Category: Genre

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Game Ramblings #157 – Kirby and the Forgotten Land

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

This isn’t quite the open world revelation that we all hoped it would be after the first trailer. It also isn’t at all a challenging game like Elden Ring. It doesn’t really do anything all that ambitious, even for the Kirby series. However, what it is is fun. It’s fun in that weird unexplainable way that so many Nintendo games just are and so many developers wish they could capture. It’s that fun that makes this worth playing.

Within the opening sequence of the game you become the car above and that really just sets the stage for the game. Kirby is taking his hoovering mechanic to a new level here and more often than not it serves as an outlandish way for the game to get you through a specific mechanic. Need to cover long distances fast? There’s a convenient car. Need to shoot at enemies or break through a wall from range? Why not becoming a soda shooting vending machine. Need to pierce through a weak point in the ground? Well, a traffic cone is the right shape.

The thing about all these instances isn’t necessarily that they are new mechanics. What they are wrapped in is a layer of magic. There’s something entirely unknown to me about why the simple mechanics are so memorable here, but a lot of it ultimately comes down to the attention to detail in the buildup of the world itself. It’s little things, like the way Kirby’s animations show squish and stretch when there’s changes in velocity. It’s things like the subtle freeze frames that occur when you smash through something as car Kirby. It’s things like seeing the same damn tree boss that every Kirby games has, but now with a tropical flair and a change to the camera angle to hit both nostalgia and mechanical interest. That attention to detail is so utterly hard to grasp as a developer, but is something that Nintendo has routinely done so well that allows its otherwise simple games to nearly universally be regarded as great.

Luckily, the game doesn’t just skate by on polish. Despite being easy, it’s got a surprising amount to do, which gives a lot of interesting content for players of all skill levels. Each level has your normal end point, but within that there’s also a bunch of hidden objectives. Each level has a collection of hidden waddle dees, but the rest of the objectives run the gamut from beating enemies with specific powers to finishing encounters without taking damage to beating bosses quickly to simply just finding cool hidden shit. It provides enough of a distraction for completionists to be chasing a bit of a carrot that’s beyond just simply finishing the levels. That’s not to say that it doesn’t start to wear a bit thin by the end, but it was nice to have something to strive for and even replay levels for

However, my favorite thing were the treasure road levels. These are effectively single-power time trials, and they’re a speed runner’s dream. Each one drops you into a level with a specific power and a handful of encounters to finish between you and the goal. Everything between that point is entirely up to your skill level. In doing these, you very quickly learn how to efficiently use your powers, allowing you quicker and quicker times through the specific level. That then leads to more efficient and more clever use of the powers in regular levels and boss fights, giving a positive reinforcement loop to the player’s skill in the game.

That kind of a loop is also a classic Nintendo thing. If you think about something like level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros – you run the right, see a Goomba, maybe you die, but if you jump and land on it you now know a core mechanic. As you keep running to the right, you see a few more as well as some pipes. You know how to jump, so now you’re learning how to jump well. Each little step along that way reinforces what you learned in previous things to become better at the game. Kirby treats the treasure road levels the same way. They’re run on their own, but the skill improvements you get in them just serve to improve how you play through the rest of the game.

All that said, if you want something ambitious or innovative, this isn’t it. This game should be played because it’s purely fun. It’s not fun in a new way, and it’s not often fun in an explainable way, but it just is. If you’re wanting something more forgiving after Elden Ring, give this a try. If you want something fun to just fill a gap, give this a try. End of the day it’s just a mindless title, but it didn’t stop being fun for me the entire time.

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Shelved It #17 – Bug Fables: The Everlasting Spring

More Info from Dangen Entertainment

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

As basically a clone of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door this one gets a lot right. The writing is entertaining. The combat has good action-based attack and defense perks. The visual style really hits a good place. However, at the 10 hour mark my attacks still did the same damage as the 0 hour mark. What ultimately did me in is that I wanted to kill some trash quicker, couldn’t find an item to do so, then did a bunch of side quests in search of similar things with my rewards only some small amounts of currency. It felt unrewarding in a way that made me question how much longer I’d have to go to get beyond the simple set of strategies available to me for the majority of my time in the game. The core choice in how they handled stats and how it impacted my power curve was something I couldn’t shake.

The way this game doles out stat upgrades really just doesn’t work for me. Level ups give you three choices – +1 HP, +3 badge points, and +3 special attack points. That’s it. What this ultimately means is that your power curve is tied to badges. Early on most of these are simple things – +1 defense to the back row character, automatic kills of weak enemies, etc. By the point I’m at, I can start to see some more interesting possibilities emerging – for example, a badge that causes a character to get poisoned and a badge that increases defense for a poisoned character. However, I don’t have anything resembling a complete set of badges to execute an actual strategy. For example, I don’t have anything to match with poisons that increases healing to mitigate the inherent damage or increase attack to reduce turns in the fights while poisoned. And sure, there’s food that can temporarily boost things to help you out more but they’re temporary, they’re consumable, and they require you to take up slots in an extremely limited inventory, so it also feels less than ideal to follow after.

In lieu of stat upgrades, strategies like these would be interesting and fun as a mechanical choice, but there’s just such a slow rate of giving out the more interesting badges that I don’t know when I’m going to actually be able to have fun using those types of things. It would be one thing if that was the late game goal and early to mid game were supplemented by stat increases, but I’m also not getting those. My 3 point attack at minute 0 is the same 3 point attack that I have at hour 10, and it’s largely what I do against any trash. The problem is that the trash has gone from 4 to 10 HP in that time, and the only thing I’ve gained is some HP to stay alive a bit longer. It’s caused the pace of battles to slow tremendously for no reason other than lack of power to push through the fights.

It’s such a small mechanical difference from most RPGs, but it’s really wrecking the experience for me. I want to have combat filled with interesting strategies, but I also want to feel like I’m gaining power. Sure, I’ve added some special attacks in that time so intuitively I have more tools at my disposal, but it doesn’t feel like I’m making progress. Something that took two rounds hours ago still takes two rounds, and it will continue to take two rounds until some currently undetermined time at which I find attack up badges or find a complete set to execute some fun strategy.

What it ended up doing was kind of a compound thing. I knew that I needed to do side content to hopefully find some cool rewards, but I didn’t want to do side content because so many of them don’t give cool rewards. I also didn’t necessarily want to push story content because I was getting to a point where normal trash fights were taking more time than I cared to get through, but because stats aren’t earned through leveling it made no sense to do even a small typical grinding pass to alleviate some of the slower pace. Spending a bunch of time fighting trash that gives no XP because it’s “weak” despite taking the same amount of time to kill as five hours ago is pretty discouraging. Finishing those combat sections and getting 20 or 30 berries instead of a useful badge is even more discouraging.

The unfortunate thing is that in a vacuum I really like what they did here. The combat clearly understood what people liked about old Paper Mario. You can reduce incoming damage with well timed button inputs, including a couple different tiers based on how precise you were. Each enemy has very different timing and tells, so you have to learn and memorize enemies. Attacks are similar, with each character having their own flavor of action inputs to increase the damage being done. Each character also has important strengths that play into combat strategy. The bee can knock down flying units. The beetle can flip over armored units. The moth can throw magic which is super effective against specific enemy types. Outside of the lack of power curve, the combat just works extremely well so it’s frustrating that stats are the thing really throwing me off.

This is ultimately a thing where my lack of patience is doing me in here. I get why people enjoy it and for the most part I really like the core mechanics at play but it just is hitting the wrong notes for me. I just want to feel like my time is being rewarded in a consistent manner, and typically for RPGs that would be through token stat increases and gearing. It doesn’t even have to be huge to feel effective in a game like this with such small numbers. Adding a +1 to one stat on one character each level would already be huge. Having the badges then supplement those stat increases to bring in interesting combat strategies would just be icing at that point. As it stands right now, the question mark of when I’ll feel more powerful, or even if I happen to do the right content to get those badges to do so is always just hanging over my head, causing me to fall off this game.

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Shelved It #16 – Gran Turismo 7

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Racing
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4

This one probably could have been titled Set Aside, because frankly that’s what I’m doing. I’m putting this one aside to return to it at some point. The driving experience is still far too good for me to not jump into this one periodically, much like past GT titles. However, everything around it is garbage – just flat out garbage, and it’s baffling that Gran Turismo continues to be like this, because a lot of the problems are not new.

Just on its own, the problems that came over from past games were enough for me to generally pull my very little remaining hair out. Gran Turismo has ultimately been well titled in the past as “The Ultimate Driving Simulator” because the racing experience has always been pretty bad, and it’s still bad here. In past entries, it was something I was largely able to ignore but we’ve continued to have Forza entries in intervening years that at the very least have fun racing, even if the driving experience hasn’t quite felt there. Unfortunately for GT, I’m kind of at the point where I would just rather be playing Forza.

The first obvious thing is that you’re never actually in what I’d call a race. You’re just in a chase. You start every race 20-30 seconds behind the leader, who’s a quarter lap or more ahead of you. You’re given a very limited set of laps to do your best to chase up to the front and try to get the “win”. However, all you’re doing is upgrading your vehicles to the class limits of the races so you can easily outclass the AI enough to get to the front. You’re never just starting an event from the line and going head to head against cars of equal measure. Again, it’s not racing. It’s chasing.

On its own, that sucks. And ya, I can do multiplayer if I want to race but frankly it isn’t why I play these games. However, the AI are also part of the overall problem. They simply aren’t trying to race. They’re just out driving. If you’re next to them and in their perceived line on a turn? Fuck you they’re running into you. If you’re ahead of them and their braking pattern doesn’t match what you want? Fuck you they’re running into you. They just stick to their preset racing line and don’t react to what’s going on around them……which might be fine, but they also rubberband. Their braking is clearly unnatural. Their acceleration is clearly unnatural. Their ability to do things in turns without losing traction is clearly unnatural. As a combination of things on top of the fact that you’re trying to rush to the front ASAP, it results in a frustrating mess of dodging unpredictable and unnatural cars at high rates of speed.

Which again, it sucks, but I expected it. This is Gran Turismo. It’s always fucking been like this. Just like past GTs, the menus also still suck. Things take far too many clicks to get through. There’s far too many layers deep to change simple things. Modifying your car’s setup is still in weird spots. Restarting a license event when you don’t quite hit gold is still slower than I want it to be. But again, these are all things I expected. I knew that all of this stuff was going to be the case going in, and I wanted to play it anyway because the driving experience part of the games is what always drew me in. So they went ahead and added more problems anyway.

Simply put, the game shipped with barebones content on the single player side. There just isn’t really the wide set of unique races that past games have had. Rather than being a wide array of manufacturer specific races, there’s a handful for a couple of companies like Porsche, then a handful of country specific events. The rest are largely class type races. You’re completely missing out on the wide array of lower power races like the old Mini Cooper or K-Car races. You’re missing out on some of the fun endurance events that encouraged tuning less exciting vehicles to go for as long as possible without needing refills or tire changes. It’s just missing the interesting random stuff that made expanding your garage fun.

Which doesn’t really matter, because the economy is completely busted. Get a duplicate car? Too bad, they removed selling it. Car prices? Now modeled after realistic car values rather than being set to some gamified practical price. Have fun with your $400k Skyline. Don’t like the changes to driving dynamics if you apply engine mods? Too bad, they’re permanent. Buy a new engine, often as expensive as the car was to start with. Want to put a set of racing tires on your car? Well about 75% of the races don’t give you enough money to do that through one try, so lmao start grinding. A lot of the public is pessimistically noting this as a consequence of microtransactions trying to be encouraged, and there’s probably some bean counting going on to prove that out, but frankly a lot of this just feels like bad design.

Ultimately, this was all capped by the game forcing an online connection, even in single player mode. The development team claims this was to prevent hacking in multiplayer, but that feels like a copout. People that want to play in multiplayer will accept some form of restrictions, be that an online-only profile, multiplayer being distinctly separate, etc. Make that distinction and keep it on its own. Don’t let it affect the single player. Frankly, the single player could be balanced much better without the online chain around its neck.

All of these little things are basically making me put the game down. Sure, the driving experience is still as fun as ever. Doing hot laps for shits and giggles in a Miata is great. It’s as close as I’m generally going to get to taking the ND in my garage out to these tracks, and I love it. However, everything around feel like the game is actively trying to get me to put it down. It has old Gran Turismo problems that have been ignored at this point for literal decades and adds new problems that just make the game insufferable to play, so this one is going back on the shelf until it starts to see some patches roll through.

Perhaps by then I’ll be playing Forza 8 anyway.