Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a fairly enjoyable game overall. It had a great universe, enjoyable story, fun characters, and a ton of depth. However, it wasn’t without its issues. The game, like its predecessors was somewhat grindy. The UI was often in the way of streamlined leveling. Overall, despite its depth, the game often felt like it was pushing for more for the sake of more.
Torna however feels like they really embraced the idea of less is more, and the experience is much better as a result. This is an entirely standalone experience, billed as an expansion. It’s a much shorter experience with a significantly streamlined story, rips outs a whole bunch of extraneous systems to focus the leveling aspect, and narrows you onto two main titans. Some clever changes to the battle system really finish up the tweaks, and the total package ends up being much better than the base game, despite the reduction in bullet point features.
Welcome to Torna. After hearing so much about this land in the original game, it’s nice to finally be able to run around on it.
The most obvious immediate change is that almost all of the blade collecting, and therefore a lot of the metagame leveling is gone. You only get blades that are important to the story, and each party member ends up having two blades of different types. By the end of the expansion, you’ve basically got exactly what you need to finish the game with the full suite of ability types. There’s also no longer any special blades, no multi form blades, any robot blade replacements, and no mercenary guild to level up. This all sounds like a lot of removal, but that also meant that a lot of the tedious grind simply went away. It’s entirely addition by subtraction.
The rest of the leveling setup is maintained. You get XP from kills and quests, weapon points from kills, skill points from kills, and various things can be activated in each blade’s affinity chart. As a core set this ends up playing a nice balance between having a nice range of systems without having too many, and also gives you some specific subgoals to focus on, particularly with respect to the blade affinities.
Combat should feel extremely familiar to XC2 fans, though it has some tweaks.
The battle system has also been tweaked to generally feel more streamlined, as well as a fair bit quicker paced. For the most part, people familiar with XC2 will drop in quickly and feel right at home, and I suspect they will like the changes in place.
The first big change is that blade swapping is used as a way to switch the active passive attacker, and swapping between the blades and the driver activate an attack on swap. This is used to inflict a number of status effects, particularly things like topple or smash, as well as providing a full recharge of the blade artes. In practice, it basically means that you can do a combo as follows:
Activate Break on one character while using all of their artes.
Swap to another character to inflict Topple and quickly use the full suite of artes.
While this is happening, the AI will typically inflict Launch
Swap to the third character to inflict Smash, finishing a full chain combo.
This pattern is done way faster than any similar combo would have been done in the original release. In also having the blades be the primary attacker, there’s a much more direct feel to the swap, instead of it simply being the blade out of frame swapping out.
The elemental orb / chain attack setup has also been tweaked a bit to reduce clutter. There are still orbs applied on successful blade artes, elemental orbs can be broken in a final combo attack, etc. However, the elemental chaining no longer is used to seal attacks, so a big UI element that I generally ignored is no longer there, and honestly I didn’t miss it at all.
This is still a spectacularly gorgeous game, especially for an open-world Switch experience.
So in the end, this is both a great expansion on the XC2 universe, as well as a way to generally improve on the overall gameplay at the same time. As a prequel, this covers a bunch of story that was hinted at throughout the original game in a way that only improves the universe. On its own that’s enough for me to recommend it to fans of the original. However, the gameplay improvements definitely clinch it for me. This is a much better experience than XC2, and it’s clear that the dev team is learning some lessons from their past releases. Here’s to hoping whatever comes next continues that improvement.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a curious experience. So much time was clearly spent on the technology of the game, and it is super impressive. Just as impressive is the story, which manages to craft perfect heroes and villains while simultaneously ending with an epilogue that connects to the first game in a way that elevates the original’s story even more. However, the gameplay is the odd ball out. There’s a lot of pieces here to take in, but they don’t fit together in a clean way – the game often feels like a collection of parts with no collective whole. Are the parts that are great enough to recommend playing this one?
It’s nice seeing Marston near the end, and it definitely feels more like the RDR1 landscape than the rest of the game. It really connects the two titles well.
RDR2 is the type of game that I kind of dread playing. I really enjoyed the original title despite its flaws, and that really centered around my enjoyment of the story. However, that game in particular wrote itself into a corner where a direct sequel was impossible. In this case, Rockstar went with the direct prequel approach. You’re generally playing as Arthur Morgan, though RDR1’s John Marston is still around as a member of your gang.
While this game is heavily focused on Arthur, this is still entirely the story of John Marston. Throughout the game, you see the events that shape Marston in the original – why he went after the people he did, why he cared so much to rescue his family, why the FBI had cornered him to begin with. Marston ultimately becomes the best of Arthur, and the care given to the growth of Arthur’s character ultimately has the great payoff of leading into the original game through RDR2‘s fantastic epilogue chapters played through the eyes of Marston. All of the narrative pieces that come together really end up elevating the story of RDR1 while allowing us to have a story that is fantastic as its own standalone experience.
This horse in particular died when a checkpoint reload spawned the horse inside a train that I was on. I couldn’t get back to it in time. That annoying level of missing polish is pretty persistent.
However, the gameplay is a lot less polished, and it’s definitely a big negative to me. Rockstar’s titles in the past decade or so have all had fairly similar issues to me. There’s always 1000 different systems that feel like they were made independent of each other and never tied together in a cohesive manner. In GTA4 and GTA5, the driving functioned but wasn’t great. In RDR1, the horse was there and felt like a chore. In all three of those, the gunplay was quite frankly below average at best and entirely exploitable. Overall their gameplay always seems to take a back seat at a polish level to technology and story. While that has worked great for them, it’s frankly kind of a bummer to see that continue.
I’ll start with some small stuff, because I think it’s indicative of the lack of care shown to allowing the gameplay to iterate to a high polish state:
I lost track of the amount of times I was attempting to hitch my horse up, then it would continue moving forward and run people over by accident, despite me having started the button input to begin hitching. This unfortunately usually results in the police chasing after me. Given a bit of polish, have hitching automatically lock and slow down the horse into the hitch point to reduce errors. If the user lets go of the button early, then allow the horse to resume normal movement.
You can fast travel if you’re at camp, and can do a pseudo fast travel by buying train tickets. Does this mean they technically have fast travel in the game? Sure. Does not being able to arbitrarily fast travel suck? Yes. Should they have done a more modern-style fast travel where unlocking travel points allows it to happen from anywhere? Absolutely. The current system is just encouraging empty gameplay hours to ride between missions.
Skinning animals is a large part of the general upgrade path for a lot of gear in the game. Unfortunately the skin trader only has two locations – one in the far east of the map and one in the far southeast of the map, both of which you don’t really spend much time in until well into the game.
Quite a lot of missions are preceded by a 5+ minute horse ride to the destination while the player follows some NPC. This would be all well and good, but many of these don’t include a checkpoint right afterwards. Nothing is more frustrating than being unable to skip a replay of a bunch of dialog because it isn’t technically a cutscene.
There’s a cover system, but it’s quite frankly not any more advanced than that seen in Gears of War more than a decade ago. You hit a button, hard lock to the nearest thing, have really bad mechanics to unlock from cover, and pretty rough mechanics to transition around or between different covers. Does it work? Sure. Is it good? Not really.
Those are just a few examples, but what it really comes down to is that it feels like realism or feature count constantly won out over fun. Do I get why they stuck to that as a principal of the development of the game? Sure. Does it make the gameplay worse for it? Absolutely.
You end up spending a LOT of time riding back and forth on horseback. Luckily it looks pretty damn good, even with rough spots.
The horse is also entirely frustrating, especially when compared against the horse mechanics introduced by Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey. RDR2 has the autopilot horse that AC does, but requires being in the cinematic camera, meaning it can’t be used for combat. Anything other than a gallop also requires the player to rhythmically tap X in sync with the horse’s gait which becomes entirely entertaining the first time you have to ride ten minutes across the map, let alone 40 hours later when you’re still tap tap tapping away to move fast. Of course, this isn’t necessary if you’re following alongside an NPC. At that point you can just hold X to match their speed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily cleanly match their turning, so you can get way off course if you aren’t actively turning the horse anyway. What this all comes down to is that combat on a horse is needlessly shit, and you spend a lot of time getting into combat on your horse.
You’ve got four entirely different sets of things you want to be doing on a horse – shoulder buttons for weapon firing input, face buttons for speed input, left stick for horse turning, and right stick for camera aiming. Right off the bat, speed vs camera aim are in a fight for a thumb. In a lot of situations, the people you are fighting are chasing you, so you’re trying to steer backwards while also not being able to see where you’re going. It’s all just a bunch of inputs fighting against each other in a way that Ubisoft already solved. The entire setup would be significantly better if you could just lock onto the nearest road at a fast gallop and completely remove the need to steer or manage speed, allowing the combat to shine and the player to focus their energy on taking out enemies. It would also have allowed for much more dynamic combat where enemies are coming from multiple directions since the player wouldn’t be having to manage so many disparate input needs.
It’s even more frustrating because they accidentally have sequences that allow this. There’s enough situations where you’re either the second person on a horse, or in the back of a horse drawn cart where you literally are a road-locked turret, and those all work fantastically better as combat situations than general minute to minute horse riding combat. Between these sequences and Ubisoft’s AC horse, I’m baffled that nobody noticed that there were already solutions that are simply more viable for smooth gameplay.
Some of the best sequences were stealth sequences and I wish they’d leaned more into using them over large scale combat, even if the stereotype of the wild west is large gun fights.
For what it’s worth, it also doesn’t help that the gunplay is down right average in RDR2. There’s a pretty decent range of weapons between multiple types of pistols, revolvers, rifles, and bows. However, they didn’t really separate themselves enough for me to care to use a specific weapon in most situations, unless I wanted the bow for stealth or a sniper weapon for longe range firing. In the most combat, the range of the weapon didn’t matter as I could lock fire snipe just as well with a revolver or rifle simply due to how bad the input setup worked.
Hip firing is effectively useless in RDR2. The game’s general gamepad input is pretty miserably bad. Target adhesion for right analog input is pretty rough, there’s not much in the way of useful magnetism to hone you in on a target close to the reticle, and I didn’t really get much out of turn sensitivity options. What they do have in place of good camera movement is an entirely exploitable hard lock system. Hitting the lock on button anywhere even close in screen space to a target will hard lock you to the target’s center. A simple stick flick upwards will pretty much guarantee a shot on the target’s head or neck area. I’d estimate that I could headshot about a 75% effective rate just doing this alone. The AI playing a lot of sit in a spot and peak out every now and then doesn’t make it any better.
Quite frankly, it trivializes combat in a way that makes the game far worse. The most tense situations end up being ones where the game simply has to throw targets at you because it’s easy to one-shot guys, and their AI isn’t trying to do anything other than move forward from cover to cover towards you. However, you can pick off entire crews of enemies in a matter of seconds because of how easy it is to exploit the targeting system. While I did occasionally die in some of these setups, it never really felt challenging, and death felt more happenstance based on me not paying attention to my health and getting to cover.
Regardless of all my complaints, this is still a damn fun game – entirely because it’s rescued by a story that’s as good as you’ll ever see in games.
I realize that that reads like a lot of complaining, and to some extent it is. However, for me it’s more frustration that a company can spend the amount of time and money it takes to make a game of absolutely mind blowing scope like RDR2, but still come up with something that has gameplay that feels entirely average. There’s a whole lot here that technically works, but spending more time on gameplay polish instead of time on feature creep (do the horses really need to periodically shit everywhere for realism?) could have left us with a game where the gameplay matched the fantastic story and visuals, rather than feeling like an afterthought.
All that aside, is this worth playing anyway? 100%. The story is going to be one of the best wild-west stories that we likely see for a long time in games, and I think it’s worth physically being in the game playing over watching the story on Youtube. Visually I was also constantly floored with each new vista I came up to, or each time I entered the largest city of Saint Denis at night. Those things being so good are what makes it incredibly frustrating that the gameplay simply doesn’t match it. This game is definitely a case where the sheer amount of money spent on it is obvious and raises the game up to something really damn good despite it having a ton of flaws, and for that alone I think it’s worth the spin.
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.
