Category: Genre

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Game Ramblings #126 – Replaying Ori and the Will of the Wisps

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch, Windows

I guess this is going to be a bit of a weird ramblings in that I don’t really plan to talk about the game, at least not directly. It’s been out for long enough that it’s been done to death. What I will talk about is the fact that playing this on the Series X redeemed the game for me. The first time I tried playing this I was incredibly disappointed. The gameplay was definitely there, and when it worked well it was really solid. But that was the problem, it generally wasn’t working that well. Framerate problems, load hitches, and crashes were all over, and it made getting through the game incredibly frustrating. Luckily we’re now back with faster hardware, not to mention a patch or two along the way. Now that the game’s unimpeded, it was exactly what I wanted – a Metroidvania with great flow, fun puzzles, and a lot of good reasons to re-traverse things as you gained new abilities. Simply put, this is now what I expected the first time around, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

I start here not because the screenshots are important to gameplay, but because I took damn near the same screenshot on the Xbox One and Series X, so it’s as good a visual comparison as I have. This level of change is indicative of the difference between the initial release and the one I played this second go around. It’s not just that things are clearer, but that certainly helps. Instead of running at 30ish, it now runs at flat 60 (or higher if your TV supports it). Instead of having load hitches all the time, there’s none. Where I was seeing crashes maybe every 30-40 minutes before, I didn’t see a single one this entire play through. It was such a completely different experience to play it without technical issues this go around.

The thing about me shelving the original one is that while it really came down to technical issues, it was ultimately a boss that did me in. The boss is against a large frog enemy in a sort of swampy area, and about half way through the fight you get sent underwater for good, which eliminates your ability to spend time healing in a pinch, adding a certain level of tension to the fight. Mechanically I knew the fight, but frustration absolutely got to me on it. The underwater phase just would not perform in a way that made the fight fun. In about a dozen deaths, I’d seen about a half dozen load hitches that would last for upwards of 3-5 seconds. The underwater phase itself basically guaranteed a framerate tank, which made fast movement difficult. At one point I’d gotten down to about 20% health remaining, and the game crashed.

Ultimately, frustration begets frustration. I get to a point when playing games where frustration at things just causes a landslide. Missing a jump can be frustrating in isolation, but is controllable. Dying to a boss is controllable when it feels fair. However, you start stacking these things up and I start losing those gaps where I have time to breathe and decompress. That causes impatience, which causes mistakes, which causes more frustration. When a game is crashing or having load hitches, all that’s happening is annoyances start to pile up that are not in my control, which just accelerates the problem. That is why I ultimately shelved it. It just wasn’t worth the cascade of frustration causing me to play worse.

This go around? I beat the boss on the third try, with the first two tries largely being me remembering the mechanics. No out of control frustrations, less annoyance, more patience, fewer mistakes. Now that I’ve beat the game completely, it turns out that for me that was by a long shot the most difficult fight anyway so doing it in the progression order I did the first go around was probably a recipe for disaster, but I did roughly the same progression this time and got through it. Not really because the game was different, but because it was now running great and I wasn’t pissed off about technical problems.

Cyberpunk was the big one this year that launched and had major obvious issues on console, but for me this one was my Cyberpunk months earlier. Metroidvanias are probably the one genre that comes close to JRPGs for me in terms of games that I will absolutely play above all else. Ori and the Blind Forest was such a spectacularly good game that shelving the sequel was something so unexpected that it blindsided me. Luckily, the current state of the game – especially on better hardware – has completely redeemed it for me. This is now the game I wanted to play, and not the game that crashed and burned. It’s now the mechanically fantastic game with incredible platforming flow. It’s now one of the flag bearers for the genre, instead of a game that wasn’t ready for launch.

It’s now a game that I recommend without question.

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Game Ramblings #125 – Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Rhythm
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch

I sat down to play the game and immediately got smacked in the face with a sense of having played this game before. The systems that I was going through; the interface at the end of songs; the way things were unlocking. I’d done it before. Then it hit me – this is a Theathrhythm game. I absolutely love the three Theatrhythm games on the 3DS and I don’t know why I never recognized what this was before its release. Ya the name isn’t there and they moved to a rear-camera 3D view, but it’s the same developer, the same systems, and the same pattern. Most importantly, it’s just as good.

Starting this as a comparison against Theatrhythm is really the place to start. The obvious change is the switch in view from side-scroll 2D to rear-scroll 3D, and that brings some oddities. Something about that change took me a long time to really grok, and I think it came down to a couple of main things.

The first is that there’s no mark to really establish the beat on the board. Looking at games with a similar viewpoint like Guitar Hero, having that scrolling beat indicator really just helps to establish some sense of depth to get some basic timing in your mind’s eye. It also didn’t help that the enemies popping onto the board didn’t have consistent timing. Some would be stationary as you scroll towards them. Some would walk towards the screen. Some kind jumped and weaved. Because of that I also couldn’t really depend on depth perception as a tool for timing the song out.

However, I hit a point probably about a third of the way into the game where I became less focused on hitting a beat, and more focused on hitting a melody, and that drastically changed how I played the game. There’s a tendency in these songs to use a bit of a Nintendo trick. The first time they introduce a melody, it’s a bit on the easier side. You’ve got enough of it to be able to hit the notes while listening to what is playing. The second and third time’s it comes around, it’s all-in and you’re responding to the full melody that you now recognize. They do this on even the highest difficulty, so you have an inherit ramp up in the song as you go through a couple loops of it. It works really well to allow you to learn on the fly, then really come back on a second go through fully knowing the song and ready to hit that full combo.

The rest of the core systems will feel familiar to players of Theatrhythm FF. Instead of directional swipes, you’ve got joystick flicks. Instead of screen holds, you have button holds. Instead of lanes per-character, you have attack buttons per-character. Instead of slide input segments, you’ve got in-air notes to catch while drifting Sora around on screen. There’s some nice additions there in terms of allowing you to do multiple attacks at once by pressing multiple buttons, but it still all feels familiar to me as a player of the Theatrhythm games.

If there was one last thing that really caught me off guard, it’s that this game did a fantastic job actually telling the Kingdom Hearts story. Ya, I’m not lying. This game covers the story of the entire franchise so far through cutscenes and voiceovers, and it does it in about 10-15 hours of gameplay. You’ve got coverage of all the main games, the important plot points from the spinoffs, and it’s all told in a concise way. In a series that effectively prides itself on being completely baffling, I retained more in one rhythm game than I did playing the entire rest of the series last year.

Now, because this is Kingdom Hearts, they couldn’t get away with not doing some stupid plot twist, and the end of the game has some important lore that ties the end of KH3’s DLC to whatever comes next. While I do recommend playing this one, if rhythm games aren’t your thing you’ll definitely want to catch up on the new lore via Youtube. It’s definitely a very Kingdom Hearts thing to have put new story into a recap game, just because they can.

I mean, I guess this is an easy recommendation. This is both really entertaining on its own as a Kingdom Hearts recap title, and a fantastic rhythm game. It takes systems that worked really well on the 3DS, and transforms them just enough to flow really well on a TV and gamepad, once I stopped trying to treat it like Guitar Hero. It’s also a great way to go back and hear how fantastically good the soundtrack of this series has been over the past 20 years.

Plus the game has One Winged Angel. That’s worth at least a +1 on the review scores.

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Game Ramblings #124 – Yakuza: Like a Dragon

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4 / PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox One / Series, Steam

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this series successfully moved into the JRPG genre, but it kind of is. The previous titles had a lot of things typical of the genre already in place – great story, characters, and settings, your typical array of shops for items and gear, a strong levelling system, lots of things to do on the side. However, they were always first and foremost an action game, and since they moved to a new engine on the PS4 they were perhaps the BEST action-focused series out there. Despite it all, they changed to a JRPG and still ended up with something that feels straight up fantastic.

Given the change, I guess combat is the place to start. The thing to really know is that the entire genre switch and the fact that I’m up there fighting a 7 foot tall pirate all comes down to one thing – the lead character is a huge fan of Dragon Quest and has delusions of leading a party of heroes throughout Japan, just like in the game.

How fucking perfect is that?

It sets your expectations of what combat should be – purely turn based. Now, it’s not exactly as classic as Dragon Quest, and that’s a good thing. It’s got a timing-based defense mechanic similar to games like Super Mario RPG. It’s got a D&D-style opportunity attack where enemies can interrupt you if you try to run past them to attack someone else. It’s got a strong job system with job-based skills, leveling, and permanent stat gains. It’s got weaknesses and resists to different types of weapons. Basically, it takes a bunch of features from a bunch of JRPGs, and wraps it all into a combat system that feels classic, but with a modern touch. And it works really well.

I think more than anything, the reason it feels good is that everything still feels impactful. There’s a clear sense here that they’re bringing their action knowledge to this genre in how things react to combat. Big hits don’t just throw a big number, they cause knock downs. Knockdowns don’t just cause an animation – they put enemies in a weak state that causes them to take increased damage. When characters go flying, they don’t just fly, they also hit and damage anyone else they hit (including knocking down your own friends if you aren’t careful). If there’s something in the environment, your attacks can take advantage of that and use it instead of your weapon. It’s everything that made sense and worked well in an action combat system, but now just turn-based. It’s a bit slower, it’s a bit more strategic, it’s a big less reactionary, but it all feels fantastic.

That’s not to say that they completely converted over well to a JRPG-style. This game’s biggest issue is really around grinding, and that happens in two places.

The first is really around equipment. you hit a point fairly early in the power curve of the game where you just can’t buy better equipment. I hit it around the 60% mark of the game. From that point on, you have to craft better equipment to improve gear stats. Crafting is fine on its own, but the crafting building requires significant investment to upgrade it far enough to craft the end game gear. From there, the gear then also costs a ton of money and crafting items to put together. I did one stretch to do an armor upgrade pass, and it required me to do about 4 million yen in investments, 2 million yen per-piece of armor, and approximately another half million yen in crafting item value. Keeping in mind that normal fights were dropping 3-5 thousand yen, you can see the issue.

Around the same time, I started needing to do XP grinding because the bosses were jumping 5-10 levels ahead of me. At this point I was probably needing to get around 100 thousand XP per-level and only getting around 1000 XP per fight. Again, you can see the issue. I could get some more permanent stat boosts by switching jobs, and taking advantage of the quick early job levels when switching, but it was a pretty slow process overall.

At this point in the game it basically resulted in me using one specific spot, floors 16-18 of the Sotenbori battle arena. That could net me about 300 thousand yen and about 150 thousand XP. It was fast, it was efficient, and it was boring. It was clearly what was intended for fast leveling, but it felt awkward compared to just having a higher XP/money curve in the wild and letting the player more naturally level.

On the other hand, the side content is both plentiful and a lot of fun if I needed a distraction. Some of it is just side quests where I get some entertaining side story content. Some of it is your standard item collection faire. However, there’s also things like the Mario Kart inspired mode above to keep me distracted. There’s also a really deep management simulation worth noting as another good distraction (and source of money later on in it). I knew I could fall back on these things when I needed a break, and it allowed me to fall off of doing the same content grind on repeat while still having some benefit to my team in the long run.

Ultimately this isn’t a perfect transition from ARPG to JRPG, but as a first-try at the genre I was super impressed with the game. It kept things that worked really well in the series in the past, gave a pretty entertaining reason to switch genres, and ran with it. If they felt they had reached the peak of what they thought they could do as an action title, this certainly gives them a strong reset. It also puts them in a place where they still have room to improve. If the next title is still a JRPG, they could do a much better job of managing their power and XP curves to make the experience more linear and less prone to slow grinds when power jumps occur. However, as a first-pass this is still one of the best JRPGs of the year and is definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre.