Category: Platform

2017-07-19

Game Ramblings #42 – Ever Oasis

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.

2017-07-112018-01-13

Shelved It #6 – Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom

More Info from Enigami

Genre: ARPG
Platform: PC
Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One
Main Reason for Shelving: Questionable combat system decisions

I’m starting this one off with a screenshot, because it immediately gets into my theme here of wasted potential. This scene is the first thing you see when you take control of the game, and the scenery you see continues to be at this level of quality. This is a phenomenally beautiful game with good music, a good cast of characters, and an enjoyable, if simple story. When the combat works, it’s also a ton of fun, with great pace, decent combos, and a nice mix of melee and ranged abilities. However, as the game ramps up the difficulty, the combat very quickly goes from extremely fun to occasionally unfair to downright bad, and it’s really a consequence of one main issue; bad resource generation.

I guess first to set the stage, a bit about how the battle system actually works. Base melee attacks are comprised of kicks and punches, which can be comboed together. Ranged attacks are comprised of four sets of elemental attacks that use individual element-based resources. For avoidance, the player can dodge or parry. Parry uses the Tension resource, while dodge does not, which is a somewhat strange decision from a high level point of view, but makes sense in practice given how ineffective dodging is against melee attacks. Finally, Tension can also be used to throw a set of more powerful combo moves, or stored to throw what is effectively an ultimate power move.

So then, let’s start with magic generation since it’s the less frustrating of the two. While fighting in an arena, there’s a color-coded barrier that periodically changes. By standing still, you can activate a recharge. The element color that matches the barrier quickly recharges, while the non-matching elements recharge excruciatingly slow. This presents two main problems. For one, you have to stand still. In a combat system that is heavily based around quick combos and high action, this means that you have to be at high range to even think about recharging. It also means that characters have to be built for all elements in mind, as fights that don’t cycle between the elemental colors you want effectively negate the use of those elements. While yes, non-matching elements recharge, it’s so slow as to be impractical in practice.

Unfortunately, Tension is an even worse resource. It gets generated through melee attacks, but typically requires three or so hits to generate one bar of tension. Unfortunately, this also puts you in range of enemy melee attacks, which means you’ll be in melee range of enemies, requiring heavy use of parry to avoid damage. Unfortunately parry itself requires a full bar of Tension. Generally speaking you can expect an enemy to start a melee chain sooner than you can get in three hits, so you end up generally just having to eat massive amounts of damage. This is compounded by the fact that stronger enemies tend to have some form of stun lock-style maneuver with little to no tell, so you’re hoping that the moves you decide to parry vs. the moves you decide to eat damage end up being the right choice. Worst of all, a successful parry does not give any Tension back, so you can very quickly run dry if you have to dodge two or three hits in a row by the enemy. Changing this alone to give Tension for a successful parry could have saved the battle system, giving an advantage for well timed dodges through the system.

This is compounded by poor choices in the combo maneuvers. Standard combos tend to only use one or two bars of Tension, but also tend to be short range and missable, so the price of using one is more than just the loss of a potential parry. There is also then a super move which uses the entire tension bar, but can easily be interrupted by the enemies you’re facing. When the super move is typically a 5 button chain, it’s simply not worth the price of admission to use them and lose all Tension for potentially no gain. In general, I ended up avoiding use of the combo moves altogether, because they simply were not worth losing the resource that I could be using to parry and avoid taking more damage, particularly when one missed parry could be a 100-0 death chain.

The unfortunate thing is that a handful of changes could have been done to establish the quick pace while making things actually fair and challenging, rather than unforgiving. Outside of the stun locks, enemies just were not challenging, so it felt like all challenge was put into catastrophically fucking the player over. The stun locks should have been outright removed. They’re just not fun, especially when a single miss can be a 100-0 situation. Ideally parry should not be on a shared resource with combo moves, and realistically should not be a on a resource at all. Even if it had its own resource, generating that for a successful parry would encourage well timed moves there instead of button spam. With parry in a better place, and the 100-0 stun locks removed, the enemies could then have their overall difficulty adjusted up to make the skill of the fights all about constantly timing parry properly, rather than a guessing game of when you were about to be screwed the most.

I suppose I’ll close with an example here that basically killed the game for me. The second real main boss that you hit is a multi-stage battle against some mobs, then a sub-boss, then a main boss controlling said sub-boss. In between rounds of killing and reviving the sub-boss, the main guy would throw an orb of magic at me, which could be parried back to deal damage. It was 100% the Ganon baseball fight from Ocarina of Time. Unfortunately, it also meant that I needed tension to win, and the amount I needed inherently ramped up each time I hit the main boss. Because I needed Tension, I had to eat damage, but mechanics started ramping up to include floor traps that slowed my movement and attacks, AoE magic, sub-boss throwing magic spells, etc. In general it became more of a fight where I was dodging constantly until the opportunity for one or two hits arrived, while minimizing the damage I was taking as much as possible. Sure I used healing spells and healing items to survive, but quite frankly the fight was just a chore.

The developer has shown some willingness to respond to feedback, so I’m hoping some things can be changed to ultimately rescue the game, but the things I suspect need changing may be too core to really do too much here. The unfortunate result there is a lot of wasted potential. This is the type of high quality ARPG that you usually don’t see from a small developer, because quite frankly they’re hard to make enough content for in a reasonable time. Unfortunately a few highly questionable decisions in the combat mechanics ultimately ground this game, and prevent it from really reaching the potential it shows.

2017-07-06

Game Ramblings #41 – Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment

More Info from Yacht Club Games

Genre: Platformer
Platform: Vita
Also Available On: Windows, Linux, OS X, PS3, PS4, Wii U, 3DS, Xbox One, Fire TV

TL;DR

As mechanically tight and satisfying as the original Shovel of Hope campaign.
Fills a neat void as a prequel story to the original campaign. Gives a lot of great backstory to one of the original bosses.
Changes to core mechanics greatly benefit traversal-based puzzle solving and bring a nice twist to combat.

Let’s get this out of the way. If you’ve never played Shovel Knight, go grab the original campaign right now. It’s one of the greatest examples in the past few years of a mechanically solid 2D platformer, regardless of the fact that it then goes even further and solidly represents an 8-bit style to great effect. Specter of Torment is now the third campaign under the Shovel Knight umbrella, covering the prequel backstory to the Specter Knight boss from the original. It brings some interesting mechanics with the change in weapon that really benefit the expansion overall.

The big obvious change here is that you’ve got a scythe instead of a shovel. This has some pretty big ramifications to both combat and traversal. Straight away the shovel bounce is replaced by a lock-on melee dash used for both traversal and combat. For traversal, this ends up giving a lot more interesting and challenging traversal options. Enemies, obstacles, and projectiles can all be used as traversal targets, meaning that entire rooms can be traversed without touching the floor. This is used extremely effectively in getting the Specter through auto scrolling segments where falling down would mean death. There’s also entire runs through boss fights where I would combo dashes the entire time without touching the ground. While the original campaign was pretty quick paced, Specter had an entirely higher level of speed, and greatly benefited from this change. While this will feel pretty immediately familiar to players of the original, at this point I’m leaning towards a greater enjoyment of this expansion purely because everything feels so fast. It’s one of the best feelings a game can bring when I sit there comboing enemies while juggling them in the air, and it’s rare to see a game nail it so well.

Because of the emphasis on speed over safety, the items that are earned throughout the campaign also play into this. Rather than being generally offense focused, a lot of the items are generally interesting helper items. There’s a healing item that allows you to take greater risks and focus more on slash combos over a defensive play style. There’s a hover item that lets you stay in the air to extend combos or get to a platform out of reach. There are items that spawn a secondary clone of the Specter, as well as one that spawns a projectile firing skeleton. In general, the items are used to effectively extend the speed focus on combat, rather than being used as purely secondary weapons, and all play into making sure the speed of encounters is kept as high as possible.

Overall this was a pretty solid expansion that I think ends up surpassing the original from a pure gameplay perspective. Like Plague of Shadows, it’s also a nice touch to see the backstory to one of the original bosses, and give them more life than simply being a target of the Shovel Knight. Given development of these campaigns seems to be continuing, with the King Knight’s campaign being up next, the Shovel Knight as a platform seems to have a lot of life. We’ve now got three campaigns that all play fairly differently, and Specter of Torment shows to me that they are only improving as they go along.