Category: Switch

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Game Ramblings #201 – Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Wii U

I never actually finished the original game. I hit some point where there was a huge difficulty spike and just couldn’t be bothered doing the grinding to get through whatever the block was for me. I don’t know if it was the platform being played on, other games coming out around then, or that this release got a rebalance but that was never a problem on this version. 95 hours later this game was an incredible joy to play.

Playing this game now really is a series of “I don’t remember…” moments, but I suppose that comes with the nature of this being a 10 year old game that I didn’t finish. The first thing that really struck me was that I don’t remember it taking so long to get the mechs. I was at least 30 hours in before I got the mech and at least 50 hours in before the mech could fly. However, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I spent so much time exploring on foot in ways that was absolutely fun and interesting.

The thing that struck me as impressive here that I didn’t remember is how much you can literally explore the entire world on foot relatively early in the game. Every zone has an entire level range of areas from low to high. However, high level enemies aren’t necessarily dangerous on foot because they will ignore you. They’re huge and level 60 and you’re effectively an ant. However, if you come back in a mech later on they absolutely attack you. What it did for me was allow me to just wander for the sake of wandering. Sure, I was also generally chasing some basic mission marker for extra XP or rewards, but it wasn’t like I was chasing a story mission. I was just wandering to see what was there and what I could find and generally doing it in areas that I wouldn’t get to in the story for dozens of hours. It was simply fun in the way that exploring the mainline Xenoblade games is fun, but in an even more open nature.

The thing I don’t remember about the original release is precisely where I shelved it. There’s a point about 2/3 of the way through the game where I think may have been it. In the fight I’m thinking of you fight what is effectively a gigantic floating fortress with a bunch of adds that spawn throughout it. It’s a bit of a fight of managing focus and a bit of a fight that is just checking your DPS, and it’s the one boss fight that I did manage to wipe in here.

In this release it felt appropriately hard but not impossible, and I think that feeling of balance being better exists throughout but I can’t really tell if that is a placebo effect. In classic Xenoblade fashion, balance is a wild mess of numbers that don’t really have any relation. A level 40 bug is different than a level 40 gorilla is different than a level 40 dinosaur is different than a level 40 flying blimp fish. You basically learn by dying what you should really be fighting, and the unfortunate thing about that is that there’s a lot of stuff that is hard to fight that earns you effectively no reward because it’s “low level” by the time you put up a fair fight. To me, that’s just Xenoblade and it’s a problem that every game in the series has had. The nice thing here though is that the game does a pretty good job of balancing the core golden story path to where if you’re at the level recommended in the quests, it feels appropriate. If you want a harder experience you go in slightly lower level. If you want an easier experience you go in slightly higher level. It all just works well, and that’s not something I remember of the original release. Frankly, it’s something that they didn’t really get that right until Xenoblade 2, and the remaster of this and XB1 show those learnings.

Tied into the balance thing is that I don’t remember doing as much of the “side” content in the original release, and frankly I don’t remember enjoying doing it either. In this release though, I was doing everything. I think some of that is tied into the fact that I was enjoying exploring in general. It’s easy to hit mission points incidentally when you’re just exploring anything and everything. However, I was also enjoying doing the little character side stories.

It struck me how important the character missions are to the actual plot of the game. Relative to the main entries, this is a very story light experience if you follow just the main story line. However, if you do the character stories – and importantly, are thorough in recruiting characters – you get a lot more world building. You get stories of how other alien races came to this world and are involved with the main antagonists of the game. You get back stories of how the humans got to know each other and ended up on the space ship that escaped Earth. You get to see the team building as it’s happening. In core Xenoblade games, these are things that kind of just happened as you played the game, but here are presented as side content, and I think the game experience is worse if they are treated like that by most players. There is a surprising amount of story content here if you go after it.

All that being said, the main draw for me was that there was new content in play here. It’s….fine. Ultimately the story portion of it was a better draw for me than the game portion. The game portion railroads you into a really long slog of a dungeon that takes place in a stereotypical JRPG floating island void and I could have gone without it. However, the story part closes a lot of plot holes that were never resolved in the original game and it sets them up for what now feels like an inevitable sequel and for that I suppose I’m thankful. I now want to see more of this style Xenoblade gameplay explored – although please change the combat inputs to be XC2 style instead of the hotbar. The mech gameplay is just such a fun experience that I don’t want to see them drop.

This remaster almost certainly exists because Monolith needed an excuse to do engine testing for the Switch 2 and Xenoblade 1-3 already existed on the Switch 1. If that is the justification for this existing, then hell ya. They wrapped the story of those games with 3, so opening up the story a bit here to maybe give them a path forward in the XCX story line on Switch 2 also feels like an absolute win. Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with going forward.

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Game Ramblings #197 – Kunai

More Info from TurtleBlaze

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PC

Metroidvanias are usually an easy to pick breather for me in between longer RPG runs, and we were definitely in one of those. After Metaphor and Mario & Luigi back to back I needed a break. This one kind of fell into my lap via my backlog randomizer, but it chose well. This is a compact experience with solid combat and great movement that really hit what I needed out of it.

The thing that really stood out at the start was how fast the game was. This has such a smooth movement set that really just worked and continues to get better as the game continues. Core movement is fast on its own, which prevents the game from dragging. You then get the kunai that act like a typical grappling hook. This adds a bunch of possibilities for vertical movement up walls as well as even faster horizontal movement. You then get double jumps to cover gaps and eventually an SMG that you can shoot down to hover to cover even LARGER gaps. Finally, you get a dash to extend your movement even further.

All of the movement feels like it’s in service to reduce friction in moving through the environment. The unfortunate thing is that despite it improving the main story line, I don’t think it really does much to improve retraversal. Ultimately this feels like more of a problem of the core path than the movement mechanics but there just isn’t that much reason to retraverse most areas. You’ll go into an area, maybe hit a few areas a second time on the wya out, then really not see it again. In a couple of cases you retraverse through old areas late in the game, but for the most part the central hub of the game is so conveniently located that you just go through it instead of old areas. If I wanted to do a 100% run I’d have visited more, but just to complete the game there wasn’t much reason.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how much combat changed over time, but also how naturally the change felt. The first half of the game is entirely melee driven, and it starts that way early. You get a katana and learn to use it both at close range and for deflecting projectiles coming at far range. The use of it opens up more as you get traversal mechanics – for example using the kunai to grapple and reposition. This on its own feels incredibly tight and fun. It’s obviously pretty simple and wouldn’t have had legs to support an entire game, but it’s incredibly effective as the opening half. It’s when ranged starts to come in that things really change.

The first ranged thing you get is a throwing star. Its main use in combat is less for damage and more for its stun capability. Being able to stun larger enemies brings them from things that need at least a bit of thinking to something that you can run over, and as a power curve thing it felt well timed to right around when fighting the larger enemies is becoming a bother. Once the speed of stunning starts to become bothersome, you get the SMG. Besides its traversal hover utility, this is pure damage. This allowed me to start taking out enemies as I moved. In large packs I would still need to slow down a bit, but ultimately I was getting rid of targets quicker. The rocket launcher finished converting the game into something entirely different. Now rather than slowing down I was simply lobbing rockets and watching everything explode. The power curve changes allowed the game to slowly morph into a ranged-centric game in a way that felt entirely natural.

The thing that impressed me about this was that while it made getting through trash quicker, the bosses were clearly designed with this change in mind. Each boss felt like a test of the new things you gained. Early bosses were largely stationary, allowing you to dodge attacks and get in close range for melee damage. As you gained ranged weapons, bosses started requiring those because they were fast or had a lot of movement or just stayed out of range. By the final boss, I was basically using all traversal while lobbing rockets to get splash damage and focusing purely on dodging. It was such a smooth transition that I didn’t think about it, but in hindsight it was handled much better than a lot of games handle the change.

I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a game of the year candidate from the year it came out, but it didn’t necessarily need to be. In simply being good at what it did, it provided exactly what I wanted out of it – a breather from RPGs. In being short it also was something easy to run through without growing tired of it. Basically, it made itself easy to play, easy to finish, and easy to recommend.

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Shelved It #21 – Mario & Luigi: Brothership

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

It’s not unprecedented that I drop a Mario RPG on the final dungeon and boy was that the case here. If you’d have asked me about 10 gameplay hours ago how I was going to start this ramblings it would have been “this game would have been better received if it was under any other IP” but this game just did not know when to end. Since then I had two plot twists at the end boss, a handful of really unnecessarily long dungeons, and a final dungeon with so many wings and unnecessarily spongey enemies that I just said “forget it, I’m done.”

And honestly, that’s a shame.

But for now, let’s go back to where I thought this set of ramblings was going to start. I really do think that this would have been better off with even a different name. Calling this game Mario & Luigi has so many expectations that come with it. Sure, there’s the timing-based combat but that had been done outside of M&L to where adapting that to another RPG wouldn’t have been seen as weird. What that name really brings with it is an expectation of a certain metagame style with large scale exploration in a mushroom kingdom setting. That is completely not this game.

This game is a series of relatively loosely connected 30 minute segments that you can kind of leisurely play at a relaxed pace that eventually loop back to a core story every now and then. However, independent of the M&L baggage this is a really fun metagame loop. This works well as an RPG where you have some agency over what order you’d want to do things. In other genres it would work well as a puzzle game where you go to different spots to solve unique puzzles. In an action game this would work where each loop has new enemy archetypes to engage with. Various Mario games have already proven that this metagame loop works well for a platformer where each new area has fun new challenges to engage with. However, it is not Mario & Luigi. If they had simply called this Super Mario Brothers-ship a ton of expectations would have been dropped, and frankly it would have probably been better received.

That is, until the end of the game. So many RPGs that are simply good but not great have the same failings around sticking the landing and this really is just a whose who of failures to stick the landing.

At about the 20 hour mark the first signs of this start to show up with the introduction of a Glohm mechanic. It makes sense tied to the story, but from a gameplay perspective it’s a debuff that prevents brother actions and can make enemies stronger. The main issue I had is that this is a sign of them running out of enemy archetypes, to where the glohm is in place to re-use old archetypes, but stronger. Typically besides just stronger, this actually means faster, and often that doesn’t just mean faster, it means fast enough that when we multi-attack, you can’t actually dodge all damage because game mechanics prevent you jumping/hammering that fast. Unavoidable damage in a combat system built around avoiding as much damage as possible is really a huge problem.

Then at about the 30 hour mark the dungeons start to get noticeably longer. 30 minute dungeons stretch into 45 minutes, then 60 minutes, and it really starts to negatively impact the fun of getting through a dungeon. Fighting the same enemy archetypes has a certain shelf life before you get bored, and this really starts to hit that cap. In isolation, it’s simply annoying because the pay off of a dungeon is usually a cool boss fight. While that’s certainly the case here, they start being capped off by unnecessary plot twists. The plot twists are obvious that they are coming, so they are both not fun and just generally feel like they’re extending the game for no reason. Past the plot twists are simply revisits of existing islands, so you don’t get new cool stuff. You’re just fighting stronger things that you’ve already fought (see previous note) and you’re not meeting new people. It just feels unnecessary.

For me, at about the 35 hour mark I then hit the final dungeon. I got to the end of the first wing, saw a hub with seven extending spokes, and literally just said “oh no”. It wasn’t actually seven wings since they loop back on themselves at times, but it was enough to be negatively impactful. I started playing a bit of it, but it was clear that it was going to be a slog. The just normal trash enemies very quickly stopped being 2-3 attack kills and started being 5-6 attack kills. They stopped doing 20-30 damage and started doing 80-90 damage. They stopped being occasional glohmed enemies and started all being glohmed enemies. It just stopped being fun. It wasn’t that it was hard, and I guess that’s my problem. It just felt like it was setup to kill time. I was already overleveled and it was dragging, so grinding to overlevel more was not appealing. I got back to the central hub and went “I’m good.”

I’ve never worked on a JRPG but in my head it feels like something that shouldn’t be difficult to tune around. There are certain metrics that testing should identify as fun. How long can a dungeon be before players start to grow bored of it? How long do players identify as “fair” to defeat a trash enemy? How many fights feels like enough to learn how an enemy archetype works before mastering it, and how many times can the player fight it before feeling bored? These are things that all worked very well for the first 20 or so hours of this game. I totally get that there’s a need to finish on bigger and badder, but bigger and badder should still be served by metrics of what is found as fun. Is an extra turn to kill an end game enemy a bad thing? Probably not but double the amount of turns probably is. 30 minute dungeons extending to 60+ is probably a bad thing. Fighting an archetype 10 times is fine, but 20 times is probably bad.

JRPGs that are simply just good flex too much from what is fun. JRPGs that are great do not. In my head as both a developer and consumer it’s as simple as that. Find the metrics that are fun, and make sure that you follow within some close range of that for the entire game. Make difficulty come from difficulty actually ramping up, not from length. Brothership simply failed that test.