DWGames

2017-08-142018-01-13

Game Ramblings #45 – Yakuza 0

Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: PS4

TL;DR

Excellent combat with multiple styles to fit different fights
Swapping between characters worked well due to how the story timeline worked between the two
Difference in tone between serious story missions and almost 100% non-serious side missions somehow didn’t cause issues

The Yakuza series has always been more of a Shenmue than a GTA, and Yakuza 0 doesn’t change any of that. This one provides a new starting point for the series, providing some back story to the events before the original entry in the series. It takes the same mix of combat, light puzzle solving, and high levels of drama, and modernizes it a bit as the first PS4 entry in the series, giving us another great entry to play. Despite being played across two characters, the story manages to send enough clues cross-character to weave together a fun narrative, with plenty of action and violence expected of the genre.

The combat in place is similar to past games, taking place in small areas walled off by onlookers, where enemy groups of varying size can be attacked. Combos of attacks can be grouped to knock down enemies, building up secondary resources to do more spectacular (and powerful) attacks. From a high level it’s fairly simple, but different variations of button holds, character placement, environmental interactions, and most importantly, multiple fighting styles add a lot of depth. Of note, the fighting styles all feel fairly different, and bring advantages to different fights. Both characters have a fairly standard brawling style and legendary fighting style, but the real fun is in one of each character’s other styles.

Kiryu’s Beast mode allows for slow but heavy attacks in a wide range, as well as a number of wrestling-inspired finishers. More importantly, it also allows for automated grabbing of environmental objects to swing at enemies, including things like motorcycles. On Majima’s side, the real standout is Break mode. This uses a series of breakdancing moves to quickly and heavily take out large groups of enemies through effective AoE attack and dodge maneuvers. In general, I was able to switch to a mode that made sense for each fight, whether I needed to do heavy damage to individuals, or keep it safe while whittling down a large group.

On the story end, there’s not too many surprises here, but it’s definitely entertaining. The more surprising thing for me was the mix of the serious story with incredibly non-serious side missions. The side missions typically had similar gameplay, but the characters you meet during them were generally absurd, whether it’s Mr. Libido being unable to contain himself, helping out fake Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg make Thriller, or Kiryu mixing up visas and pizza when helping an immigrant, I could pretty much expect side missions to go straight for the absurd. Given the seriousness and level of chaos that most of the main story had, it meant I could use the side content as a way to unwind between places where I knew I could get into big fights. This is backed by a surprisingly entertaining set of real estate content for each character to add even more depth to the things to do on the side; Kiryu runs a full real estate company and Majima runs a cabaret club.

Totally not Spielberg stares into your soul.

If there was anything I would directly point to as a severe negative here, it’s that at a number of points the story missions simply don’t tell you what to do. You’d be given a vague goal (find somewhere to hide!), with no map marker, and no obvious place to go, and be forced to wander around until you hit the magic trigger. More often than not these places would be triggered in areas where you had no NPC contacts, no reason to be in the area, and would never revisit the place for any other reason. While filling gap time between story missions doing side content allowed me to accidentally wander into these from time to time, I was still forced to effectively blanket the map covering all roads until I found the specific spot. Any sort of minimizing of the vague nature of these would have been a great help, but luckily these types of missions were the minority in place.

Overall though, Yakuza 0 was a ton of fun to play. The combat was solid, the story was enjoyable, and the side content had a lot of flat laugh out loud moments. If you’re wanting to play a Japanese GTA, this is not the right game, but if you’re looking to rekindle memories of playing Shenmue, this is a great place to start.

2017-08-082018-01-13

Game Ramblings #44 – Runbow Pocket

More Info from 13am Games

Genre: Platformer/Racing
Platform: New 3DS
Also Available On: Wii U, Windows, Xbox One

This is a strange one in a lot of ways. Runbow is the second retail title I’ve seen (and own) in the US that is specifically New Nintendo 2DS/3DS exclusive. Despite platformers being entirely dependent on good physics, the weak physics also ended up being something I could ignore because the core mechanics of the game were simply good enough to ignore the problems I was running into. The short format of the levels also ended up being a significant draw to playing this in a portable fashion.

I suppose it’s worth getting the physics problems out of the way because it really is the main drawback of some of their design decisions. Jumping itself is generally pretty stiff, and while it’s predictable, doesn’t have the same smooth variable feel that a lot of better 2D platformers end up having. Because of this, I was becoming more dependent on overcompensating my jumps, then air dashing to adjust my landing positions if I under or overjumped my intended landing area. However, dashes in general have an awkward pause at the end of the action. While this wasn’t generally a problem, the inherent core idea of getting to the end of the level as fast as possible is negatively impacted by the loss of momentum, even just from a feel perspective. The act of landing on platforms also had some issues. I was never really able to pinpoint whether it was the small size of the screen or simply a game feature, but it felt like platforms had some amount of magnetism if you were “close enough” to landing on the edge of one. This combined with the stiff jump meant I was second guessing a lot of precise jumps that were over more significant gaps. For most platformers, this would all combine to be the death of the game, but luckily the core mechanics of the level progression were good enough to let me ignore a lot of this.

From a high level the core mechanic across the entire game is that the platforms, traps, and in some cases shields around enemies in the foreground and the level’s background are made up of a handful of primaryish colors. If they match, the platform effectively disappears. This right there is what elevates the game to something fantastic, and the amount of depth that the devs pulled out of a seemingly simple idea surprises throughout. Each level has some way of playing off this system to actively change what things can be collided with. This can run the gamut from the entire background changing in rhythm with the music to waterfalls of flowing color to shapes moving across the scene seemingly at random. You’re simply dropped in and given a few seconds at the start to figure out what’s going on and react to it so you don’t lose time running through.

The format also worked fantastically as a portable experience. The longest levels typically hit goal times around 1:15 or so, but were typically only in boss levels. Most standard levels fit into the 20-40 second range. The idea of grabbing my 3DS, hitting a couple levels while waiting on something, then putting it away has always been a draw of the platform, and this fits the bill nicely. The fact that there’s a ton of content (nearly 200 levels in just the core game) means that I can be poking at this for a long time, even ignoring the replayability of going for low times across all levels.

This is definitely a bit of a unicorn. It’s a New 3DS exclusive, a platformer with awkward physics that I didn’t hate, a game experience suited for portables that shipped last on a portable, and despite it all is a fantastic time to play. A lot of that goes into a great style that is wrapped directly into the core mechanics of the game, giving a lot of mileage to what is at the surface a really simple idea.

2017-07-30

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.