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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 #200 – The Plucky Squire

More Info from All Possible Futures

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

My initial instinct was to go “well this is an expanded version of Link Between Worlds” and….I guess that isn’t entirely accurate. This game absolutely pulls a lot of mechanics from the top-down Legend of Zelda games. However, it’s not simply a Zelda-style game. It pulls mechanics from all sorts of games of the NES and SNES era. This game is an absolute celebration of late 80s/early 90s games tied together in a modern package.

The core gameplay of the game is very much Legend of Zelda though it feels a bit simplified Link to the Past in terms of complexity. You’ve got some basic sword attacks (melee, charge spin attack). Rather than secondary items, you can throw the sword and use a basic jump attack. However, combat is often not the core focus of the game – or at least this style combat is not. It’s there for story reasons, but most of your time is spent elsewhere.

The first place it really strays is the 2D/3D switching mechanic. You can pop in and out of the story book, and the core gameplay doesn’t change much between the two. However, that switch is often used for what are puzzle types that feel unique to this game. Flipping pages to return to past parts of the game for items is an interesting mechanical use of this. Tilting the book to move things around in the book world is an interesting use of this. Pulling items out of 2D space into 3D space to use them in new ways (for example, a jetpack) is an interesting use of this. Adding stamps to the book in 3D space to stop the movement of things in the book is an interesting use of this. It’s all these little things where it becomes clear the book isn’t just set dressing but is instead a core integrated part of the game. These are all puzzle types that are directly in line with this being a “Zelda” experience but end of being completely unique to this game.

It was also visually impressive just how consistent the styles are. Enemy silhouettes are always incredibly important to combat so having these be immediately recognizable in multiple visual styles without thinking is an impressive thing to pull off, even with the simplicity involved. The green guys with pointy hats are obviously ranged in both cases. Yellow guys are obviously melee in both cases. Orange guys obviously throw bombs in both cases. Mice and snakes are obviously the same in both cases. You just look and know how to react despite the changes in gameplay between the two scenarios.

However, the boss fights were the thing that impressed me the most and were also the thing I was not anticipating. Put simply, the boss fights are not Zelda gameplay, and this was probably the smartest decision they could have made. By making the boss fights entirely different, the core combat in the rest of the game was able to be simplified and reduced to only a small necessary segment leaving room for puzzles and unique boss mechanics to shine.

So what do I mean by this not being Zelda gameplay? Well, there’s a boss fight that is entirely the mechanics of Punchout. There’s a boss fight that pulled in Puzzle Bobble mechanics with no direct combat. There’s segments that are side scrolling shooter gameplay wrapping around a bucket. There’s a bullet hell air combat fight. Basically, the bosses are uniquely tied to mechanics that are simultaneously some classic gameplay setup and tied directly to the boss’ visual and story design. It makes an incredible amount of sense to do it this way because each boss can shine independent of the rest of the game, while also allowing it to further reinforce the 2D/3D swapping. It’s something that I didn’t expect going in and completely blew me away.

This was a delightful surprise. It exists as the perfect combination of mechanics pulled from other titles tied together in a package that only makes sense because of the game they ended up in. Rather than feeling like it lacked originality, it felt like the originality came from the team putting together a total package that can only work because of how they constructed it. It’s the type of game that you just sit down and have fun with from front to back and wonder why nobody had ever managed to do this before. It’s simply worth playing.

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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.