Tag: square enix

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Game Ramblings #85 – The World Ends With You: Final Remix

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally released on: DS
  • Also available on: iOS, Android

TL;DR

  • Input and visual remake ported over from mobile both work fantastically well for a handheld Switch title
  • Still one of the most memorable soundtracks for an RPG from the DS’ run

This is a pretty interesting game to play on a second system if you originally played it on the DS. While the story is the same and the gameplay clearly takes its base style from the DS release, in practice it’s a much different experience due to the lack of a second screen. What this ends up being is a mix of nostalgia and new that somehow succeeds just as well as the original did, despite the years in between.

The obvious starting point here is combat. The original game had two screens of combat, the bottom which juggled manipulation of touch screen elements, and the top which used d-pad button combos to simultaneously attack two different areas at once. Since the top screen is gone, this version goes all-in on the touch elements. That tweet is just a small example where one of the player’s attacks (via equippable pins) involves dragging around environment obstacles to damage enemies. There’s a whole slew of tap, drag, slash, and hold attacks to equip and it’s all up to the player to find a mix that works best for them.

The combo attack is the reward for playing the game well, and it ends up being core to the changes to the battle system.

What’s most interesting for me was how they replaced the top screen manipulation. Under normal circumstances, the second party member is now just a normal pin. However, alternating each player’s attacks also builds up a meter that allows for a large combo attack to occur. Importantly, this combo attack also heals the party, so it doubles as a defensive maneuver as well. This completely changes the flow of battles compared to the original.

On the DS, my pattern was generally to switch my focus back and forth between each screen, doing a combo on one screen, moving the character to a safe area, then switching to the other screen. Here the focus is on one spot, and the peak way to fight is to find ways to build out your pin set to allow you to smoothly alternate between each character. In practice, this made my playing style a lot more aggressive than the original release. I was no longer too worried about avoiding damage, and in many cases encouraged taking damage so I could stay in close range. I’d maximize my attack alternation, get my combo built up, heal and do big damage to eliminate everything. It made the entire battle system feel completely new, and meant the loss of the unique second screen gameplay was not a negative.

Some of the old top screen gameplay does show up in bosses, and it’s a nice way to make boss fights feel unique.

Boss fights do bring in some of the dual-screen mechanics in a good way however. Boss fights in the original game generally revolved around one or the other character having to do specific actions in order to make the boss damageable or expose weak points. In this remake, that happens through transition points where you gain control of one character at a time to activate these actions. In the example above, the fight takes place in a music venue where one character is on the floor fighting the boss, and the second is in the rafters fighting adds to turn on lights to expose the boss. It basically ended up that the boss fights still felt really familiar and brought in some of the solid dual screen gameplay in a way that didn’t feel forced.

The mobile remake’s visuals really work well on the Switch. Everything is super crisp in handheld mode, and is a significant upgrade over the DS.

I suppose the short version here is that this is a game worth playing. I put way more hours into the DS version than I care to admit, and even for me playing this in the new format was a treat. The mix of old and new gameplay styles from the DS and mobile versions still left me playing an RPG that feels like nothing else on any system. The story was still super engaging, and the soundtrack is one of the best RPG soundtracks I’ve ever heard. If there’s anything I’d hold against this, it’s that playing it in anything other than handheld mode is a terrible idea, but I think it’s worth pulling that Switch over to your lap to give this one a whirl.

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Game Ramblings #76 – Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, 3DS (Japan Only)

TL;DR

  • Pretty traditional turn-based JRPG typical of the series, with a few nice modern features brought in
  • Fantastically gorgeous game thanks to using UE4
  • Solid story that kept me pushing forward, even if the “true ending” path got unnecessarily grindy

I’m pretty sure  I’ve made note of the fact that I’m a sucker for JRPGs in the past, and Dragon Quest 11 is about as JRPG as it gets.  The story is nonsense, the battles are strictly turn based, the grind is real, and the characters are still default Akira Toriyama.  Despite it all, this is clearly a modernized entry in the series from the visuals to some of the little gameplay elements that improve the overall experience, and it ends up going a long way to finally bringing the series into the current generation.

Combat is definitely familiar to traditional JRPG fans, but there’s a few nice things to minimize the tedious nature of this style.

Since this is a JRPG, I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with combat.  This is definitely a very traditional experience, even within the Dragon Quest series.  Turn order is based loosely on an effective speed stat.  Player characters have their basic attacks, skills, and magic attacks.  The general class archetypes of warrior, thief, mage, healer, etc are all present and each character definitely has their strong suit.  Behind it all is a skill tree for each character that the player can customize via skill points earned at each level.  Basically, it’s what you’d expect from a JRPG.

However, it’s the little things that this game brings that make this game an obviously more modern approach.  Auto battle makes its return from DQ9 to keep the pace of individual fights moving along.  It allows for setting priorities on how AI react, or can be turned off entirely on a per-character basis if more decision making detail is needed.  The party line up AND equipment can be changed at any time from within battle, allowing for very detailed strategies on harder content if a party or equipment setup isn’t working well.  Even more importantly, characters not in the active party gain 100% of XP from a fight, allowing the player to focus on the style that makes sense at the time without severely penalizing them for not using all characters at once.  In general, this is following a pattern of traditional but modern that is seen in a lot of other areas of the game.

I think most importantly though, this game has auto saves at pretty much every door and cutscene.  I couldn’t tell you if this was a technical or gameplay consideration, but simply knowing that I wasn’t going to lose a ton of progress to a boss death was a huge improvement to my overall play.  Rather than worrying about finding a save spot before a boss or worrying about my level, I simply always did boss fights.  Generally speaking this was fine and I would get through fights.  For a good portion of them, it also meant that I was going into fights at a challenging level, rather than grinding a bit more just to  be safe.  Overall it resulted in two really important changes to my usual JRPG game style; I did a lot less grinding so the game didn’t drag, and because of my level I was able to enjoy the challenge of level-appropriate or even underleveled fights without caring about whether I was going to die.  It may sound weird, but it just made the game more enjoyable knowing I was going to play this way.

Visuals are definitely distinctly modern. It’s obviously Dragon Quest, but it’s gorgeous.

The non-gameplay elements also fit well into the traditional but modern approach.  Visually, this is probably the best looking JRPG I’ve played, hands down.  Games like Final Fantasy 15 brought the flash in an open world setting, but definitely stretched the definition of what a JRPG really is.  Dragon Quest 11 doesn’t sacrifice visuals at all while still maintaining the JRPG gameplay.  Even better, the modern style allows for all enemies to be seen in the field in ways that make sense, so there are no random battles to be seen.  On the other hand, the music side of things is very traditional Dragon Quest.  Simply put, the game uses entirely MIDI audio instead of a fully orchestrated soundtrack.  Admittedly I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I can see why it’s been rubbing some people the wrong way compared to a lot of expectations of modern games.

It wouldn’t be a JRPG if all bosses were serious. Sometimes you just have to fight a mural.

Overall this was a pretty enjoyable romp.  On the story front there wasn’t much new; this is still the story of a convenient hero creating a gang to take out the big world destroying baddy.  On the gameplay front it was mostly tweaks to the existing formula.  On the artistic side, it was a blend of the old and new.  However, the total package is one that really hasn’t been seen at this quality for what has been a genre moving into much different territory at the AAA level.  This may be the best example we’re going to see for a long time of a strictly turn-based JRPG, so I can’t do anything but strongly recommend it if that’s what you’re looking for.

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Game Ramblings #43 – Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Originally Released On: PS2

TL;DR

  • Battle system is still going to be hit or miss for people.  If you enjoy the idea of programming the AI, you’ll likely enjoy this.
  • Story hasn’t aged too bad.  Vaan being the up front starting main character is still weird.
  • Modifications to the license system for upgrades are neither a big positive or negative to me.  Still like the general system overall.

Final Fantasy XII was at the time a pretty controversial game for the series.  It came on the heals of a long gap since X, with an MMO in between.  Even though on the surface the battle system seemed hugely different, it was still an ATB-based battle system, just with some potential for automating tasks thrown in.  However, it was that change that in a lot of ways threw a players for a loop.  Looking at this again 11 years later, I’m still a huge fan of the way the game was put together, even if some of the details still leave me grumbling at times.

Back when I originally played this, I never really understood a lot of the criticism thrown at the battle system.  At its core, it’s still the ATB-style system that had been in place for a number of years for the SNES and PS1 entries to the series.  Time bar fills, action can be taken, rinse and repeat.  To me, the ability to automate what the other party members were doing, and the ability to freely run around in real-time didn’t hugely differentiate the core of the system that much.  From my perspective, the biggest change was that battles were no longer random, and simply started up when an enemy was approached.  The fact that I could program out the party through the Gambit system meant that I could concentrate on fixing things when they went sideways, and leave the obvious things up to happen on their own.  It’s a given that I’m always going to attack, when some party member’s health drops I’m going to throw Cure, when debuffs are out I’m going to use Esuna or some variant, if the enemy is weak to an element I’m going to use magic.  The system in place here let me preset the entire party to do the obvious, and simply handle jumping in when adjustments needed to be done on the fly.  By and large, that system still works fantastically, and gets you through a lot of the game.  Boss battles are where I tend to jump in to manual actions the most, but even then I tended to spend more time adjusting my Gambits to suit the needs of the fight, and having fun doing that.

However, the Gambit system does have a few noticeable gaps that the programmer in me really wants more control over.  Target prioritization in general was typical pretty poor.  While there’s a lot of flexibility in how the target gets selected (nearest, furthest, X% HP, party leader’s target, etc), there was no way to use a priority to select a target, then stay locked on that target until they were killed.  Because of this, group fights can get really hairy really quickly if I was fully automated, with targets swapping almost every attack, rather than grinding down one enemy at a time.  It would also have been nice for some sort of binary system to place more stringent conditions on target selection (Ex: If leader is dead, use nearest target; else use leader’s target).  I also wish there was a concept of group-based conditions.  I ended up placing group spells like Cura on single-target “oh shit” conditions, and just manually triggering group buff type spells as necessary.  For example, Cura was fired on my group if ANY ally was below 30% health.  Ideally this would have been in a place where I could have done something to the effect of average group health, or similar condition.

The other real big change over normal Final Fantasy with this game was the License system.  The short version here is that while weapons, armor, magic, and skills are purchased in shops, they also have to have a corresponding License purchased.  In the original release, all characters had the same base License Board layout, with a different starting point in the board.  For the International release, as well as for The Zodiac Age, this has been replaced by job-style boards.  To be perfectly honest, there’s things I like about both and ended up not really having a preference as to which system was used.  In the original release, there was a ton of flexibility as the board filled, since all characters theoretically had access to everything.  I could very easily do high melee damage white mages, or a black mage that used gun attacks, or a ninja tank.  Characters in The Zodiac Age can still do this to some extent with a primary and secondary board, but the build out is significantly more focused, and the flexibility in class layout has to be determined at board purchase time, rather than being able to swap the character style at any point.  The flexibility of the original was nice, but being able to focus on a core build throughout the entire game in this place also simplified the nature of using the License Board system, so I ended up enjoying it just as well.

All in all, I enjoyed the hell out of the original release, and I still enjoyed the hell out of it the second time around.  This is definitely the kind of game that if you didn’t like it before, it’s not going to convince you to play it this time either.  The inclusion of an always on fast forward feature also meant that getting through the game was significantly quicker, clocking in at about 40 hours for me to complete the story, as well as a fairly large chunk of the hunt and side quest content, so the time commitment was significantly lower than in the past.  End of the day, the only thing replaying this did for me was convincing me that it’s still one of my favorite RPGs, and one that has aged pretty well since it came out two console generations ago.