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Game Ramblings #48 – Nights of Azure

More Info from Koei Tecmo

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Japan Only – PS3, Vita

TL;DR

  • Solid combat with multiple fighting styles
  • Good exploration mechanics that encourage taking risks without huge penalties
  • Small demon collection aspect that ends up giving a lot of party flexibility, adding good depth to combat

Nights of Azure is one of those games that I can best describe as being entirely competent.  It’s a game with solid combat, an entertaining enough story, and some nice systems to flesh things out.  It ends quick enough that it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and in doing so doesn’t do anything egregious to piss me off.  The visuals were decent, and it was clear what was going on.  The soundtrack hit the emotional notes of the story’s current progress, and the battle music kicked into high gear when necessary.  Given it was developed by Gust, this should come as no great surprise.  The DNA of their other more famous series (Atelier series, Ar Tonelico/Nosurge series) is definitely in place here, and the game benefits a lot from it.

There’s a lot on screen during combat, but you learn to look at important info quickly.

Being an ARPG, the most important thing in general is going to be the combat, and Azure definitely brings some solid combat to this.  In a lot of ways it can be described as a sort of Tales-lite system.  You’ve got a small party, some core melee combos, and some SP-based skills.  However, the party members revolve around a Pokemon style collection system instead of being core NPCs.  The other main thing that adds a lot of depth is that there are 4 different combat styles, giving some flexibility in picking the style that works best for the user.

However, the best thing that came out of all of this is the leveling system.  While it’s definitely a consequence of the game’s short length (< 20 hours for the core story), I ended up finishing the game around level 8, and my demons at their max level of 10.  Because of this, getting a level felt extremely important.  Each stat bump that came with it, as well as skills gained from leveling all had an obvious impact on my character, which is a nice change from the usual 50+ level slog of more high budget ARPGs and JRPGs.  The resource used for leveling was also a nice touch.  Killing enemies results in Blue Blood being gained, which can be used for leveling, summoning new demons for your party, as well as purchasing items from demon vendors throughout the game.  This gave a lot more consequence to the use of the resource, particularly because you could not use the blood you gained until you returned back to home base.

While that last note may sound scary, the game has other systems in place to encourage exploration, rather than making the resource gathering feel like a huge risk.  The main bonus here is that you can teleport instantly back to base at any point, and most quests also typically teleport you back to base for story reasons after finishing the goal.  The second thing they do is checkpoint your progress at the beginning of a room.  If you die, you lose all the resources you gained specifically within the current area, but you don’t lose everything from your current exploration session, and can choose to immediately go home, or pick up where you checkpointed.  In general, this allowed me to be slightly gung ho about going down side paths, because I knew at most I was only going to lose a few minutes progress, with the potential for a huge payoff defeating something optional.

I suppose my final note is that this definitely felt like a portable title, rather than a typical console title, and it being released on the Vita in Japan points to that.  Exploration was done with a time limit of 15 minutes, after which you’d teleport back to base.  However, I never really got close to that time limit, and the tasks I was chasing were typically done within a 10 minute or less window.  This would have been a perfect amount of time for a typical portable experience, and the sequel being aimed at the Switch leads me to believe they’re sticking with the system.  However, even on console the game loop there worked pretty effectively, letting me jump in in short bursts.

The outfit choices were sometimes questionable, and generally got a laugh out of me for their absurdity.

In a lot of ways, this was definitely a very typical Gust title.   The plot was very female-focused, the interaction between the two main characters was personal and positive, and the end of the game left it open for the since-announced sequel.  The outfit choices in some of the cutscenes (as seen above) were also generally pretty hilarious in how little was being worn.  However, it was more often than not hilarious in its lack of care, rather than being risque or offensive in any way.  End of the day, this was a game that was a lot of fun to play, even if it’s not chasing the AAA titles for game of the year.

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Shelved It #7 – Hollow Knight

More Info from Team Cherry

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: Mac, Linux, Switch

TL;DR

  • Solid mechanics, solid visuals, solid audio all put together a great base that can be built on.
  • Small bits of lack of polish, rather than anything egregious led to frustration, and eventual shelving.

This is going to sound weird for a game I’m shelving, but Hollow Knight is really quite good.  It’s a pretty traditional Metroidvania in layout, using a solid short-range melee system and some occasional powerups to round out the move set.  This is complemented by a solid visual style, and great audio and soundtrack to put together one of the best themed titles in this genre I’ve recently played.  However, this was a case of a thousand cuts, where small lack of polish in the details led to a continuous pattern of one step forward, one step backward in my progress.  This was combined with a somewhat questionable use of the Souls death mechanic, to where body runs began to feel like a slog, rather than a good balance of penalty and learning reward.  In the end, the good couldn’t outweigh the bad for me to continue on.

Early example of some of the fantastic visuals you’d see in this game.

However, let’s start with the good.  As with a lot of recent Metroidvania games, particularly in the indie scene, this one is a fantastic looker of a game.  Like the recent remake of Wonder Boy 3, or other Metroidvania titles like Ori and the Blind Forest, this one has a fantastic visual style.  Everything has a great hand-drawn appearance, with thick painterly lines.  It’s a fairly distinct style, and works rather well.  This is combined with great use of dynamic lighting to give some dramatic areas.  The biggest problem with it all is that most of the areas share a similar color range, so things can begin to look rather samey as you continue on.  On the other hand, it never got old running through the environment and having all the little blades of grass in the scene explode into similarly styled particles as I swung through them.  As a whole, this was a part of the game that never really diminished in my time playing it.

The core combat is also really well put together.  The base of the combat are melee strikes, which sounds simple at its core.  However, there was a smart choice made specifically in the horizontal strike, giving some verticality outside of the swing’s hitbox, and allowing players to hit things both slightly above and slightly below without having to be super precise with jump heights. This was extremely nice for how small some of the hitboxes on armored bosses and enemies could be.  This was backed up by a strong set of spells and abilities that are earned throughout the game to fill out the move set.  Examples here include mid-air dashes and double jumps for traversal, or energy missiles and dive bomb spells for damage.  Generally speaking, the game gives you a bunch of tools to use, and its up to you to then figure out what is most effective for each situation.

However, as I continued on, the little details that didn’t quite have the polish of the visuals and core combat started giving way to more frustration than fun.

The first big place this showed for me was in their use of the Dark Souls death mechanic.  The basic system is that at death, your soul gets stuck in the world along side all currency you earned during that life.  If you get back to the soul and defeat it in combat, you earn all the currency back.  If you die before that, you permanently lose all of it.

Generally speaking, I’m pretty neutral on this system.  There’s a fine line where this system works well, and to me it requires enough save points in place that are both close enough together, as well as close enough to where players will die so that the game doesn’t heavily discourage exploration, and keeps game pace post-death high.  To me it feels like Hollow Knight fails on both of these counts.  Many areas had a bunch of save points clustered near the center of the zones, but fewer out towards the edges where a lot of boss battles or more dangerous sort of side dungeons were.  There were also hardly ever any save points actually immediately before or immediately after boss rooms, so deaths during bosses (which are extremely common) often resulted in a long run back to the boss.  It just felt like a lot of wasted time, rather than a good chance to learn and retry the boss quickly.  This was compounded by a number of times where my soul spawned out of reach, effectively ending my change to re-earn my lost currency, so I eventually just stopped exploring altogether, choosing to go the lower risk way of sticking to main paths and simply grinding out kills if I required more money or power for skills.

There were a bunch of other little details that also compounded on top of this core problem for me.  First and foremost, jumping feels awkward.  This is a game with purely digital left/right movement, and no in-air momentum.  If you’re jumping and let go of the stick, you fall straight down.  It just feels weird, and eliminates a lot of subtle movement flow that a lot of better examples of the genre have.  There’s also a really obnoxious backwards impulse after hitting an enemy.  This is combined with somewhat imprecise collision on platforms to put me in situations where trying to jump and hit enemies mid-air around small platforms was pretty much a death sentence if solid ground wasn’t below me.

The final sort of annoyance was in the mapping system mechanics.  Rather than mapping out rooms when you walk through them, you had to clear a couple of hurdles first to map out a zone.  First and foremost, you had to buy a map of the zone from a vendor within the zone, generally well within the zone and out of the way (see annoyance with losing currency when your body run fails due to spawning out of reach….).  This only opened the ability to map the area.  It then didn’t mark areas on your map until the next time you reached a save area (see annoyance with the location and frequency of save poiints….).  Otherwise you were basically flying blind, and have to remember your path through areas until you hit both points above.  Generally speaking, it just felt like an additional unnecessary money and time pit, where I’d rather be spending my currency on functional upgrades.

End of the day, the further I went into Hollow Knight, the more the small details outweighed the good of the core systems.  Could I have grinded through it without too much trouble? Sure.  Are the problems going to be something that bothers everyone? Nope.  However, I’ve got plenty of other games to play, and seeing lack of polish in the details just generally distracts the hell out of me.  However, for those with more patience than me can probably find a lot to love here, so if nothing else, I’d recommend taking a look the next time a Steam sale rolls on through.

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Game Ramblings #47 – Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap

More Information from DotEmu

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Xbox One, Windows, Linux, Mac
  • Original Version On: Sega Master System, Game Gear, TurboGrafx-16

Right from the start I could see that this game is a lovingly made remake of Wonder Boy III.  This remake feels like the original, if the original was made in 2017 with fantastically drawn visuals.  While that means that it doesn’t lose its original charm, it also means that it carries some finicky mechanics from the late 80s with it.  However, the quality of the original still comes through, and being able to play it without having to break out the old consoles is still worth the experience, and the polish in place to transition between the old and new is absolutely impressive.

The hand drawn style is a standout, particularly against the original primitive pixel visuals.

The most obvious thing that’s been changed here are the visuals.  Rather than going the easy route and sticking with an upgraded 8-bit Master System style, DotEmu went all out with a full visual refresh of the original game.  Every character, NPC, and world area has been redrawn over the original geometry, maintaining the original gameplay space, but giving it a fantastically modern look.  If it wasn’t for Cuphead finally being ready to release, this one would probably be a runaway winner for me in terms of flat out best looking pure 2D platformer.

Transition between styles is immediate, and can be done at any time.

However, the more impressive trick is that you can go between the original and modern looks at any time, and most importantly, the original sprites maintain the aspect ratio of the remake on modern platforms, giving a nice mix between the look of the old and the practical functionality between the two.  You simply press R2, the screen wipes side to side, and you’re right in the old style without having to pause the game.  This can also be done with R3, changing the music between the old and new, giving you the option to mix and match your preferred styles for sound and visuals at any time.  This is particularly important, because it has some surprising gameplay ramifications as well.

The hit boxes in modern graphics are…vague.

One of the biggest issues I continued to have was that the hit boxes in modern style were not that precise to the actual visuals of the character.  In some cases they matched pretty well to the general shape of the enemies, but in a lot of cases they were often much smaller than I was expecting.  For single enemies this wasn’t a huge deal, but for packs of enemies, it meant I was often swinging and missing, then getting stuck in situations where I would take a lot of unnecessary damage.  However, the hit boxes in the original game were generally much more precise, so by the tail end of the game, I was often switching to the old visuals purely for collision convenience, and minimizing my damage taken simply due to the more instinct-precise way of attacking.

Mechanically speaking, there’s also a few warts that were fine in the 80s, but at this point are kind of just moderate annoyances.  There’s a lot of situations where enemies can stun lock you into corners and walls.  While I wouldn’t take damage after a hit until I finally landed, it was annoying getting endlessly juggled into a corner until an enemy decided to finally turn around and back off.  For the bosses, they were mostly fairly trivial as well, with each boss generally having one attack and a single hit zone that was generally placed in the most obnoxious place to attack, while trying to avoid relatively quick and low damage attacks.  Jump physics are generally fairly precise, but mid-air control is definitely not as good as some more modern takes on the genre like Shovel Knight.  Generally speaking, this was a pretty high quality game mechanically when it originally came out, and the remake benefits from being able to start with that solid base.  While everything here is still pretty solid, it definitely plays like an 80s game, for better or worse.

All that said, this is a great take on an older title.  In doing the port, they avoided the trap that a lot of remakes do in trying to reimagine an old title.  This one is as straight a gameplay port as I’ve ever seen, particularly since the old title runs permanently emulated in the background.  The modern visuals and audio, as well as the fantastic feature to switch to the originals in real time is a nice touch that I wish more remakes would take advantage of.  End of the day, if it comes down to breaking out an old console, or playing this remake on a modern platform, I’d say throw out the few bucks and go this way, it’s worth it just for the visuals.