Tag: nintendo

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Game Ramblings #106 – Splatoon 2 Single Player + Octo Expansion

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Third-person shooter
  • Platform: Switch

I really enjoyed the original Splatoon, despite the fact that I was tragically bad at it in multiplayer. However, the thing that surprised me was how solid the single player experience was for a game where that was clearly not the focus. Some of that may have just been how fresh it was to play what is a third-person shooter in a very new way, but it really left a mark. For Splatoon 2, the initial single player was more of the same. While it was fun, it was a bit disappointing…..until I played the Octo expansion, which was an entirely ambitious push of single player content that I wasn’t expecting.

Mechanically speaking, this is still a fantastic game. This is one of the best shooter experiences I’ve had on console, thanks to it intelligently using motion controls to improve aim, rather than feeling ham fisted. It’s got your typical twin stick movement and aiming, but then you do little tilts of your controller for finessed aiming, and it all just clicks. Large motions go on the right stick, and kills come out of motion, and it’s as effective as any aim assists I’ve ever seen out of more traditional shooters.

The base single player is a pretty by the numbers copy of the original game. You’ve got a handful of worlds where you go through a series of puzzles and light AI combat levels, capped with a boss fight. What it ends up being is basically a tutorial for the core gameplay to lead you into the multiplayer. From that perspective, it’s super solid. From the perspective of a returning player, it’s repetitive. I’ve seen this content before, down to some of the bosses returning with only light mechanical changes. It was nice to see them pushing the lore of the series a bit, but it didn’t feel like something I needed to play again.

That feeling changed when I started the Octo expansion.

From a very high level, the Octo expansion is basically Portal. Like the screenshot above says, you’re literally doing a bunch of test chambers to prove your skill. After you pass through that section, you end up in a fairly linear sequence of levels to escape the facility. If that sounds familiar, it’s definitely intentional.

At its core, the thing that makes the Octo expansion work is the sheer amount of variety to play with. Each test chamber has its own little gameplay tweak to play with. Some levels are straightforward puzzles to get to the end of the level. Sometimes they get a bit cheeky and give you limited amounts of paint to use. Sometimes they force you into stealth segments. Sometimes they don’t give you any weapons at all, and make you traverse intelligently through.

However, it’s when things go off the rails that it’s really fun. There’s levels like the one above where you’re literally playing Breakout with paint. There’s some levels where you’ve got to push a giant billiard ball around the world without knocking it off the level. There’s some levels where you gain a jetpack instead of using the paint to traverse around. There’s even a level where you play Picross 3D to create a box fort shaped like a dog.

It’s the variety and jumps between traditional and fun levels that really give the expansion a really great pace. You’ll do something normal for a bit or hit a really high tension combat level, then be given a breather level to bring down your heart rate. You’ll go from using the typical shooter mechanics to using your paint gun to play tic-tac-toe. It’s all bite sized chunks that are the right length to want you to keep playing just one more level, until suddenly you’re 30 levels in and hours have accidentally gone by.

This is all capped by a fantastic escape sequence that culminates in a boss battle against the giant human statue above, combining all the skills you’ve learned in the single player game into a super intense and super fun sequence filled with platforming and firing.

The whole of the Octo expansion shows a level of creativity that is so typical of Nintendo, and yet was not present in the Splatoon series up to this point. The two games were both fantastically well crafted, but distinctly multiplayer-focused. What the expansion has done is shown that there’s a lot of room for this series to also have a single player tilt. Ya they’re sort of being tongue-in-cheek in riffing on the overarching Portal pattern, but there is so much more content here than that game brought to the table. At its core, Splatoon is an easy recommendation for me anyway just to experience what that multiplayer is like. However, with what I’ve played here, I think it may be worth getting Splatoon 2 + Octo expansion just for the single player experience alone.

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Game Ramblings #98 – Pokemon Sword

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

There was a lot of noise about this release in the general gaming sphere – a bunch of Pokemon were removed, people got up in arms, they then started picking apart every little thing as reasons why the game was lazy or low quality or whatever the complaint of the day was. Frankly, it felt like a bunch of whining prior to release. Having played the game now, it’s definitely a bunch of whining. While Pokemon Sword is a pretty straightforward Pokemon game in general, it’s still extremely high quality and also takes some important steps forward for the series in a general sense, giving us what is another solid entry worth playing through.

The obvious change here is that despite the Switch’s ability to be played on the go, this is the first mainline release that’s actually playable on the TV, unless you count the Super Game Boy on SNES or Game Boy Player on the Gamecube as console option entries. This definitely made playing the game in long sessions at least a lot more comfortable. The main focus though is definitely on gameplay features, which kind of falls into two main things – the Wild Area and Dynamax Pokemon.

Dynamax is the replacement for Mega Evolution and Z Moves from previous generations. In this case, it feels like it’s been integrated in a much better fashion. For one thing, it’s available to damn near all Pokemon, apart from a handful of legendaries. There’s an additional tier available called Gigantamaxing that also adds some unique moves and fun visual forms, but it’s there as an additional layer. This leaves your entire party as being useful in these situations, which is a much better situation than the limits in place in X/Y + Sun/Moon. The ability to use it is also limited to specific battles – generally speaking, Gym battles and specific wild battles against other Dynamax Pokemon. Overall it means that the system isn’t available to be spammed all the time, but is always equally useful when it is available.

The other big one, and probably the biggest feature, is the Wild Area. What this ends up being from a feature perspective is just another route to catch Pokemon. However, from a visual perspective it’s a huge leap forward for the series. It turns a large portion of the game into a pseudo open world area where you can catch stuff, but also run into Pokemon that are way too strong for your current team, go into multiplayer Dynamax fights, and just generally run around. It’s as close to reaching for a modern RPG experience as the series has ever gotten, and it’s a much larger modernization step than has been typical for the series.

There’s a bunch of little user experience things that have also improved the game in small ways. The player is automatically healed to full after gym fights, including the Elite Four replacement because the player was going to heal up anyway. Pokemon are visible in the world in the grass areas like in Pokemon Let’s Go!, because random fights are fairly silly. HMs continue to go away, with flying open almost immediately at the start of the game via a taxi service and Surf being replaced entirely by a bike upgrade. The player can now setup camp while in the field replacing the need to run back to Pokemon Centers to heal. There’s a portable Pokemon Box device to grab Pokemon in and out of your storage on the go. EXP share for your party makes a return and EXP gain is also around when catching Pokemon, leaving it practical to go for either as a leveling setup.

It’s also worth mentioning just how fucking cool it is to do the gym battles. It’s a little thing, but having a huge crowd chanting and yelling, and having good fight music on is such a huge experience change from the past that I’m honestly surprised they haven’t gone in this direction before. It actually feels like a sport now, which animal rights problems aside, is a fantastic change.

At the same time, there’s still some things they’re stubbornly holding on to for seemingly no reason. The box storage system still exists, and it still can’t be sorted despite the fact that there’s no technical reason to not allow for better storage solutions. Despite the fact that you can see move advantages when switching Pokemon, you can only see that if the opponent’s Pokemon is already out, even though you explicitly know which Pokemon will come out next. Evolution methods are still not shown anywhere in-game, despite the fact that all the information is available on the internet all the time. It’s little things like that that are really going to go a long way to making the series feel like it’s finally really moving forward, and also currently go a long way towards ammo about the series feeling lazy.

However, the core of the series is still as strong as ever. It’s still just straight enjoyable to play the stat game, play the type advantages, and build out the party that suits you the most. I’m also not sure if it’s a placebo, but the game felt much better balanced in general, and certainly balanced more difficult than in the past. I found myself using a significantly larger amount of Pokemon to use my type advantages, even in just fighting wild Pokemon and Route trainers. By the end of the game, my party’s level range was only around 60-65 for all members, which is an extremely narrow range for my typical use. In general I had to use those as well. I was almost always around level parity with the opponents, so going in with type disadvantage was a good way to get killed. In good news, I didn’t feel a need to grind either, so the curve felt pretty appropriate to a first-run through.

End of the day, this one is a pretty simple thing to recommend. If you’ve liked Pokemon in the past, you’ll still like Pokemon now. At the same time, while I sort of get where people are coming from, I think it’s worth ignoring the pre-release noise. The loss of Pokedex did not effect the quality of the game and only helped the game’s overall balance, and the game that is there is still as good as ever. Frankly, if removing more Pokemon results in steps as big as the Wild Area for Gen 9, remove even more. If there’s anything to take out of this generation it’s that there’s been a big jump in the quality of what’s there, but they’ve definitely still got a lot of room to grow now that they’re fully embracing their console future.

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Game Ramblings #96 – Luigi’s Mansion 3

More info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is where the gameplay of the series has really come together for me. The original had clever mechanics, but was a bit rough around the edges, particularly with respect to the grind of catching a high health ghost. Dark Moon went a bit more mission-based and improved the mechanics a lot, but ended up feeling like a grind. This one feels like it’s finally hit a nice middle ground, and in doing so has probably finally proven that going a bit off-base with Luigi was a good call.

At its core, this one is still the Mansion gameplay that’s expected. You find ghosts, you zap them with your flashlight, and then you vacuum them up. That hasn’t really changed. However, there’s been a bunch of little additions that significantly improved the core experience. There’s a new sort of mini burst AoE move that can be used as a stun mechanic, and is occasionally used as a way to make certain ghosts able to be captured. There’s some good use of motion controls to make more precise vertical aiming much easier to pull off.

However, the most important change is the new slam attack. After having a ghost in the vacuum for a period of time (typically around 20 health), you can slam the ghost into the ground for 20 health damage. On its own this exists as a nice mechanic to more rapidly catch ghosts. However, it can also damage other ghosts, including ones that aren’t visible. This single added maneuver greatly increases the speed of capture in a general sense, eliminating a lot of grind. It also means that there are a lot of situations in which there are a TON of ghosts in the room, simply because there are now fun ways to clear a ton of ghosts all at once. It ends up being a huge boon to the fun of capturing ghosts that I wasn’t really expecting.

Despite this being listed as action/adventure, Luigi’s Mansion is really a puzzle game at heart, and there’s a bunch of cool new mechanics around that as well. The previously mentioned AoE burst can be used as a way to uncover hidden items. There’s also a new black light function of the flashlight that can cause hidden paths to appear. A plunger item has been added to the vacuum as a way to grab on and tear down blocked paths throughout the environment.

Again though, there’s one big important change that ties this all together – Gooigi. The hideous green goo clone of Luigi. At its core, this is simply a second Luigi, allowing for some interesting mechanics around two active vacuums (as well as a great built-in co-op mechanic). However, Gooigi can also slip through grates, fences, and more, allowing for the player to get to new areas that are simply blocked off to the more solidified Luigi body. In a lot of areas this plays heavily into the puzzle solving, with the player having to open paths and hold hatches for one or the other to traverse through the world. This also plays into a lot of the boss battles, where the player will be swapping heavily between the two to set traps for bosses that only one of the pair can get to at any time.

All of these tools together bring the puzzle element to a really high level, and it all works because of the changes to the overall game structure. While this is a “mansion” title, it takes place in a large hotel. Each floor has its own mini theme, and as long as you have the elevator button to the floor, you can go to it. In practice, this has a really fun cadence to completing the game – you get a floor button, go through and complete the core puzzle and boss sequence for the floor (typically around 30-40 minutes), then go on and explore a bit based on any new mechanics that you unlock. There’s always new things to find, whether it be Boos, gems, or simply more money, and there’s always a new floor on the horizon. It ends up giving the game a really good rhythm where you learn some new tricks, apply them in a strong floor, then go back and reinforce the learning by going back to old areas. It’s a rhythm that Nintendo and its second party developers have continued to show it does better than anyone in the industry, and it’s brought this game to a high point for the series.

It would be as easy to dismiss this title as it was either of the previous games in the series. After all, these aren’t Mario games, and after Odyssey, there’s a lot to live up to. However, dismissing this as a second rate title would be a huge mistake. I’d argue that this title has shown as much improvement as we’d seen in past mainline Mario titles, and it can now easily stand on its own as something worth playing. There’s a ton of really fun puzzle solving to do, and it’s wrapped around a really fun core ghost/vacuum interaction to give moments of high action amongst the moments of heavy thinking. I totally get that folks wanting a pure action platformer aren’t going to want to get after this, but those looking for a bit of that typical Nintendo magic will find a lot to enjoy here.