Category: Switch

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Game Ramblings #62.1 – Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country

More Info from Nintendo

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a fairly enjoyable game overall. It had a great universe, enjoyable story, fun characters, and a ton of depth. However, it wasn’t without its issues. The game, like its predecessors was somewhat grindy. The UI was often in the way of streamlined leveling. Overall, despite its depth, the game often felt like it was pushing for more for the sake of more.

Torna however feels like they really embraced the idea of less is more, and the experience is much better as a result. This is an entirely standalone experience, billed as an expansion. It’s a much shorter experience with a significantly streamlined story, rips outs a whole bunch of extraneous systems to focus the leveling aspect, and narrows you onto two main titans. Some clever changes to the battle system really finish up the tweaks, and the total package ends up being much better than the base game, despite the reduction in bullet point features.

Welcome to Torna. After hearing so much about this land in the original game, it’s nice to finally be able to run around on it.

The most obvious immediate change is that almost all of the blade collecting, and therefore a lot of the metagame leveling is gone. You only get blades that are important to the story, and each party member ends up having two blades of different types. By the end of the expansion, you’ve basically got exactly what you need to finish the game with the full suite of ability types. There’s also no longer any special blades, no multi form blades, any robot blade replacements, and no mercenary guild to level up. This all sounds like a lot of removal, but that also meant that a lot of the tedious grind simply went away. It’s entirely addition by subtraction.

The rest of the leveling setup is maintained. You get XP from kills and quests, weapon points from kills, skill points from kills, and various things can be activated in each blade’s affinity chart. As a core set this ends up playing a nice balance between having a nice range of systems without having too many, and also gives you some specific subgoals to focus on, particularly with respect to the blade affinities.

Combat should feel extremely familiar to XC2 fans, though it has some tweaks.

The battle system has also been tweaked to generally feel more streamlined, as well as a fair bit quicker paced. For the most part, people familiar with XC2 will drop in quickly and feel right at home, and I suspect they will like the changes in place.

The first big change is that blade swapping is used as a way to switch the active passive attacker, and swapping between the blades and the driver activate an attack on swap. This is used to inflict a number of status effects, particularly things like topple or smash, as well as providing a full recharge of the blade artes. In practice, it basically means that you can do a combo as follows:

  • Activate Break on one character while using all of their artes.
  • Swap to another character to inflict Topple and quickly use the full suite of artes.
  • While this is happening, the AI will typically inflict Launch
  • Swap to the third character to inflict Smash, finishing a full chain combo.

This pattern is done way faster than any similar combo would have been done in the original release. In also having the blades be the primary attacker, there’s a much more direct feel to the swap, instead of it simply being the blade out of frame swapping out.

The elemental orb / chain attack setup has also been tweaked a bit to reduce clutter. There are still orbs applied on successful blade artes, elemental orbs can be broken in a final combo attack, etc. However, the elemental chaining no longer is used to seal attacks, so a big UI element that I generally ignored is no longer there, and honestly I didn’t miss it at all.

This is still a spectacularly gorgeous game, especially for an open-world Switch experience.

So in the end, this is both a great expansion on the XC2 universe, as well as a way to generally improve on the overall gameplay at the same time. As a prequel, this covers a bunch of story that was hinted at throughout the original game in a way that only improves the universe. On its own that’s enough for me to recommend it to fans of the original. However, the gameplay improvements definitely clinch it for me. This is a much better experience than XC2, and it’s clear that the dev team is learning some lessons from their past releases. Here’s to hoping whatever comes next continues that improvement.

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Game Ramblings #86 – Yoshi’s Crafted World

More Info From Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Classic Yoshi gameplay, accessible but deep with great replayability of the levels
  • Another fantastic visual style from the team at Good-Feel

This could be a really short ramblings from a practical perspective. If you liked any past Yoshi games, you’ll probably like this. The gameplay still revolves around heavy exploration of side scrolling levels, eating enemies to get eggs, and using those eggs to find things hidden around the levels. This one does a few things to separate from past titles though – particularly in the replayability of the individual levels – that really make this a solid new entry that plays well on the go.

This is a Yoshi game through and through, eggs, cute visuals, fun levels – it’s pretty familiar on the surface.

There really is a lot of familiarity at play here, but really that isn’t very surprising for the Yoshi series. The Island games and Woolly World were a lot of fun, but really all had similar mechanics. Manipulating the firing of eggs is still the real core skill here other than staying alive. The point of each individual level is still to basically collect everything, and the objectives are still largely the same – find flowers, find 20 red coins, don’t lose hearts. There are a few core differences here though. Each flower is an individual goal on its own, along with flowers gained from the coin/heart objectives, but there’s other ways to gain flowers that become more important. In addition, flowers are used as progression blockers in a way similar to stars in Mario games, though most players will never have trouble having an overabundance. The differences in star collection are what really drive replayability in this game though.

Back side levels are one of the replay options, and also serve as a way to lean into the Crafted World gimmick.

Replaying levels really becomes key to the core loop here. Back side levels are one of the big options, where the player runs through the level in reverse to find Poochy Pups. These serve a two-fold purpose; they’re an additional goal using the same content, and they also use a speedrun timer that forces the player to ignore exploration in favor of speed. In doing so, these levels really change how the player thinks about the core gameplay in a fun way.

From a visual perspective it also really pushes the crafted aspect of the game world. You see the labels on the back of cardboard boxes, the tape holding everything together, the enemies that are holding up stage props. It all serves to give a fairly adorable setting to the world and a reason for the way the game visually exists.

These aren’t the only replay tools though. In addition to the obvious goal of finding everything, each mini world has a series of collection tasks that also provide flowers to the player. These all involve finding one to a handful of a specific prop, and the player has to shoot eggs at them to collect them. They’re small goals, but act as an addition gameplay layer to complete.

All of these replay tools really serve to push the purpose that this is a game that works as well on the couch as it does on the go. If you’ve got a large chunk of time, it’s easy to run through a bunch of levels or spend a lot of time looking for every little detail on the front side run throughs. If you’re in a commute and only have a few minutes? Go ahead and do a quick back side run or one of the collection tasks. Either way you’re earning rewards and finding new things to do, and the game works phenomenally well in allowing you to tailor your minute to minute experience to the time you have available.

There’s also some neat non-traditional diversions to do, such as this level where Yoshi balances a kart to get it through the world as fast as possible.

Realistically there isn’t much new to be had here compared to other Yoshi games, but this one definitely does the best job of sitting somewhere in the middle of a home and on-the-go experience. The huge variety of different types of tasks to accomplish means you can do things that run from taking minutes to taking hours, and this is the same thing that some of the best Switch titles I’ve played have typically pulled off. It also helps that the core Yoshi gameplay was already a lot of fun to begin with. Although this doesn’t end up being your traditional platformer gameplay like a New Super Mario Bros game, I’d still have a pretty easy time recommending this one straight out for anyone looking for a game in that genre.

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Game Ramblings #85 – The World Ends With You: Final Remix

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally released on: DS
  • Also available on: iOS, Android

TL;DR

  • Input and visual remake ported over from mobile both work fantastically well for a handheld Switch title
  • Still one of the most memorable soundtracks for an RPG from the DS’ run

This is a pretty interesting game to play on a second system if you originally played it on the DS. While the story is the same and the gameplay clearly takes its base style from the DS release, in practice it’s a much different experience due to the lack of a second screen. What this ends up being is a mix of nostalgia and new that somehow succeeds just as well as the original did, despite the years in between.

The obvious starting point here is combat. The original game had two screens of combat, the bottom which juggled manipulation of touch screen elements, and the top which used d-pad button combos to simultaneously attack two different areas at once. Since the top screen is gone, this version goes all-in on the touch elements. That tweet is just a small example where one of the player’s attacks (via equippable pins) involves dragging around environment obstacles to damage enemies. There’s a whole slew of tap, drag, slash, and hold attacks to equip and it’s all up to the player to find a mix that works best for them.

The combo attack is the reward for playing the game well, and it ends up being core to the changes to the battle system.

What’s most interesting for me was how they replaced the top screen manipulation. Under normal circumstances, the second party member is now just a normal pin. However, alternating each player’s attacks also builds up a meter that allows for a large combo attack to occur. Importantly, this combo attack also heals the party, so it doubles as a defensive maneuver as well. This completely changes the flow of battles compared to the original.

On the DS, my pattern was generally to switch my focus back and forth between each screen, doing a combo on one screen, moving the character to a safe area, then switching to the other screen. Here the focus is on one spot, and the peak way to fight is to find ways to build out your pin set to allow you to smoothly alternate between each character. In practice, this made my playing style a lot more aggressive than the original release. I was no longer too worried about avoiding damage, and in many cases encouraged taking damage so I could stay in close range. I’d maximize my attack alternation, get my combo built up, heal and do big damage to eliminate everything. It made the entire battle system feel completely new, and meant the loss of the unique second screen gameplay was not a negative.

Some of the old top screen gameplay does show up in bosses, and it’s a nice way to make boss fights feel unique.

Boss fights do bring in some of the dual-screen mechanics in a good way however. Boss fights in the original game generally revolved around one or the other character having to do specific actions in order to make the boss damageable or expose weak points. In this remake, that happens through transition points where you gain control of one character at a time to activate these actions. In the example above, the fight takes place in a music venue where one character is on the floor fighting the boss, and the second is in the rafters fighting adds to turn on lights to expose the boss. It basically ended up that the boss fights still felt really familiar and brought in some of the solid dual screen gameplay in a way that didn’t feel forced.

The mobile remake’s visuals really work well on the Switch. Everything is super crisp in handheld mode, and is a significant upgrade over the DS.

I suppose the short version here is that this is a game worth playing. I put way more hours into the DS version than I care to admit, and even for me playing this in the new format was a treat. The mix of old and new gameplay styles from the DS and mobile versions still left me playing an RPG that feels like nothing else on any system. The story was still super engaging, and the soundtrack is one of the best RPG soundtracks I’ve ever heard. If there’s anything I’d hold against this, it’s that playing it in anything other than handheld mode is a terrible idea, but I think it’s worth pulling that Switch over to your lap to give this one a whirl.