Tag: mario

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Game Ramblings #86 – Yoshi’s Crafted World

More Info From Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Classic Yoshi gameplay, accessible but deep with great replayability of the levels
  • Another fantastic visual style from the team at Good-Feel

This could be a really short ramblings from a practical perspective. If you liked any past Yoshi games, you’ll probably like this. The gameplay still revolves around heavy exploration of side scrolling levels, eating enemies to get eggs, and using those eggs to find things hidden around the levels. This one does a few things to separate from past titles though – particularly in the replayability of the individual levels – that really make this a solid new entry that plays well on the go.

This is a Yoshi game through and through, eggs, cute visuals, fun levels – it’s pretty familiar on the surface.

There really is a lot of familiarity at play here, but really that isn’t very surprising for the Yoshi series. The Island games and Woolly World were a lot of fun, but really all had similar mechanics. Manipulating the firing of eggs is still the real core skill here other than staying alive. The point of each individual level is still to basically collect everything, and the objectives are still largely the same – find flowers, find 20 red coins, don’t lose hearts. There are a few core differences here though. Each flower is an individual goal on its own, along with flowers gained from the coin/heart objectives, but there’s other ways to gain flowers that become more important. In addition, flowers are used as progression blockers in a way similar to stars in Mario games, though most players will never have trouble having an overabundance. The differences in star collection are what really drive replayability in this game though.

Back side levels are one of the replay options, and also serve as a way to lean into the Crafted World gimmick.

Replaying levels really becomes key to the core loop here. Back side levels are one of the big options, where the player runs through the level in reverse to find Poochy Pups. These serve a two-fold purpose; they’re an additional goal using the same content, and they also use a speedrun timer that forces the player to ignore exploration in favor of speed. In doing so, these levels really change how the player thinks about the core gameplay in a fun way.

From a visual perspective it also really pushes the crafted aspect of the game world. You see the labels on the back of cardboard boxes, the tape holding everything together, the enemies that are holding up stage props. It all serves to give a fairly adorable setting to the world and a reason for the way the game visually exists.

These aren’t the only replay tools though. In addition to the obvious goal of finding everything, each mini world has a series of collection tasks that also provide flowers to the player. These all involve finding one to a handful of a specific prop, and the player has to shoot eggs at them to collect them. They’re small goals, but act as an addition gameplay layer to complete.

All of these replay tools really serve to push the purpose that this is a game that works as well on the couch as it does on the go. If you’ve got a large chunk of time, it’s easy to run through a bunch of levels or spend a lot of time looking for every little detail on the front side run throughs. If you’re in a commute and only have a few minutes? Go ahead and do a quick back side run or one of the collection tasks. Either way you’re earning rewards and finding new things to do, and the game works phenomenally well in allowing you to tailor your minute to minute experience to the time you have available.

There’s also some neat non-traditional diversions to do, such as this level where Yoshi balances a kart to get it through the world as fast as possible.

Realistically there isn’t much new to be had here compared to other Yoshi games, but this one definitely does the best job of sitting somewhere in the middle of a home and on-the-go experience. The huge variety of different types of tasks to accomplish means you can do things that run from taking minutes to taking hours, and this is the same thing that some of the best Switch titles I’ve played have typically pulled off. It also helps that the core Yoshi gameplay was already a lot of fun to begin with. Although this doesn’t end up being your traditional platformer gameplay like a New Super Mario Bros game, I’d still have a pretty easy time recommending this one straight out for anyone looking for a game in that genre.

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Game Ramblings #57 – Super Mario Odyssey

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: 3D Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Another great entry in the Super Mario series, with great platforming mechanics, a predictable but fun story, and great world locations to explore
  • Collectathon-style worlds didn’t work as well for me as the more focused Mario 64/Sunshine style individual stars, but the story moons in particular were great
  • New core mechanic of taking over enemies and using their abilities was a great focus for the design, and works fantastically
  • Theme song of the year – go buy it on iTunes or Google Play Music

I’ll be perfectly honest from the start here; I still think Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine are better games.  While Super Mario Odyssey is definitely a fantastic game on its own, the change to the star collecting mechanic into something more akin to Banjo-Kazooie often felt weird to me with a strange mix of really good focused moons alongside completely incidental ones that you can find in things like piles of leaves.  That said, once I get beyond that change the rest of the game was fantastic and is as good as any Mario game we’ve seen before.

Flick a hat at an enemy and more often than not you take them over, gaining their abilities and strengths.

Since it is the core difference in the game, let’s start with the takeover.  For various story reasons, your hat is now alive and can bind Mario to the soul of his enemies, or something to that effect.  The end result is that you can now become your enemy.  Take over a Goomba, and you can now build stacks of goombas and stop sliding around on ice.  Take over a Cheep Cheep and you can now swim under water without needing to breathe.  Hell, take over a T-Rex and stomp the shit out of everything around you just for laughs.  This even extends to seemingly mundane things like the little traffic cones in the city that you can use to catapult Mario around.

This new core ability and the set of enemy mechanics that come out of it are used to great effect.  A large portion of the boss fights use specific environment and enemy combos to change things from just being your standard 3 butt stomp affairs.  Almost any puzzle solving segment will involve finding the nearby enemy type to use their skill set.  Even just for changing up gameplay a bit, it’s nice to be able to warp into an enemy and use a completely different set of skills than Mario on his own can do.  There’s even a surprise at the end that leads to one of the most bombastic finishes to a Mario game that I can remember.

While most bosses are typical scale for a Mario experience, that wasn’t always the case.

On the boss front, there really was a much wider variety than normal.  There’s a recurring set of bosses that act as this game’s substitute for the Koopa kids, and they’re the normal 3 hit to kill with minor mechanical changes.  However, there’s definitely a few much larger bosses in place.  For example, the New Donk City segment has a large centipede boss that can warp in and out of buildings, and the only way to defeat it is to hat-possess a tank and shoot its weak points.  A later fight pictured above has a very non-Mario dragon boss that ends up being more about attack avoidance than offense, with distinct cooldown segments where Mario can land his damage.

The end result of all this is that both by sheer quantity, as well as mechanic variety, this is the widest set of boss fights that Mario has ever seen, and the game’s pacing greatly benefited from it.  At a typical rate, I was seeing a boss every 30-45 minutes, giving me a nice set of pseudo-open world collecting, followed by a high intensity battle.  The consistency of this pace and the mechanical variety allowed for the game to pump up the action when needed to avoid the slow pace trap that other heavy collection platformers have fallen to.

Little touches like the 2D segments gave a lot of life to the world, and some fun hints at the past.

However, it was that collection aspect that ended up being the strong low point for me in an otherwise fantastic game.  The amount of collection just didn’t make sense, and often times felt like fluff to me.  In a typical world, you’d have 3-5 moons that were mandatory per-story, then the need to collect an additional 15-20 just to power up the ship and leave for the next kingdom.  Out of those, I’d estimate about half were purely incidental; a glowing stump may be a hint at a hidden moon, a music note starts a 10 second run to collect all notes, or hell, just a moon floating out in the open that you have to climb a tree to collect.  Among the ones that required a bit more effort, you’d typically see a segment similar to a simplified hidden shines in Super Mario Sunshine, where some quick platforming or single-mechanic enemy would grab you a guaranteed obvious shine and loosely hidden shine.  While there were certainly a lot of shines to get, it often didn’t really feel like there was much point to a lot of them, and I’d have rather seen a larger focus on expanding the story or hidden-area shines into something more meaningful.

There’s definitely a few other minor things there that didn’t really hit.  The motion controls in particular are pretty terrible, but purely optional.  On the hardware front, I’d recommend playing with a Pro Controller over the Joycons, as I had far too many deaths caused by the signal loss that is effecting them.  Some weird mechanical bugs, such as an unintended quick pivot when using fire flower boosts also killed me too many times in some tight movement areas.  However, they’re not really the types of things that kill enjoyment of the game, at least beyond some grumbling at the time problems came up.

What kind of Mario game would it be without Bowser’s Castle? It’s seen some upgrades this go around.

That said, while the collectathon may prevent me from ever doing a 100% run, it certainly didn’t stop me from really enjoying the hell out of what I did play.  End of the day, the core mechanics of the game are just too good to miss out on.  The platforming is as fun as it’s ever been and for the moons that push for depth, it’s more important than ever to be on top of my game.  Even just the act of running around the worlds to get to the next objective is fun to do due to the much larger inclusion of vertical elements and enemies to takeover to traverse them.  While it may not hold up to me like 64 or Sunshine, this is still a game worth getting a console for, and that right there says a lot about the quality that’s in place.

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Game Ramblings #55 – Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: 3DS
  • Originally Released on: GBA

TL;DR

  • Faithful remake with the right mix of visual polish without losing the soul of the original
  • Battle system still holds up, particularly against the newer entries that went more experimental
  • Bowser’s Minions portion of the game well made, but feels more suited towards mobile

I suppose the TL;DR really should have read – If you enjoyed the original, you’ll enjoy the remake – because that’s really all there is to it.  The fact that this game is enjoyable is not a mystery.  In its GBA form it was well received for funny dialogue, a great battle system, and a visual style that brought the world to life.  All of that moves itself to the 3DS perfectly well, with some enhancements to the visuals and audio that make this feel a lot more modern.  In addition, the new Minions mode does add a particularly nice tie in to what happened to the typical enemy cast of the game while the Mario Bros were out adventuring, even if the mode feels more suited to a mobile device.  All in all, this is a solid remake that folks holding onto their 3DS will find worth playing.

For anyone that hasn’t played these games before, like any JRPG the battle system is really the core of what made the gameplay so special, and it’s standard turn based with a twist.  Like Super Mario RPG on the SNES, button inputs at the right time can provide both offensive and defensive capabilties, in this case tied to A and B for Mario and Luigi respectively.  The combat in place here was probably as simple as the series had, but the simplicity was also its strength.  The core moves were easy to pull off and strong (jumps, hammer attacks, and fire/ice ball attacks).  Moving up in complexity and strength, the brothers can combine to do Bros Attacks, involving more intricate combo and timing segments to pull off large damage.  This pattern of A and B for each brother then goes into the entire game, whether it’s character-specific actions during combo attacks or actions taken in the overworld for traversal purposes.

Speaking of which, the overworld actions are still a lot of fun to use, and end up being the big puzzle push for the game.  Most puzzles tend to be fairly basic, and generally involve whatever the latest power the bros gained, but they provided a nice break in the action that wasn’t just straight battle grinding.  By the end of the game the brothers had a set of 10 traversal abilities, giving the inevitable Bowser’s Castle run a huge amount of flexibility in the use of different powers.

As far as changes go, there were some dialog changes, a few additional side quests, and the more obvious sound and visual upgrades.  However, the big addition was the Bowser’s Minions portion of the game.  Within the first couple hours, this mode is unlocked, and then runs as a separate independent mode with its own new (and entertaining story).  From a gameplay perspective, it’s a simple mode of assembling a squad of minions and having them faceoff against an enemy squad.  They can be one of three types, giving us an advantage triangle not too dissimilar to Fire Emblem.  The fight then automatically goes, with the player really only occasionally interfering, whether to block special attacks or do a timed input for a damage bonus.

In general, the mode is mechanically solid, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would have worked out a lot better as a phone game, and that’s the biggest problem I had with it.  Each battle is a generally quick hitting segment, with maybe a few minutes of story the first time you play, then combat lasting maybe a minute or two per battle.  Given the size and number of units you can get, it then encourages you to keep replaying the battles to level up units.  Victory grants more units, as well as beans used as a type-specific XP boost, allowing for even more growth of the party.  In general, this feels perfect for a phone where you’d fire it up to play a couple levels then be done, and less perfect for the 3DS where it’s still just a sub mode to the much deeper main game.  And I’m being serious when I say I’d absolutely play this on my phone because it is a lot of fun.

There’s really not much to say here.  If you liked a previous Mario & Luigi or enjoyed the original release at all, this is still a great game.  The battle system is really solid, the writing is often times hilarious, and there’s a ton of content to be had here.  It also shows that the gameplay of the first couple games in the series is likely what I consider the pinnacle of the series, with a couple of the more experimental entries on the 3DS perhaps going a bit too far away from the core.  Hopefully this means Nintendo is considering a more traditional entry looking forward to the Switch, but if the worst we get is another remake then I suppose we’re still doing pretty good.