Category: Genre

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Game Ramblings #138 – Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime 3

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: 3DS

We’ve only been fortunate enough to get one of the entries in this Dragon Quest sub-series in the US. Luckily, an English patch has been created by a group called Fan Translators International, and it’s a quality one. I’ve been going through the process of backing up a lot of my older disc and cartridge games, and DS/3DS was up so I figured I’d take the opportunity to play through this one in English, and that was definitely the right choice.

The Rocket Slime games are kind of hard to describe, but the short version is that it switches between two main types of gameplay – an overworldish section where you collect items and monsters to build ammunition and crew and a battle-based segment where you engage in ship vs ship combat. The second one is definitely the thing that’s worth playing.

The overworld stuff is all well and good, but it basically exists to serve the purpose of grinding out ammunition for your ship. You use the same movement as ship battles in terms of flinging the player around and grabbing things, but there’s no real challenge here, even in the handful of boss battles. You go around, mop up everything, and send it off to your ship. Parts of it become pretty grindy as you get a bunch of parts to craft higher level stuff, but you get through it to make your ship stronger. If there’s anything to really point at as a major experience killer, it is that grind. Getting your ship together for the end game fight was really a hassle that I wasn’t expecting.

The ship battles just work so well. It’s a pretty basic loop, but has a really nice rhythm. You’re basically being given periodic dumps of ammo that you’ve collected throughout the world, picking it up, and chucking it into upper and lower shooting cannons. You’re doing this both offensively and defensively – hitting the enemies shots will knock them down, getting through to the enemy ship damages it. You can also fire yourself and your crew, allowing you to wreak havoc on the enemy ship, taking out their ammo feeds and really minimizing their ability to fight back. Once the enemy reaches 0 HP, you invade their ship and destroy their engine. That’s really all that there is mechanically.

That said, it works so damn well. On the ammo front, you get a feel for roughly how often you’ll get ammo and where on your ship it will show up, so you start picking out ship hulls that allow you to maximize your routing efficiency in picking up and chucking ammo. You start finding crew combos that work best with your play style. In particular, I had a combo where two crew split cannon duty and a third one chucked itself at the enemy ship to cause damage while I defended from enemies coming on board. It’s the kind of experience where even though a lot of the fights are generally the same, it doesn’t stop being fun.

The game we got as Rocket Slime on the DS was a really fun experience, featuring similar gameplay with tanks instead of pirate ships. Knowing that this game had been released in Japan and wasn’t being seen here – despite the popularity of the Dragon Quest main series – was a major bummer. I’d imported this one a while back, but kind of sat on it knowing that I was probably going to want to wait for a fan patch. Luckily some enterprising fan translators got that done, so I was able to play through it.

It’s tough for me to generally recommend importing JPN-only games, and in this case that still kind of stands. Playing this involved a number of things; importing the game in the first place, converting one of my 3DSs to custom firmware, going through the process of setting it up for custom game patches, getting this patch on there. It was a lot of stuff to play one game, but for me it was absolutely worth it. This is a hell of a fun game with a unique ship combat system that we could use more of, and I’m glad I stopped being lazy about getting this stood up to play.

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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.