Tag: square enix

2019-08-182019-08-14

Game Ramblings #91 – Dragon Quest Builders 2

Genre: Action RPG / Sandbox Builder
Platform: Switch
Also Available On: PS4

Playing this game was all sorts of breaking my usual tendencies. I would typically buy this game on PS4 for better performance, but opted for the Switch for handheld convenience. I don’t really like builders like Minecraft, but the story and goal-focused gameplay really looked interesting to me. I would typically shelve a game after reaching end credits, but I’m already hours past that point and still playing. Really I think all of those things and the quality of the core game itself have helped me to really enjoy this game a lot more than I really expected I would.

This game was a relaxing pleasure. Sometimes there’s combat, sometimes there’s building, and sometimes you just sit there and work on your community.

Where the first Builders was a sequel to Dragon Quest 1, this is a sequel to Dragon Quest 2. It picks up some time after the original game, the player becomes friends with the resurrected final boss of that game, and a buddy copy adventure ensues, with the player being the builder and Malroth being the smasher. It’s all a little bit absurd, and it provides just enough of a grounding to the DQ world to really drive the fact that this game has goals and progress and a reason to march forward.

I’ve never really been a big fan of Minecraft, which makes this game perhaps a weird target for me to play. I just never really dealt well with the open ended nature of the game, and never really felt like putting together my own list of goals to move toward. DQB2 solves a lot of that for me by providing even a small overlay of goals to head towards. I’ll just do a quick walk through of the sort of opening little bit of time in the game where you learn to build basics, learn to gather followers, and learn to farm to provide yourself food. How it works in this game is important to why it clicked more than Minecraft.

Automation through your villagers becomes super important to the improved flow of this game over your typical building-type games. Focus on what’s important next, not what you’ve already done.

Eating to keep away from hunger is important in both games, as is the act of creating farms to sustain this growth. The first part is building farms, and importantly equipment for it. In Minecraft? You’ve got to know some recipe or figure it out, then build out some stuff with an interface that is cool to see a few times, but becomes tedious over time. In DQB2? You learn recipes and automatically batch build them in an easy to use menu. Cool, you’ve got a farm. In Minecraft? Manually grab things every time. In DQB2? Recruit followers to your island who will keep the farm in shape, plant new crops, pick grown crops, and put them in storage for you. Cool, now you’ve got some food, and can eat it raw or cook it. In Minecraft? Get on that yourself. In DQB2? Cook a thing once to learn it, then have a cooking follower do it for you, and grab from storage as needed.

I suppose the high level of all of this is that once you do something once, and it becomes automated. This allows you to focus on what’s next, instead of having an ever growing list of things that you have to do on routine. You learn to farm, setup the basics, then automate it. You later learn to mine, setup the basics, then automate it. Hell, as you start to explore smaller side islands you can gain perks that give you infinite resources of some types, which completely removes the tedious nature of having to find more and more and more of basic resources. The nature of all this is that the repetition is removed, and you’re basically focused on always doing new cool things.

The fact that this ties into a light action RPG layer also helps a lot. In general exploration, there’s simple party-based hack and slash combat. You’ve got some light gearing to provide a nice power curve. You’ve got some tools to provide enhanced exploration as the game goes on. Basically, that progression curve of action RPGs is there enough to provide a push forward. Where this really comes into play is the base defenses that grow more complex as the game goes on.

Base defense becomes really important later in the game, to the point where it becomes the focal point of a large segment of building.

The base defenses are effectively tower defense while mobile. On your side, you’ve got your base defenses and your base followers. Followers can be geared up using the same recipes used to create player gear to make them more effective. Base defenses are the real meat though. This runs the gamut from simple spikes and ballistas to more fun magic traps, whether it’s fire, wind, or ice. These provide a really fun way to meld customizing your base through the heavy builder gameplay with the combat mechanics and more typical ARPG elements. As distractions along the way they also provided periods of strategy and pace changing that broke up the monotony of exploring and digging for resources.

I think at the end of it all, I’m surprised how well just a few small changes to the core Minecraft loop got me to play the game in a different disguise. Giving me goals, giving me a story, automating monotony – those are all things that are small in theory but huge in practice. Having played the original Builders, this is also a huge push forward just for this series. The first one felt like a half step in this direction, but the sequel really smoothed out the game. It’s gone from being a neat variant on an idea to being something that I don’t want to put down, and honestly I can’t say that I saw that coming.

2019-08-142019-08-14

Game Ramblings #88.2 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance HD

Read Part 2 here.

More Info from Square Enix

Genre: Action RPG
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: 3DS

Dream Drop Distance is one of those classic games where I started it, played a whole bunch of it, then just…..stopped. I didn’t stop for any reason other than getting distracted. What I’d played I’d enjoyed, but it just never really gave me a reason to get back to it. In playing it again on the big screen, I’ve come around to this one more than I think I would have trying to replay this on the 3DS, and in doing so at the very least checked another game off on the way to playing KH3.

Summons have been replaced by a Pokemon-style collection system. I didn’t really use this a whole hell of a lot, but they’re pretty dang adorable.

Playing Dream Drop Distance after II definitely makes this game feel worse to some extent, but in the grand scheme of things this still played well. Like other KH games, it’s got a few tweaks to combat – some that worked well, some that didn’t – and a completely bat shit character split that does more harm than good in gameplay, but provides a pretty good grounding to the story. Realistically, the Kingdom Hearts series as a whole has always been a some things work, some things don’t and DDD isn’t any different.

Combat changes are really the key here, and the changes really fall into three main categories – reduction in chains, much greater use of the environment in combat, and changes to mana (again). The first feels purely like a change made for the limitations for the portable experience, and after KH2 it feels really unfortunate. Combos may last three or four hits on their own. On face value it feels sloppy but in practice it really encourages and forces the use of other new combat mechanics. Mana also sees some changes in this game, in so much as it no longer exists. In place of the recharging mana bar from KH2 are individually recharigng abilities that can be stacked into a scrolling list. This list grows as the player levels, giving a nice mix of flexibility in building out the active spec and some of the nice gains from the recharging bar of KH2.

Flowmotion and Reality Shift make the world a lot more of an interactive experience in combat, and it’s pretty key to being effective at avoiding damage in larger fights.

The real meat of the combat changes are around the Flowmotion system. The tl;dr here is that dodge rolling into pretty much any environment section (walls, poles, etc) or large enemies will put the player into a quick combo action. For walls, this is a linear flight move into a large attack. For poles, the player will circle around the poll and jump off into a tornado-like move. Different flowmotion attacks do different things and most of these moves provide some amount of immunity frames so this becomes the sort of default way to fight.

Unfortunately this is kind of a mixed bag. The moves are definitely super flashy and they’re entirely effective. However, it trivializes a lot of combat situations in really negative ways. On the other side though, the lack of combo attacks and boss fight patterns really makes it feel like there’s no other effective way to fight that doesn’t involve grinding and overpowering. It’s definitely a bit of good and bad, and it can get really repetitive during boss fights, but it’s at least still fun to watch.

The other mixed bag is the way the meta progression occurs in the game. The minimal spoiler version is that this game takes place around Sora and Riku trying to become key blade masters. In doing so, the two get split up in alternate dimension versions of the same world, with each needing to complete their version of the world to meet up at the end of the game. In practice, the switch between characters happens in a time-based forced switch. Realistically, this just feels shitty. There’s things you can do to slow down the countdown and give the other person boosts during their story segment, but even with that it kind of just feels like it always forces a switch at the worst time. I really like the story aspect for having this system too, but I’d so much rather it just switch characters at the end of the world, or let players switch as they want and simply introduce blocking points at a couple sections along the way. The worst part of all of this is that they HAVE those blocking points at a few spots along the way, so you have both the countdown AND progress blocking at the same time and the user never really has good control of their wanted flow.

If nothing else, this game still has sick costumes. I’ll take musketeer Mickey on my team any day.

Dream Drop Distance continued the pattern that we’ve been seeing. Kingdom Hearts will attempt some new things. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. At its release, this game proved that portable KH in Birth by Sleep was perhaps not a fluke in being a really deep experience, but on the TV it felt both more easily playable but also less forgiving in how its gameplay loop really worked out. Overall this is still a pretty entertaining game, and if nothing else this was at least a better sidetrack on the path to KH3 than when I went off track to Chain of Memories.

2019-07-172019-07-17

Game Ramblings #88.1 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix

Read part 1 here.

More Info from Square Enix

Genre: Action RPG
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: PS2, PS3

This is admittedly the first time I’d played Kingdom Hearts II. I’d played most of the spinoff games in the past, but given how little I kind of enjoyed playing through Kingdom Hearts in its original form, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to pay for KH2 at its release when I should really have been focused on paying for college. Since then going back to play it just never really happened. In continuing my path to eventually get to KH3, this was then the one real big game I had to get to, and it’s surprising in ways I wasn’t expecting.

The first surprise is in the drastic difficulty change between releases. Where the original Kingdom Hearts was artifically difficult because of bad mechanics, the second game is artificially easy because of good mechanics used too much. There were definitely a couple of times where I died to the usual KH blind damage nuke, but by and large I was able to brute force my way around those points once I knew what to look out for. However, this all came down to the fact that combat was significantly better than the first game in a couple crucial ways.

Combat is definitely better in KH2. This ends up being really nice when literally dozens of enemies are thrown at you.

The first big change to combat is the complete rewrite of how mana works in the game. The original game recharged mana per-attack completed. While this works alright in games like Tales of where there’s a bunch of safety space in absorbing damage, for KH getting up close had to be fairly specifically timed and often resulted in death by accidents. The entire process of using mana in that combat system just ended up feeling like a slow process, so I really leaned into items for healing and straight attack brute force. It’s a style that I enjoy anyway in a typical action RPG, so poor combat mechanics aside it worked out fairly well for me.

For KH2, mana is a fixed bar resource, magic attacks have a fixed cost, and once a mana bar is depleted it is set into a timer-based automatic recharge. This vastly improved the utility of magic as a whole. I knew that I could fairly reliably have a Cure spell if needed. If I was in a section where the enemy was stunned, I could unload a bunch of magic spells and know that I wouldn’t then have to play it safe while waiting for attacks to refill my mana. As a result, my entire combat tendencies went into a much more aggressive offense-first setup which ended up greatly benefiting the overall flow of the game throughout.

At this point in the game I’d already stacked up a 5+ chain combo, which made getting after tiny flying enemies really nice.

The combat flow was also helped by the second biggest surprise for me – just how many damn attacks they let you build into your combo by the end of the game. Additional combo skills were unlocked periodically, usually focused on some specific type of combat (on the ground, in the air, etc). Turning on these skills basically meant that your combo chain would get one longer and let you lean into heavy damage that much longer. By the end of the game I probably had about a 10 combo chain in the air, and at least 6 or 7 on the ground. The end result of this is that I could pretty typically go into a boss and do at least half a bar of damage per-combo, if not more. In any stun situation, I was easily doing 2 full bars of damage against a boss. This solved a lot of the problem of the first game’s bosses, where they mechanically sucked AND took forever, by simply having them die quicker whether or not their mechanics were really that good.

Besides all that, the overall game was definitely a cleaner experience. Boss arenas tended to be pretty simple box or circle affairs, which got rid of the collision problems of the first game. Your sidekick characters tended to be more on the ball with support healing, giving you more opportunity to be in the fight. The general balance curve was a lot less prone to difficulty spikes and flatline segments, giving a much more balanced progression path. Even the worlds themselves were setup in a way that more paths opened up on second or third playthroughs of a world, so going back never felt like it was done as a need to grind or search, but instead to learn more about what was going on. Attacking vaguely in midair did a much better job of homing in on targets around you, so there was a lot less waste in simply trying to get AT something.

It’s also worth noting that the Lion King costumes are the best costumes the series has had to this point.

Is this game without problems? Hardly. The things above all lead up to an experience that is simply way too easy overall, but it ends up being easy in a way that doesn’t detract from the experience. It’s also got some systems like the form-shifting Drive system that I quite frankly didn’t find at all useful beyond gaining some traversal passives. Summons were also technically still there, but again I didn’t end up finding much practical use for them. The story is also completely bonkers, and when combined with the KH 1.5 disc’s lore makes absolutely no sense. However, this game is a much cleaned up experience compared to the first title, and in doing so it goes from something that I play because Disney + Final Fantasy is an interesting quirky idea to something that I play because it’s actually a lot of fun.

Next in line for the KH replay cycle is going to be Dream Drop Distance HD, which actually is one of the games I’ve played through before.