Tag: action

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Game Ramblings #214 – Ghost of Yotei

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5

For all intents and purposes, this is a perfect iterative sequel. It’s familiar enough to not be different from what I enjoyed about the original, but it’s got enough changes to feel fresh. In some ways that is probably something that people would criticize as feeling safe, but for me it’s hitting a fine line of moving the gameplay forward without losing what it was, and that’s a tough balance to hit.

If I put this up against what I thought of Tsushima there really isn’t a huge difference in my mind. They both do the Assassin’s Creed combat hub and free range stuff meta loop very well. They both have incredibly good combat aligned with some really effective stealth moments. They both have the same general discovery loop of looking for landmarks in the world (ex: steam -> hot springs, big fire -> inn, for all of them you can find a yellow bird to follow). Where this one improved for me really did end up being in the iterative nature of its combat.

In Tsushima I specifically mentioned that duels were where I felt combat really hit its stride, and while that is still largely the case here I do think that the wider group combat saw enough of an improvement to be of note. My problem with the previous title was that group combat never felt like I had a good way to focus on where to look, and a lot of that came down to what felt like a lack of obvious prioritization of incoming damage. That feels much improved here.

Part of it is that NPCs simply are better at taking turns. I know it sounds weird for a group of enemies to attack one-on-one, but from a gameplay perspective it makes sense for the player. Spamming dodge or parry buttons because multiple NPCs come after you more or less simultaneously is not a fun experience. Having the NPCs take turns – and more importantly giving the player time to attack the NPC that they successfully dodge or parry – is a big win in playability and letting the player feel powerful against a larger group of enemies. From a danger perspective it also felt like the NPCs would attack more quickly in succession if I wasn’t correctly dodging or parrying, so it encouraged me to be precise in order to not be overwhelmed. Another part of it for me is that rather than using stance switching to go against enemy weaknesses, Yotei uses weapon switching. From a result perspective this is exactly the same – you switch stance/weapon in both games to give yourself an advantage. However, recontextualizing this to something even more obviously visual feels better in a way that I can’t really place my finger on.

It also may just be placebo or fading memory, but it also felt like the general tells about incoming attacks were more obvious. Visually there were fewer large feints to make you guess incorrectly. The visual language of things that are dodgeable or parryable felt more clear. The audible tells of ranged attacks felt like they punched through the general noise of combat better. These are all things that were important to the larger group combat scenarios to make them feel more immediately manageable compared to the original title to really elevate that part of the experience to allow it to shine. It may not quite match the spectacle of duels yet, but rather than feeling like a negative of the experience I was generally able to enjoy combat in all situations much more easily in the sequel.

If there was one thing that I felt did take a step back here it would be the presentation of the story. The story is a generally non-linear set of sections sandwiched between a fixed start and end. What this means for the player is that once they get into the world, they can generally pick the direction they want to go. Each smaller region of the overall game world was its own self-contained experience where entering the zone triggers some story moment to occur, with the zone having its own plot line, side characters, and wrap up moment. However, that section of the game could occur in any order, so it had very little in terms of ties to anything else.

The practical impact for me is that this title felt like what would normally be a series of smaller independent expansion packs, rather than a whole new title. Each section kind of gets you an upgrade path of some sort and a character that ends up being important later-ish but because they have to work independently it often feels a lot like the zones are – for lack of a better description – nerfed down to just kind of be played through. Narratively it works well, but I’m not sure it was the best for gameplay purposes. On the other hand, when it does tie together for the final zone of the game, the toolbox as a whole works incredibly well so I’m not sure I’m overly fussed that each tool you gained had its own zone to learn the thing in with repeated use.

In some respects it also felt like this change might have forced a bit more simplification of side content, which was something I enjoyed about Tsushima over the larger Assassin’s Creed games. There is still some side content in place, but apart from a couple small specific places there isn’t side content that reaches across zone lines. It helps keep the side content locked to very specific upgrade-focused bits, alongside some side quest lines that deal with things specific to zones – for example, all upgrades for kunai take place in the zone where you earn kunai. I can’t tell whether it was an intentional change to match the narrative setup, but I do think the reduced stuff continues to be a benefit to reducing boredom in games of this scope.

I said this of Tsushima:

I certainly won’t sit here and claim that this is generally an original title, but it didn’t necessarily have to be. It takes the framework established by the recent Assassin’s Creed titles, and iterates enough on it to feel like its own thing.

I think that is particularly relevant here. Ghost of Yotei feels even less original, but I don’t think it needed to be original. Tsushima was a wildly successful and fun game. This takes the core put in place there and iterates on it, and in doing so didn’t lose what made the game a standout. Yotei is a wildly gorgeous game with extremely tight combat and that’s all I really needed it to be.

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Game Ramblings #208 – Shadow Labyrinth

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

For a game that has Pac-Man levels, I actually found those segments to be by far the least fun sections of the game. The platforming involved in there was just never fluid or interesting. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What is there most of the time is a melee Metroidvania that surprised me in how well it took simple combat and crafted it into something fun with a very limited set of mechanics.

I can’t really think of a boss fight in this game that had more than four or five attacks, and generally they had one or two. What that really meant was that learning and avoiding the attacks was the most important part of combat, and not actually doing damage. You could ultimately indefinitely extend a boss fight via well timed defense.

Where this came in for the player was dodging and a chosen defensive maneuver – parry, shield, etc. The dodge is really what made the game sing. It’s a very fighting game-style dodge where you get pass through and immunity frames. This pushes combat in a direction where timing is the most important element. During a new encounter I’d lay back, learn the attacks, probably die a couple times, then come back in and know my timing. You hit your defensive move, lay in a handful of attacks as necessary, maybe use some excess energy on bonus damage, then time the next attack. In action games that work for me I generally talk about how the combat has a good rhythm and this has that. Once learned, most of the boss fights have pretty reliable segments of two melee combos followed very quickly by an attack with little downtime in there.

So let’s go back to probably die a couple times. Normally that’s where I find a lot of issues and even going back to ramblings like Hollow Knight that was where the game fell flat for me. Shadow Labyrinth feels like it was designed to mitigate the downsides of death. For one thing, nearly every major boss fight had a save point immediately before its room, if not a full on teleport location. This allowed the boss fights themselves to be isolated in their difficulty and let you focus on going in, learning, and immediately executing on learnings instead of having to do a death run back.

The second thing that really stood out was how many places existed that could be opened as shortcuts through the world. The map when completed really feels like it’s a series of compact loops. There’s an obvious first path through an area that you run through and find a bunch of impassable doors. You then start hitting branches in that path that loop back and end at one of those doors. If I was to really visualize it, it would be like taking a winding river as the main path and a straight line through it as the path that gets opened once you finish all the loop backs. It highly encourages exploration, often leading to upgrades, while also encouraging fast retraversal. Combined with a really solid teleportation network, every time I earned a new traversal upgrade (hook shot, double jump, air dash, etc) was very quickly followed by me happily going back to past areas to find new stuff.

Where things weren’t necessarily as positive for me largely centered around progression. This is a game that just does not offer any progression hand holding. In some ways that’s good because it forces exploration. However, in a lot of cases I want to know vaguely what direction I should be going. At one point around the middle of the game I was tasked with finding two major power sources to move the story forward but it took me about 10 hours of gameplay to complete that. It’s not that I was having trouble, but that I just kept picking the wrong direction to go in. I would go down a path for 20 or 30 minutes and hit a wall, then have to wander back and find a new direction. This continued for a long time. It’s not that I was suffering for it, because I earned a ton of upgrades. However, what it generally meant was that by the time I found the right path to where I was supposed to go I was tremendously overpowered and had nearly completed the entire map in the game. The couple hours immediately following it were just a breeze. Had I had a little bit of direction to say “go roughly into this region” I think the flow of the overall game and my character’s power curve would have been more appropriately challenging and interesting.

I could also just do without the Pac-Man challenges and I think that really differs from a lot of reviews that I read. I just found these to generally be a chore. Platforming as Pac-Man was always some variation of stiff and inconsistent. Switching between the always moving default mode and player-controlled movement mode felt like switching between two modes with equally bad weaknesses – always moving had huge weaknesses in directionality of jumping and player-controlled really felt sloppy once in the air. Getting good completion times felt like it was just learning precise movement patterns instead of actually being good at the game, and later higher challenge levels felt more like fighting mechanics than actually having fun gameplay. It felt like a bad implementation of Pac-Man on the surface and a weird distraction from what was otherwise a really solid core Metroidvania game.

Wrapping Pac-Man into the wider Namco space force lore and turning it into a Metroidvania was certainly a bold choice, but I think more than not it worked out well. Combat was a real pleasant surprise for me in that it took a simple set of mechanics but did them incredibly well. Things around that experience may not have been as solid as other entries in the wider genre, but there’s enough that works out well here for me to give this a pretty easy recommendation.

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Game Ramblings #207 – Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon

More Info from PlatinumGames

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

This game surprised me in a lot of ways. Unlike Bayonetta, it’s a low slower paced. Unlike many action/adventure games, it’s focused more on puzzle solving. Unlike most Nintendo titles, it has what initially feels like a complicated and confounding control scheme but trusts that its players will put the pieces together. It drops the series’ relatively realistic visuals for a storybook painter feel while also dropping as much of the over the top bombastic elements as a game about witches, demons, and fairies realistically could. If anything could be an anti-Bayonetta yet still exist in the IP, I suppose it makes sense that this is what it would come out being.

The control scheme is going to be the thing that makes most people pause when they look at this and go did Nintendo really allow this? It’s not bad, but it’s decidedly weird. The left analog stick and shoulders control Cereza. The right analog stick and shoulders control her demon. This is active at all times and a camera restriction forces them to be within a reasonable distance of each other. The thing that is unusual about this is that in an action game, splitting focus is typically wildly dangerous. I’m not going to say that I didn’t get into situations where I totally lost a character on screen, because it happened. However, I was often moving the two as a unit because of the mechanics that were chosen.

Cereza’s not really a combat unit in this case. What her powers are focused around is crowd control. She increasingly becomes able to stun lock one to multiple units throughout combat via her magic. This then lets her demon deal out extra damage, or in a lot of cases for my play style allowed me to focus damage on units that were not crowd controlled. The demon also has elemental powers to help specific situations – rock to break shields, water to kill fire, etc – so most of my time in combat was really a minimal portion of my brain dedicated to using my crowd control, then most of my brain focusing on demon attacks.

It surprised me how often this just worked pretty well. The game generally didn’t toss a ton of units at you at one time so losing focus on one of your characters wasn’t generally a huge issue. High danger situations for attacks typically involved boss fights, and in those cases there are lots of tools to deal with them as well. You can re-summon the demon to Cereza at any time and with later upgrades allow Cereza to move quicker when they’re together. This is really what made boss fights click. In those cases, the focus was always just the boss and playing around with their tells to stay out of danger vs using the right elements to open opportunities for Cereza to stun them and get damage in.

Ultimately it feels like combat was crafted for the control scheme rather than around it, and I get that feels like a vague distinction. In this case though, the combat is very clearly tuned toward a situation in which the player doesn’t have as good of focus as usual, so all the tools in play are to reduce the speed of needing to think. CC gives the player more safety and time. Damage buffs reinforce the use of CC. Limited enemy counts allow you to focus both characters on one spot with independent movement. Element requirements give you something specific to action upon that doesn’t involve a change in focus. It is all crafted to enhance the experience rather than a 2.5D combat experience being grafted into a weird control scheme.

The rest of the experience surrounding this is just kind of the cherry on top. There’s a decent upgrade system here to grant the player some feeling of a power curve that they can choose the direction of. There’s some light Metroidvania elements in the environment to make retraversal both beneficial and fun. There’s some light time attack elements to optional dungeons to give some side content to hit. There’s a good mix and rhythm to changes between puzzle sections and combat sections to keep the player engaged throughout. It all just kind of works well. Is it anything mind blowing? Not really. It’s all just kind of done at a high enough standard to not be a detriment, and that’s perfect for what it is.

However, this does bring up a thought that I had the entire time. Why does this game not have couch co-op? All of the entirely practical development reasons for couch co-op to not exist – screen real estate and performance with split viewports, game balance, mechanical oddities, etc – have been dealt with here. You always have two characters, they always exist independently, their UI elements are always present on screen, and there are mechanical reasons for the camera to be forcefully restricted to keep them nearby. Couch co-op is literally a drop in for this design. There are a tiny handful of spots that don’t have both characters playable for story reasons, but even then the mechanics of one or the other player having a short solo experience are fine in context for people playing together. Co-op simply just does not exist, and it’s a shame. This is a theoretically great title for people to co-op since you have two characters with two wildly different mechanic sets to allow players to choose the play style – offensive or defensive – that they prefer.

I played this on a whim and came away happily surprised. I’m generally a fan of the Bayonetta series but this was obviously something very different. Where Bayonetta is thematically as anti-Nintendo as they come, this game is for gameplay reasons as anti-Nintendo as they come. However, despite that it all works very well which leads me to believe that this was more carefully considered than I’m imagining. The controls are relatively complex but the gameplay feels tailored toward them. It ends up being an experience that feels like a well thought out package, rather than a game grafted onto a weird control scheme. It ends up just being a really pleasant surprise.