Category: Genre

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Game Ramblings #129 – Shantae and the Seven Sirens

More Info from WayForward

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam, Xbox One, Apple Arcade

I fucking love Metroidvanias. I fucking love the Shantae series. Guess what? I fucking loved this game.

Alright, that was probably too simple of an opening. A lot of what I’d say about this game matches with exactly what I said in the ramblings for Pirate’s Curse or Half-Genie Hero, and that’s a good thing. This is another iterative release in the series, and it takes what made the past games really work and moves it forward in important ways.

The first big one is that instead of being level-based, this is 100% a true Metroidvania. The entire game takes place on a single unified map and new areas open up purely based on upgrades you receive. While I definitely liked the way previous entries encouraged re-traversing levels once you gained new abilities, there’s just something to having a pure open environment. You see and make note of those open ends of hallways that you can’t quite get to or those things in the environment that are obviously something that you can interact with, and make mental notes to return to later.

Where they end up making use of their history of level-based gameplay is in the handful of labyrinths that come up. These act as pillars to the overall story and upgrade path, but also serve as mini-tutorials to learn new powers, as well as the core spot for the big boss fights in the game. It gives a nice on and off pace to exploration where you kinda futz around finding new areas and exploring for hidden stuff, then go into a labyrinth and really focus on combat for a while in a controlled linear environment.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how well integrated the transformations were into gameplay. In a lot of ways, this felt very much like Pirate’s Curse. That game required upgrades to be fast and easy to use due to story reasons causing the loss of transformations. In this one, the transformations are automatic. There’s things like the newt form which gives you a dash and wall climbing. There’s things like the frog form which the frog which gives you the ability to swim. Thematically they make a lot of sense, and the fact that they’re automated makes the game flow pretty much a non-stop affair, which is a huge benefit to the game pace.

That’s not to say there aren’t dances, but in the case of this game they’re all there as one-off attacks that don’t have permanent transformations. These are definitely useful in their own right – for example an electric attack does AoE damage to all things on screen, as well as powering up mechanical devices – but they definitely have a much more straightforward use that isn’t tied to moving through the world.

This is just a really fun game. There’s not been that many Metroidvanias that really have high pace gameplay and almost purely melee combat, and the Shantae series continues to be at the forefront of that style. Movement is fun, combat is fun, the bosses are fun. It’s just all fun and I can’t think of many better series to recommend in this genre right now.

….and don’t worry. Everyone’s favorite Squid Baron makes his return.

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Game Ramblings #128 – Minecraft Dungeons

More Info from Microsoft

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

This was one that I was really hoping to like more than I did. The promise of this extension of the IP is to blend what makes Diablo 3 fun with some of the unique nature of Minecraft. However, it never really ended up doing that. While what is there is mechanically sound, it ended up being a disappointing mix of two styles that never lived up to either end.

If this was simply a good Diablo clone, I’d have probably been fine with it on its own. However, this doesn’t really hit the variety that comes with that series.

While there’s a bunch of different weapons to equip, the differences in attack style between them never feel that impactful. A fast dagger and slow axe have obviously different speeds, but it ends up not really mattering much. What I was ultimately doing was going for the highest damage because one shotting an entire group with cleave damage was far more valuable than having an attack style that fit how I wanted to play. Ranged weapons were largely the same problem. Big damage was more useful than fast damage just in terms of ability to clear things out.

On the skill side, there’s just not much there. You can equip skills to three slots, and they can have different power levels, but I largely didn’t find them that useful. They ranged in use from skill buffs to pets to AoE damage. About the only one I found useful was an AoE blast that uses the souls of the things you kill to do large area damage, and given its low rate of charge I mostly just used it as a way to power through bosses super fast. Beyond that the skills were just kind of there, and didn’t do enough to justify paying much attention to.

In what is both a blessing and a curse, there’s also no classes. This is great in that you can equip any item to any character, and don’t have to worry about restrictions. However, it means everything feels kind of samey, rather than being uniquely tuned towards the character and how it plays in isolation. In the end, the Diablo side was just disappointing. Mechanically, what was there was super tight, but it just wasn’t that fun.

However, the Minecraft side was even more baffling to me. I get that they didn’t want to turn this into a full Minecraft experience, but thematically speaking, having so little of it feels out of place. Having a Creeper come at you should be scary – not just because of the damage, but because it exploding could mean that it opens a huge chunk in the land that could leave you stranged. Tossing a bomb should absolutely remove chunks of the environment, and it doing nothing of the sort feels out of place.

It leaves the game in an awkward spot where it’s visually Minecraft, but it just doesn’t use the license for anything useful. The game could have been reskinned to any other IP and played just the same, and probably have been better for it without the expectations that come with the license. When there’s such an iconic gameplay element missing – in this case the ability to destroy blocks in the environment – it just ends up making the game feel worse, even if the mechanics around it are fine.

This was unfortunately just a mix of styles that didn’t work. There’s really two paths that end up making this one work better. Make the Diablo style ARPG gameplay better, or make this feel more like Minecraft from a gameplay perspective. By mixing an average ARPG set of mechanics with a complete lack of ability to deform the terrain, you elevate the problems and just make the game worse for it.

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Game Ramblings #127 – Immortals: Fenyx Rising

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Stadia, Switch, PC

It’s pretty easy to look at this game and consider it a ripoff on Breath of the Wild, and frankly that isn’t necessarily the most wrong thing. It definitely shares a general metagame with BOTW, and it has the obvious gameplay hook of stamina while climbing. However, that’s taking an overly simple look at things. Immortals takes some steps in interesting directions that give it some unique legs – and quite frankly shows some good iteration on the general style beyond BOTW.

If there’s one way I’d really describe the overall metagame of Breath of the Wild it would be exploration supported by combat. Combat wasn’t the focus, and for the most part you could get through the game without fighting just about anything. The meat of that game was exploring to find shrines, and finishing the puzzles within. Immortals feels like a very different approach to me – combat supported by exploration. There’s definitely not a lack of puzzle dungeons, and the overall game flow is similar, but so much more of this game is based on combat, and that’s really the first bulk of differences from BOTW.

I suppose what’s important here is that their combat is really a lot of fun. There’s definitely a very Assassin’s Creed approach here, which isn’t that surprising. At its core you’ve got a similar approach of watching for enemy tells so you can parry or dodge attacks. There’s definite lessons learned here from their other series because the tells are extremely well done. Even with short timing, the enemy will have some obvious windup tick or some flash of particles or some full-body emissive effect to tell you that an attack is coming. For me it hit that nice line where the tells are fair, but still require good timing. Simply dodging or parrying is effective on its own, but nailing the timing gives you things like slow motion to get in some quick hits so there’s a certain level of benefit that makes being effective at these moves worthwhile.

There’s a secondary layer to combat that really worked out well in the integration of a stun system. This feels pulled right out of Final Fantasy 15, but the short version is that damaging an enemy enough can cause it to go into a stun state, opening up the enemy for some real big damage. Where this is really well integrated is that your best use of stuns is a slower attack axe, where the real damage potential is in a fast attack sword. This hugely encouraged me to be switching between the two weapons a lot, which really prevented combat from becoming boring. This also provided some interesting potential for larger group fights. Stunning a few enemies would allow me to then shift my attention elsewhere, rather than being overwhelmed by a bunch of enemies. In both group and larger solo fights, the system is extremely effective in a way that feels completely unique to this title, and really provides a direction for how improved combat mechanics could improve BOTW2.

That’s not to say that the game is all combat all the time. There’s definitely a lot of cool puzzle shrines here, and in a lot of cases they’re similarly silly and physics based like BOTW. However, there’s a lot more traversal mechanics at play that really give another sort of +1 to this iteration of the overall gameplay. BOTW had a lot of incidental secondary ways to solve shrines through clever or weird use of mechanics. Immortals feels a lot more direct. It’s got things like vertical and forward dashes to really push traversal. It’s got a magnetic-style ability that can push and pull objects around to set off weight plates. And ya, BOTW had some of this stuff, but Immortals separates itself out by having everything more easily accessible.

Immortals has everything on hotkeys. L1 plus a face button will activate one of these abilities, so they’re always there. You don’t have to switch between abilities in a slowing menu, which is a huge benefit for general speed of use. The other benefit is that all of these abilities use the shared stamina pool, rather than individual cooldowns, so they’re available all the time and can be chained back to back. The net result of this change is that puzzles are often less about doing a sequence of steps one at a time, and more often executing a fast series of steps rapidly. It’s an interesting dynamic shift from some of the more logic-based puzzles of BOTW and instead really reinforces the heavy physics-based puzzles that were some of my favorites.

When I did my ramblings for Breath of the Wild, it was pretty clear how special that game was. Even with four years gone, that’s still apparent. However, I think Immortals is at this point the better game. It clearly took the metagame and general physics fun of BOTW, but added in a lot of iterations in combat and ability use. Having the combat iteration in place added so much variety to what you’re doing, which is never a bad thing. Instead of going from spot to spot looking for a shrine ping, I was now going from spot to spot sometimes doing puzzles, but just as often fighting epic bosses and creatures of legend. It’s those kinds of changes that really push games forward, and in doing so it’s pretty clearly shown that there’s a lot of room for iteration in the sort of exploration-based open world ARPG subgenre.