Tag: jrpg

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Game Ramblings #201 – Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Wii U

I never actually finished the original game. I hit some point where there was a huge difficulty spike and just couldn’t be bothered doing the grinding to get through whatever the block was for me. I don’t know if it was the platform being played on, other games coming out around then, or that this release got a rebalance but that was never a problem on this version. 95 hours later this game was an incredible joy to play.

Playing this game now really is a series of “I don’t remember…” moments, but I suppose that comes with the nature of this being a 10 year old game that I didn’t finish. The first thing that really struck me was that I don’t remember it taking so long to get the mechs. I was at least 30 hours in before I got the mech and at least 50 hours in before the mech could fly. However, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I spent so much time exploring on foot in ways that was absolutely fun and interesting.

The thing that struck me as impressive here that I didn’t remember is how much you can literally explore the entire world on foot relatively early in the game. Every zone has an entire level range of areas from low to high. However, high level enemies aren’t necessarily dangerous on foot because they will ignore you. They’re huge and level 60 and you’re effectively an ant. However, if you come back in a mech later on they absolutely attack you. What it did for me was allow me to just wander for the sake of wandering. Sure, I was also generally chasing some basic mission marker for extra XP or rewards, but it wasn’t like I was chasing a story mission. I was just wandering to see what was there and what I could find and generally doing it in areas that I wouldn’t get to in the story for dozens of hours. It was simply fun in the way that exploring the mainline Xenoblade games is fun, but in an even more open nature.

The thing I don’t remember about the original release is precisely where I shelved it. There’s a point about 2/3 of the way through the game where I think may have been it. In the fight I’m thinking of you fight what is effectively a gigantic floating fortress with a bunch of adds that spawn throughout it. It’s a bit of a fight of managing focus and a bit of a fight that is just checking your DPS, and it’s the one boss fight that I did manage to wipe in here.

In this release it felt appropriately hard but not impossible, and I think that feeling of balance being better exists throughout but I can’t really tell if that is a placebo effect. In classic Xenoblade fashion, balance is a wild mess of numbers that don’t really have any relation. A level 40 bug is different than a level 40 gorilla is different than a level 40 dinosaur is different than a level 40 flying blimp fish. You basically learn by dying what you should really be fighting, and the unfortunate thing about that is that there’s a lot of stuff that is hard to fight that earns you effectively no reward because it’s “low level” by the time you put up a fair fight. To me, that’s just Xenoblade and it’s a problem that every game in the series has had. The nice thing here though is that the game does a pretty good job of balancing the core golden story path to where if you’re at the level recommended in the quests, it feels appropriate. If you want a harder experience you go in slightly lower level. If you want an easier experience you go in slightly higher level. It all just works well, and that’s not something I remember of the original release. Frankly, it’s something that they didn’t really get that right until Xenoblade 2, and the remaster of this and XB1 show those learnings.

Tied into the balance thing is that I don’t remember doing as much of the “side” content in the original release, and frankly I don’t remember enjoying doing it either. In this release though, I was doing everything. I think some of that is tied into the fact that I was enjoying exploring in general. It’s easy to hit mission points incidentally when you’re just exploring anything and everything. However, I was also enjoying doing the little character side stories.

It struck me how important the character missions are to the actual plot of the game. Relative to the main entries, this is a very story light experience if you follow just the main story line. However, if you do the character stories – and importantly, are thorough in recruiting characters – you get a lot more world building. You get stories of how other alien races came to this world and are involved with the main antagonists of the game. You get back stories of how the humans got to know each other and ended up on the space ship that escaped Earth. You get to see the team building as it’s happening. In core Xenoblade games, these are things that kind of just happened as you played the game, but here are presented as side content, and I think the game experience is worse if they are treated like that by most players. There is a surprising amount of story content here if you go after it.

All that being said, the main draw for me was that there was new content in play here. It’s….fine. Ultimately the story portion of it was a better draw for me than the game portion. The game portion railroads you into a really long slog of a dungeon that takes place in a stereotypical JRPG floating island void and I could have gone without it. However, the story part closes a lot of plot holes that were never resolved in the original game and it sets them up for what now feels like an inevitable sequel and for that I suppose I’m thankful. I now want to see more of this style Xenoblade gameplay explored – although please change the combat inputs to be XC2 style instead of the hotbar. The mech gameplay is just such a fun experience that I don’t want to see them drop.

This remaster almost certainly exists because Monolith needed an excuse to do engine testing for the Switch 2 and Xenoblade 1-3 already existed on the Switch 1. If that is the justification for this existing, then hell ya. They wrapped the story of those games with 3, so opening up the story a bit here to maybe give them a path forward in the XCX story line on Switch 2 also feels like an absolute win. Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with going forward.

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Game Ramblings #199 – Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Windows

The original mainline Yakuza series showed a very distinct progression in the quality of its gameplay through the series. The PS2 entries were good, but the PS3 entries were clearly better, and the PS4 entries better still. The combat got more refined. The power curve of the player and enemies got smoother. Grinding was reduced and friction points were reduced. That’s where I feel like this one landed relative to Like a Dragon.

Sequels should be similar, but refined and this definitely fits the bill. In my ramblings about the original Like a Dragon I made note of a few places where the game felt grindy, and I think that’s as good a place to begin as any.

My first point about grinding was specifically around equipment. In the previous title, I felt like I capped out too early on purchases and crafting was too expensive. This game definitely addressed that. I hit the end of the crafting shop investment before end game, but because I still had plenty of gear to purchase out in the world I never really hit a point where I felt like I capped out there. The gear I had wasn’t necessarily end game and could be beneficial to upgrade more for optional content, but for the golden path it felt appropriate. The actual cost of everything was also lower overall combined with significantly higher drop rates. In the previous title I was getting 3-5k yen for near end game trash fights. Here I’m getting more like 50-100k yen in Japan and $1000+ in Hawaii. You are simply getting wildly more money to play with.

I also made note of needing to XP grind. There’s a few things that felt like they addressed that problem here. For one thing, bosses are simply more in line with the levels of everything around them. They aren’t wildly jumping ahead in levels compared to trash mobs, so I don’t have to overlevel just to be on even ground with them. In addition, trash mobs are giving significantly more XP – rather than 1-2k per fight, I’m getting more like 5kl or upwards of 20k for special repeatable world boss fights. It’s a huge difference in terms of time allocated to simply fighting, allowing me to spend more time doing “time waste” side content while also keeping up with the rest of the game.

The rest of combat is similar, but again at least feels more refined. The game still has combo attacks and follow-up attacks with your party, but at least compared to my memory they happen more often so the squad feels more like an actual squad with good interpersonal relationships that you built. MP-based attacks – and importantly, MP regen – feels more consistent, really pushing me to use them more often to take down squads quickly. There’s some cool expanded options around tag teams and huge specials that feel like they’re tuned to really nuke bosses quick, giving a really cool power fantasy and payoff to your squad’s growth. Basically, it’s similar but again feels more refined.

And because this is a Yakuza title, I have to talk about side content. I don’t think it’s quite as good as past entries, but there are two standouts that I need to talk about. The first is Crazy Delivery which is a straight food delivery ripoff of Crazy Taxi. It’s stupid, it’s bright and colorful, it fundamentally makes no sense, but it totally fits in this series.

However, the standout is Sujimon. In the previous game it was basically a Pokedex-only system to collate the people you fought into a Sujidex. This game goes the full Pokemon treatment. You now capture Sujimon and add them to a party, with an entire set of Sujimon side quests. This goes the full Pokemon route with gym fights and badges, leveling, 3v3 battles, weaknesses and strengths, and an entire Pokemon Stadium side content block. It’s a completely ridiculous and over the top set of content, and frankly I would have spent more time on this than the main game if I wasn’t so hooked on the story.

I don’t really want to talk more about the game because I think the story is worth experiencing completely without spoilers, and it would be tough to talk more about the game without getting too deep into that side of things. However I can easily recommend this one. It takes what I thought was already a really solid JRPG transition for the Yakuza series and begins its iteration that the previous action-focused titles did. You can tell that they took feedback from the previous game seriously, and it shows that the next however many titles we get in this style are simply going to be instant plays.

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Shelved It #21 – Mario & Luigi: Brothership

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

It’s not unprecedented that I drop a Mario RPG on the final dungeon and boy was that the case here. If you’d have asked me about 10 gameplay hours ago how I was going to start this ramblings it would have been “this game would have been better received if it was under any other IP” but this game just did not know when to end. Since then I had two plot twists at the end boss, a handful of really unnecessarily long dungeons, and a final dungeon with so many wings and unnecessarily spongey enemies that I just said “forget it, I’m done.”

And honestly, that’s a shame.

But for now, let’s go back to where I thought this set of ramblings was going to start. I really do think that this would have been better off with even a different name. Calling this game Mario & Luigi has so many expectations that come with it. Sure, there’s the timing-based combat but that had been done outside of M&L to where adapting that to another RPG wouldn’t have been seen as weird. What that name really brings with it is an expectation of a certain metagame style with large scale exploration in a mushroom kingdom setting. That is completely not this game.

This game is a series of relatively loosely connected 30 minute segments that you can kind of leisurely play at a relaxed pace that eventually loop back to a core story every now and then. However, independent of the M&L baggage this is a really fun metagame loop. This works well as an RPG where you have some agency over what order you’d want to do things. In other genres it would work well as a puzzle game where you go to different spots to solve unique puzzles. In an action game this would work where each loop has new enemy archetypes to engage with. Various Mario games have already proven that this metagame loop works well for a platformer where each new area has fun new challenges to engage with. However, it is not Mario & Luigi. If they had simply called this Super Mario Brothers-ship a ton of expectations would have been dropped, and frankly it would have probably been better received.

That is, until the end of the game. So many RPGs that are simply good but not great have the same failings around sticking the landing and this really is just a whose who of failures to stick the landing.

At about the 20 hour mark the first signs of this start to show up with the introduction of a Glohm mechanic. It makes sense tied to the story, but from a gameplay perspective it’s a debuff that prevents brother actions and can make enemies stronger. The main issue I had is that this is a sign of them running out of enemy archetypes, to where the glohm is in place to re-use old archetypes, but stronger. Typically besides just stronger, this actually means faster, and often that doesn’t just mean faster, it means fast enough that when we multi-attack, you can’t actually dodge all damage because game mechanics prevent you jumping/hammering that fast. Unavoidable damage in a combat system built around avoiding as much damage as possible is really a huge problem.

Then at about the 30 hour mark the dungeons start to get noticeably longer. 30 minute dungeons stretch into 45 minutes, then 60 minutes, and it really starts to negatively impact the fun of getting through a dungeon. Fighting the same enemy archetypes has a certain shelf life before you get bored, and this really starts to hit that cap. In isolation, it’s simply annoying because the pay off of a dungeon is usually a cool boss fight. While that’s certainly the case here, they start being capped off by unnecessary plot twists. The plot twists are obvious that they are coming, so they are both not fun and just generally feel like they’re extending the game for no reason. Past the plot twists are simply revisits of existing islands, so you don’t get new cool stuff. You’re just fighting stronger things that you’ve already fought (see previous note) and you’re not meeting new people. It just feels unnecessary.

For me, at about the 35 hour mark I then hit the final dungeon. I got to the end of the first wing, saw a hub with seven extending spokes, and literally just said “oh no”. It wasn’t actually seven wings since they loop back on themselves at times, but it was enough to be negatively impactful. I started playing a bit of it, but it was clear that it was going to be a slog. The just normal trash enemies very quickly stopped being 2-3 attack kills and started being 5-6 attack kills. They stopped doing 20-30 damage and started doing 80-90 damage. They stopped being occasional glohmed enemies and started all being glohmed enemies. It just stopped being fun. It wasn’t that it was hard, and I guess that’s my problem. It just felt like it was setup to kill time. I was already overleveled and it was dragging, so grinding to overlevel more was not appealing. I got back to the central hub and went “I’m good.”

I’ve never worked on a JRPG but in my head it feels like something that shouldn’t be difficult to tune around. There are certain metrics that testing should identify as fun. How long can a dungeon be before players start to grow bored of it? How long do players identify as “fair” to defeat a trash enemy? How many fights feels like enough to learn how an enemy archetype works before mastering it, and how many times can the player fight it before feeling bored? These are things that all worked very well for the first 20 or so hours of this game. I totally get that there’s a need to finish on bigger and badder, but bigger and badder should still be served by metrics of what is found as fun. Is an extra turn to kill an end game enemy a bad thing? Probably not but double the amount of turns probably is. 30 minute dungeons extending to 60+ is probably a bad thing. Fighting an archetype 10 times is fine, but 20 times is probably bad.

JRPGs that are simply just good flex too much from what is fun. JRPGs that are great do not. In my head as both a developer and consumer it’s as simple as that. Find the metrics that are fun, and make sure that you follow within some close range of that for the entire game. Make difficulty come from difficulty actually ramping up, not from length. Brothership simply failed that test.