Tag: switch

2019-09-202019-09-20

Game Ramblings #93 – Astral Chain

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.

2019-08-302019-08-25

Game Ramblings #92 – Fire Emblem: Three Houses

More Info from Nintendo

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.

2019-08-182019-08-14

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.