Also Available On: iOS, Android, Steam, Xbox One, Switch
Ovivo is the perfect kind of indie experience for me. It takes a single mechanic, polishes it to a brilliant shine, and lasts as long as it needs to. It doesn’t start adding a bunch of cruft. It doesn’t add 20 hours of extra shit purely meant to extend gameplay. It doesn’t try to be something it isn’t. In focusing on what makes it special, it ends up being better than games that push higher and fall hard.
Ovivo is super simple mechanically but feels SO good as you get comfortable maintaining momentum. pic.twitter.com/4Ze4sSyo4z
This is an early level that I was playing, but I figure it’s a good place to start. The only mechanic available to you is the ability to switch between the white and black gameplay spaces. As you go further in the game, there’s some amount of nuance there, but it really is that simple. You can move left and right, and you can press the one button to switch between color planes. However, it’s the nuance that ends up giving the game a lot of depth.
Early on they give you those curved platforms and elevation changes. In swapping planes, you start to see a bit of momentum from the swap. It intuitively pushes you to preload your swap, which then teaches you about really using that momentum change to get to new spots. Meanwhile, this is all being taught in complete safety. Later levels start adding little pits that you have to use momentum to get around, giving you a spot to experiment with. It then proceeds to moving platforms and moving traps, giving another layer of depth to the interaction.
It’s that little step at a time push forward in complexity that works really well. You hit a new wall, have to experiment a bit, learn a little bit more, and move on. You see it in games like Super Mario Bros – can’t run left, always move right; jump before the first Goomba and hit your head on a question mark block – where new mechanics are introduced in a spot where you intuitively learn something, rather than being hand fed something. In the case of Ovivo, they do it extremely well. The complexity they get out of the one simple mechanic is astounding.
This is all helped by the fact that the game is visually stunning AND the visuals are core to that single gameplay mechanic. The entire game is presented in black and white, and everything you see is part of the gameplay space. The transition in colors literally acts as the collision boundary. Things that rare visually spiky and dangerous looking are literally dangerous and will kill you. Nothing is wasted in the layout of the levels, and it’s all important to the experience.
The fact that it is visually interesting leads to the one other sort of mechanic, which ends up being the light collection aspect. There’s two types of collectible items to find in the levels, and they’re a mix of on the core path and off of it in unique side areas. They end up playing a nice role in forcing you to pay attention to what’s going on around you to find those little side spots. In general, the ones off the path are also the ones that have the most interesting puzzle and momentum tricks, so it ends up being fun to find them anyway.
Each level is followed by a zoom out, showing both the entirety of the level you went into, and the art theme around it. It’s always impressive.
These kinds of short indie experiences are the type of game that I really like playing, and also the type of game that I’m glad to see coming to physical releases. In this case, I got this one from Red Art Games. These types of indie releases usually have a pretty small audience, so seeing them on disc is always a nice treat. Despite the small release number, it’s still getting it out to an expanded audience, and in a way that it will continue to be preserved. This definitely fell on the positive side for me. They really took their core mechanic to a polished state that isn’t common in many games, and it results in a game that feels truly unique in execution.
Admittedly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the first game. The only reason I finished it in the first place was because the story and setting for the game was so captivating. Mechanically, it otherwise reminded me a lot of Red Dead 2 – unnecessarily tuned towards realism, and generally clunky. For the sequel, it was again the story that kept me rolling on through, although I was surprised as I played how much the game had mechanically improved. That’s not to say I think that its mechanics are necessarily great, but it felt much better as a game, which allowed me a much smoother path forward through it.
If I look back at the original game, there were a number of mechanics that generally frustrated me that feel much improved here.
Gun combat in the first was pretty difficult, mostly because aiming felt made to be incredibly difficult on purpose. This one was somewhat more tuned to be a game. That’s not to say it was CoD aiming, but it was more forgiving. There were also some upgrades that provided significant boosts to your ability to quickly aim, have stability, etc that made things cleaner. It also just felt like the game was made to support gun-based interactions better. The original felt like guns were there for oh-shit moments. In this one, resources aside, I felt like I could legitimately play the game using gun combat as a primary path, even if I didn’t go that route. It’s better enough that I kind of wonder how much of it has actually changed, or if I just had a better feel for it this go through.
Melee combat was also significantly improved in a way that made me avoid combat significantly less than in the first. Dodging attacks is extremely fast and useful. Enemy tells are obvious without having huge timing windows. The melee combat in that regard is simple – basically dodge and swipe – but it feels fair, and it feels precise. The original game’s mechanics basically resulted in me avoiding combat entirely, because it felt like a death sentence. In this one, oddly large damage at times aside, combat didn’t feel like a reload – it just felt like a different kind of challenge.
However, the big thing that really changed combat for me is that the set pieces felt designed for combat. That’s kind of vague, but this is probably my best description of it. In the original, encounters with the infected were generally stealth sequences with guaranteed death traps. They were tight quarters, often had sound-based traps, and if you triggered the wrong infected, you were screwed. The infected areas in particular were terrible for gun combat, since they were generally winding corridors with no sight lines to shoot. That generally just exacerbated how rough the guns were for me to begin with.
In this one, things are just a lot more free flowing. The encounter areas are generally wider and more open, even when indoors. There’s a lot more escape spots – whether it be vaulting over something, escaping through a gap, or just generally having the horde go back into roving patterns if you kill your immediate target and hide. The same things you can use to vault over can also be used for peeking over and firing. Sight lines are much longer in almost all encounters, giving you more opportunities to shoot and save yourself when things do go wrong. There’s much better ability to even fire silent ranged projectiles like arrows, which greatly enhances your stealth capabilities. Overall, this one felt much better as a combat game, rather than combat being something that is a last resort.
That’s not to say that things always felt great. The picture above is from what is probably the largest boss-style encounter, taking place in the VERY dark and VERY tight abandoned basement of a hospital. This one felt straight out of the original game. I couldn’t see far, I couldn’t navigate well, and I was able to get stuck on things extremely easily. I probably died more in this single fight than the rest of the game, and generally speaking it felt less like mistakes I made, and more the game fighting against me. Luckily, this was far less common than the original.
There was also one early game surprise that really brought me into the game, but quickly and sadly went away. The first day of the first of the game takes place in a pseudo-open downtown Seattle. You get a map, you get to check off areas you’ve explored and pilfered for goods, you actually get to just randomly explore. They so heavily teased an open world experience, with all the side tracking exploration that I love out of that type of game. Then you get to the end of that chapter, and it’s completely linear for the rest of the game. It felt like a cock tease, and even worse is that it worked really well. It was fun to wander over to a big ruin, see if there was a path in, go in and sneak around the infected, and find some prize at the end. That’s not to say that the rest of the game didn’t have some semblance of side tracking, but from then on it was always incidental entering a building you were walking past anyway, and not giving the player the agency of wandering around a city just to explore. In the context of the story it made sense, but I was sad to see the mechanic teased then pulled away.
So then, that story:
Spoiler
I suspect I ended up liking the story a lot more than the general internet has, or at least, the internet seems really up in arms about it, and it’s hard to tell how much of that is noise or consensus. There’s no way to really avoid it – Joel came out of the first game looking like a real asshole. I sympathize with what he did, and I sympathize with Ellie being the only immune survivor, but there’s no doubt that Joel potentially fucked humanity. However, the story felt complete. It being complete is what made the start of this one so predictable. Joel was going to get killed by someone in an act of vengeance. There was no way that was going to be avoided, because there’s no reason for the sequel to exist otherwise. If Joel isn’t going to get killed, then him and Ellie are going to be living their best survivor life in Jackson, and this was not going to be a farming simulator.
That’s not to say that the predictability was bad, but it muted what was probably the opening shock moment to me, and it set an early tone for Ellie’s arc in this one. She was always going to come out looking like an asshole on her quest for vengeance. However, I had no problem with that. She had good reasons within her character arc to go out for vengeance, had a good path in doing so, and the payoff was gratifying within the expectations I had.
The big swerve for me in that regard ended up being Abby. Her connection to the first game as the daughter of the surgeon you murder right at the end of the game was incredible. It gave a second arc of vengeance that was definitely convenient in its appearance, but equally strong. Abby’s arc in particular felt more interesting and complete to me. Her arc started as one of completed vengeance, grew into a character learning to trust in others and not so blindly follow orders, and ended back at the beginning in vengeance after Ellie and her crew killed her friends. Of the two arcs, Abby’s felt like it had more overall growth, and wasn’t just fueled of blind rage. In doing so, it added to both of their arcs, and added interesting back story to the path of the original game.
That’s not to say that everything in the story felt great to me. Dina’s pregnancy in the game’s first arc felt a little too like a convenient plot device to give a reason for Ellie having a fixed base in Seattle, and felt too convenient of a way to provide tension in their relationship. Jesse’s character felt like a convenient pop-up helper in the first arc as well, then after he’s killed he felt swept under the rug entirely, as Ellie’s anger through the end of the game was still clearly around vengeance for Joel. The Scars also felt less like the intended “back to nature” rebel group, and more like another convenient way for the second arc of the game to have a large-scale enemy. It gave Abby some room for character growth, but it felt unnecessary when she could have also been rebelling against the group she was a part of with the same end gain.
However, the big issue for me was really the lack of player agency in the finale sequence. This is a similar problem I had with the first game. You had no choice but to escape with Ellie in the original, and you had no choice but to kill the surgeon. Without it, this game wouldn’t exist. This one had a similar problem. The Seattle portion of the game ends with Ellie and Abby facing off, and effectively fighting to a violent draw. They’ve both lost people at each other’s hands, and they’ve gotten to a point where Ellie has lost, and Abby no longer has the will to fight. As an ending, this felt appropriate. They’re both assholes, and neither of them are going to gain anything by killing any more. And then the game continued.
The end arc of Ellie tracking down Abby again to kill her felt forced, especially in how the result panned out. Abby is found imprisoned and at the end of her rope while trying to find any of her past life with the Fireflies. Ellie is emotionally and physically drained, and has abandoned her life with Dina to continue her path of vengeance. Given the rest of the game, it felt like one more unnecessary smack across both of their faces – giving them one more dose of suffering in an already shitty world. You’ve got no choice in the path that this takes, and it’s incredibly frustrating. You can’t help Abby not get imprisoned. You can’t have Ellie just enjoy her life in Wyoming. Hell, you can’t even go for a complete bad ending and have one of them die anyway. In the end, Ellie is alive and goes home. She lets Abby escape to Catalina Island to go to the Fireflies. Ellie has nothing to go home to, and the Fireflies have no ability to even provide her with the saving grace of being humanity’s savior anymore. It all ends in complete hopelessness, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
Really, it feels setup in a way that provides a path for another sequel.
[collapse]
I guess overall, this one fell on the more positive side of what I expected. Given the first game, I expected some mechanical roughness. I definitely got that, but mechanically it fell far more on the positive side that I went in expecting. On the story side, I expected a difficult story, but one that I enjoyed and I got that, even if a few things rubbed me a bit the wrong way. On the setting side, I expected a fantastic compelling setting, and I got that in spades. It’s interesting seeing where this one landed, and it’s a really fine example of what’s possible in game storytelling, despite the fact that the internet seems to be a little angry with the end result.
So, this is admittedly the third time I’ve played this game. I knew I would enjoy it, I knew it would take a long time, and I knew what the experience would be like. However, it was interesting playing it after Xenoblade 2. It didn’t necessarily make the remake better or worse, but the big changes in combat for Xenoblade 2 are something that I think I now appreciate more having gone back to the older combat style. My ramblings here are generally going to reflect seeing the changes the series has gone through now that I’ve played the two book ends sort of back to back.
Combat in the remake is the same as it was in the original. Your artes are lined up in a row to be used. Some artes are attacks, some are buffs or debuffs, some are defensive maneuvers, etc. Some of them are based on positioning (ex: bonus damage if attacking from behind). Some are used in tandem to effect the enemy (ex: Break -> Topple -> Stun). The basics that are there are the same that have been in the Xenoblade series the whole time.
What surprised me going back now that I’ve played Xenoblade 2 is how much I wish they’d have applied that game’s combat system to the remake. Ignoring some of the features that are definitely tied to the Xeno 2 story, the core change to that combat is that instead of a bar of artes that you scroll through, each attack is tied to a hard button – either on the d-pad or on the face buttons. This would have made the combat in this remake so much more fluid. You’ve got 8 buttons that could be used, 8 artes that you can assign anyway, and then a center activation on each character that could easily be applied to one of the shoulder buttons. Instead, you’re stuck doing a scroll to get to the arte that you want to use, while at the same time trying to juggle movement.
It also caught me a bit off guard that I never hit a point where I really felt a need to grind. I’m not sure if this is just because I’m generally familiar with the game, or if they did a rebalance pass, but balance was almost always in line with my expectations. Bosses felt reasonably balanced for where I expected to be in the game. If I was hitting a point where I was feeling a bit pressured, there was generally enough side quests around to give me boosts. I was generally collecting enough general stuff to keep up with money needed to grab the relevant current set of gear. It was just kind of a nice level playing field for the bulk of the game. I admittedly dropped it down to easy at the end, but not because I was frustrated of the grind like 2 or X. I was simply at a point where I wanted to see the remastered finish and epilogue content, rather than go through a boss gauntlet I’d already been through before.
On the other hand, boy do I really not miss the complexity of the systems in place in Xenoblade 2. That’s not to say that this game was ever really that simple, but it still only has three real forms of progression – XP for levels, AP for leveling up artes, and SP for leveling up passive skills. This is a far simpler game than the Excel simulation that Xeno 2 ultimately became. If there’s anything that really is still a bit of a chore to manage, it’s the amount of side questing involved.
That said, the overall UX for this is much improved over the original game anyway. Getting to your quest list is super fast (d-pad down). The in-world indication of where quest items or quest kills are is significantly improved. Generally speaking, it’s a lot more obvious what I should be doing at any point, and far quicker for me to change my focus to a different side quest with a few clicks.
There’s also some bonus points for how easy it was for me to change the cosmetic look of the party in the remake. Buying a piece of gear once permanently allows you to equip its cosmetic look to the characters it applies to. This is a super nice change, since your party can very rapidly turn into a multicolor shit show with all the random gear you’ll end up finding. I set my party’s look pretty early on to be consistent with roughly where they started, with a few minor color variations that I preferred, and stuck with it. On the surface, this may seem like a small feature, but I was always more of a fan of the numbers behind gear in JRPGs, and typically less of a fan of the visual impact in games that supported it, so finding my look and sticking to it is one of those things I really appreciate.
However, the real reason I suspect most people will want to replay this is for the Future Connected epilogue. This one was interesting in that it’s substantial, but not nearly as substantial as the Torna expansion for 2. It provides some nice story closure specifically for Melia, but not much else for the rest of the gang. It adds an interesting mechanic with the Nopon Ponspector horde that replaces chain attacks, but also significantly scales back your party flexibility. I suppose ultimately, it was a nice way for me to wrap up my gameplay of the remake, but it left me wanting to see more of what happened to the rest of the party. There may be some potential for them to add more of these epilogues to the game if they need to stretch the schedule before whatever Xeno project comes next, but I’m not sure if I’d recommend playing through an entire long JRPG again unless you’re really as big a fan of the series as I am.
Remakes are always a tough one, but in cases like Xenoblade I’m pretty happy about it. Beyond exposing the game to a much different audience than the previous go arounds, it’s just nice to hop into a game I loved in a way that is significantly better looking. This has continued my sort of run of JRPG remakes that I’ve been doing lately, and this is probably the safest of my recent bunch, sticking to the original framework entirely – FF7R was a distinct explosion, and Trials of Mana was similar in gameplay, but much different in visual style. However, it being safer didn’t make it worse. The game largely still works great. Would I have liked to see them take some risks and make combat smoother with lessons learned from 2? Ya. Am I glad to see that they didn’t add heaps of new systems? Even larger ya. This game wasn’t accidentally a 92 metacritic its first go around, and that shows. This game has aged remarkably well, and with a fresh coat of paint it’s still going to be worth playing for newcomers, and returning players may just take it as an opportunity to revisit a game they loved.
