Tag: action

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Game Ramblings #28 – The Last Guardian

More Info From Sony

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4

The Last Guardian is about as niche a recommendation as I can ever give to a game that I highly enjoyed.  This is definitely a game that has taken the things that were learned on the related Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to make a great experience.  However, it also brings most of the negatives along with it.

The thing that stands out to me the most having completed this game is how realistic the actual character of Trico feels.  Despite being a giant flying dog thing with the attitude of a cat, it feels like a creature that would not be out of place in our world.  It was typically the little things that Trico did that brought this out.  When going into tunnels that it can’t fit through, it sticks its face into the hole and sulks like a dog that had been punished.  When you call out to it to follow after you, it will bark back at you.  When its facing enemies, it will growl and roar at them while attacking.  The realism that they’ve brought to the character is fantastic, but it also leads to some of the game’s biggest problems.

Like Ico, this game is effectively a long chain of puzzles surrounding an overarching protection quest.  Like Ico, this also brings a lot of the same AI-related problems with it.  While in a lot of ways the somewhat catty behavior is often purposeful, I spent a fair bit of time simply fighting with Trico to go to the right places.  Since a lot of the spots I would end up could only happen while on Trico’s back, there were sections where I’d be spending 5+ minutes simply trying to get the AI going back in the right direction.

The Shadow of the Colossus influence comes in with how the game plays.  Interactions with Trico are very similar to interactions with the colossi.  You jump up onto the soft areas of Trico, and can climb around all over its body.  However, you aren’t stabbing Trico, but giving him commands about where to go, healing injuries sustained in fights, or simply using Trico as a leg up to get to higher platforms within puzzles.  However, like Shadow, the climbing is also extraordinarily clumsy, to the point where Trico’s movement was often throwing me off his body, many times to my death.  Climbing through the environment also has a lot of the same difficulties.  In the end the game’s animation is both its blessing and its curse here.  While the character animation for this traversal is spectacularly good, its reliance on IK solving means that all motion is realistically paced, which for games translates to slow and often unpredictable.

The rest of the problems from the past couple of games are sort of scattered throughout as well.  The art style itself is going to be hit or miss for a lot of people.  There’s a lot of work put into the real-time feathers covering Trico, but the rest of the environment is generally fairly simple and visual the same throughout.  Outdoor scenes are a mixed bag of scenes lit spectacularly, and scenes suffering from severe overbloom.  Performance in general is pretty unreliable, particularly outdoors.  Puzzles can often be fairly vague leading to a lot of guess work, particularly when they’re relying on Trico’s AI doing things to solve them.  The camera is also a mixed bag, often getting stuck on scenery, particularly when riding on Trico’s back.

So all that said, if this sounds an awful lot like a combination of things seen in Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, that’s because it basically is.  For better or worse, the things the team learned in the first two games, and the problems that existed in the first two games are both here.  Fans of either of those are largely going to find that this is the game they’ve wanted for the last ten years, but if you don’t find yourself in that group, this is going to be a pretty rough place to hop in to the line.

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Game Ramblings #25 – Shadow Complex Remastered

More Info from Epic Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows (Steam, Windows Store, Epic Games Launcher), Mac App Store, Xbox One, Xbox 360 (XBLA)

Back before they spawned the mobile juggernaut known as Infinity Blade, Chair Entertainment released a nice little Metroidvania title called Shadow Complex.  In honor of why the hell not, a remastered version has come out for PC and current gen consoles.  With the great folks at Limited Run Games releasing a physical version, I figured it was as good a time as any to make a run through this one again, and as it turns out, the game is still damn good.

If there’s one genre I’m a sucker for nearly as much as JRPGs, it’s Metroidvania-styled Action/Adventure games.  If you ignore the setting, this one definitely strays much closer to Metroid than a lot in the genre.  It’s got upgradeable guns and pickups that unlock ways to get through new doors, a computerized mech suit that tells you where to go, and eventually a chargeable dash that breaks through even more doors.  Basically, a lot of what is here is straight out of Metroid, but grounded in a somewhat more believable Earth-based setting.

That said, all its similarities are definitely not a detriment to this game.  They’ve captured a lot of the exploration magic that the Metroid series, and in the roughly 3-5 hour adventure, you’ll traverse a lot of the same areas multiple times, but always in new ways.  The pickups and upgrades are scattered all over the place, so returning to old places always brings side paths to grab things that were just taunting you out of reach before.  To some extent I was even going out of my way once I got some of my larger weapon upgrades just because I’d remembered a handful of upgrades that I wanted to get right away.  In addition, unlike some games in this genre, ammunition for secondary weapons (grenades, missiles, etc) are plentiful, and available for recharge at all save stations, so you never feel crunched into not using some of your more powerful arsenal.

That said, there’s definitely some things that are missing that I wish were explored more.  There’s really not much in the way of memorable boss fights in this game.  For the most part, you fight the same spider mech a handful of times, with a couple other fights that can be mechanically exploited to avoid difficulty.  As an example, one fight has you up against a giant mech wheel that is jumping around the walls of a ring-shaped room.  By positioning yourself just behind one of the corners of the room, you could avoid all damage, while still being able to easily shoot at the boss’ weak spot, giving an easy victory.  In addition, there’s some points, particularly in the final battle, where I would get shot at and effectively instant killed without much of an idea where damage sources were coming from.

All that being said, when this originally came out in ’09, it was one of the best Metroidvanias that had come out around that time.  In 2016, I’d still say that it’s one of the better Metroidvanias out this year.  While the upgrade didn’t bring much new to the table, other than some improved visual fidelity, the game itself has not lost anything in its age, and should definitely be played if you missed it the first time around.

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Shelved It #1 – Paper Mario: Color Splash

More Information from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Wii U
  • Shelved At: Bowser’s Castle, basically the last couple hours of the game.

It may seem weird that I shelved a game when I knew I was near the end of the game, but for this game it was basically the point of no return for me.  Paper Mario: Color Splash was a frustrating experience.  Frustrating because it’s a much better game than the previous entry, Sticker Star, but also because the key story points generally introduced changes in mechanics that seemed to counteract everything that had been going on before.

One of the big things that really turned me off from playing Sticker Star was the need to collect stickers just to continue the battles.  This has unfortunately not gone away, but at least for the bulk of the game, is not a huge issue.  There are now a couple shops in the main town that sell standard cards, as well as the more special-case Thing cards that are the primary mechanic of most boss fights.  That said, the convenience of them being there is fairly heavily counteracted by the need for them to be there.  Going into a boss battle, you generally don’t know what you need to do to win.  You may know what cards you’ll need, but not when or how to use them.  Because of this, it was not uncommon for me to go into a boss battle blind, effectively expecting to die so I could actually prepare for the fight.

Because this entry is also not a stat-based RPG, the effective growth curve of enemies results in you needing upgraded variants of cards, and therefore a higher overall cost.  The cost is both coins if buying directly, or amount of paint used if using unpainted cards.  This ended up pushing me to a point where to get past where I shelved the game, I would have had to just grind through battles with cheap cards in order to buy the expensive cards I now knew I needed.  Because the first fight in Bowser’s Castle effectively starts out by removing your paint supply, then limiting you to specific colors of cards, simply stocking up on cheaper unpainted variants was a recipe for death.  While grinding then wouldn’t have been difficult, it wasn’t worth the amount of time needed given how many frustrating boss fights I’d already encountered getting to there.

If nothing else, there were some positive signs in this game if a future entry cleans up some of the less fun shenanigans.  The story itself was much more entertaining than either Sticker Star or the sort of related Paper Jam, and was definitely much closer to the quality of the RPG entries in the series.  While the battle system had some collecting issues, when I was just using the cards themselves, it was still a mechanically tight and fun to use turn-based system, with a lot of variety in the cards beyond the standard jump/hammer.  The visuals and soundtrack were also both fantastic.

At this point, I’m not really sure what this series needs.  My instinct is to say they just need to go back to making a straight RPG experience, and Paper Jam was certainly enough of an indication that a Mario RPG is still fun to play.  That said, they’ve shown that non-RPG Paper games can be a lot of fun with Super Paper Mario, but that was nearly 10 years ago at this point.  I suspect what they really need to do is just take a break and try some other things before deciding to come back, because their attempts at new things within this IP have become at best a mixed bag.