Month: August 2019

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.

2019-08-252019-08-25

Game Ramblings #88.3 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – Kingdom Hearts 3

More Info from Square-Enix

Genre: Action RPG
Platform: PS4

I finally got around to KH3. Ya I skipped some of the side games, and ya I should go back and play Birth by Sleep on a TV, but frankly I was ready to get this one off the list. KH3 was a bit of an oddball – it combines bits and pieces of all the past games while adding a ton of cinematic flare now possible on current generation hardware. What comes out of it falls somewhere between great and complete disaster, which I suppose could be said for a lot of this series as a whole.

This is really the game that finally feels like a modern experience. If there’s one thing that really speaks next-gen to me, it’s not necessarily new complex gameplay elements, or flashy new effects, but of worlds that feel alive and cinematic scenes that look like the game world. Kingdom Hearts 3 finally delivers on that. Visually, it’s definitely a looker, but importantly the worlds feel believable. Whether it’s San Fransokyo from Big Hero 6 or the world of Toy Story, these worlds no longer feel reminiscent of the movies, but actually feel exactly like the movies. It’s completely uncanny. The style also lends well to spectacular cinematic elements in traversal, such as wall running up Mount Olympus during a boss fight, dodging fire and rocks, instead of simply being somewhere vaguely in the area.

It’s also worth noting that this is probably the best mix of pure new content and pure Disney fandom experience that I think I’ve seen in the series. As a fan of KH, it was great to finally have visibility on both the Keyblade Graveyard, as well as some of the worlds behind Xehanort, and they gave a LOT of time at the end to him. At the same time, they quite literally remade Let it Go within the lore of KH3, which is a huge shot of Disney fandom adrenaline to be hit by. Every moment felt like I was seeing some new cool thing that brought me back to a movie or character I wanted to see more of, and given the lore of the series I was frankly surprised at how well it pulled together.

What gets lost in all of this though is the Final Fantasy connection. The folks from FF10 are nowhere to be seen on Destiny Islands. The FF cast members in Radiant Garden no longer appear. There’s no resolution to the plot between Cloud and Sephiroth in KH2. While the progression of the game lore kind of forces it in this direction, this game is now more accurately described as Disney + Square, not Disney + Final Fantasy. It’s not a deal breaker, but it’s definitely a disappointment.

Combat is a bit of a mixed bag, and it’s definitely a mash up of past games.

Core combat is still how it’s been since KH1, and it still has its issues with targeting and lock ons. It’s straight hack and slash, but the combo count trends more towards KH2 so it’s generally effective and easy to pull off.
Your partners are still kind of useless, but now your party occasionally grows up to 5 characters, which is kind of neat.
Magic and mana regen has been pulled in from KH2, which is a huge perk.
The Flowmotion system from Dream Drop Distance is there again, but it’s been neutered by the removal of most of its triggers, so it’s kind of useless.
Dream Eaters have been merged into the Summon system from past games, and the summons use both a full mana bar and are still kind of useless.
The dark form from KH2 still pops up from time to time, and is still kind of annoying when it shows up. Since it now gets in the way of triggering other group attacks, it’s particularly flow breaking.
Fortunately the dark form is hilariously effective against bosses, so when it pops up in a boss fight it’s pretty much an instant win.

Basically, mixed bag.

However, it’s the special attacks like the tea cups above that are the most egregious. These are basically triggered group attacks that do a ton of damage and effectively provide you with immunity. They are hilariously overpowered and completely unbalance combat in most situations. There are encounters where it’s pretty obvious that things were balanced around these, so it’s particularly bad that they become a bit of a necessity. In Kingdom Hearts fashion, it’s another case of something that is flashy and cool that gets used way too much, and quickly becomes annoying and necessary.

In good news, the non-standard stuff is way better in this game. The Gummi ship sequence is now a pseudo open space experience. Combat is triggered by the player by chasing after Heartless ships, and some of the sequences turn into large scale boss fights. It provides a lot more gameplay than simply the annoying experience flying between worlds, and becomes an entire great change of pace after a bunch of RPG combat. Some worlds also provide their own entire experiences. The obvious example is the Caribbean world, which now has an entire Assassin’s Creed 4-style pirate ship gameplay experience, including ship upgrades, boat to boat combat, and plenty of small islands to hop off at and explore for treasure.

The improvements to the meta experience are really what make this feel like that modern experience. The game goes back and forth between extremely linear sequences and semi-open exploration, so there’s enough of a change in pace going on to allow for some breathing room as I went through the game.

So, many games and more hours than I care to admit later, I’ve gotten through the Xehanort story. I still couldn’t tell you most of what happened, because quite frankly the lore is batshit. I couldn’t tell you I really enjoyed the gameplay a lot of the time, because quite frankly the combat really isn’t that good. But did I enjoy it all anyway? Hell ya I did. These games are the most spectacularly stupid mix of Disney and JRPG aesthetic possible, and now that technology has caught up to that, it was a sight to behold.

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.