Category: Switch

2019-08-302019-08-25

Game Ramblings #92 – Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Genre: Tactical RPG
Platform: Switch

I’ve got a bit of a history with the Fire Emblem series. Ya I’ve played a bunch of them, and ya I’ve been playing the more recent entries in the series. However, the bigger problem for me is that I was on the QA team for Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon on the DS. QA at Nintendo was one of my first jobs in the game industry while I was in college, and getting a summer assignment like Fire Emblem sounded great until it was 40 hours a week, finishing the game every day on repeat. The outcome of all that is that I got really fucking good at Fire Emblem games, and I really hate permanent death.

It’s not that I have anything particularly against permadeath; it just doesn’t feel like it pushes the gameplay in a good direction. My strategies start to revolve around slow pushes, exploiting weapon and terrain strengths, and really playing overly cautious. It’s slow, it’s boring, and it’s not a good experience. Because of my gameplay push, I miss the consequence of death and probably to some extent miss out on the stress that it causes as well. So give me Fire Emblem games without it like the past few? Hell ya I’m down for that.

Three Houses continues the push in the last few to really modernize the series. Permadeath is optional, which is nice, but it’s not the only thing that really feels fresh. This game comes with a lot more to do in between combat, giving a lot more depth to characters, the world, and the relationships you build. The weapon advantage triangle also felt a lot less present, which on the surface sounds weird, but ends up giving me a lot more flexibility in battle. While it’s taken a lot of years, this is the one that finally feels like it’s pushed me back over the edge from casual enjoyment to really wanting to see every piece of this series.

I think it’s important to start outside of combat, because it becomes important to the way I play the game. The super high level of the game is that you are a professor in a military school, you pick a house of students to teach, and you are in charge of their growth. You can basically make any character any class in a much more flexible way than normal for FE. Want to hybridize your mages to also provide healing? There’s classes for that. Want to make a dual spec archer swordsman? By all means. Want to concentrate purely on axe work to become some axe wielding badass? Have a ball. The freedom to steer your party basically meant two things to me – I could pick the characters I liked for my interactions with them instead of what their combat use was, and I could steer their growth in a way that fit how I wanted combat to play out.

The school aspects are also where you become attached to characters. In between story combat, you interact with the entire school and start to learn about all the characters, whether it’s the people they’ve got conflicts with, the potential love interests they share, what their likes and dislikes and in some cases some fears are. It provides a ton of depth to the characters in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

On the surface, the combat of FETH is going to look familiar. It’s still a TRPG grid, the weapon advantage triangle is still in place, basic magic and movement types of past games are still there, but this kind of feels like FE+. However, the flexibility of my party build throws a lot of this on its head. If I’ve got a dual-spec archer/swordsman, lance flyers are no longer a big worry for me. Having some magic skills scattered around means armored enemies are less of a danger. Adding some healing abilities to a few characters allows me to play more aggressively, instead of having to carry extra dedicated healers.

Not having to play with permadeath also really pushes this. In past FE games I would never go into a skirmish unless I had a near 100% certainty of being able to kill the group of enemies I was going after. Now? Let’s go after it. Does it make me play like a moron at times? Hell ya it does, and I’d have it no other way.

This game also brings in a bunch of much tougher 2×2 and 3×3 grid space enemies with some interesting mechanics. The player characters have Gambit attacks, which are effectively mini group attacks. Against smaller enemies, they’re just kinda convenient to use at times in the event they have some secondary effect. Against the larger enemies though? They provide both built-in stuns and aggro draws. Against enemies that may take 6-8 people to kill, these add a ton of flexibility to my toolbox in action. I can draw aggro to people I know won’t die. I can stun the enemy, then go in for high damage with low defense characters, since they will now not take return damage.

Overall, all of these things provided a lot of new depth to the series combat. It all fits into a state of feeling familiar, but deeper, and I suspect it hits a really good mark for both new and old players.

If there’s one thing that really surprised me coming out of all this, it’s that I really cared about the characters I met along the way. Ya it’s natural to become somewhat attached to the squad you create, but there’s a level of attachment that I got to people I didn’t recruit that really made the second half of the game memorable. The mix of Persona-style interaction and traditional Fire Emblem combat has been done so well that I can’t believe it’s taken them this long to go full in. The 3DS titles started moving in this direction, particularly with the relationships, but Three Houses has brought it to a spectacularly higher new level.

There’s not much else I can really say here other than go play it. It’s taken me a long time to get back to a point where I could beat a Fire Emblem game – I definitely played some of Awakening and Fates, but never finished them – but I’m glad it’s finally happened. It says a lot about the game that I can not wait to see where the story goes when the season pass story content comes out some time next year. This series really has pushed into a new era with both story and gameplay refinements that leave this game in a place of being familiar but refreshed, and I can’t think of any TRPG that I would recommend over this one in the past few years.

Also it has fishing. 11/10 GOTY again.

2019-08-182019-08-14

Game Ramblings #91 – Dragon Quest Builders 2

More Info from Square-Enix

Genre: Action RPG / Sandbox Builder
Platform: Switch
Also Available On: PS4

Playing this game was all sorts of breaking my usual tendencies. I would typically buy this game on PS4 for better performance, but opted for the Switch for handheld convenience. I don’t really like builders like Minecraft, but the story and goal-focused gameplay really looked interesting to me. I would typically shelve a game after reaching end credits, but I’m already hours past that point and still playing. Really I think all of those things and the quality of the core game itself have helped me to really enjoy this game a lot more than I really expected I would.

This game was a relaxing pleasure. Sometimes there’s combat, sometimes there’s building, and sometimes you just sit there and work on your community.

Where the first Builders was a sequel to Dragon Quest 1, this is a sequel to Dragon Quest 2. It picks up some time after the original game, the player becomes friends with the resurrected final boss of that game, and a buddy copy adventure ensues, with the player being the builder and Malroth being the smasher. It’s all a little bit absurd, and it provides just enough of a grounding to the DQ world to really drive the fact that this game has goals and progress and a reason to march forward.

I’ve never really been a big fan of Minecraft, which makes this game perhaps a weird target for me to play. I just never really dealt well with the open ended nature of the game, and never really felt like putting together my own list of goals to move toward. DQB2 solves a lot of that for me by providing even a small overlay of goals to head towards. I’ll just do a quick walk through of the sort of opening little bit of time in the game where you learn to build basics, learn to gather followers, and learn to farm to provide yourself food. How it works in this game is important to why it clicked more than Minecraft.

Automation through your villagers becomes super important to the improved flow of this game over your typical building-type games. Focus on what’s important next, not what you’ve already done.

Eating to keep away from hunger is important in both games, as is the act of creating farms to sustain this growth. The first part is building farms, and importantly equipment for it. In Minecraft? You’ve got to know some recipe or figure it out, then build out some stuff with an interface that is cool to see a few times, but becomes tedious over time. In DQB2? You learn recipes and automatically batch build them in an easy to use menu. Cool, you’ve got a farm. In Minecraft? Manually grab things every time. In DQB2? Recruit followers to your island who will keep the farm in shape, plant new crops, pick grown crops, and put them in storage for you. Cool, now you’ve got some food, and can eat it raw or cook it. In Minecraft? Get on that yourself. In DQB2? Cook a thing once to learn it, then have a cooking follower do it for you, and grab from storage as needed.

I suppose the high level of all of this is that once you do something once, and it becomes automated. This allows you to focus on what’s next, instead of having an ever growing list of things that you have to do on routine. You learn to farm, setup the basics, then automate it. You later learn to mine, setup the basics, then automate it. Hell, as you start to explore smaller side islands you can gain perks that give you infinite resources of some types, which completely removes the tedious nature of having to find more and more and more of basic resources. The nature of all this is that the repetition is removed, and you’re basically focused on always doing new cool things.

The fact that this ties into a light action RPG layer also helps a lot. In general exploration, there’s simple party-based hack and slash combat. You’ve got some light gearing to provide a nice power curve. You’ve got some tools to provide enhanced exploration as the game goes on. Basically, that progression curve of action RPGs is there enough to provide a push forward. Where this really comes into play is the base defenses that grow more complex as the game goes on.

Base defense becomes really important later in the game, to the point where it becomes the focal point of a large segment of building.

The base defenses are effectively tower defense while mobile. On your side, you’ve got your base defenses and your base followers. Followers can be geared up using the same recipes used to create player gear to make them more effective. Base defenses are the real meat though. This runs the gamut from simple spikes and ballistas to more fun magic traps, whether it’s fire, wind, or ice. These provide a really fun way to meld customizing your base through the heavy builder gameplay with the combat mechanics and more typical ARPG elements. As distractions along the way they also provided periods of strategy and pace changing that broke up the monotony of exploring and digging for resources.

I think at the end of it all, I’m surprised how well just a few small changes to the core Minecraft loop got me to play the game in a different disguise. Giving me goals, giving me a story, automating monotony – those are all things that are small in theory but huge in practice. Having played the original Builders, this is also a huge push forward just for this series. The first one felt like a half step in this direction, but the sequel really smoothed out the game. It’s gone from being a neat variant on an idea to being something that I don’t want to put down, and honestly I can’t say that I saw that coming.

2019-07-022020-05-24

Game Ramblings #89 – Cadence of Hyrule: CRYPT OF THE NECRODANCER FEAT. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

More Info from Brace Yourself Games

Genre: Rhythm RPG
Platform: Switch

This is definitely one of those games that I assumed would work when it was announced, but you can never really be sure. Outside of the obvious rhythm gameplay of Crypt of the Necrodancer, it’s not that far off of Zelda. It’s still basically an action RPG with a bunch of inventory. It still encourages you to romp through effectively dungeons to progress. It’s god a damn good soundtrack. But still, this is Zelda. Somehow this has come out and feels great, feeling like each of their series at the same time without losing anything in the process.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a screenshot of a standard Zelda 2D title, but that little bar at the bottom is where it starts to separate itself.

The screenshot above does a good job of visually laying out how much things are the same, but totally different. On the surface, this looks like a 2D Zelda-series RPG. There’s some familiar looking enemies, a normal item wheel, hearts, rupees, keys, a slightly angled camera viewpoint. However, that little bar at the bottom and the specifics of the grid are where you start getting the Necrodancer gameplay.

Like Necrodancer, any movement or attack is most effective when done on the beat of the music. At the same time, enemies also move and attack on the beat, so you’ve got a play around keeping on eye on what you’re doing and an eye on the enemies to make sure you aren’t getting trapped. While it’s technically a turn-based game as a result, the practical pace is really close to an action RPG and it ends up straddling the line between familiar and new really well.

Combat is also a bit different than expected for a Zelda game, mostly due to a large unexpected variety in ways to attack. Each character that you control has its own specialty, and you can swap between Link, Zelda, or Necrodancer’s Cadence at any time once you reach them. You’ve still got your Link-style broadsword attacks that hit a wide line in front of the player. However, you can also use spears for extended range straight attacks, flails for L-shaped AoE style attacks, or daggers for real close-range combat. Even on defense you have more variety than just Hylian shields, with characters like Zelda able to activate a projectile-reflecting magic shield if timed correctly. You can even add modifiers to your weapons like health drain or poison to add some additional flexibility to your loadout.

The positive outcome of all of this is that I really spent time modifying my gear loadout and character selection based on what I knew would be most beneficial to me at the time. Early on I went more spear-focused in order to keep enemies at a larger range from me. As I gained some hearts and defensive items, I started moving into broadswords in order to take out more than one enemy at a time, even if it allowed them to get closer at range and occasionally hit me. As a whole it ends up in a battle system that has tremendously good flow due to the rhythm focus, but still has a ton of ways to play to your strengths at any time in a way very reminiscent of high end ARPGs.

It definitely helps that there’s a lot of familiar things in the gameplay though despite all the changes. You’ve still got to save up your rupees to buy things in shops. You’ve still got to visit Kakariko Village to move forward. Hell, you’ve still got to get lost in Lost Woods as part of your quest. However, through it all the focus on rhythm gameplay really feels like a fun fresh take on the Zelda formula.

And oh boy that soundtrack. The Zelda soundtracks on their own are really special, and really familiar to a lot of gamers. Living up to that alone is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. However, the need to really hit a music pace that allows for a good gameplay pace added a level of technical need that the team really nailed. The familiar Zelda themes are morphed into new genres – whether it’s jazzier takes on the main theme or Song of Storms, or more dance-based overworld themes, or even rock-focused takes on the Gerudo Valley theme – that really push a fast gameplay pace while still being fantastic takes on familiar themes. This is the rare game where the soundtrack alone is worth the price of purchase, but you still get a great game on top of it.

It also helps that the bosses are punny as hell.

This is definitely a game out of left field. While Necrodancer on its own is a fantastic game, the fact that Nintendo allowed for the Zelda license to run wild in the Necrodancer universe. What ends up coming out of it is something that just works fantastically well – as long as you’re comfortable in the rhythm style. Is this going to be a replacement for the upcoming Link’s Awakening remake? No not really. Is this better than I could have hoped for as a way to get more Necrodancer content? You better believe it.