Tag: switch

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Game Ramblings #62 – Xenoblade Chronicles 2

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Visually spectacular JRPG filled with large monsters and even larger environments
  • Overly complicated level and gearing systems that could have worked much better if the UI wasn’t so frustrating
  • Solid battle system that has been smartly streamlined since the previous titles, but still has late-game issues with overuse of one-hit mechanics

I’m going to open with what nearly had me shelving the game, because it was the same type of weird late-game design pattern that plagued both Xenoblade and Xenoblade X.  For reference, I was at 84 hours in and on the final sort of boss run before the end of the game.  That late into the game is not the kind of place you want to turn the design on its head.

Throughout the game, I had basically setup my party to where I was a DPS/off heal, one of my characters was a full time tank, and my third was rotating between pure DPS and mixed tank/heal, depending on my needs.  Basically, the main character was in no way setup to actually BE a tank, but that’s what the end game expects of you.

The TL;DR without spoilers is that your entire party gets taken away, and two of the main blades that you develop through the story get taken away, leaving the main character on his own to fight a chain of 1v1 boss battles, without the two blades I’d built my gameplay style around, and needing me to scrounge together what blades I had to try and bullshit my way through the boss fights.  Looking on Gamefaqs and looking at my roster I barely had what I needed leaving me with one choice; bullshit around mechanics to get through it.

I threw on two hammer tanks that have a shield move containing major block percentage and health regen, swapped between the two of them only attacking while the shield was down and the other blade was recharging, and made the fight trivial.  Was it fun? No.  Was it doable? Yes.  That right there is the main problem.  And that’s to say nothing of the final boss, which had some fairly RNG-heavy mechanics that made an otherwise easy fight into a dance of potential instant death.

So with that said, if I’d have known 20 hours ago what to prepare for to avoid having to do that, is this a good game?  More or less, but it’s definitely not without its issues.

Xenoblade 2 follows the pattern from the previous titles where it looks way better than most games on the platform, even in portable mode.

Like its predecessors, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a large scale JRPG with huge environments, too many different systems that go into the character’s power, and a somewhat shoddy UI.  It uses the same battle system as the others where it’s technically in real-time, but more or less plays like a turn-based RPG in practice.  However, it’s streamlined a few things for better overall flow.  The biggest problem that it has is that it doesn’t really attempt to fix the problems with its predecessors, instead adding more systems that didn’t feel needed.

While not everything is this large, the scale of the top enemies continues to impress.

Since it is the core of the game, the battle system is the thing that made XC2 last as long as it did, despite some of the problems I mentioned in the opening.  The battle system in place is very much a JRPG-style one, but more in the vain of Final Fantasy 12.  The player has real-time movement, but doesn’t attack while in active movement.  Each player character (driver) is joined by a passive character (blade) and work as a pair in battle.  However, it is a deep system, and I’d argue very nearly too complicated for most players.  I’m bolding a few things here for reference of how many things are in place.  Basic attacks happen automatically, charging up driver artes.  Successful driver artes charge up blade arts.  Successful blade artes can be chained to apply elemental orbs that can then be used to extend the length of a chain attack.  Driver and blade artes are tied to swapping out blades, which can be done in real-time.  If this all sounds complicated, it is, but it’s all very easy to activate thanks to some smart changes to the battle system.

Previous Xenoblade titles used a scrolling list to activate artes, so there was always a bit of a fight of scrolling around in menus to activate things.  XC2 changes this to be much easier.  Blade swapping is on the d-pad.  Driver artes are on B/X/Y face buttons.  Blade artes are activated with A for the player character, and LZ/RZ for party members, then use small quick time events for success chance.  Chain attacks are activated with the Start button, and then use the blade artes for damage.  Basically, if there’s a button around, it’s used for an attack.  There’s no scrolling, no in and out of menus, no looking around to figure out what’s going on.  It’s all extremely fluid, so even with the huge amount of things going on, it’s easy to do what you need to do.

This is backed by continued fantastic variety in what can be done with artes.  There’s a whole mix of artes based around damage bonuses for hitting at certain angles.  Heals can be either direct for healer blades, or incidental potion spawners for attackers.  Tanks have a variety of threat-generation and damage mitigation for good back and forth timing play.  Reaching into blades, a wide range of elemental types means that running a wide variety in your party will benefit your ability to maximize damage in any situation.

Despite everything going on, the rhythm of the fights always feels really good.  Swapping between blades is fast and used often.  Both driver and blade artes charge quickly and always feel impactful.  Chain attacks offer a nice way to interrupt the enemy flow, and also offer the player a fun dance in trying to burst elemental orbs and extend the chain attack.  Basically, the act of fighting is the best part of the game and will keep you coming back to do all the little side things that can be found.

Blades come in a large variety, though they do have some hilarious outfits.

However, when you start getting into the rest of the game systems, XC2 starts to feel like a game that has added systems just for the sake of adding them.  This is best illustrated by all of the different forms of experience-based things that have to be gained to truly increase your party’s power.

  • There’s core XP from kills that goes into the character levels like most JRPGs.  However, there’s also rested XP earned by completing quests and other side items that can only be earned by resting at an inn.
  • Killing enemies also earns SP, which is a currency for drivers to apply to passive skills, such as core stat boosts, ability to use certain abilities at the start of battle, etc.
  • Killing enemies ALSO earns WP, which is a currency earned per-blade to increase the level of the driver artes tied to individual blade types.
  • Every single blade has a unique affinity chart that has to be leveled up.  This can be done in any number of ways, whether it be kills on specific enemies, collecting things in the environment, completing blade-unique side quests, and more.  However, you have to go into the affinity chart of the blade to activate things they earn; it isn’t automatically activated when earning is complete.
  • Trust can be earned by completing quests and battling with blades.  For most blades, trust is used to unlock new tiers in their affinity charts.
  • Some blades have multiple forms, which each need to be leveled separately.
  • For those who don’t care about spoilers, there is a unique leveling scheme:
    Spoiler

    One driver can also be a blade, but can only level one of those forms at a time.

    [collapse]
  • One of the main characters also uses an artificial Blade, which as all the normal leveling systems, but also has a unique minigame that has to be completed in order to earn a unique currency that goes into core upgrades specific to these blade forms.
  • Part way through the game, the player inherits a mercenary guild, opening an option to send out unused blades on missions to earn XP, rewards, and affinity chart leveling.  It basically becomes mandatory for leveling more than just your core set of blades.

If all of this doesn’t make your head spin, then you’re probably as much of a JRPG fan as I am.  However, the problem is that these systems are all in separate menus found in separate places, and often interrupted by multi-second loads.  At best it can be described as clunky, and really adds a lot of unnecessary hassle to a bunch of systems that probably could have been largely combined into passive earning through battle.

It’s a good thing the banter is fun, because some comedy breaks are needed after dealing with endless menus.

That said, the story kept me coming back, even when I wanted to shelve the game near the end.  Although playing the first title isn’t necessary, the end of XC2 does tie the two games together nicely.  The game’s overarching story is also fairly cliche as far as JRPGs go (boy finds girl, wants to help her achieve her goal, drama, betrayal, etc), but the interplay between characters is generally entertaining enough to rise above it.  This is further extended in the return of the Heart-to-Heart segments, where specific drivers and blades act out little skits to the side of the story.  It’s a lot like the Tales of series in that regard, but it’s always a nice little break from the rest of the game.

In general, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a tough game for me to place.  I enjoyed the hell out of a lot of it, but the last 10 hours of the game were frustrating as hell for no good reason.  I enjoyed the depth of the systems in place, but they make it hard for me to recommend to anyone but core JRPG fans, and the menu systems backing them were clunky as hell.  If there’s any single thing I can point at that anyone would enjoy, it’d be the soundtrack.  It’s phenomenal.  If nothing else, this is another point that Nintendo had one hell of a 2017, giving us one of the best JRPGs of the year, warts and all.

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Game Ramblings #59 – RiME

More Info from Grey Box

  • Genre: Adventure/Puzzle
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Windows

TL;DR

  • Light puzzle-based gameplay feels like it aspires to be Ico/Journey, even if it doesn’t quite reach those heights
  • Fantastically good soundtrack and beautiful visual style
  • Disappointing performance problems on the Switch, even in docked mode

Admittedly this is a game that should be played on something other than the Switch.  At the end of the day this is more of an experience than it is a straight game, with the bulk of the gameplay existing as small and simple puzzle segments wrapped around a lot of audio and visual mastery.  As such, it deserves to be played in as high fidelity as possible.  That said, I’m an Unreal Engine developer, and this is using UE4, and my curiosity got the better of me.  While the Switch did an alright job keeping up, it was clear that the folks couldn’t quite wrangle the hardware in a great fashion, but the downfalls there couldn’t stop this from being a worthwhile play through.

The story runs through the five stages of grief, with visuals matching the appropriate area. In this case, depression carries the theme with rain and dark lighting throughout.

Any game that tries to be more of an emotional experience than a typical game needs to carry a strong theme, and RiME does a lot to succeed here.  In this case, the story takes place going through the five stages of grief, with each of the four main levels and epilogue covering one of these.  While your typical gameplay was the same in each area, the dangers associated with each spot tended to carry towards the theme.  In bargaining, for example, the player is attempting to resurrect robots in a series of dark caves while attempting to avoid a horde of faceless humanoids.  By the time we get to depression, these faceless creatures have stopped even attempting to interact with the player, leaving him to his own as things start to crumble around him.

In the anger level, the player is constantly harassed by a bird-like creature, attempting to stop his journey.

The best use of this though is the anger level.  Immediately upon entering it, the player character is thrown by a flying creature down into a small desert area.  Throughout the rest of the level, he has to dart from hiding place to hiding place avoiding being attacked, and never really being allowed to rest.  While there’s no actual dialog in this game, the idle animations make it clear that the player is afraid of his situation, and the direct anger shown by the creature plays right into the theme of the area.

The fox partner is an important helper in showing the player where to go, which is often necessary due to somewhat inconsistent level design.

That said, the gameplay doesn’t quite keep with the rest of the presentation aspects.  One of the most obvious problems is that it can often be REALLY easy to get lost.  While there is some merit to exploring and finding some hidden artifacts and collectibles, there were quite a few times where I simply didn’t know what direction I was supposed to be going.  The real main clue that something is the right direction tended to be looking for climbable ledges in weird spots, rather than more elegant environmental solutions.  This is solved through the use of a fox, which tends to place itself in the direction you want to go, yelping away to lead you in the right direction.

Beyond that though, the rest of the gameplay is pretty basic.  The pattern has a tendency to be a single room puzzle, followed by a bit of traversal, or a single room that can be looped back into itself in multiple vertical layers.  Puzzles run the gamut from block pushing to light manipulation to the use of physics to get through the environment.  However, they don’t really ever get to a point where the solution isn’t pretty easy to arrive at, and feel like they serve more as pacing instruments than actual gameplay.

While the Switch version doesn’t lose as much visual fidelity as I expected, performance suffered as a result.

Having played this on the Switch, I can also only recommend to play it elsewhere.  It’s not that the Switch version is bad, but the performance was pretty typically under 30 FPS.  In general, as an Unreal developer this was a disappointment.  There’s some areas where things could have been obviously cut to improve frame times (sight lines in open areas are huge, and could have used more aggressive LODing).  The level streaming the other platforms use to break up the levels is also in place here, but causes a much more significant framerate impact.  That wouldn’t typically be a huge issue, but a lot of the streaming points took place at areas where more important interactions with the environment were occurring, rather than at more passive hallway areas.  In general, it doesn’t feel like a game that should be suffering from the sort of performance issues I was seeing, especially relative to its competition on the system.

All that said, this is absolutely a game worth playing.  While it’s not quite the classic that Ico or Journey have been recognized as, it’s still a pretty solid example of a game as a piece of art.  Visually it uses a simple art style to very cleanly represent the emotional state of the player’s story arc.  The audio design is fantastic, and its soundtrack is one of the best of the year.  However, play this one on as high-performance of a platform as possible; it’ll be absolutely worth the bump.

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Game Ramblings #57 – Super Mario Odyssey

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: 3D Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Another great entry in the Super Mario series, with great platforming mechanics, a predictable but fun story, and great world locations to explore
  • Collectathon-style worlds didn’t work as well for me as the more focused Mario 64/Sunshine style individual stars, but the story moons in particular were great
  • New core mechanic of taking over enemies and using their abilities was a great focus for the design, and works fantastically
  • Theme song of the year – go buy it on iTunes or Google Play Music

I’ll be perfectly honest from the start here; I still think Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine are better games.  While Super Mario Odyssey is definitely a fantastic game on its own, the change to the star collecting mechanic into something more akin to Banjo-Kazooie often felt weird to me with a strange mix of really good focused moons alongside completely incidental ones that you can find in things like piles of leaves.  That said, once I get beyond that change the rest of the game was fantastic and is as good as any Mario game we’ve seen before.

Flick a hat at an enemy and more often than not you take them over, gaining their abilities and strengths.

Since it is the core difference in the game, let’s start with the takeover.  For various story reasons, your hat is now alive and can bind Mario to the soul of his enemies, or something to that effect.  The end result is that you can now become your enemy.  Take over a Goomba, and you can now build stacks of goombas and stop sliding around on ice.  Take over a Cheep Cheep and you can now swim under water without needing to breathe.  Hell, take over a T-Rex and stomp the shit out of everything around you just for laughs.  This even extends to seemingly mundane things like the little traffic cones in the city that you can use to catapult Mario around.

This new core ability and the set of enemy mechanics that come out of it are used to great effect.  A large portion of the boss fights use specific environment and enemy combos to change things from just being your standard 3 butt stomp affairs.  Almost any puzzle solving segment will involve finding the nearby enemy type to use their skill set.  Even just for changing up gameplay a bit, it’s nice to be able to warp into an enemy and use a completely different set of skills than Mario on his own can do.  There’s even a surprise at the end that leads to one of the most bombastic finishes to a Mario game that I can remember.

While most bosses are typical scale for a Mario experience, that wasn’t always the case.

On the boss front, there really was a much wider variety than normal.  There’s a recurring set of bosses that act as this game’s substitute for the Koopa kids, and they’re the normal 3 hit to kill with minor mechanical changes.  However, there’s definitely a few much larger bosses in place.  For example, the New Donk City segment has a large centipede boss that can warp in and out of buildings, and the only way to defeat it is to hat-possess a tank and shoot its weak points.  A later fight pictured above has a very non-Mario dragon boss that ends up being more about attack avoidance than offense, with distinct cooldown segments where Mario can land his damage.

The end result of all this is that both by sheer quantity, as well as mechanic variety, this is the widest set of boss fights that Mario has ever seen, and the game’s pacing greatly benefited from it.  At a typical rate, I was seeing a boss every 30-45 minutes, giving me a nice set of pseudo-open world collecting, followed by a high intensity battle.  The consistency of this pace and the mechanical variety allowed for the game to pump up the action when needed to avoid the slow pace trap that other heavy collection platformers have fallen to.

Little touches like the 2D segments gave a lot of life to the world, and some fun hints at the past.

However, it was that collection aspect that ended up being the strong low point for me in an otherwise fantastic game.  The amount of collection just didn’t make sense, and often times felt like fluff to me.  In a typical world, you’d have 3-5 moons that were mandatory per-story, then the need to collect an additional 15-20 just to power up the ship and leave for the next kingdom.  Out of those, I’d estimate about half were purely incidental; a glowing stump may be a hint at a hidden moon, a music note starts a 10 second run to collect all notes, or hell, just a moon floating out in the open that you have to climb a tree to collect.  Among the ones that required a bit more effort, you’d typically see a segment similar to a simplified hidden shines in Super Mario Sunshine, where some quick platforming or single-mechanic enemy would grab you a guaranteed obvious shine and loosely hidden shine.  While there were certainly a lot of shines to get, it often didn’t really feel like there was much point to a lot of them, and I’d have rather seen a larger focus on expanding the story or hidden-area shines into something more meaningful.

There’s definitely a few other minor things there that didn’t really hit.  The motion controls in particular are pretty terrible, but purely optional.  On the hardware front, I’d recommend playing with a Pro Controller over the Joycons, as I had far too many deaths caused by the signal loss that is effecting them.  Some weird mechanical bugs, such as an unintended quick pivot when using fire flower boosts also killed me too many times in some tight movement areas.  However, they’re not really the types of things that kill enjoyment of the game, at least beyond some grumbling at the time problems came up.

What kind of Mario game would it be without Bowser’s Castle? It’s seen some upgrades this go around.

That said, while the collectathon may prevent me from ever doing a 100% run, it certainly didn’t stop me from really enjoying the hell out of what I did play.  End of the day, the core mechanics of the game are just too good to miss out on.  The platforming is as fun as it’s ever been and for the moons that push for depth, it’s more important than ever to be on top of my game.  Even just the act of running around the worlds to get to the next objective is fun to do due to the much larger inclusion of vertical elements and enemies to takeover to traverse them.  While it may not hold up to me like 64 or Sunshine, this is still a game worth getting a console for, and that right there says a lot about the quality that’s in place.