories REALLY lost it.

On the other hand, Chain of Memories really didn’t pass the worth it test. This was a GBA->PS2 remake where ARPG and cards mixed. Movement was in real time, where action selection was out of a card deck. Cards have a score value, playing a card against an enemy card of higher value would cancel their attack, and you go from there. In 2D on the GBA, this worked….alright. The view of the action was limited, so movement wasn’t super important, and you could still see to dodge while focusing on getting your card selection in order. In 3D this just doesn’t really work well at all.

Between manipulating the bad camera, trying to dodge attacks that you can’t really see, and trying to select the right cards, there just is too much going on to really effectively play the game. My best plan of attack ended up being a simple rotation:

  • Setup my deck specifically in high->low card value, with healing cards at the end.
  • Spam all my high-value cards to get off some easy attacks.
  • Spam stack the low value cards and activate some quick combos. This would remove low value cards over time, but I didn’t care.
  • Spam the healing spell cards at the end of my deck.
  • Refresh my active deck and repeat.

It was basically an invincible pattern as long as I kept my deck up to date, and in being invincible it wasn’t really fun. I wasn’t playing to effectively run the battle system. I was simply stacking my deck and going through the motions. In practice, this game would be better off being much slower paced, getting rid of movement, and having it be more around deck strategy, but we aren’t likely to see that anytime soon.

So the question then becomes, is it worth replaying these if you’ve really never played a Kingdom Hearts title? Honestly? Probably not. I could make a case for Kingdom Hearts 1, but you definitely want to go in expecting something a bit rough around the edges. I’d definitely skip Chain of Memories, although catching a cutscene movie on Youtube is probably not a bad idea. This is capped by a cutscene retelling of 358/2 Days which can also be found on Youtube to finish the story tie-ins between KH1 and KH2, and that’s where we’ll pick things up at some point in the future.

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Game Ramblings #62.1 – Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country

More Info from Nintendo

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a fairly enjoyable game overall. It had a great universe, enjoyable story, fun characters, and a ton of depth. However, it wasn’t without its issues. The game, like its predecessors was somewhat grindy. The UI was often in the way of streamlined leveling. Overall, despite its depth, the game often felt like it was pushing for more for the sake of more.

Torna however feels like they really embraced the idea of less is more, and the experience is much better as a result. This is an entirely standalone experience, billed as an expansion. It’s a much shorter experience with a significantly streamlined story, rips outs a whole bunch of extraneous systems to focus the leveling aspect, and narrows you onto two main titans. Some clever changes to the battle system really finish up the tweaks, and the total package ends up being much better than the base game, despite the reduction in bullet point features.

Welcome to Torna. After hearing so much about this land in the original game, it’s nice to finally be able to run around on it.

The most obvious immediate change is that almost all of the blade collecting, and therefore a lot of the metagame leveling is gone. You only get blades that are important to the story, and each party member ends up having two blades of different types. By the end of the expansion, you’ve basically got exactly what you need to finish the game with the full suite of ability types. There’s also no longer any special blades, no multi form blades, any robot blade replacements, and no mercenary guild to level up. This all sounds like a lot of removal, but that also meant that a lot of the tedious grind simply went away. It’s entirely addition by subtraction.

The rest of the leveling setup is maintained. You get XP from kills and quests, weapon points from kills, skill points from kills, and various things can be activated in each blade’s affinity chart. As a core set this ends up playing a nice balance between having a nice range of systems without having too many, and also gives you some specific subgoals to focus on, particularly with respect to the blade affinities.

Combat should feel extremely familiar to XC2 fans, though it has some tweaks.

The battle system has also been tweaked to generally feel more streamlined, as well as a fair bit quicker paced. For the most part, people familiar with XC2 will drop in quickly and feel right at home, and I suspect they will like the changes in place.

The first big change is that blade swapping is used as a way to switch the active passive attacker, and swapping between the blades and the driver activate an attack on swap. This is used to inflict a number of status effects, particularly things like topple or smash, as well as providing a full recharge of the blade artes. In practice, it basically means that you can do a combo as follows:

  • Activate Break on one character while using all of their artes.
  • Swap to another character to inflict Topple and quickly use the full suite of artes.
  • While this is happening, the AI will typically inflict Launch
  • Swap to the third character to inflict Smash, finishing a full chain combo.

This pattern is done way faster than any similar combo would have been done in the original release. In also having the blades be the primary attacker, there’s a much more direct feel to the swap, instead of it simply being the blade out of frame swapping out.

The elemental orb / chain attack setup has also been tweaked a bit to reduce clutter. There are still orbs applied on successful blade artes, elemental orbs can be broken in a final combo attack, etc. However, the elemental chaining no longer is used to seal attacks, so a big UI element that I generally ignored is no longer there, and honestly I didn’t miss it at all.

This is still a spectacularly gorgeous game, especially for an open-world Switch experience.

So in the end, this is both a great expansion on the XC2 universe, as well as a way to generally improve on the overall gameplay at the same time. As a prequel, this covers a bunch of story that was hinted at throughout the original game in a way that only improves the universe. On its own that’s enough for me to recommend it to fans of the original. However, the gameplay improvements definitely clinch it for me. This is a much better experience than XC2, and it’s clear that the dev team is learning some lessons from their past releases. Here’s to hoping whatever comes next continues that improvement.