Month: September 2019

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Game Ramblings #94 – The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Original Versions: Game Boy, Game Boy Color (DX)
It was nice seeing this again after all these years.

This was the first game I got on the Game Boy. When my family got me the Game Boy for Christmas, Nintendo wasn’t doing Tetris as the pack-in, and boy was that a lucky thing for me. I played this for way too many hours as a kid, wracked my brain over the puzzles, and I’ve loved the Zelda series ever since. Even at the time of its release, this was a special game, and now that it’s been given the modern treatment it’s worth playing more than ever.

From a high level, there’s not much of a surprise here – it’s a 2D Zelda game. You go to dungeons, you get an item, you use that item to get through the dungeon, by the end of the game you’ve got a tool set to take out the boss. It’s not that this one was necessarily breaking totally new ground, but that it was doing so in a handheld game, and was STILL as good as (and I’d argue better overall) Link to the Past.

There was just something about this one that always hit better for me, and I think I figured it out with this play through. Link’s Awakening plays a constantly good balance of both telling you what to do, and giving you a bunch of leash to go exploring on your own. There’s always a bit of a hint coming out of a dungeon about where to go next. That gives you enough of a bread crumb to go on. But those spots you walk past that you don’t have an item for yet? That item you just got in a trade quest and don’t know who the next step is for? You’re always going to want to go off and explore. Even on the Game Boy that always worked better for me than Lttp‘s somewhat more open ended nature, and it hasn’t stopped working well here.

It helps that the items here are still a ton of fun to use. There’s some of your usual suspects here (bow, swords, shield, weight bracelets, etc) to get you into the game – and boy doesn the inclusion of dedicated sword and shield buttons REALLY help this remake. However, this game also had its weird items that just WORKED. Roc’s feather to jump over things? Fun item at the start. Combine with the Pegasus Boots to really jump far? Now you’ve got a great combo. A shovel to give you more of an excuse to find treasure? Why not. Some magic powder that you can use to stun enemies or turn a raccoon back into a human? Why the hell not. This game really just embraced the weird in a way that the rest of the 2D games often didn’t want to do and it’s all the better for it.

The dungeons themselves are also really solid. I’m assuming it was due to the limited nature of the system, but these dungeons really lean on puzzles over combat. You’ve got your usual puzzles tied to the dungeon’s main item, but this one also does a bunch of puzzles that slowly build upon each other across multiple dungeons. A lot of these end up being some variant of switch manipulation that modifies where you can go throughout the level. These are typically tied into the item puzzles to add multiple layers of solving in one. It ends up really reducing combat to boss fights, which is a benefit for how simple the combat really is. It leaves the boss fights down to puzzle solving with the right item and sword spam to kill, and the rest of the game to swinging only when necessary.

All that said, fuck adding physics to this damn crane game.

This one’s pretty simple – this is one of my favorite games in the Zelda series in general made pretty for modern consoles. The gameplay that made it so good 25 years ago has been tweaked a bit to feel up to date, but not changed where it wasn’t necessary. There’s a lot to be said about not messing with what worked and Link’s Awakening is definitely a good example of that. Where Breath of the Wild proved that a rethinking of the formula was a good direction for the series, this one proves that it’s not always a bad thing to be a bit classic.

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Game Ramblings #93 – Astral Chain

More Info from Platinum Games

Further Reading: Game Ramblings #64 – NieR: Automata

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

If you’ve played some of the recent games that Platinum has done, whether that was NieR: Automata or Bayonetta, or even something a bit older like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, you probably know roughly what to expect out of this one. Great action combat, over the top set pieces, a somewhat wild sci-fi story, and just enough anime tropes to not be annoying. In that regard, Astral Chain really isn’t any different. However, the combat in place shows a lot more finesse than I find typical of their games, while doing the rest of Platinum’s typical feature set as well as ever.

This game isn’t really a surprise from a setting perspective for Platinum. The tl;dr is that the world has gone through a near apocalypse, humanity is hanging on through a man-made island floating in the ocean, and demons constantly invade through portals into another dimension. This is all bits and pieces that Platinum has done before. Where they really lean into this is that the other dimensional beings are crucial to the combat, and that tie into the story is all they need to give you your core abilities that the game is centered around.

Right from the start, you’re given a controlled variant of these beings called a Legion. This is both a partner in battle, a practical RPG power curve element, and a way to hook into that story. Your ability to control Legions means you can see demonic corruption in the world (ties into XP gain), you can fight against the demons that are invading and enter portals into their dimension (main story hook), and gain some flashy as hell combat capabilities (let’s face it, this is because it’s cool as hell). All of this combined is super over the top levels of stupid, and damn does it work well. The game plays a fine line between being silly enough to be highly fun without crossing the line into boredom the entire time. In typical Platinum fashion, this ramps up slowly over time to give you bigger and badder set pieces and boss fights right until the end.

But let’s face it; combat is the most important thing going for this game. This has definitely got the usual run of hack and slash going on, but at its core that’s not really the most effective way to fight, and in practice there’s a lot of enemies that actively can’t be killed that way. Using the Legion is entirely the where combat ends up. The Legions sort of act on their own, but you’ve also got direct control over them. You can throw them towards and drag them through enemies. The chain that binds you to your Legions can be used to wrap up and stun enemies or trip enemies that are charging in your direction. Each type (Sword, Axe, Bow, Beast, Arm) have different special abilities that can be used as additional offensive or defensive capabilities both in combat and in environment traversal. Quick time events that flash up can also be used to allow your Legion to do combo attacks, defensive measures, and even parries against incoming enemy attacks.

All of this may sound complicated for a fast-paced action game, but it ends up having a really good flow to it. The Legion capabilities are all just different buttons on the controller, so you don’t have to do complicated things to activate them. It becomes more of a game of identifying weaknesses, having the right Legion out, and being ready to react when combat events are occurring. Rather than it becomes tedious to do all these things, different actions becomes second nature. A lot of this definitely comes down to fantastically well done combat tells – for example, charge attacks have a huge red line prior to attack to allow you to line up your chain trip, quick time events for parries have a visual flash and audio stinger as well as a bit of time dilation for extra activation time – but the combat pace is also really well balanced. It’s fast combat, but leans just slow enough to give you time to fairly react, allowing you to maximize damage output without turning into button spam.

By the end of the game, you end up just rolling through these things without stopping. That boss up there is only around the midway point of the game, so you can imagine how ridiculous it gets by the tail end of the game. I ended up finishing this one in about 25 hours, and there’s definitely some more to be pulled out of it. There’s multiple endings (also typical of Platinum titles), multiple difficulties, lots of side quests, cat collecting (!!!!! 11/10 game of the year), and generally just a lot of fun to be had. While I may not recommend getting a Switch for this one alone, if you’ve already got a Switch this should definitely be on your short list, at least until Bayonetta 3 comes out.