Tag: square enix

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Game Ramblings #136 – NieR Replicant ver 1.22474487139…

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Steam

Playing remakes – and not just remasters – is always interesting. How do they modernize the game without ruining what people liked about the original? Do they choose to add or remove anything to change the game at all? Playing remakes when you didn’t really play the original is even more interesting. I bounced off NieR on the PS3 pretty hard, though I don’t remember why. However, I really enjoyed Automata so I figured it was worth a revisit. As it turns out, I definitely enjoyed Replicant a lot this go around, although it has some spots where it definitely shows its age.

In hindsight, this ones feels a lot like Automata, and that’s probably what makes it work out so well for me at this point. My Automata ramblings cover the basics, but to be sure the ARPG systems still work great here. The mix of melee and ranged combat, as well as your occasional bullet hell chaos works really well still. It’s generally clear whether a boss is more susceptible to what kind of attacks, and you plan accordingly to get your big damage dumps. It just works well.

However, the thing that struck me is how overwhelmingly fair it is. There just aren’t big fuck you moments. If you execute your offense well, you won’t have problems taking out enemies. If you execute your defense well, you won’t have problems avoiding damage. If you’re paying attention to enemy tells you’ll be ready to dodge things. The game just isn’t going to punish you if you’re paying attention.

Having talked to a few people about the original release, this seems like a big change. From what I understand, the original wasn’t necessarily unfair, but leaned into difficult tuning more than it should have. To me this feels like a conscious effort to align the game with both Automata, as well as a larger mass market. You can go to a harder difficulty if you want to, but the game doesn’t feel designed around punishing the player even on that harder difficulty. It just feels tuned to be right.

However, that was something they could absolutely control when remaking the game. What they couldn’t control was the overall metagame that was there, and that part is definitely showing its age. The first thing that stood out to me was how minimal gearing was in contrast to Automata. You have weapons that can be upgraded and some basic mods that can be applied to your gear (+damage, +defense, +magic, etc) but compared to the chip system it feels pretty slim. I just didn’t derive much gameplay out of it, because I basically picked a weapon that fit my style then applied the best mods and didn’t really think about it.

The general story flow also just didn’t age well. There’s a lot of mindless back and forth between the same areas just to finish story quests (run to coast town -> go back to your village -> go back to coast town -> go back to your village) and with so few unique areas, it wears out pretty quick. The lack of quick travel for most of the game also exacerbates the issue. You just spend a lot of time mindlessly running in comparison to the original.

This is pushed way to the forefront in the design of the game’s endings. Ending B is a replay of the second half of the game with a few unique story bits added. Ending C and D are replays of the second half of the game accessible only after you collect all weapons, which then adds a unique selection to the end boss. The new ending is the sole new addition, but frankly it wasn’t worth replaying the game so many times to get to it, so I just watched it on Youtube. Automata definitely learned a lot from this one in terms of making the chase towards multiple endings more fun and more unique. Replicant, even in modern form, is a bit of a drag.

That said, this game is worth playing even if you only get to the first ending. Even with its problems the combat is just that good. This and Automata have a combat flow that I’ve rarely felt nailed so well in other games. The closest that I could really compare it to would be something like Bayonetta in terms of mixing the grand scale and tight action. It’s just consistently fun and exciting to get to and fight through bosses, and each one leaves you wanting to push through the story problems just to get to that next adrenaline rush. For that alone, this gets the approval.

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Game Ramblings #125 – Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Rhythm
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch

I sat down to play the game and immediately got smacked in the face with a sense of having played this game before. The systems that I was going through; the interface at the end of songs; the way things were unlocking. I’d done it before. Then it hit me – this is a Theathrhythm game. I absolutely love the three Theatrhythm games on the 3DS and I don’t know why I never recognized what this was before its release. Ya the name isn’t there and they moved to a rear-camera 3D view, but it’s the same developer, the same systems, and the same pattern. Most importantly, it’s just as good.

Starting this as a comparison against Theatrhythm is really the place to start. The obvious change is the switch in view from side-scroll 2D to rear-scroll 3D, and that brings some oddities. Something about that change took me a long time to really grok, and I think it came down to a couple of main things.

The first is that there’s no mark to really establish the beat on the board. Looking at games with a similar viewpoint like Guitar Hero, having that scrolling beat indicator really just helps to establish some sense of depth to get some basic timing in your mind’s eye. It also didn’t help that the enemies popping onto the board didn’t have consistent timing. Some would be stationary as you scroll towards them. Some would walk towards the screen. Some kind jumped and weaved. Because of that I also couldn’t really depend on depth perception as a tool for timing the song out.

However, I hit a point probably about a third of the way into the game where I became less focused on hitting a beat, and more focused on hitting a melody, and that drastically changed how I played the game. There’s a tendency in these songs to use a bit of a Nintendo trick. The first time they introduce a melody, it’s a bit on the easier side. You’ve got enough of it to be able to hit the notes while listening to what is playing. The second and third time’s it comes around, it’s all-in and you’re responding to the full melody that you now recognize. They do this on even the highest difficulty, so you have an inherit ramp up in the song as you go through a couple loops of it. It works really well to allow you to learn on the fly, then really come back on a second go through fully knowing the song and ready to hit that full combo.

The rest of the core systems will feel familiar to players of Theatrhythm FF. Instead of directional swipes, you’ve got joystick flicks. Instead of screen holds, you have button holds. Instead of lanes per-character, you have attack buttons per-character. Instead of slide input segments, you’ve got in-air notes to catch while drifting Sora around on screen. There’s some nice additions there in terms of allowing you to do multiple attacks at once by pressing multiple buttons, but it still all feels familiar to me as a player of the Theatrhythm games.

If there was one last thing that really caught me off guard, it’s that this game did a fantastic job actually telling the Kingdom Hearts story. Ya, I’m not lying. This game covers the story of the entire franchise so far through cutscenes and voiceovers, and it does it in about 10-15 hours of gameplay. You’ve got coverage of all the main games, the important plot points from the spinoffs, and it’s all told in a concise way. In a series that effectively prides itself on being completely baffling, I retained more in one rhythm game than I did playing the entire rest of the series last year.

Now, because this is Kingdom Hearts, they couldn’t get away with not doing some stupid plot twist, and the end of the game has some important lore that ties the end of KH3’s DLC to whatever comes next. While I do recommend playing this one, if rhythm games aren’t your thing you’ll definitely want to catch up on the new lore via Youtube. It’s definitely a very Kingdom Hearts thing to have put new story into a recap game, just because they can.

I mean, I guess this is an easy recommendation. This is both really entertaining on its own as a Kingdom Hearts recap title, and a fantastic rhythm game. It takes systems that worked really well on the 3DS, and transforms them just enough to flow really well on a TV and gamepad, once I stopped trying to treat it like Guitar Hero. It’s also a great way to go back and hear how fantastically good the soundtrack of this series has been over the past 20 years.

Plus the game has One Winged Angel. That’s worth at least a +1 on the review scores.

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Game Ramblings #111 – Trials of Mana (Remake)

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch (original in Collection of Mana and remake), Windows
  • Originally On: Super Famicom

Where Final Fantasy VII Remake took a classic and completely reinvented it, this is more of a careful remake. Ya it does some things different than the original. Ya it’s in 3D. However, it follows a pretty safe path in modernizing the original instead of reinventing it. At the same time it’s a lot of fun on its own, so I didn’t particularly mind the areas where it still felt stuck in the 90s. If it wasn’t for AI difficulties, I would have no problem pushing this one more, but the AI really ran into problems that I’ll get into.

Where Secret of Mana’s remake felt odd because it stuck to its design, Trials feels good for the same reasons. Trials in general was always a more modern approach to the ARPG formula, having things like distinct combat areas, combo-based attacks instead of stamina, easy access to magic and skills, etc. It all worked pretty well on the SNES. In 3D it still works just as well thanks to some pretty solid implementation of hard lock targetting and target switching on the right analog stick. In its current form, it feels pretty reminiscent of the Tales of series, which caught me pretty off guard. The fights have a pretty good flow to them in normal trash fights, and for the most part the bosses played a balance that I really enjoy – not punishingly difficult, but longer in form and with multiple distinct phases, forcing you to keep focused and learn on the fly.

However, the boss fights are really where the AI struggles. As the game progresses, there’s more frequent segments where some high priority targets spawn with a timer. At the end of the timer is usually some punishing mechanic – maybe the boss gains 15% health back, maybe there’s large AoE damage, maybe there’s more adds, maybe it’s a guaranteed party wipe. By and large these are things that MUST be killed, and fast. However, the AI has extreme problems targeting them, and if you even get lucky, the AI typically won’t hit them more than once or twice before going on cooldown. Of the probably 6 or 7 times I party wiped in the game, I think only one of those was because of something other than a timed segment where the AI simply didn’t attack.

On the other hand, the game is extraordinarily clear about how the enemy is going to target you with special and magical attacks. Targeters are large and red, and very precise to the area that will be hit. They also fill in various ways to indicate when attacks will take place. Circle AoE fills from the center out. Sweep cones will go from the inside to outside of their sweep. What I like about all of this is that dodging attacks is never about small tells or dramatic animations. It’s 100% about paying attention to where you are, what the targeter is doing, and having an idea of how long you can stay in place attacking before dodging the hell out of the way. It’s both incredibly clear in execution, and allows for attacks to be incredibly punishing when they hit you, which ends up being a very fun and very fair combination.

The rest of the game kind of is what it is. The story is a straight pull from the 90s, and is a plot we’ve seen 1000 times before. It’s got a pretty cliche fantasy take on some other dimension dude taking over someone’s body and sending its minions in to sow chaos and take over the world. On the other hand, they’ve added a ton of voice acting across the board, so the story that is there is much more alive than in the past. Towns still feel like 90s JRPG standards. Ya there’s a bunch of people, but they nearly all throw irrelevant one liners in conversation. As a result, towns still work as the usual standard three stop affair – weapon shop, armor shop, inn to sleep and save. However, it’s still as fun as ever to walk into a town and buy out the entire upgrade stock, leaving the town as a more powerful badass version of your party. This release also has the same class tree as the original, which is effective but nothing new. Each branch of the tree has a bit of a specialization, and you can definitely tailor it to your preferred style, but it’s not doing anything that isn’t standard to the genre.

As safe as this release was though, it is still fun. Ya the AI problems on boss fights suck, but you get through them. Because the battle style focuses more on skill than numbers, I didn’t really need to putz around grinding. However, the game also gave out a fair amount of XP to balance that so it wasn’t like I was surviving purely on grit and determination. Trash fights have a really nice flow to them, so that never got boring. Ignoring the AI problems, the boss fights were also mechanically fun and long enough to feel like a real accomplishment. Is this as impressive a remake as Final Fantasy VII Remake? Absolutely not. However, it doesn’t feel like it was trying to be, and where it ended up feels like where it belonged.