Tag: adventure

2017-08-172018-01-13

Game Ramblings #46 – Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

Genre: Adventure
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: Steam

TL;DR

Fantastically gorgeous environment and great soundtrack
Main quest line that’s entertaining to play, and gives you the right amount of push to continue seeing the new environments
High end crafting and side quests are fundamentally problematic with the game loop as implemented

Yonder is a game that at its core feels like it was made by a group of artists. The attention to detail in the environment is up there with some of the best games available this generation. The soundtrack backing it is the right level of ambient orchestral music without getting in the way. All of this is tied into a fantastic implementation of a day/night cycle very reminiscent of its use in Breath of the Wild. However, once you go beyond the core story quest line, the lack of real depth to the game systems in place, and a crafting system that is more menu and resource frustration really shows the problems that come out in the game loop that’s available.

One of the first areas you see in the game.

Right off the bat, it’s clear that this is going to be a beautiful game experience. After an initial intro scene and cave crawl, you immediately get out into an open field that gives you a vista of a large part of the island the game takes place on, and it’s astoundingly beautiful. The characters and animals around have a simple but effective style, and everything is fairly recognizable right off the bat. Each area that you go to throughout the game then has its own core visual theme, whether it’s the snowy areas as you climb the central mountain, the palm trees near the beach, or the sparse rock formations in the desert. Each area is just as great looking as the one you just had left.

Things look just as great when you hit night time. The sky grows dawk, constellations fill it, and the player’s character breaks out a torch to give some local dynamic lighting around. At the same time, the music drops in intensity, and you really feel the encroachment of night time around you.

The core gameplay itself is built around an effective set of collection and crafting quests. The main line is pretty straightforward, with a series of quests that basically lead you into visiting each area, collecting Sprite creatures to clear off the Murk attacking the island, and collecting parts to fix the Cloud Catcher from the title. By and large these serve as a way to get you to the towns that hold the various crafting type masters, and allow you to expand your repertoire or skills, which lead into further use through side quests. While there are some systems in place on the side dealing with farming, it’s not deep enough to serve as a long term distraction. This along with the nature of the side quests really starts becoming the main problem in exposing the larger issues with the core of the game’s systems.

The side quests take the core collect/craft mechanic of the main story line, and ramp it up to 11. The problem is that the crafting system in general is just not that good, and the collecting of resources in the environment is kind of a hassle.

Materials used to craft a single bridge…

As an example, I created the above list to try and wrap my head around what I needed to craft a single bridge. At the highest level, this thing required somewhere around 300 stone, and a bunch of other various ingredients. The big problem is that stones can either be found solo on the ground, or in groups of 4 that can be mined out of a single boulder. Just from a length of time to collect, this then becomes rather time prohibitive. It also means hopping around to a ton of different areas in the crafting menu to craft individual pieces, then larger pieces, then larger pieces where each tab in was another level down in the crafting sequence. For me, there was also the fundamental problem of not really understanding why something that uses parts made out of stone then requires MORE stone. Even as it currently exists, being able to pick the high level item (say a stone arch), getting a total list of ALL resources needed to build it, then being able to one shot complete the project would have significantly improved the experience, as opposed to the current mess of crafting large items.

Scenes like this pushed me to keep playing.

End of the day, the main reason why this was not another entry into Shelved It has more to do with the fact that the game was abrupt in finishing, and I wanted to see what else the environment team had put together. While the base that is there has potential, there’s too many fundamental problems with the crafting and collecting systems that are the core of the game to really consider this one worthy of high praise. On the other hand, given the lack of content, a few changes to the way these work could fairly quickly elevate this one to a pretty entertaining and relaxing adventure title. However, if you really want to see a gorgeous game, it may be worth taking a look at anyway.

2017-08-142018-01-13

Game Ramblings #45 – Yakuza 0

More Info from Sega

Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: PS4

TL;DR

Excellent combat with multiple styles to fit different fights
Swapping between characters worked well due to how the story timeline worked between the two
Difference in tone between serious story missions and almost 100% non-serious side missions somehow didn’t cause issues

The Yakuza series has always been more of a Shenmue than a GTA, and Yakuza 0 doesn’t change any of that. This one provides a new starting point for the series, providing some back story to the events before the original entry in the series. It takes the same mix of combat, light puzzle solving, and high levels of drama, and modernizes it a bit as the first PS4 entry in the series, giving us another great entry to play. Despite being played across two characters, the story manages to send enough clues cross-character to weave together a fun narrative, with plenty of action and violence expected of the genre.

The combat in place is similar to past games, taking place in small areas walled off by onlookers, where enemy groups of varying size can be attacked. Combos of attacks can be grouped to knock down enemies, building up secondary resources to do more spectacular (and powerful) attacks. From a high level it’s fairly simple, but different variations of button holds, character placement, environmental interactions, and most importantly, multiple fighting styles add a lot of depth. Of note, the fighting styles all feel fairly different, and bring advantages to different fights. Both characters have a fairly standard brawling style and legendary fighting style, but the real fun is in one of each character’s other styles.

Kiryu’s Beast mode allows for slow but heavy attacks in a wide range, as well as a number of wrestling-inspired finishers. More importantly, it also allows for automated grabbing of environmental objects to swing at enemies, including things like motorcycles. On Majima’s side, the real standout is Break mode. This uses a series of breakdancing moves to quickly and heavily take out large groups of enemies through effective AoE attack and dodge maneuvers. In general, I was able to switch to a mode that made sense for each fight, whether I needed to do heavy damage to individuals, or keep it safe while whittling down a large group.

On the story end, there’s not too many surprises here, but it’s definitely entertaining. The more surprising thing for me was the mix of the serious story with incredibly non-serious side missions. The side missions typically had similar gameplay, but the characters you meet during them were generally absurd, whether it’s Mr. Libido being unable to contain himself, helping out fake Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg make Thriller, or Kiryu mixing up visas and pizza when helping an immigrant, I could pretty much expect side missions to go straight for the absurd. Given the seriousness and level of chaos that most of the main story had, it meant I could use the side content as a way to unwind between places where I knew I could get into big fights. This is backed by a surprisingly entertaining set of real estate content for each character to add even more depth to the things to do on the side; Kiryu runs a full real estate company and Majima runs a cabaret club.

Totally not Spielberg stares into your soul.

If there was anything I would directly point to as a severe negative here, it’s that at a number of points the story missions simply don’t tell you what to do. You’d be given a vague goal (find somewhere to hide!), with no map marker, and no obvious place to go, and be forced to wander around until you hit the magic trigger. More often than not these places would be triggered in areas where you had no NPC contacts, no reason to be in the area, and would never revisit the place for any other reason. While filling gap time between story missions doing side content allowed me to accidentally wander into these from time to time, I was still forced to effectively blanket the map covering all roads until I found the specific spot. Any sort of minimizing of the vague nature of these would have been a great help, but luckily these types of missions were the minority in place.

Overall though, Yakuza 0 was a ton of fun to play. The combat was solid, the story was enjoyable, and the side content had a lot of flat laugh out loud moments. If you’re wanting to play a Japanese GTA, this is not the right game, but if you’re looking to rekindle memories of playing Shenmue, this is a great place to start.

2017-03-19

Game Ramblings #35 – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

More Information from Nintendo

Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: Switch
Also Available On: Wii U

I kind of expected this one to not live up to the hype, especially given the reviews it was getting up to release. However, for me it definitely nailed it. Even given the quality of past Zelda games, this is a tremendously special game.

As far as open world games go, there’s a certain set of expectations involved with what you’re going to see as a player. Most of them have some form of collecathon of things all around the world, a relatively loose structure in how you get between different quests, and more recently, some way to reveal portions of the map to the player as they explore. Breath of the Wild certainly sticks to some of these conventions, but in doing so they’ve also shaped the conventions in a way that make the game still feel distinctly Zelda.

Nintendo went all the way with the story being entirely open world. Once you finish the tutorial you’re given a couple quests as is typical of the genre. What isn’t typical is that one of them is literally to go kill Ganon. From this point forward, you can either explore and do things that will expand your repertoire, or you can literally go finish the game. More than any other open world game I’ve played, this very quickly establishes the expectation here. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, and finish the game whenever you feel like it’s time to do so. Everything else that is typical of Zelda games falls into this setup. What also isn’t typical is that the tutorial gives you all of the items and skills you will earn within the game, upgrades not withstanding.

Despite some of the lead in news, dungeons are there, but you have to earn your way to them, and they can be done in any order. The dungeons themselves focus more on puzzles than combat, and tend to be somewhat shorter than past games. However, what they lack in length, they make up for in quality. The core theme here is puzzles tied to environment manipulation. Upon completion of the core puzzle, there is of course a boss fight, this time acting as proof of mastery of the skills earned at the start of the game. While not being a necessity anymore, the quality of the dungeons absolutely made them worth completing, if for no other reason than the story elements they provide showing the past of the world.

It’s also worth nothing that despite the reduction in dungeon count and size, the world itself provides more than enough to cover this missing element. Within the world you can find over 100 individual shrines to complete, as well as towers that provide the map viewing coverage typical of open world games. While these things do provide the way to fast travel, these are also the main puzzle element present in Breath of the Wild. Each tower tended to focus one on specific skill in manipulating the environment to get to the point where you could climb and complete the tower. On the other hand, each shrine effectively acts as a fantastic mini dungeon, with a huge variety in what is available. These ran the gamut of what was available in the game. Some of the shrines were just simple combat rooms. Some shrines had a focus on individual skills like manipulation of air for gliding, or the use of fire-based weapons to burn a path to the end. Still some of them were there purely for amusement, like one physics-based minigolf shrine. While completing the shrines did ultimately give rewards that resulted in heart and stamina upgrades, they also provided a nice way to break up the game as I traveled around the world of Hyrule.

Despite all the changes from the usual Zelda formula, the one that was most striking to me is how they changed the use of music in the game. Outside of towns, there is hardly any music, apart from some sporadic piano melodies. Even within towns, the music was typically fairly subdued, and the bulk of what could be called the soundtrack was composed of ambient noise from the abundant wildlife throughout the environment. When the music does kick in though, they definitely aren’t shy about bringing in some hints of the past whether it’s night or day. Overall while it’s not as in your face as is typical, this soundtrack is another memorable one in the books for this series.

What became quickly apparent playing this game was just how polished it was, and it’s always in the little details. There’s a ton of wildlife around, and it’s not just there for show. It can be hunted, and the supplies you earn from doing so can be cooked into food to heal Link in battle. Because you CAN climb anywhere, you end up climbing just for the sake of it. Because shrines are then typically glowing orange against the background, climbing anywhere typically gives you new goals on the horizon to go for, further providing you with new things to do. Large scale bow aiming with the analog stick is there, but subtle motion controls provide an extremely fast and precise way to accurately aim in small amounts for things far in the distance. Camps of enemies can be cleared in straightforward combat, but it’s also just as practical to roll a rock down a hill onto the group, send fire arrows into explosive barrels, or lead enemies into traps by chucking bombs into their midst. Those are all little separate things, but I hope it’s making my point here. The amount of polish in place is of a level that only a few other companies ever attempt to approach. This is on a level typical of companies like Naughty Dog or Rockstar, and I’d dare to say it surpasses them.

All that said, weapons that can break are still a terrible idea. It’s not that weapons are hard to find in BotW, but when you’re trying to fight a boss and you run out of weapons from lack of preparation, it can be extremely frustrating. This did push me to collecting Korok seeds to upgrade my inventory, and by the end of the game was a non-issue, but boy were early large scale fights super obnoxious when weapons started running out.

I’m the type of person that will pretty much buy hardware on launch without fail. Regardless of how many games are coming out, there’s going to be something in there I want to play. What is rare is that I recommend other people to buy hardware just for one game. Breath of the Wild is one of those. If you have neither a Wii U or a Switch, you should get one just for this game. Go grab a system for yourself or go grab one from a friend. Just find a way to go play this.