Tag: switch

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Game Ramblings #54 – Golf Story

More Info from Sidebar Games

  • Genre: Golf / RPG
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Charming RPG with gameplay reminiscent of Mario Golf on the GBC/GBA
  • Entertaining writing, good mix of quests, and a bunch of clever hints at games from the past.
  • Golf game is serviceable and fun, despite obviously not being the focus of the game.

Out of everything that surprises me about this game, it’s that I can’t figure out who the hell the development team is.  The game’s credits simply had their studio name, they have no website or Twitter beyond the game’s info, and I can’t find a damn thing on Google.  Yet despite it all, this is potentially the best of the so called Nindies to come out this year.  While the game owes a lot to Mario Golf before it, it leans heavily on the writing and questing RPG to make a game that ends up being one of the best non-combat RPGs I’ve played in a long time.

Sometimes you play golf, sometimes you have rap battles.

Given that this is RPG first, the writing was always going to be important.  While this definitely isn’t deep, and it definitely ends abruptly, the writing is lighthearted and entertaining throughout.  Each course has its overarching story that takes place through a couple main quests and a lot of optional side quests.  These run the gamut from a Caddyshack-inspired battle against (and with) moles to rap battles between an old country club and a rival invading course to a haunted course where you help create a zombie army.  While the main story line of rising into the pro tour provides the overall push to the end, the individual stories and the wide range of characters you meet throughout are easily the thing that kept me going back and digging into all the available quests.

Among others callbacks, you sometimes just end up playing Pac Man while invading a base Metal Gear style.

There’s also a very distinct sense of playing homage to games of the past.  The visuals are very clearly styled after SNES and Genesis era games, even if the quality is somewhat higher than would have been possible on those systems.  However, it’s the game references that really hit home.  The Pac Man example above is just one.  There were also side quests based on Micro Machines, NPC hints at the Mario

Tennis series, a built in recreation of NES Golf, and more.  There’s a lot of love shown in bringing in elements of the past in ways that really succeed in giving a lot of life to the RPG aspect of the game, elevating it significantly above the similar Mario Golf games in that regard.

Even playing golf itself, you get a lot of non-standard variety like this Par 1 only course.

Since this is a golf game that side also had to not suffer, and while it’s nothing deep it works pretty well.  It’s a pretty standard 3-click setup (start, set power, set aim) for shots.  It also has your standard mix of curving, spins, and wind effect on the ball flight path.  There’s a bunch of different clubs with various effects on shots as well, giving a bit of flexibility in the gear build out.  The RPG aspect also plays out here, with XP going into the golf stats.  Like Mario Golf, increasing power lowers the other stats, giving a balance between quickly increasing shot power vs. not throwing other stats out of whack.

However, there’s also a lot of depth at play here in the style of game available.  For the most part, there’s really no normal courses.  Even the first course with a standard layout has mole traps that can cause your ball to be carried all over the course.  From there you get courses with no greens, tar traps instead of sand, par 1 courses, turtles that bounce your ball down the course out of water, and more.  In general you basically have to be ready for anything and can’t settle into the typical pattern of a golf game where any course generally plays the same.  The only thing that really was consistent here is that I could aim smack at the flag and more often than not sink the shot, which admittedly is both highly satisfying and incredibly hilarious when hitting a 300 yard shot into the hole during a match play event.

If I made the rules, this would definitely be in there.

I think my big takeaway here is that Golf Story proves the value of making RPGs without combat, particularly in lieu of Nintendo abandoning the idea of the Camelot-developed mobile sports RPGs.  There’s enough golf here to still be considered a sports game, but the RPG aspects pulled in bring so much to the game that non-fans can also find a lot to enjoy here.

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Game Ramblings #49 – Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Turn-based Tactics
  • Platform: Switch

I hope you’ll pardon my pun here, but Ubisoft has managed to pull a Rabbid out of a hat.  This game seamlessly blends the Mario and Rabbid IPs into a single game, throws it into a turn-based game with some fantastic use of the Mario universe for its move set, and popped out a game that is one of the best I’ve played this year.  While there’s a few things that I’d have liked to see improved in the overall mission structure, the end result is still a fine example of what developers can do with the Switch, and an interesting example of a team making a Nintendo quality experience, without being Nintendo themselves.

The visuals would be at home in any of the recent 3D Mario series titles.

The biggest surprise to me is that this feels like a Mario title through and through.  While the gameplay is obviously different, the little details are all there.  It’s the sound of a coin when you pick it up.  It’s the vibrant and varied environments across four main worlds (and the Peach’s castle hub).  It’s the inclusion of red and blue coin challenges scattered throughout hidden areas.  It’s Mario’s jump attack straight out of the Mario series RPG titles.  Everywhere you look, there’s little details that make this feel extremely familiar, despite the huge differences in gameplay.

The nice thing about all of that is that it’s worth exploring every corner.  Scattered throughout the environment are series of small challenges, puzzles, and hidden crates.  While most of them contain little bonus art or music pieces, a number of the crates also contain weapons or power orbs.  Make no mistake, the underlying systems of this game are very traditional to the tactics genre.  Weapon upgrades for primary and secondary weapons are here, giving you obvious damage upgrades, but also adding secondary hit effects, bonus damage to specific enemies, and more.  While there’s no direct XP for killing enemies, the power orbs you earn in battle or find throughout the environment act as a functional replacement, being used to purchase upgrades in character-specific skill trees.  These skill trees act as a way to build out each character’s skill set, as well as provide more obvious passive bonuses like increased health and damage.

The facial animations in cutscenes are universally good, and usually play up the more slapstick comedy aspect of both series.

All of the skill upgrades compound into what ends up being a fantastic battle system.  The basics that are there are all solid, and work in a very XCOM-like fashion.  During your turn, you can run around and hide behind various pieces of the environment.  In a very Mario way, you can warp to different platforms via pipes, or hide behind blocks.  Also of note, brick-based blocks can be destroyed via friendly or enemy fire, and fans of the Mario series will know where not to hide if this is a concern.  However, where the battle system really shows its greatest potential is in its exploitation of movement mechanics, both as an offensive helper, and a defensive measure to keep enemies away.

On the weapon side, the two main mechanics I ended up leaning heavily on were bounce and push.  Bounce does just that; when you hit an enemy, it causes them to bounce in the air, taking additional damage, and also giving them the potential to get thrown off the level for further damage.  Push on the other hand causes the enemy hit to ball up and start rolling around the level.  They can then rebound off walls, blocks, and other enemies to cause a chain reaction of bouncing chaos.  In both of these cases, I could take advantage of the damage increase, but more often than not I was using these mechanics to push the enemies backwards, and control the flow of their movement beyond them just moving towards me.  I could also use things like the rebound on push to cause enemies to be knocked out of cover, offering more opportunities for large damage.

There were also some other traversal-based mechanics that were handy to use.  Each character could dash through enemies, causing damage.  However, each ally also had a special move for traversal.  Mario could also jump off an ally, and jump stomp enemies, giving both additional damage and travel distance on the hop.  Rabbid Luigi could dash and drop Vampire on an enemy, causing an HP siphon to be applied.  Peach could jump off an ally, and heal anyone within range of her landing location.  This all added up to each turn not just being about weapon damage, but in seeing how many things you could chain in one turn for maximum potential.

Even the ghost town still feels very Mario, with Boos replacing the normal lamps above houses.

Given all that, the only real criticisms I had were involved in the occasional parts of the mission structure.  There were a handful of escort missions that work about as poorly here as in every other game that uses them.  The escorted units had no attack, and typically moved slower than the rest of the party, as well as spawned enemies.  These missions usually just devolved into running forward to wipe enemies, then running everyone back to act as a damage sponge for reinforcements flanking from behind.  The other main problem was in the mission chaining within each chapter.  Rather than allowing healing between missions, you could only heal at the end of each chapter, and had to fight with the HP pool you had through multiple battles.  There was healing to alleviate the problem, but I felt like they could have played up to higher difficulty within a single mission if they’d gone with a more typical heal in between battle setup.  As it is, quite a few of the missions in place were simply too easy due to the chaining being in place.

You can never go wrong with an opera boss.

It speaks volumes to the skill of Ubisoft’s developers that they pulled this off.  They managed to seamlessly blend two franchises that have next to nothing in common, beyond a love of occasional slapstick comedy.  They put them into a genre that hadn’t been done for the two series, and yet made it feel like it belonged.  They turned what many gamers assumed was a joke, and made it one of the best games that has come out this year.  It also speaks volumes to Nintendo’s ongoing willingness to let external development teams have the keys to the kingdom, in a manner of speaking.  We’ve seen this with Metroid for years, Zelda with Hyrule Warriors, and a ton of great platformers out of the team at Good-Feel.  Is this worth buying a Switch for? I dunno, I’d save that for Breath of the Wild, but it certainly makes a good case for the console.

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Game Ramblings #40 – I am Setsuna

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Vita, PS4, Steam (Windows)

TL;DR

  • Despite the story being thematically similar to FFX, holds its own well enough to make the game worth playing.
  • Battle system was well done.  Easily possible to break the game with certain skill and gear combos, but the positioning additions to the ATB system were well placed.
  • Doesn’t do anything egregiously bad, but there’s some obvious flaws in most parts of the game
  • Game in general showed signs of being either incomplete or rushed to completion, but the core that is there is really strong.

I am Setsuna is definitely a JRPG that points back to the kinds of games Square was releasing back in the 90s and early 00s.  It directly uses a very Final Fantasy styled ATB battle system, uses a very Final Fantasy styled story, and has the same sort of mage/healer/melee/assassin character archetypes that the Final Fantasy games used.  While there are some definite places where the game has some pretty major flaws, the base that is there shows a lot of promise for the next title by Tokyo RPG Factory, Lost Sphear.

Since it’s realistically the thing that any JRPG spends the most time in, let’s talk about the battle system.  If you’ve played anything between about FF4 through 9, you’ll recognize the ATB system in place.   The battle runs in real-time, filling a meter.  When it’s full, that person can attack.  Faster characters attack more often, rinse and repeat.  In general the system has worked fine for 25 years, and in this game it’s no different.

The big things that I am Setsuna really does well that are kind of atypical usually have to do with positioning.  Rather than being fixed on one side of the screen, both friendly and enemy characters can move around the play field.  This allows for some interesting setups in hitting multiple enemies at once, whether it’s with AoE magic, melee swipes, or pass through projectiles.  This also means that party buffs, healing, and more can also take advantage of the AoE nature in order to optimize spell use.  There’s also a number of combo skills with multiple party members that take advantage of this, allowing you to line up multiple enemies in one go for much larger damage.

However, the battle system also shows one of the biggest signs of lack of polish in the game.  In general, the boss fights were a lot of single mechanics.  Put on the right gear, find the right party members, and you’re guaranteed an easy victory.  Because skills are equippable, the amount of flexibility is astounding, but can lead to some extreme breaking of the game’s difficulty curve.  For example, the Counter skill blocks ALL physical damage, so phsyical-only bosses revolved around one party member doing nothing but staying in Counter, one party member casting a Taunt skill on the Counter person, and a third party member being there to grind out damage.  It got so bad that by the end of the game, I was using three very specific party members for everything.  The title character Setsuna had a skill that did massive AoE damage + AoE Heal.  I equipped her with MP drain on damage taken and MP drain on damage dealt passive abilities, effectively meaning she did everything at next to no cost.  The second character cast a party Protect spell, and the third just did damage.  It made the game trivial, but it also seemed like what the game was balanced for given the incoming damage numbers.

The game’s presentation was the next point where there were some big highs, and also big lows.

A normal view within the I am Setsuna overworld.

For one thing, the game is astoundingly gorgeous.  The overworld takes on a very painteresque feel, with billboarded mountains and trees over a simple 3D landscape.  The main problem here is that there are no battles in the overworld at all, so you’re just running through from point A to B as fast as possible.  The little details as you walk around in the environment, from the snow falling out of trees to the trails you leave in the snow are also always well done.  However, that’s the big problem; EVERYTHING IS SNOW.  There’s effectively no environmental variety, so the towns all look similar, the forests all look similar, the caves all look similar, and they are all frozen over.

In a nice touch, the snow trails fade over time as you wander through the environment.

The soundtrack was also a bit of a mixed bag.  While the piano-only focus of the soundtrack works fantastically well in emotional moments, high tension moments lack any sort of depth to the soundtrack, with a high pace and high volume piano not really ever being enough to carry through.  The fact that the battle music adds in a bass line and some light percussion makes this even more frustrating, because they clearly put at least some thought into expanding out the landscape of the music they were writing.  It definitely didn’t need to be fully orchestrated, but adding a bit more depth in places to the music would have greatly benefited the game’s exciting moments.

Having a pixel art styled developer thanks island was a nice touch in the end game.

The little details were the last place where things were a bit of a mixed bag.  Once you get the air ship, you can run into a developer island that shows a clear nod to the team’s past games.  It’s entirely pixel art, with classic 16-bit music and visuals.  However, there’s a lot of places where things seem like they were left unfinished, with numerous empty houses in the overworld, bath houses with no meaning, and worst of all, gaining a new party member quite literally at the door to the final boss room.  There’s also a number of high level dungeons and scattered encounters that would be great to fight post-game, but can be a big pain to get to due to some of the traversal back through long linear dungeons. I hate to say the game feels unfinished, but there’s some things that definitely give me the impression that the team’s budget couldn’t quite match their ambition.

In general, I am Setsuna is a game that JRPG fans should at the very least check out.  There’s better out there for people new to the genre, but for folks looking for an ATB-system throw back, this is a pretty solid one.  For a game that’s regularly under $30, you can do much worse.  However, don’t expect a perfect game.  It definitely has its flaws, but for me it was worth overlooking them to experience what had been done here.