Tag: rpg

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Game Ramblings #63 – Okami HD

More Info from Capcom

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PS3, Windows, Xbox One
  • Original Platforms: PS2, Wii

TL;DR

  • One of the best examples of the Pre-BOTW 3D Zelda ARPG
  • Fantastic visuals that scaled up to modern systems nicely, as long as the screen filter is turned down
  • Combat generally simple, but a lot of fun thanks to the Celestial Brush mechanic, turning each encounter into a small puzzle

This is going to be a relatively short one, simply because there’s been enough said about Okami since its 2006 release.  As far as 3D Zelda-style games go, this is one of the best.  It starts with the typical Zelda pattern of going to a dungeon, finding an upgrade, and using that upgrade to finish the dungeon.  It adds much deeper combat that is more typical of JRPGs, with each encounter being its own little experience.  It uses a Celestial Brush system to literally draw in the world, repairing bridges, breathing life to trees, shooting fire at enemies, and more.  It then wraps all of that into one a gorgeous aesthetic reminiscent of Japanese sumi-e painting.  Put all together, it’s one of the finest examples of a Zelda game prior to Breath of the Wild, even if it wasn’t actually a Zelda.

There’s no talking about Okami without going straight at the visuals.  That little cutscene above is just a taste of how the game looks, but by and large it’s always that gorgeous.  Enemies killed with slashes float into the sky and separate into pieces like sheets of paper.  Trees explode into flower petals when brought back to life.  Even the static areas of the environment take on a beautiful painted look, with large outlines and simple color shading, giving the entire game a look that is entirely its own.

Combat takes place in its own little areas, giving a very JRPG feel to an otherwise action-focused system.

However, being an ARPG combat is still the focus, and this has much more depth than your typical Zelda game.  Sure, Zelda has its moments in boss fights, but your typical encounter with any enemy in the world is a few quick slashes and the player moves on.  In Okami, every encounter is its own little puzzle.  Some enemies may be weak to elements, so the player can drag those in from environmental source to stun enemies.  Some may have to be beaten down a bit before their weak points are exposed.  Some enemies can’t be hit unless time is slowed down, giving an opportunity to rush in for the kill. In general, each encounter has its own little piece to figure out in order to get through the fight in the most optimal matter.  Sure, you can usually also just beat on enemies until they die, but rewards scale based on time to complete an encounter, so effective use of the tools at hand is always the smart way to go.

All of this goes through the Celestial Brush system, which uses painted symbols to activate abilities.  Drawing a straight line on the screen will activate a powerful sword slash that can cleave enemies and environmental pieces in two.  Drawing a line from water, fire, ice, or lightning can cause those elements to help or hurt, depending on their use.  A swirling motion will activate wind, blowing away fire that may be shielding an enemy.  At its core, this replaces the typical items that Zelda games use, and allows for interactions that end up feeling more meaningful in their end result due to the need to draw on the fly.

The screen filter’s default option me feeling crosseyed.

I suppose the question then becomes, is this a good port?  More or less, but it has a few rough edges.  The default visual filter in place definitely had its problems, with some of the visual separation of things really looking awkward.  Turning that down to low solved most of the problems.  Otherwise things were solid.  Performance was consistent throughout the game, which was a particularly nice improvement over some of the more complex bosses on the PS2.  While the controls for painting were sometimes a bit awkward, the shape recognition is forgiving enough to allow for a lot of flex room in getting your symbols close enough.  If there’s anything with controls that did translate awkwardly, it’s that Start/Select from the PS2 were moved to the PS4’s touchpad, which also doubled as a secondary way to move the camera.  It didn’t cause issues in general, but every time I went to pause I ended up accidentally moving the camera completely in a place that I didn’t want to.

There’s a lot of bosses to defeat, all with their own tricks and fantastic designs.

Going back to this one 10+ years later was a nice treat.  Its visual style was always its selling feature, but only translated so well in 480i.  Luckily, the move up to 4k only helped the visuals, and the great combat system built around the Celestial Brush has aged extremely well.  If you’ve played this before, I could see an argument for not coming back again, but anyone that missed this the first go around would be well recommended in taking a whirl.

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Game Ramblings #54 – Golf Story

More Info from Sidebar Games

  • Genre: Golf / RPG
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Charming RPG with gameplay reminiscent of Mario Golf on the GBC/GBA
  • Entertaining writing, good mix of quests, and a bunch of clever hints at games from the past.
  • Golf game is serviceable and fun, despite obviously not being the focus of the game.

Out of everything that surprises me about this game, it’s that I can’t figure out who the hell the development team is.  The game’s credits simply had their studio name, they have no website or Twitter beyond the game’s info, and I can’t find a damn thing on Google.  Yet despite it all, this is potentially the best of the so called Nindies to come out this year.  While the game owes a lot to Mario Golf before it, it leans heavily on the writing and questing RPG to make a game that ends up being one of the best non-combat RPGs I’ve played in a long time.

Sometimes you play golf, sometimes you have rap battles.

Given that this is RPG first, the writing was always going to be important.  While this definitely isn’t deep, and it definitely ends abruptly, the writing is lighthearted and entertaining throughout.  Each course has its overarching story that takes place through a couple main quests and a lot of optional side quests.  These run the gamut from a Caddyshack-inspired battle against (and with) moles to rap battles between an old country club and a rival invading course to a haunted course where you help create a zombie army.  While the main story line of rising into the pro tour provides the overall push to the end, the individual stories and the wide range of characters you meet throughout are easily the thing that kept me going back and digging into all the available quests.

Among others callbacks, you sometimes just end up playing Pac Man while invading a base Metal Gear style.

There’s also a very distinct sense of playing homage to games of the past.  The visuals are very clearly styled after SNES and Genesis era games, even if the quality is somewhat higher than would have been possible on those systems.  However, it’s the game references that really hit home.  The Pac Man example above is just one.  There were also side quests based on Micro Machines, NPC hints at the Mario

Tennis series, a built in recreation of NES Golf, and more.  There’s a lot of love shown in bringing in elements of the past in ways that really succeed in giving a lot of life to the RPG aspect of the game, elevating it significantly above the similar Mario Golf games in that regard.

Even playing golf itself, you get a lot of non-standard variety like this Par 1 only course.

Since this is a golf game that side also had to not suffer, and while it’s nothing deep it works pretty well.  It’s a pretty standard 3-click setup (start, set power, set aim) for shots.  It also has your standard mix of curving, spins, and wind effect on the ball flight path.  There’s a bunch of different clubs with various effects on shots as well, giving a bit of flexibility in the gear build out.  The RPG aspect also plays out here, with XP going into the golf stats.  Like Mario Golf, increasing power lowers the other stats, giving a balance between quickly increasing shot power vs. not throwing other stats out of whack.

However, there’s also a lot of depth at play here in the style of game available.  For the most part, there’s really no normal courses.  Even the first course with a standard layout has mole traps that can cause your ball to be carried all over the course.  From there you get courses with no greens, tar traps instead of sand, par 1 courses, turtles that bounce your ball down the course out of water, and more.  In general you basically have to be ready for anything and can’t settle into the typical pattern of a golf game where any course generally plays the same.  The only thing that really was consistent here is that I could aim smack at the flag and more often than not sink the shot, which admittedly is both highly satisfying and incredibly hilarious when hitting a 300 yard shot into the hole during a match play event.

If I made the rules, this would definitely be in there.

I think my big takeaway here is that Golf Story proves the value of making RPGs without combat, particularly in lieu of Nintendo abandoning the idea of the Camelot-developed mobile sports RPGs.  There’s enough golf here to still be considered a sports game, but the RPG aspects pulled in bring so much to the game that non-fans can also find a lot to enjoy here.

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Game Ramblings #4 – Thoughts on Pokemon F2P Experiments

So this is going to be a two parter covering both of the free to play Pokemon titles Nintendo has released for the 3DS, Pokemon Shuffle and Pokemon Rumble World.  Both are curious small titles, and I think they are an interesting early look into what Nintendo’s long term mobile plans could possibly look like.

Pokemon Shuffle

More Info From Nintendo

Info:

  • Genre: Puzzle RPG

Progress:

  • 95 Pokemon
  • Handful of Mega Evolutions
  • Handful of daily/special events

Similar Titles

The first of the free to play titles is a pretty standard pick-3 puzzle game, with the added twist that you battle to catch Pokemon, and can gain XP to level up the Pokemon you are using in battle.

In general this was a good time waster.  I could go in, spend 15 minutes running through my available stamina, and go back to whatever else I was doing.  The core game is solid, and has enough Pokemon features to feel like it’s well integrated into the overall rule set established in the RPG titles.

What I Like

The type strength/weakness system from the main line series is represented here.  While this may seem like an obvious addition, it does have some fun ramifications in terms of how you build out the squad of Pokemon for each battle.  In addition, because there is a pre-battle party optimize feature, you can get in and out of battle with a generally good set of Pokemon without spending a ton of time in menus.

In addition, the variety of Pokemon was astounding.  The in-game Pokedex lists 233 capturable Pokemon at this time, and special events have been showing off some fun rare Pokemon from time to time.  It results in allowing you to really build out a strong squad from any number of your favorites from past games.

What I Don’t Like

The catching system feels super arbitrary.  Every Pokemon has base odds of being caught, then bonus catch odds based on how many turns remained in the battle upon victory.  The majority of Pokemon typically end up in the 70-90% catch rate range, but the stronger Pokemon are locked behind often < 5% base odds with low per-turn bonuses, making repeated battles a chore in these cases.  This is exacerbated by the fact that Great Balls are extremely expensive in terms of the in-game currency, as well as them only doubling catch chance, making the gold cost often not worth the risk.

 

Pokemon Rumble World

More Info From Nintendo

Info:

  • Genre: Brawler

Progress:

  • 116 Captured Pokemon
  • 9 Balloons
  • Account Level 19

Similar Titles

This one is a continuation of the Pokemon Rumble series.  The basic gameplay is similar to top-down twin stick shooters, with some simplifications.  Combat can either be automatic upon contact with enemies, or triggered via A/B attacks.  Upon defeating an enemy, there is a random chance that they will drop as a capturable Pokemon that can be added to your roster.  As your account levels up, the Pokemon in all areas progressively grow stronger, giving you consistent progress and good excuses to go back to old areas to capture stronger versions of already captured Pokemon.

In general, while I did enjoy this title, it is extremely simple.  It is essentially a 5 minute play and forget title to pick up while you have a few free minutes.  The variety of Pokemon is again really strong, but the F2P mechanic blocking progress is more aggressive than in Shuffle, to some extent to the game’s detriment.

 

So, what does this all mean for Nintendo?  A while back they announced their entry into the mobile market going into 2016, and these feel like their first experiments in that style.  Both games have very similar monetization efforts, with progress blocked via some sort of stamina mechanic, a soft gold currency earned in game, and a hard diamond currency earned through microtransactions.

Shuffle’s stamina mechanic is more typical, with one heart per battle, and hearts earned back over time.  Rumble uses a slightly different mechanic.  Balloons can be purchased that transport you to various areas for battling/capturing.  The balloons then go on cooldown, with progressively longer cooldowns based on how expensive the balloons were to purchase.  In general, this simply forces me to replay old content more often, which doesn’t really feel that good.  However, it does push me more towards purchasing into diamonds, which is good for the typical purchasing path.

Overall both of these titles feel like they would be appropriate entries into the mobile market for Nintendo.  They’re solid quick play titles, have simple but engaging mechanics, and are already setup with the typical monetization scheme that the highest grossing titles typically use.  Looking a year from now, I wouldn’t be that shocked to see both of these as the first of the  Nintendo mobile titles being released as part of their latest market experiment.