Category: PS5

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Game Ramblings #188 – A Plague Tale: Innocence

More Info from Asobo Studio

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch

I was going to sit here rambling about how this really did a great job of combining a solid story with solid puzzle stealth gameplay. I was going to sit here rambling about how the rat setup really did a fantastic job of tying something core to the story (the black death) to the core gameplay mechanics. But then I got to the last chapter which leaned way heavy into combat and now all I want to do is complain.

It just kills me when a game does great things for the entire length right up until the end, then leans into something that was barely used throughout the game. Combat is this game’s trip up. The core of the game is about being slow, so when the end of the game throws some sequences where you have to make relatively quick combat decisions it’s clearly not in the game’s best interest. When the game’s aim assist is about making careful locks that can be lost when the target is moving fast, it’s clearly not in the game’s best interest to have stuff running at you across elevation changes. When the stealth is best while avoiding one or two targets around a bunch of obstacles, it’s clearly not in the game’s best interest to throw a bunch of targets at you across an open arena. The last chapter did all of those things.

The sequence above is a perfect encapsulation of what I think is good to not do in a game like this. The sequence has you hiding next to an off screen moving cart while a sequence of six dudes runs at you through this little drop down. Among the ways I’ve died included: running just too fast while I couldn’t see the cart and getting one shot by an off screen arrow, missing lock-ons entirely because the guys were moving too fast, missing lock-ons entirely because I started aiming while they were too far away, losing lock-ons after releasing the fire button because the animation had to finish, early on paying attention to where the cart was and missing a dude sneak up behind me. It’s all the things that work really well when you’re being purposefully slow and considering your options in stealth that fall apart in a faster paced section.

It’s not that I don’t get needing to ramp up for the finale, but this is a frustrating one to work through. The preceding chapter introduced a new rat control mechanic that felt like it had a ton of legs, but it was then effectively lost in combat. Rather than really leaning into the puzzle solving it was used as a finishing maneuver. You’d put out whatever light sources then send in the rats, rinse and repeat. Even the final boss encounter was dodge a few things, send in the rats. It felt like it never took advantage of the puzzle solving possibilities.

I guess I just wanted this to lean into the puzzles through the finish. This game was absolutely fantastic when its goal was to hide in the grass and trick enemies into getting eaten by rats. Getting through 10 hours of gameplay only for the last hour to fall into combat feels off. I guess what I’m saying is land your game on what made it good to begin with. Don’t land it on something made purely for high drama.

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Game Ramblings #185 – Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5

This game doesn’t have the benefit of being the first in line. It comes on the heels of the astoundingly good FFVII: Remake and continues the ongoing story. However, that wasn’t really a problem for most of the game. It continued to really push the things I liked while adding a larger open world adding a huge, varied, and beautiful open world experience. However, finishing it left me a bit at a loss – the game was definitely extremely good and had I not played the final boss I would be higher on the game, but something about the way the game wrapped up left me at a place of wanting something different.

Note: This ramblings is mostly going to be spoilers, so I’m hiding it behind spoiler tags. Obviously, read at your own risk. My ramblings for the original game absolutely covers a lot of the good here, particularly with combat, so I’m not going to retreat that stuff here.

My disappointment was tied to both the final boss from a mechanical standpoint and the way the story wrapped up, but for now we’ll start with the boss fight.

Spoiler

The final fight is (unsurprisingly) against JENOVA and Sephiroth. Where Remake had a fun spectacle fight against Sephiroth and the Whisphers, this game had a slog. The final fight in this game is at least 8, or maybe 10 phases (honestly, I lost count) full of all the worst JRPG tendencies. The fight is too long, it has too many unblockable RNG attacks, it has too many party wipe elements, it’s not hard until you get immediately wiped, it changes your party without control too much. It was just not a fun fight. Spectacle, yes. Fun, no.

The party changing was really my biggest gripe with the fight, because it made a lot of the phases not particularly fun. After playing a game for 60+ hours, I kind of had some built-in likes and dislikes to my party. Aerith was always the right one for me to have in the background handling heals. Cloud was my main damage person due to his ranged/melee flexibility, but I was always comfortable swapping him with Red. Barrett and Tifa were pretty swappable for me in terms of decent damage but great stun build-up. I was never particularly effective with Yuffie, but I could make use of her as an NPC in the party due to her useful elemental switching. Cait Sith was always a black hole for me because of his ineffectiveness without the Moogle being present and the requirement to charge the ATB meter to bring it out. I’d say I could generally switch between 3-4 of them and be immediately comfortable as long as I had some of them around.

However, each phase of the boss fight swapped the party around without your control. Some phases were just Cloud/Zack solo, which is not really all that fun. Healing while also damaging while also avoiding incoming damage is a lot, and it resulted in me caching ATB charges in case I needed them for healing instead of burning the boss. Some phases had me in random combos of the non-Cloud cast, such as a phase of Rifa, Red, and Yuffie needing to take out wings that switch their magical weakness to stun Sephiroth. The unfortunate thing is….I really didn’t have the party setup for varied magic because my focus for that had been on Cloud and Aerith, neither of whom were available. Ya I could redo my materia with a reset, but I was already 40 minutes into the fight. The final phase was the real kicker though, and it wasn’t because it was hard. It was because it felt incredibly random.

I had a series of wipes that basically resulted from “lol bad timing sucker” that didn’t feel avoidable. One wipe I had just used my ATB to heal and it was followed by Sephiroth throwing out Heartless Angel, which reduces the party to 1 HP. Because I had just used my ATB, I didn’t have any leftover to heal and couldn’t avoid damage long enough to charge it. One wipe was caused by me using an ATB attack, which was long enough that Sephiroth started Skewer during my animation and triggered it right as I finished my animation, leaving me unable to avoid it. Cloud died, and Aerith didn’t have enough ATB or really much of an ability to dodge Sephiroth’s attacks long enough to build up charge to get Cloud back up and heal Cloud and heal herself. The final wipe of the night was me getting to the last phase, which involves dodging a deadly moving attack for a bit, while also requiring you to burn him down, while also requiring you to stun him before the move ends and he wipes the party.

Ultimately my problem with the last phase, and the fight in general, was that it never really felt hard but kept finding ways to just wipe my party with single attacks. It’s not fun when that happens in general, and it’s even less fun when the party setups have changed how you’re used to playing 70 hours in, and it’s even less fun when those attacks are unavoidable and you’re an hour into the fight. The way to get through the fight is to basically just not use ATB segments, keep them around just in case, then burn them when you’re hit with the big unavoidable things. For the last phase’s big final attack, keep them around, spam them when the attack starts, and just burn to the end. Chipping away with basic attacks and storing the ATB charges just made an unnecessarily long fight even longer. As I found out I was about one Thundara away from winning on my final wipe when I finished the game during my lunch break today, which is a really annoying way to have ultimately gone from about 80% health to 0 in an instant.

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On the story front, I was also kind of disappointed with how things wrapped up, though the jury is still out there based on whatever the third game ends up being.

Spoiler

It was obvious from the previous game that this one was going to end right at the point where Aerith died in the original game. I have no problem with the fact that she died here, but I do have a problem with how they arrived at that. The previous game’s entire core conceit was that the party was able to defy fate and set their own future. This entire game felt like it was doing its best to ignore that. This was as close of a step by step retread of the original game between Midgar and Aerith dying as possible, other than some sidetracking with alternate universe Zack. However, you get to the altar in the Forgotten City and Cloud blocks Sephiroth’s attack. It’s a huge moment meant to shock FF7 fans. It’s then immediately ended by a static screen that transforms it into Aerith being stabbed. That part felt like it was directly meant to evoke the same shock of the original game’s death scene, but when it immediately follows Cloud changing fate it feels deflating and unnecessary. It’s obvious that this is now Sephiroth having direct control over fate and returning it to what he wants. It makes sense. But it also feels unearned.

One of the big things about the entire ending segment is that it’s obvious that Aerith also has control over fate in some form – whether that be direct control or at least an ability to cross between different parts of the multiverse shenanigans at play. She’s able to bring Zack into the Sephiroth fight. She’s able to bring Cloud between multiverses. She’s able to join the Sephiroth fight despite dying, presumably by coming in from the Lifestream. It just feels like she died because she was resigned to dying because that’s the fate that is required to block Meteor in the original game. It feels like the hope of fighting against fate from the original game is gone because that is what was required of the story. It again feels unearned.

If the entire point of the original game was that the party can decide their own fate, this all feels wrong to me. Sephiroth being able to so easily set fate despite showing no ability to do so at this scale previously feels sudden. Aerith suddenly not wanting to decide her own fate despite being so for it previously feels sudden. My problem with all of this isn’t that these things happened, but that they feel like they were conveniently done to maintain the original storyline. Where Remake felt like it was setting up for a new future, this feels like it was purposefully to reduce new things from occurring. It feels like a setup for part 3, rather than something done to result in an interesting part 2, and in turn it weakens the impact of both Remake and the original FF7 because it all became predictable in the end. I guess I was ultimately hoping for Aerith to live, not necessarily because I wanted her specifically to live but just because I wanted part 3 to be something different. Now I feel like I know exactly what is going to happen. The excitement of possibilities I had coming out of part 1 is now just gone.

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I don’t really want all that to make the game sound like it was bad though. I was disappointed by how it was wrapped up, but ultimately I played it for 70 hours because it was fun. The combat is a refined version of what we saw in Remake and it’s still an absolute blast – as long as you’re in control of your party make up. At this point I’m now curious what part 3 will be. It feels predictable at this point to expect it to wrap up precisely how the original game did, but I’m hoping that they go in a new direction. The story team has laid enough potential places for story changes to occur instead of being a retread of the original. Remake gave me hope that we were going to get something new and interesting, and I’m hoping that they don’t miss the opportunity.

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Game Ramblings #184 – Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Windows

I was pretty thrilled with the series’ change to JRPG in Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon but I wouldn’t like if I’m still a bit of a sucker for the series’ action gameplay in 1-6. I thought that the series had kind of reached its peak and didn’t need to explore more in the genre. Gaiden doesn’t necessarily change that feeling, but as a much smaller and quicker experience than core games in the series, it feels like a nice place to fall back into for a little while.

From a story perspective, this is an interesting one as it fills in a lot of the time gap between Yakuza 6 and roughly the mid point of 7, but as seen from the perspective of the series’ previous protagonist Kazuma Kiryu. In doing so, the change back to action gameplay makes a lot of sense. It’s a Kazuma story. It’s only focused on his actions, and not the actions of the Yakuza 7 party. From that perspective, you get thrown into a nice tight game. From a core perspective, I finished this one with a very heavy emphasis on completion and getting distracted in about 20 hours, which was about 30 hours less than my playthrough of Yakuza 0 and about 50 hours less than my playthrough of Yakuza 7.

The slimmer nature also extends to combat. The stance switching is still there, but it’s now only two styles. There’s the yakuza style which is more brawling-focused, and is a bit of a combination of some past styles with an emphasis on bigger damage at a slower pace. Agent style on the other hand is a speed and gadget-focused style new to this game. Of real note to me was the inclusion of a spider gadget that works surprisingly similar to the Marvel Spiderman web slinging, allowing you to do things like pull weapons to you, wrap enemies as a stun lock, or throw enemies across the map. It’s a surprising addition to the series that just works extremely well at giving a stance that has potential at range, while still being melee-focused from a core combo perspective.

That said, where the story was pretty compact the game did not skimp on side content. These are again largely retreads of past games, which makes sense for a smaller side story, but there’s a lot of them. Billiards, darts, a number of board games, and gambling are all available as quick hitting distractions. The thing that’s surprising here is the amount of content available. Billiards has multiple types (9-ball, 8-ball, etc) AND a set of trick shot challenges. Darts has multiple game types as well as a range of collectable dart types that ultimately improve your throws. Gambling has multiple game types as well as different betting tiers to allow you to go against more difficult situations. There’s no reason for these side things to have any depth, but here we are. It’s a staple of the series and it’s been implemented to the standard depth even in a little side game.

Of particular note for me was the inclusion of pocket circuit from Yakuza 0/Kiwami. This is based on the mini 4WD RC car hobby where you can build out custom cars using a variety of different part types, and leave the car to drive through a set course as fast as possible. This as a side game was surprisingly deep, with track types built for different specialties like hill climbing, turning control, high speed, and more. Winning races was always a matter of figuring out what gimmick the track had, then testing a car configuration built around that, then going for victory. While it’s inherently a racing mode, the fact that you don’t have direct control of the cars made this feel like more of a puzzle game than anything else, which was hugely surprising.

However, the biggest distraction in the game for me was the Coliseum. While this is a huge part of the core story of the game, it later unlocks as a wide-ranging arena mode for both solo and team play. While it definitely has some aspect of climbing the ranks through harder and harder fighters (and frankly, being the best money-gaining option in the game), the team mode was the thing that really caught my attention. This allows you to recruit people in the world and add them to your combat team, which you can then train through the ranks. Each person has some core specialty (damage, defense, healing) and some activatable skills, allowing you to play a little bit of party building to create a team whose capabilities best match your own style of play. This is again one of those systems that looks simple on the surface but has a surprising amount of depth.

I’m not surprised that I enjoyed this game given the past entries of the series that I’ve played. However, I am surprised at the level of content that Sega put into this. This was supposed to be a little side entry, so there was no reason for it to be something that I ultimately spent upwards of 30 hours in. It’s absolutely a core Yakuza game to me. It has a great golden path through the story. It’s got fun little side missions to complete. It’s got a ton of non-combat side content with a huge variety. It just is Yakuza, and it’s got me even more hyped to play Infinite Wealth in the near future.