Category: Switch

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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.

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Game Ramblings #195 – The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

The big thing that came out of the pre-release press for this was obviously that you get to play as Zelda for a change. However, beyond it being set dressing that didn’t really make a huge difference to the feel of the game. What did was the core hook for the game – that instead of swinging a sword around (technically, kinda sorta….) you get to make copies of things that do the fighting for you. What you end up getting out of that is a 2D Zelda that feels like it’s Link’s Awakening by way of Tears of the Kingdom, and boy is it a lot of fun.

The thing that made this game work for me so well was the little moments. It’s the same thing that really worked for me about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Sure, the core loop is still fun and classic Zelda – go to a general location, puzzle your way through a dungeon, get a heart container and a shiny upgrade – but the little moments within that are magic.

That screenshot up there is one of those moments for me. You gain nearly immediate access to spawn echoes – copies of things you’ve found or defeated in the world – so my initial instinct for combat was “lol army of bats”. And that is a perfectly valid way to play the game. However, you get to flying things that bats are simply not good against; they’re simply too fast. One of the other powers that you get is the ability to lock onto objects that move and pull or follow them around. They don’t explicitly teach you use it as a combat mechanic, but in typical confounding Nintendo fashion they put the mechanic in front of you so often that eventually it just clicks. I ran into these birds and they were just obnoxious to me because they were fast and swarming, so I locked one down to just stop it for a breather. That’s when the light bulb went off. Lock it down and send an army of whatever after it since it can’t move. And it just works.

Those little moments happen all over. Large gap that you need to clear but is too far to jump? Well, you can use an echo of a classic 2D Zelda flying tile. Or you can build a bridge of beds. Or you can grab a bird echo and float over the gap. Or you can make a chain of spider echoes and climb on their webs. Or you can create a chain of water blocks to swim across it. Swarm of enemies about to attack hiding in grass? Well, you can use your Link transformation and fight them directly. Or you can send a pack of wolves to fight them. Or you can set the grass on fire to kill them. Or you can trap them in water blocks and drown them. Or you can create an elevator block and simply go over the top of them. Need to move a block onto a switch behind a fence? Well, you can use your attachment power and push it along. Or you can use a fan to move it. Or you can create an unnecessarily complicated stack of objects to knock something else onto the switch. Or you can spawn an Armos to path onto it.

If this sounds very much like a “play it your way”, that’s because it is. What I ended up finding the most fun was nearly entirely avoiding using the Link copy powers and focusing entirely on spawning echoes in weird fashions to get through the game. Even on the last fight I went in this direction. My focus there was on spawning echoes to fight for me and avoiding damage, making the experience a defensive dance in minimizing health loss. The game is basically a tool set for you to screw around and find solutions where the end result as a player is laughing because your absurd idea actually worked. In that way, it feels exactly like the building toolset in Tears of the Kingdom.

However, all of these options really gets into what keeps this game in simply “very good” category than being truly great. The UX around selecting your echoes is miserable. The entire selection process is being presented with an enormous growing list of echoes, at least 75% of which are completely useless by end game, and a few basic sorting options (most used, recently used, recently found, category, ….and one I’m forgetting). Finding an echo you haven’t used in a while is a needle in a haystack and there’s really no reason this couldn’t have been at least minimized.

One option they could have taken? Simply reduce the list as the game went on. There’s a whole bunch of spots where you get level 1, 2, 3 variations of the same general monster (ex: Spear Moblin). When you first get the echo, it totally makes sense that they both exist as the newer one is stronger and costs more to spawn. However, one of the upgrades you get throughout the game reduces the spawn cost of specific echoes. Once the level N and N+1 match, there’s no reason that the lower one couldn’t simply be removed from the list entirely.

Another option they could have taken? JUST LET ME TURN OFF SOME ECHOES. There are just so many things you can spawn here, and a lot of them I never found a good way to work into my combat experience. I get that there would probably be some hesitancy that the player would turn off something important to progression, but at the same time Nintendo has shown in the past that they are incredibly capable of tutorializing important things in ways that remind the player that “hey this is important”. But 4 beds? I don’t need 4 beds. I don’t need the 8 or 9 types of moblins that I found. I certainly don’t need the 5 or 6 statues that I found beyond the one dungeon where they were a mechanic.

The game really just ultimately suffers a bit from too many choices that don’t have any impact, and cleaning that up would oddly enough have really elevated the experience, as digging through menus for the thing you want at any specific time is really a grating experience.

That said, the game was still an absolute joy. It’s both a path forward for the 2D entries in the series in terms of overall quality and a great title on its own. It shows that Zelda games can still be full of action without necessarily requiring a sword. It shows that there’s still legs in dungeon-focused experiences instead of an open world. I suppose it also shows that Zelda can be a star on her own, though I’ve never really been convinced that Link being the hero really matters beyond it being set dressing. It’s the perfect title for the Switch where it is in its life cycle, providing something high quality and experimental while we wait for the bigger next console to come out.

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Game Ramblings #191 – Marble It Up! Ultra

More Info from The Marble Collective

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, macOS, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Sometimes you just need a game that you can play in quick sessions. For me, it’s when I’m sitting around waiting on Visual Studio or Unreal Editor to load for a couple minutes. This was that latest one to really hit that perfect spot for me. It combines some solid platforming, just enough chaos caused by physics, and levels that generally lasted under a minute to become something I could pick up and play whenever I had a minute to kill.

The way I played this game really benefited from being on the Switch. Playing this didn’t require me turning on the TV or getting away from my desk. It simply required me to reach over, grab the Switch, and immediately be in the game. The way the game levels are setup really played into that. It has a mix of speed and puzzle levels that are pretty evenly spaced throughout the game’s 100 or so levels. What it ended up meaning for me is that I would find a place to take a few minutes break waiting on something on my PC, get a run or two in with a couple chances to improve my time, then go back to what I was doing. It’s the perfect setup for something that I can do that isn’t just screwing around on Reddit during those little wait periods.

Within individual levels, the game is also setup to just let you rapidly push through improvements. The game levels load extremely quickly so I could retry to improve my times quickly. The select button is linked to a quick reset of the level so if I screwed up I could get back to the start even quicker. If I wanted to move on to the next level, there’s a button in the end level screen that immediately moves you there. Intentionally or not, the entire setup of the game was one that really pushed into this 5 minutes or less session time that I had for it.

Granted, it helps that the game itself is still fun so I want to play it repeatedly. There’s something about physics-based ball platformers that I really always just enjoyed, whether it’s the Monkey Ball series or older games like Marble Madness. Some of what keeps me engaged may very well be the inconsistency of the physics itself, or at least manipulating the physics to find some amount of consistency. This game really excels here due to a handful of small mechanics.

The first one that really stands out is that jumping forward while moving allows for speed gains. This turns every interaction into a sort of game around how many mini jumps I can fit in to maximize speed before it becomes hazardous. That same mechanic then combines with jumps in other direction and momentum gained via the ball’s rotation to allow me to manipulate direction in interesting ways while keeping speed up. However, the ball rotation is also an interesting mechanic at slow speed. As an example, if the ball is rotating to the left when it lands, it will inherently jump to the left because of friction. In slow speed platforming heavy segments this allows me to travel a bit faster than safely jumping forward, as I can change my rotation in-air to bounce me in a new direction when I land without necessarily losing all of my forward speed. The final mechanic is really just the core rolling itself. It feels good. High speed feels appropriately out of control, but pushing in a direction different than your movement shows obvious momentum changes. High speed racing-style courses in particular show a ton here where you’ll be really leaning heavily into the corners to drift in a new direction without ever really losing that sense of speed.

If there was one real gripe I had though, it’s that I kept wanting a quick key to reset to my last checkpoint rather than to the start of the course. This may be a habit from playing Trackmania, but I do like the distinction between reset to checkpoint and reset to start of level when I’m working on improving times. It gives me a lot more rapid iterations in going through sections to figure out best lines compared to falling off a level and waiting to reset (and in this game’s case, waiting a variable amount of time – the reset volumes are extremely inconsistent). Given runs with resets are inherently not going to be efficient, I don’t see a leaderboard concern for it being an option either. It probably didn’t help that at times I would just habitually hit the reset button expecting it to be a reset to checkpoint but that part is at least on me.

All that said, this game really hit a perfect spot for me. It was fast to get in and do a couple runs, fun to play during that, and fun to replay levels trying to improve my time. It has super solid physics, which is incredibly important for this type of game. It’s got a good mix of puzzle and speed levels, which is good for keeping the game from feeling repetitive. It just kind of checks all the boxes for me.