Tag: switch

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Game Ramblings #66 – Axiom Verge

More Info from Thomas Happ Games

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PS4, Windows, macOS, Linux, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Solid core combat mechanics with a great range of weapons
  • Visuals nail the retro look without feeling unnecessarily simple
  • Traversal mechanics (or lack thereof) end up becoming a big problem as the game goes on

Axiom Verge is a bit of a tough one to crack.  From a visual and combat mechanics standpoint, this is obviously a Metroid-inspired game, and in a lot of ways ends up surpassing what was done in those days.  The variety of weapons in particular is a real high point.  However, the game starts to drag as it goes on due to a lack of some traversal and map features that I’d consider standard in the genre, leading less to artificial difficulty and more to artificial time padding.  While the game is ultimately pretty good, those things that were missing were pretty damaging to my overall feel for the game.

Visually the game often impresses, even more so when they manage to throw in some pixel explosions.

I generally don’t try to hide the fact that I enjoy  Metroidvania games, so chalk this one up to another game I should have played a long time ago.  Coming into this, the main thing that I’d seen in the past about it were the visuals, and we’ll start there.  This is very obviously patterned more after the 8-bit style of the original Metroid, though in practice it ends up falling somewhere between the NES and SNES in overall visual style.  However, the care put into the visuals of the game elevate it above a lot of other similarly retro-inspired games.

It’s often the little details that can be pulled off in modern hardware that end up being the most impressive.  Bosses explode into pixel bits, covering the entire screen.  Warping effects give obvious hints that things are going very wrong, as well as hints that this game isn’t exactly 8-bit.  Enemy animations are simple, but very fluid throughout.  Weapon firing across a wide range of weapons all have unique effects that very plainly tell the player how a weapon works and where it will be most effective.  Overall, the game just looks damn good, even if it doesn’t look modern.

On the weapon front, things also continue to impress.  Rather than Metroid’s slim selection, Axiom Verge comes with a wide range of weapons that can be selected from at any time.  These range from your simple orb weapons to lock-on lightning beams to bouncing orbs to flails.  This is combined with a default radial selection menu that can be hopped in and out of with great speed to allow the player to quickly and effectively switch their weapon to take advantage of their current enemy’s weakness.  This is in effect the best part of the game where combat is no longer just run and gun, but often has wildly changing tactics even on a room to room basis.

Bosses are the first spot where the game starts to show obvious points of faltering.

I’ll be the first to admit that in my head the problems I have with the game generally feel like “old man complains about missing features”.  That being said, I’ve moved on from games that came out 30 years ago.  Padding time via artificial difficulty or re-traversal doesn’t feel nostalgic, it feels old.  That’s where things started to fall apart for me in this game.

However, despite bosses being visually impressive in scale they also start to show the first sign of weakness in the game.  Generally speaking each boss has one mechanic to worry about, and they fairly universally involve some sort of jumping mechanic.  For example, the boss above involves hiding behind the purple walls that block shots, then peaking out and shooting the boss from range.  A later boss involved an annoying sequence of pseudo-random projectiles that had to be avoided via teleporting.  The long and short of it is that the bosses are visually cool, but ultimately pretty simple.  Despite the typical pattern recognition of the genre, these just don’t live up to your Ridley or Kraid fights.

Get used to seeing these environments, because you will keep traversing them for hours.

This weakness is then exacerbated by some of the choices made in traversal mechanics.  The singular main issue for me in this entire game is that there is no fast travel, and this causes a cascade of issues.  As your character’s power curve advances, it just becomes a time waste to fight enemies in areas you had been to.  You know their pattern, they die quicker, they pose no danger, but you have to run through or past them.

Generally speaking, the lack of objective markers wouldn’t be a problem in this genre, but the lack of fast travel made the end of the game a chore.  By the end, I was basically doing circles around the game world to find the one spot that I could enter with a new tool, getting another new tool, then finding the next one spot I could now enter.  If a spot I hadn’t been able to get to was still closed I moved on.  There wasn’t much fun here, it just became the pattern that had to be done.

The real final problem was an expectation of how the map worked based on other games.  Typical Metroidvanias at least give some notification if there is a hidden pickup in a general area, leaving it to the player to puzzle out how to find it.  In Axiom Verge there is simultaneously no indicators and in a lot of places, no real in-world clue that there are hidden things either.  I found a not insignificant amount of treasure in the late game by accidentally teleporting too far and ending up in a wall that looked in no way passable or breakable.  For a genre built around exploration, those two things combined to just make the loot pattern feel really awkward compared to the norm.

The bee’s unamused look didn’t get any better as I proceeded to take it out.

So I suppose the question becomes, is this worth playing?  I would say yes, with the caveat being that you probably want more patience for very old missing mechanics than I generally have.  From a core fundamentals standpoint, this is a perfectly solid Metroidvania title.  The variety of weapons does a lot to push the player to explore and find new combat situations, and honestly does a lot to allow me to ignore the very real problems the game has around traversal.  However, if some of the problems I listed above sound like deal breakers, I’m probably fairly close to in agreement with you that this one is skippable.  However, it may be worth a look even with the knowledge that it may just get shelved.

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Game Ramblings #65 – Fire Emblem Warriors

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Hack and slash ARPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: New Nintendo 3DS

TL;DR

  • Probably the best Warriors game that will come out this year
  • Same Warriors gameplay that can be expected from Dynasty / Samurai / Hyrule Warriors games
  • Good implementation of standard Fire Emblem mechanics (weapon triangle, class upgrades, etc)
  • History Mode not as varied as Hyrule Warriors‘ Adventure Mode, but still a nice side mode to the main story

Being perfectly honest, there’s no real surprise to playing Fire Emblem Warriors if you’ve played any previous Warriors title.  You’ve got a big ass field with forts, captains, commanders, and outposts that have to be captured and defeated.  You’ve got big story events that cause a constant ebb and flow of control of the field as you and your commanders attempt to win battles.  You’ve got a huge variety of units at your disposal of multiple types.  However, like Hyrule Warriors before it, this game takes the standard mechanics of its parent series and marries them nicely with the standard Warriors gameplay to do just enough to differentiate itself from the mainline games.

It’s not just combat mechanics that are pulled over from Fire Emblem. Unit class mechanics are as well.

The big thing that’s always been noticeable about the spinoff Warriors titles is that they nearly always do a good job bringing together the core hack and slash mechanics with things straight out of the franchise they are pulling from.  For Fire Emblem, this ends up pulling from a few specific areas.

On the gameplay side, the weapon triangle is the big one.  The core FE mechanic of swords beat axes beats lances beats swords is still there and as important as ever.  There’s also the archer advantage over flying units and the inclusion of mage and dragon units and their typical advantages and disadvantages.  Overall this does two great things for this game.  For one, AI units feel a lot more valuable than in my typical past experience with Warriors games.  While the AI battle pace is still slow, I can now order units into advantageous fights and assume they will win, allowing me to take the unit I’m in control of and deal with more pressing issues instead of having to be involved in every single captain or fort fight.  It also means that I was more willing to use a large roster than in past games.  I wouldn’t ever want to be at a complete disadvantage, so I’d spread my types around and hop between units, taking advantage of the weapon triangle to fight with as many units as possible throughout the game.

There’s also a few smaller features at play here that are straight out of Fire Emblem.  Like more recent games in the series, pair units are included, and allow for some flexibility in covering a disadvantage of one unit.  For example, pairing an axe unit to a sword unit allows for turning around the disadvantage of fighting lances pretty handily.  Unit bonds are also available, which unlock character-specific items that can be used for some of the higher level upgrades in the game’s version of the skill tree.  Finally, master seals are available, which unlock the higher tier class for a given unit.  In general, like Hyrule Warriors this game once again manages to feel a lot like its source despite the obvious change in style from a tactical RPG to an action RPG.

The rest of the mechanics are all Warriors, including the flashy specials.

Everything else that is there is to be expected.  You’re still going to be facing seemingly endless hordes of enemies while tearing through the battles.  You capture outposts to minimize extra spawns, capture forts to lower enemy morale, defeat captains and commanders to eliminate high powered dangers, throw flashy special attacks to eliminates dozens of units at a time, and more.  It’s as satisfying as the Warriors games ever are, even if it often feels like barely organized chaos at times.

That’s not to say there aren’t some weird little things that are fairly unique to this game.  Despite the unit variety, I pretty much exclusively stayed away from flying units.  While they were fine in the hands of AI, I often found that they would lift into the air during large combos, causing me to stay in the air flailing at nothing.  It was strange and frustrating, and generally just wasted a lot of time.  I also generally had some problems using enemy level as a gauge of relative power, particularly in the History Mode side content.  Even within single battles, I occasionally found myself battling things of the same level and same weapon type with wildly different results.  While some of this came down to simple character archetype stats, it threw me off enough times to consider it a bit unexpectedly weird.

The game likes to play favorites, giving you the generally most popular units from Shadow Dragon, Awakening, and Fates.

All that said, I generally didn’t have that many issues with the game.  Is it a deep game? Not really. You run around, kill shit, rinse and repeat with a bit of variety in mechanics between maps.  Is it an innovative game? Not really.  It takes the same core mechanics from Warriors and Fire Emblem and combines them into something that happens to work.  But is it a fun game?  Absolutely.  Even if it’s kind of stupid fun I can be pretty happy about that.

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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.