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Game Ramblings #71 – Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

More Info From Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Wii U

TL;DR

  • Solid entry to the DKC series.  Doesn’t necessarily do new things, but does most things to a high level.
  • Difficulty takes awkward swings depending on whether or not you have a secondary character available.
  • One of the better pure 2D platformers available on any platform, and a great one to have on the go now that it’s moved to Switch

Admittedly, this isn’t the first time I played this one.  I got through a lot of it back on the Wii  U, but ultimately rage quit due to some of the weird difficulty swings.  This time around, I took a bit more measured approach to how I was playing the game, and realistically took advantage of knowing the sticking points, and got through it.  Ultimately this is a great game and a leading example of how classic platformers can move into modern times, even if it’s not without its share of balance issues.

DKC fans will recognize a lot, including your occasional old rhino friend.

The obvious thing to start with is the fact that this is very much a Donkey Kong Country game.  It doesn’t really do much new, does what is expected really well, and is a lot of fun.  Your move set is pretty basic, with roll jumps really being the only semi-advanced feature.  The only real addition on the newer games is the ground pound to stun enemies.  If there is any problem I’d point out there, having ground pound and roll on the same button led me to roll to my death by accident more times than I care to admit.  Given the Switch has 4 face buttons, it’s weird that they only use two of them (A/B for jump, X/Y for pound+roll).

However, beyond that input is as expected.  Movement is really tight, even with analog movement available.  Jumping is really predictable and as expected allows for some variance in height based on hold time.  Rolling off the edge of a platform and late jumping still works and is still crucial for speed runs, just as it has since DKC1.  That set of core functionality just feels good the entire time, and allows for the difficulty focus to be on not dying, rather than fighting mechanics.

Rockets are the start of things that look different from the past, with some of the changes working better than others.

By and large the things that are different still work just as well though.  On the ride front you still have your mine cart levels, but you also have levels with rockets that are just as fun, and provide nice distractions from straight platforming.  However, the biggest difference is that the secondary characters in the game aren’t playable.  They’re there to work as a backpack with a second ability, and it’s here that things start to work a bit less well.

On the secondary front, you’ve got Diddy with a short time jetpack, Dixie with her hair flip hover, and Cranky that acts as a pogo stick to avoid damage on some traps and allow for killing enemies with head protection.  There’s no easy way around this – Dixie is by far the most useful and should be the default option.  Cranky’s ability works fine but is extremely niche.  It’s just not that useful in situations where the additional jump protection provides a measure of safety.  Between Diddy and Dixie, Dixie is easily the obvious choice.  They both provide a built in amount of horizontal hovering, but Dixie’s provides the secondary help of either gaining height at the top of the jump, or allowing the player to jump under an enemy, then hover up to a platform.  It’s simply more versatile to do the same end action.

Difficulty can be rough if you don’t have a secondary character, but bosses really emphasize this issue.

However, it really feels like the game was balanced around having the secondary character at all times, and losing them is a punishing penalty.  While it’s not ideal in normal levels to lose a secondary, it will happen often and you’ll deal with it.  Most of the levels have fairly rare barrels available to get a new character, so you learn to deal with the limitations in Donkey Kong’s movement and simply slow down.  However, bosses exacerbate the issue.

The bosses are by and large 90s-era fights for better or worse.  They’re multi-phase fights, all 9 hits to win, and generally simple mechanics.  They’re definitely favoring a showcase of skill over spectacle.  However, they’re also full of one-shot death mechanics, questionable hit boxes, and having to learn untelegraphed attack patterns through repeated deaths.  For the most part it’s as expected, but it’s fairly frustrating.  Losing your secondary character just means that you go from a low threshold of danger to almost no threshold for danger.  Given how quick you can exit and re-enter the boss fights, it generally makes more sense to do just that when getting hit, and that’s probably not what the design team was going for.

This game is basically what the DKC series pulled straight into this era should be expected to be, visuals, gameplay, and all.

So end of the day this is a game that lives by the fact that it’s very much a 90s game.  Building off a series that was so mechanically fantastic as DKC puts you at a point where that will generally work fine, and Tropical Freeze doesn’t falter.  There’s definitely warts here because it doesn’t try to be something overtly modern, but at the same time I played and enjoyed it BECAUSE of that.  Do I think people that aren’t fans of 90s platformers will enjoy this? Not really.  However, that makes it pretty obvious who the target market is, and those folks will be happy again.

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Game Ramblings #70 – God of War

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4

TL;DR

  • Phenomenally well made game that brings the series out of its brawler roots and straight into a full blown action RPG.
  • Well written characters and story, to the point where they effectively make you hate the son when he’s acting like an ass.  Does a good job blending in Norse mythology to what was previously a Greek-focused series.

God of War is one of those series that screams Sony first-party, but it’s been eight years since the Greek timeline games ended.  Ya we had Ascension, but that was a prequel and even that was give years ago.  After such a long gap, announcing a Norse reboot / sequel was already a head turner.  Announcing it as a drastic genre departure was another, with this game now being very much an action RPG with all the free roam trappings that come with it.  Side quests, item collection, crafting, upgrades, skill trees and more are all there.  Despite it all, this is both extremely fitting for the series, and quite possibly the best entry of them all.

The entire game is the story of Kratos and his son’s travels, and that’s where the differences begin.

This first screen shot says a lot about the differences in this game relative to the original.  For one thing, Kratos now has a son and he hasn’t managed to accidentally kill him in a rage.  Beyond that though, you start to see little details.  The son brings in a set of ranged combat possibilities that add some new depth to the core combat.  Kratos is wearing gear that was crafted at a vendor.  We’re clearly no longer romping around in Greece.  On the far left, Kratos is using an axe instead of blades (although the blades come back later).  Basically, this is still God of War, but it’s not quite what we’re used to.

The combat front straddles that line between familiar and new in a really good fashion.  This is still melee-chain combat, but it’s not quite as high speed as the original.  You still have your light and heavy attacks, but there’s a much larger focus on parrying and dodging.  Later on in the game, you end up juggling between frost and fire weapons based on the enemies that you are attacking, so there’s some built-in strategy.  The skill tree that is there brings in some familiar special attacks, but the risk of being hit during them is much higher, so their timed use becomes much more important.

It’s the son that ultimately brings in some of the big changes.  While his positioning isn’t directly controllable by the player, his basic move set is.  He’s got arrows that can be fired at enemies, sometimes for additional damage, sometimes for the use of crowd control, sometimes for the use of stunning to allow Kratos to get damage in.  He’s also got some special attacks that can be triggered on cooldowns.  However, it’s his passive skill growth that becomes the most useful.  By late game, he’s got skills that allow him to engage in melee combat more often, including things like hopping on enemies backs as distractions and doing his own quick hitting melee.  Basically, as the son grows as a plot device, he becomes inherently more useful as a combat device, and it eliminates the frustration that typically comes with escort-based secondary characters.

Now, that’s not to say that moving to more of a core RPG combat has removed some of the flashiness. Case in point:

The big flashy scenes are largely reserved for finishers in battle, and more specifically generally against bosses and minibosses.  Stun kills on trash enemies also have mini-cutscenes, but these are quick hitters and don’t try to keep you out of combat for very long.

Despite the changes, the flow of combat feels phenomenal overall.  Most engagements are going to be a heavy mix of attacking, watching for enemy tells to parry, or really large attacks to dodge.  Its a system of constant movement, rather than a system of waiting for moments, and it really works well.

If you want to, you can spend a lot of time in boats exploring

If you really have that RPG itch though, this is also a great game for that.  Beyond the main story line, there’s side quests and collection galore.  For the most part, these simply exist for purposes of getting more gear, but that becomes important for the post-game content.  The end boss is by a long shot easier than some of the creatures out in the world and some of those fights are among the most fun in the game to engage in, so you have a lot of reasons to get out there exploring.  If you’re a lore or collection nut, there’s also a lot there.  Shrines, treasure hunts, rare ingredients, dragons to free, and more are there for exploring.  If you’re really feeling brave, there’s also two realms that exist purely for the sake of side quests.  Basically, once you finish the game you aren’t really finished if you think you want to get a bunch of hours out of this one.

At this point in the game I wanted to kill the kid, and that’s a lot larger of a complement to the developers than it sounds.

However, the thing that kept me coming back is that this was a well told story.  The interplay between Kratos and his son starts off as somewhat hilarious on the surface as Kratos pretty much spends hours yelling BOY GET OVER HERE.  However, once the boy finds out what he really is, he becomes effectively a pompous ass for an arc of the game.  The fact that I was legitimately pissed at the kid says a lot about how effective their writing was.  The gods they meet throughout, the secrets beneath the surface, and to the end of the game the little plot twists that were thrown in were all part of what would make this one great, even for folks watching it like a movie alongside someone playing.

So, I guess I’m somewhat surprised even if I shouldn’t be.  The God of War series has always been somewhat of a hallmark for the quality of Sony’s first-party teams.  However, it always was kind of a brawler with a cool theme, and not necessarily a super deep experience.  This one turns all that on its head, giving us an extremely deep action RPG that still feels familiar despite all the changes.  The fact that they so fundamentally evolved this series is a phenomenal achievement.  This is the type of game that turns other platform traditionalists into PlayStation owners, and I can’t recommend it enough to go out and play it now.

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Game Ramblings #69 – Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows

TL;DR

  • Action-focused RPG battle system that is a lot of fun, even if it’s drastically different than its predecessor
  • Biggest negative is the ease of the main story path through the game
  • Kingdom-building content is the biggest focus for the player’s power curve improvements, but is going to be love it or hate it
  • Lots of side content between collecting citizens and killing tainted monsters

Ni no Kuni II is a bit of a strange game.  While it’s technically a sequel, it only loosely shares a setting with the original, completely scrapped the original’s battle system, and more or less scrapped the originals Pokemon-style collection.  While it also brought over the visual style of the first game, this one was not done in tandem with Studio Ghibli, so it’s missing a lot of the world charm of the first one. Taken on its own though, this is a really good game.  Visually this is still fantastic and is obviously helped being on a generation newer hardware.  The characters and story are still light hearted and enjoyable to play.  In place of the first game’s combat, we now have a very Tales of action combat system that is strengthened by the inclusion of some collectible helpers.  While it doesn’t necessarily succeed across the board, the fact that I got a platinum trophy on it says a lot about how much I enjoyed my time in the game.

While not necessarily as unique as the original was at the time, this is still one of the finer examples of visuals in an RPG.

While there are a lot of differences, it’s still pretty obvious this is in the Ni no Kuni franchise and universe.  Visually, this is another pretty astounding game.  While not directly a Ghibli product, it’s pretty clear that the employees they brought over into Level-5 have continued their legacy in the sequel.  The writing also has a lot of that Ghibli feel.  Despite the serious underlying story of a child king losing his rule to a coup, the interactions between the story’s main characters are often lighthearted and often pretty funny.  It’s not shy about having serious moments, but it also doesn’t take itself too seriously.  There’s even a few nods for fans of the original game throughout, despite the sequel taking place presumably a few hundred years in the future.

However, that’s about where the similarities end.

Higgledys may not feel that useful, but they sure are kind of adorable.

The first obvious difference is that capture and collecting of monsters that you fight in the world is gone.  In its place are the capture and collection of Higgledys.  These act as little helpers in battle that for the most part act autonomously.  Some are attack focused, some are healing focused, etc.  While they do all have special attacks that can be used to provide additional support, they generally just kind of existed in my peripheral vision in-battle.  Once I had a party of four that worked for me early on, I never switched them out for a new crew, despite the fact that there were dozens to collect.  They could also be upgraded for better stats, but again I never really noticed the difference in practical use.

Combat is simple, but a lot of fun in practice.

However, the higgledys not being obviously useful didn’t really matter because the combat was a lot of fun on its own.  At the end of the day this is pretty close to a straight rip of the Tales of series combat.  You have skills and ranged attacks that use a mana resource, two kinds of basic attacks that also recharge mana, items that can be fired off if needed, and occasional special attacks.  If that rings like Tales of it’s because it is, but the pace of combat is just as fast as the source and everything feels impactful.

If there’s one real problem with the combat, it’s that the core story path really is just too easy.  Most trash can be cleared with an opening skill to clear away the bulk of the pack.  Enemies that get killed end up dropping frequent mana and health orbs, so I didn’t really need to use items that frequently.  Even on the boss end, the core mechanics around immunity during dodging often meant that I could take literally no damage in a fight if I was being even a little cautious.  This is alleviated somewhat by the ability to fight 60 “tainted” monsters, which end up being the real difficult content in the game if done at appropriate levels.  However, if you’re the type of player that skips side content in favor of breezing through the story, this won’t help you at all.

I’m a fan of city builders so when I was told to start building I couldn’t stop.

Also on the side content front is the entire ability to build your own kingdom.  For me, building the kingdom and dealing with activities associated with it was very likely close to 50% of the time spent in the game.  The core loop for kingdom building is to recruit characters, build buildings for their specialty skills, have them work in the buildings, and then either gather resources they find or have them research upgrades.  On the upgrade front this could be anything from the ability to craft and upgrade weapons and armor, to buildings that allow you to upgrade your higgledys, to buildings that provide passive effects in battle, and more.  In addition, characters must be recruited via completion of side quests AND the characters you recruit also often give their own side quests, so you’ll have the option of spending a lot of time directly dealing with your own citizens.

This is another section where if you don’t like side content, you’re going to simply miss out on a lot what is there.  On the other hand, if you want the difficulty of the game to be higher, not upgrading your kingdom is a good way to miss out on a significant portion of your party’s power curve via all the available upgrades.  However, if the completionist bug hits you, this is where you will be spending a lot of time.

It’s good to be king.

Realistically I enjoyed the hell out of this game and want to recommend it to everyone, but I suspect it’s more niche than my brain is telling me it is.  While the action combat system is probably more approachable than the first game’s system, you won’t really see it at its best unless you want to go searching for the actual difficult side monsters.  While I enjoyed the kingdom building and side quest process of searching for new citizens, I can see where people would think it’s slow and grindy.  While the story is entertaining for me, it definitely tends to lean into some pretty predictable results.  If that all still sounds fine to you though, go give this one a try; you certainly won’t find me telling you not to.