DWGames

2016-11-25

Shelved It #2 – Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors

Genre: On-Rails Action / RPG
Platform: Wii
Shelved At: End of Chapter 5 of 8
Reason for Shelving: JRPG grind without the JRPG gameplay

This is actually a fairly curious game. It’s absolutely a Dragon Quest game through and through. All your standard enemies are there, the character design is very obviously tied to the series, and the world itself is the fairly standard fantasy-based setting typical of the series. However, rather than being a JRPG, it’s effectively styled as an on-rails shooter, but with sword swinging instead of guns.

Going into the game, I was kind of suspicious the gameplay would work at all. However, they were fairly smart with the design of the game to take advantage of the Wii controls. Everything input-related uses the Wii Remote to activate actions. Swingingthe Remote activates sword swipes, while jabbing it will stab directly at enemies. Holding the B button activates a shield that can be moved around with the pointer functionality of the Remote. Movement is on the D-Pad, and setting a swipe focus point is on the A button. Overall it’s a very intuitive control scheme, and works fairly well. The main downfall is the swipe functionality itself. Since this game predates the release of the Wii MotionPlus and subsequent Wii Remote Plus, the actual accuracy of your swipes is fairly low, leading to some frustration in points where you need to be fairly specific with the angle of your swipes.

At the point where I ended up shelving the game, I had just gotten through a boss fight where I was fighting a constant refreshed party of 6 minions and the boss itself. Individually they weren’t a huge issue, but taking out the minions efficiently to concentrate on the boss required much more precision with the swipe mechanic than I could reasonably achieve. My closest comparison is really something along the lines of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, where swipe direction was also important, but was easy to manage throughout.

While in general this wasn’t a huge issue, boss fights became a bigger issue. In most on-rails games, I tend to expect that increases in player skill are the driving factor in the difficulty curve of the game. I would typically be getting better at the game to chase new high scores, or play at higher difficulties, but the NPC strength is relatively fixed. However, in this case, the player is also leveling in a fashion typical of JRPGs, as well as buying and upgrading your typical set of gear. All that being said, it felt like the game was pushing me to grind in order to progress, rather than simply being better at the game. The last boss I faced was effectively a health wall, and the damage I was doing was barely lowering his health for the amount of hits I was having to do. While the high score system typical of these games was there, the scores necessary for the highest rewards were easily eclipsed via new gear or higher levels, which is pretty atypical of the genre.

Overall this is at least a curious experiment for Square to have pulled off. While it definitely has its problems, it’s an entertaining side note in the Dragon Quest series, and one of the more curious uses of on-rail mechanics that I’ve seen. While it’s probably not going to necessarily satisfy either JRPG or rail shooter fans, at the right price, it’s the type of game you can keep coming back to for short rounds, if for no other reason than to chase that illusive high score again.

2016-11-24

Game Ramblings #26 – Pokemon Sun & Moon

More info from Nintendo/Game Freak

Genre: JRPG
Platform: 3DS

So one of the things that was continually talked about pre-release for these games was how much the 7th generation was going to change up the formula for Pokemon. Having now finished the game, I’m not that convinced they really changed much at all, and in a lot of ways they seem to have stripped out features to get to a simplified base to start the generation. While I’m pretty comfortable saying that as usual, this was a fantastic game and is the best Pokemon entry that’s been released, it feels like another iterative step in the series, and not at all a big change to the formula.

So, I guess to start, let’s look at what actually is new. We’re in a new region, Alola, this time taking place on a bunch of islands. The theme of a lot of the new 80 or so Pokemon in the Gen 7 Pokedex revolves around this, particularly in the large amount of legendaries available in the post-game content. In addition, there’s a handful of Gen 1 Pokemon in new Alola forms, such as the Dark/Normal Rattata or Ice/Steel Sandshrew. In all you’re talking about 100 or so new entries into your overall strategy. There’s also a replacement to Gen 6’s Mega Evolutions called Z-Moves, super powered moves tied to type- or Pokemon-specific Z-Crystals that are found throughout the main story.

So all that is well and good, but is largely comprised of expected changes. From there we have to get into the kinda sort asterisk changes that were really claimed as the big steps forward, as well as some features that were removed from Gen 6 games that are definitely to be missed.

The big one here is the change associated with gyms. Gyms are gone! You aren’t collecting badges! …kind of. Gyms were effectively replaced by a new captain challenge system. Each captain challenge is a special area on each island in which you take on a type-specific challenge. As an example, in one you are tasked with researching a series of disturbances in a lake, culminating in a series of water Pokemon fights, with the reward being a water Z-Crystal. Long story short, they technically aren’t gyms, and technically aren’t badges, the functionality is effectively the same, going from area to area to fight type-restricted fights. Alongside the gym changes, there’s also some big asterisks associated with changes to the Pokemon League that are effectively covered in the story.

As far as removals go, Alpha Sapphire/Omega Ruby extended the gameplay of Gen 6’s post-game in some smart ways that no longer exist. The first big one of these is the Soar feature, where you could fly on the back of Latios or Latias over the Hoenn region, giving you access to both battles against flying Pokemon, as well as a larger number of Soar-exclusive legendary Pokemon areas, and post game content. In addition, the DexNav feature is completely removed. This has two important consequences. First, the per-route visual indicator of what Pokemon are available is gone. Second, the entire hidden Pokemon feature is gone. In general the second-screen experience is effectively only restricted to combat inputs and an always-on Town Map, which fairly heavily simplified the count of non-essential mechanics available to the player. In addition, the removal of Mega Evolutions is at the very least curious given the amount of marketing push it received throughout the entirety of Gen 6.

All that being said, overall I still think the game is a step forward. In shedding some of the old mechanics, they have definitely simplified the game back to a much cleaner slate, giving them a good base to start with looking forward to the probable move to the upcoming Switch. It also provides some questions as to how they are going to handle the assumed Gen 4 remakes when they’re ready to move in that direction. The team at this point seems to have caught up to a lot of the type mechanics added within the last couple of generations, with a lot of the new Pokemon adopting dual-type combos never seen before. The addition of region-specific forms also gave us curious new type combinations, lending a bit of mystery to what kind of Pokemon is coming up next when you’re told that you will be facing a Sandslash. If they really run with some of these features through the rest of Gen 7, we could be set for a huge jump in the quality of the Pokemon games from this point forward.

2016-11-20

Game Ramblings #25 – Shadow Complex Remastered

More Info from Epic Games

Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: Windows (Steam, Windows Store, Epic Games Launcher), Mac App Store, Xbox One, Xbox 360 (XBLA)

Back before they spawned the mobile juggernaut known as Infinity Blade, Chair Entertainment released a nice little Metroidvania title called Shadow Complex. In honor of why the hell not, a remastered version has come out for PC and current gen consoles. With the great folks at Limited Run Games releasing a physical version, I figured it was as good a time as any to make a run through this one again, and as it turns out, the game is still damn good.

If there’s one genre I’m a sucker for nearly as much as JRPGs, it’s Metroidvania-styled Action/Adventure games. If you ignore the setting, this one definitely strays much closer to Metroid than a lot in the genre. It’s got upgradeable guns and pickups that unlock ways to get through new doors, a computerized mech suit that tells you where to go, and eventually a chargeable dash that breaks through even more doors. Basically, a lot of what is here is straight out of Metroid, but grounded in a somewhat more believable Earth-based setting.

That said, all its similarities are definitely not a detriment to this game. They’ve captured a lot of the exploration magic that the Metroid series, and in the roughly 3-5 hour adventure, you’ll traverse a lot of the same areas multiple times, but always in new ways. The pickups and upgrades are scattered all over the place, so returning to old places always brings side paths to grab things that were just taunting you out of reach before. To some extent I was even going out of my way once I got some of my larger weapon upgrades just because I’d remembered a handful of upgrades that I wanted to get right away. In addition, unlike some games in this genre, ammunition for secondary weapons (grenades, missiles, etc) are plentiful, and available for recharge at all save stations, so you never feel crunched into not using some of your more powerful arsenal.

That said, there’s definitely some things that are missing that I wish were explored more. There’s really not much in the way of memorable boss fights in this game. For the most part, you fight the same spider mech a handful of times, with a couple other fights that can be mechanically exploited to avoid difficulty. As an example, one fight has you up against a giant mech wheel that is jumping around the walls of a ring-shaped room. By positioning yourself just behind one of the corners of the room, you could avoid all damage, while still being able to easily shoot at the boss’ weak spot, giving an easy victory. In addition, there’s some points, particularly in the final battle, where I would get shot at and effectively instant killed without much of an idea where damage sources were coming from.

All that being said, when this originally came out in ’09, it was one of the best Metroidvanias that had come out around that time. In 2016, I’d still say that it’s one of the better Metroidvanias out this year. While the upgrade didn’t bring much new to the table, other than some improved visual fidelity, the game itself has not lost anything in its age, and should definitely be played if you missed it the first time around.