Tag: nintendo

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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.

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Game Ramblings #94 – The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Original Versions: Game Boy, Game Boy Color (DX)
It was nice seeing this again after all these years.

This was the first game I got on the Game Boy. When my family got me the Game Boy for Christmas, Nintendo wasn’t doing Tetris as the pack-in, and boy was that a lucky thing for me. I played this for way too many hours as a kid, wracked my brain over the puzzles, and I’ve loved the Zelda series ever since. Even at the time of its release, this was a special game, and now that it’s been given the modern treatment it’s worth playing more than ever.

From a high level, there’s not much of a surprise here – it’s a 2D Zelda game. You go to dungeons, you get an item, you use that item to get through the dungeon, by the end of the game you’ve got a tool set to take out the boss. It’s not that this one was necessarily breaking totally new ground, but that it was doing so in a handheld game, and was STILL as good as (and I’d argue better overall) Link to the Past.

There was just something about this one that always hit better for me, and I think I figured it out with this play through. Link’s Awakening plays a constantly good balance of both telling you what to do, and giving you a bunch of leash to go exploring on your own. There’s always a bit of a hint coming out of a dungeon about where to go next. That gives you enough of a bread crumb to go on. But those spots you walk past that you don’t have an item for yet? That item you just got in a trade quest and don’t know who the next step is for? You’re always going to want to go off and explore. Even on the Game Boy that always worked better for me than Lttp‘s somewhat more open ended nature, and it hasn’t stopped working well here.

It helps that the items here are still a ton of fun to use. There’s some of your usual suspects here (bow, swords, shield, weight bracelets, etc) to get you into the game – and boy doesn the inclusion of dedicated sword and shield buttons REALLY help this remake. However, this game also had its weird items that just WORKED. Roc’s feather to jump over things? Fun item at the start. Combine with the Pegasus Boots to really jump far? Now you’ve got a great combo. A shovel to give you more of an excuse to find treasure? Why not. Some magic powder that you can use to stun enemies or turn a raccoon back into a human? Why the hell not. This game really just embraced the weird in a way that the rest of the 2D games often didn’t want to do and it’s all the better for it.

The dungeons themselves are also really solid. I’m assuming it was due to the limited nature of the system, but these dungeons really lean on puzzles over combat. You’ve got your usual puzzles tied to the dungeon’s main item, but this one also does a bunch of puzzles that slowly build upon each other across multiple dungeons. A lot of these end up being some variant of switch manipulation that modifies where you can go throughout the level. These are typically tied into the item puzzles to add multiple layers of solving in one. It ends up really reducing combat to boss fights, which is a benefit for how simple the combat really is. It leaves the boss fights down to puzzle solving with the right item and sword spam to kill, and the rest of the game to swinging only when necessary.

All that said, fuck adding physics to this damn crane game.

This one’s pretty simple – this is one of my favorite games in the Zelda series in general made pretty for modern consoles. The gameplay that made it so good 25 years ago has been tweaked a bit to feel up to date, but not changed where it wasn’t necessary. There’s a lot to be said about not messing with what worked and Link’s Awakening is definitely a good example of that. Where Breath of the Wild proved that a rethinking of the formula was a good direction for the series, this one proves that it’s not always a bad thing to be a bit classic.