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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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Year End Ramblings – Things You Should Play From 2020

So this year was a weird one huh? While reality was throwing us all down a shit slide, there was at least a bunch of good stuff to play. Over the course of the year I’ve managed a handful of mini ramblings, started branching out into a few programmer ramblings, and an unfortunate shelved-it for Ori and the Will of the Wisps which I intend to give a second try at now that the Series X is here. However, around all that stuff I managed to put up 24 main ramblings posts, as well as a .1 post for a replay I did of A Hat in Time. Through all of that there’s definitely a few stand out titles that I think were worth the play through, so let’s take a look at those.

I do have a bit of a caveat in that I haven’t really dove into much of the Fall 2020 titles yet. I was in the process of buying a house and moving in, so my backlog is a bit out of whack compared to normal. However, that does mean that I’ll have some interesting candidates for the start of 2021….

With that out of the way…

Game Ramblings #101 – Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order

This is the one that convinced me that there’s a future in which I like Souls games. It’s always really bothered me that I can see I’m about to get completely shit stomped in a Souls game, but am stuck in an uninterruptable animation and get killed. I get that that’s kind of the style, but I’m playing a videogame – I want stupidly powerful animation interrupts that let me do reactionary dodges. Fallen Order did just that. Part of it is that Jedis having quick dodge capability just feels right. Part of it is that it was just the way the game was tuned. However, in the end it leaned more towards combat that I can enjoy, while still really embracing the core of the slower 3P action combat that the Souls-style games really embrace.

Game Ramblings #108 – Control

This was the one the further convinced me of the genius of Remedy Entertainment. This is by no means a perfect game – the gunplay was frankly pretty average. However, the powers were just REALLY FUCKIN GOOD. Telekinetic and psychic powers are the type of thing that feel like they should be easy on the surface, but are so often screwed up. Control really just got it absolutely right. Grabbing and launching debris at enemies feels impactful. Seizing an enemy and turning them to fight for you just feels really important to shifting the balance of the fight. Flanking enemies via hover abilities feels really important to establishing an advantageous position when a group of enemies loses track of you. This is all combined with the continued fantastic world setting work of Remedy to craft a really special experience.

Game Ramblings #114 – Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition

In a year in which I played a lot of remakes, this is one of the ones that stood out. There’s definitely a bit of me that wanted this remake to use the Xenoblade 2 combat system instead, but there was still a lot of care put into improving this entry beyond just obvious visual changes. Grinding was significantly reduced over the original. Finding information on what quests are active and where quest items can be found was significantly improved. Even small things like cosmetic gear changes were added in a well done fashion. It helped that this one also had a new epilogue chapter added to close out some of the story for the character set. This was not as aggressive of a remake as a game I will mention in a bit, but it was still wonderful to go back and play it with a nice visual pass.

Game Ramblings #118 – Ghost of Tsushima

Under normal circumstances this would probably be a shoe-in game of the year for me. It combined an Assassin’s Creed style open world with a much better tuned focus on exploration with the feudal Japan setting that everyone has wanted that series to use for years. It then heaped on a really fantastic combat system that pulled in things like stances from Yakuza and cinematic 1-on-1 duels to give some of the best 3P action combat I’ve ever played. From a visual standpoint this is also flat out my game of the year. Ya, I’ve played some PC games offline that are technically more proficient, but no game this year felt like it has come close to hitting such a flat out gorgeous visual style. This is the kind of title that shows why Sony was so far ahead in sales this generation, and really is the type of showcase that makes owning a PS4 worth it.

Game Ramblings #110 – Final Fantasy VII Remake

I finished this game in May and I’m still baffled by how good it was.

It’s not just that they iterated on the game’s combat – it’s that they completely changed it. If any game will convince people that JRPGs can be fully action combat, this is the one that would do it. The inputs for the characters matched expectations – presses for sword characters like Cloud vs a hold for the machine gun attacks of Barret as an example. However, they didn’t lose the turn-based rhythm. Because you’re attacking to build up your ATB meter, you always have some rhythm where you switch to abilities. Do a flurry of attacks, throw a magic spell or heal. Keep an eye out for enemy timing and dodges, blocks, or parries. Ya, it’s action combat, but the rhythm is like a turn-based game, and it is fantastic.

Then there’s the story. Everyone thought they knew what was coming – it’s the beginning of the game in Midgar. You blow up some shit, you try to save Aerith, you leave with some of the party in tow. Ya, that does technically all happen. However, by the end of the game you end up in a spot where the next title in the remake series almost certainly can not be the same. People are alive that shouldn’t be. There’s hints of multiple timelines intersecting, as well as a specific party member being aware of that and its implications for knowing the future. I mean, there’s an entire section of the story devoted to a creature line called Whispers that are attempting to keep the party from changing the timeline and sticking to the original game’s plot. This game ended at a place where the second title in the remake will almost certainly be an entirely new plot, and that excites me more than I could ever describe.

If there’s any game that I think should be an absolute must play this year, it’s FF7R.

There’s a bunch of other games that I rambled about this year, and they can almost certainly be on what I would consider to be an expanded list of games to check out. However, these five titles are the ones that I think are must-plays from this year. Looking back, they lean a lot more action than I would typically expect given how many JRPGs I tend to play, but I also think that’s a sign of where the action and JRPG genres have gone in the past decade. You’ve seen more action games bringing in RPG elements, and more JRPGs leaning into real-time combat, so the line has tended to blur for me. These games all had that common RPG thread through them, with a much larger spread in setting so hopefully there’s something there that hit for you guys as much as it did for me.

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Game Ramblings #124 – Yakuza: Like a Dragon

More Info from Sega

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

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this series successfully moved into the JRPG genre, but it kind of is. The previous titles had a lot of things typical of the genre already in place – great story, characters, and settings, your typical array of shops for items and gear, a strong levelling system, lots of things to do on the side. However, they were always first and foremost an action game, and since they moved to a new engine on the PS4 they were perhaps the BEST action-focused series out there. Despite it all, they changed to a JRPG and still ended up with something that feels straight up fantastic.

Given the change, I guess combat is the place to start. The thing to really know is that the entire genre switch and the fact that I’m up there fighting a 7 foot tall pirate all comes down to one thing – the lead character is a huge fan of Dragon Quest and has delusions of leading a party of heroes throughout Japan, just like in the game.

How fucking perfect is that?

It sets your expectations of what combat should be – purely turn based. Now, it’s not exactly as classic as Dragon Quest, and that’s a good thing. It’s got a timing-based defense mechanic similar to games like Super Mario RPG. It’s got a D&D-style opportunity attack where enemies can interrupt you if you try to run past them to attack someone else. It’s got a strong job system with job-based skills, leveling, and permanent stat gains. It’s got weaknesses and resists to different types of weapons. Basically, it takes a bunch of features from a bunch of JRPGs, and wraps it all into a combat system that feels classic, but with a modern touch. And it works really well.

I think more than anything, the reason it feels good is that everything still feels impactful. There’s a clear sense here that they’re bringing their action knowledge to this genre in how things react to combat. Big hits don’t just throw a big number, they cause knock downs. Knockdowns don’t just cause an animation – they put enemies in a weak state that causes them to take increased damage. When characters go flying, they don’t just fly, they also hit and damage anyone else they hit (including knocking down your own friends if you aren’t careful). If there’s something in the environment, your attacks can take advantage of that and use it instead of your weapon. It’s everything that made sense and worked well in an action combat system, but now just turn-based. It’s a bit slower, it’s a bit more strategic, it’s a big less reactionary, but it all feels fantastic.

That’s not to say that they completely converted over well to a JRPG-style. This game’s biggest issue is really around grinding, and that happens in two places.

The first is really around equipment. you hit a point fairly early in the power curve of the game where you just can’t buy better equipment. I hit it around the 60% mark of the game. From that point on, you have to craft better equipment to improve gear stats. Crafting is fine on its own, but the crafting building requires significant investment to upgrade it far enough to craft the end game gear. From there, the gear then also costs a ton of money and crafting items to put together. I did one stretch to do an armor upgrade pass, and it required me to do about 4 million yen in investments, 2 million yen per-piece of armor, and approximately another half million yen in crafting item value. Keeping in mind that normal fights were dropping 3-5 thousand yen, you can see the issue.

Around the same time, I started needing to do XP grinding because the bosses were jumping 5-10 levels ahead of me. At this point I was probably needing to get around 100 thousand XP per-level and only getting around 1000 XP per fight. Again, you can see the issue. I could get some more permanent stat boosts by switching jobs, and taking advantage of the quick early job levels when switching, but it was a pretty slow process overall.

At this point in the game it basically resulted in me using one specific spot, floors 16-18 of the Sotenbori battle arena. That could net me about 300 thousand yen and about 150 thousand XP. It was fast, it was efficient, and it was boring. It was clearly what was intended for fast leveling, but it felt awkward compared to just having a higher XP/money curve in the wild and letting the player more naturally level.

On the other hand, the side content is both plentiful and a lot of fun if I needed a distraction. Some of it is just side quests where I get some entertaining side story content. Some of it is your standard item collection faire. However, there’s also things like the Mario Kart inspired mode above to keep me distracted. There’s also a really deep management simulation worth noting as another good distraction (and source of money later on in it). I knew I could fall back on these things when I needed a break, and it allowed me to fall off of doing the same content grind on repeat while still having some benefit to my team in the long run.

Ultimately this isn’t a perfect transition from ARPG to JRPG, but as a first-try at the genre I was super impressed with the game. It kept things that worked really well in the series in the past, gave a pretty entertaining reason to switch genres, and ran with it. If they felt they had reached the peak of what they thought they could do as an action title, this certainly gives them a strong reset. It also puts them in a place where they still have room to improve. If the next title is still a JRPG, they could do a much better job of managing their power and XP curves to make the experience more linear and less prone to slow grinds when power jumps occur. However, as a first-pass this is still one of the best JRPGs of the year and is definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre.