Tag: action rpg

Posted on

Game Ramblings #229 – The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox Series, Switch 2

My takeaway after playing this is that 2D Zelda can learn a lot about combat. This game doesn’t reach the same highs in dungeon design or puzzle design, but the combat is leagues above what 2D Zelda has done. That alone makes this worthy of consideration.

While it’s easy to pull in other action RPGs like Ys into the talks here, the Zelda games are much more obviously the target here. The dungeon layouts and combat pace are much more in line with Zelda games where everything is on a neat grid, attacks are singular instead of fighting-combo based, and particularly boss battles are focused on single screen experiences. In my head that puts it much more in line with games like Link’s Awakening than Ys.

Where Zelda always felt like it concentrated on tools and puzzles with combat largely being secondary, this feels the polar opposite. This is a game that concentrates on weapons the entire time. Some things that would traditionally be generally tools in Zelda like the bomb also appear here – and certainly have their traditional use to blow holes in walls – but are also generally weapon-forward as well. The more practical difference is that there is more than just a sword. This is a game that lives by giving you a bunch of weapons and letting you loose. There is a sword and it’s important to the story, but there’s also weapons like a spear or a sickle. The game provides the player with a bunch of options and then you just go and find which ones you like the best.

The weapons are backed by two things that are really important as distinct differences. The first is weapon charges. Zelda has its sword spin, but there’s more here. Each weapon has a core charge up ability to mirror Zelda. This then gets modified by each weapon upgrade to add additional stages of charge. Each charge ends up giving more power to the attacks or more range to a dash tied to the charge or something along those lines. This then extends to more modifications through the use of what the game calls Magicite, which are essentially modifiers added to weapons. Some are straight attack boosts, but others do more exotic things. The particular weapon I latched onto was the spear, which I then modified with Boar Rush that provided immunity while hitting a special attack, Three-Headed Dragon that split my attack into three providing more lateral range, and Magic Spear that provided an extra attack when I was at near full health. It’s this kind of flexibility that really brings a lot of life to what is often an overlooked part of gearing in Zelda.

It then extends to fights that are generally just better than 2D Zelda. The one thing I would say is obviously different here is that the bosses are much quicker to move and attack. It brings a sense of danger that really frankly isn’t present in a typical Zelda game. What it also does is bring pace. A lot of the boss fights were frankly quick to defeat, but not because they were easy. It was because I often had one of two choices – lay back and avoid attacks to play it safe or take incredibly stupid and risky chances to lay in full-charge special attacks and try to burst the boss down before it could kill me. I generally took the second choice, it was often a bad idea, it was incredibly fun.

The flipside of this is that the focus on combat has reduced the complexity of the rest of the game. Some of that is admittedly good. Everything is quick and efficient to run through, and like the pace of combat being fast, the pace of traversal is fast. However, that does also mean that dungeons are generally pretty compact and don’t really have puzzles to solve. You kind of just follow the one path, which will generally loop back toward the entrance to open a shortcut and give you a key to move forward. The game does get some legs out of re-use of locations through the time travel mechanic, but besides the core city the changes tend to be pretty minimal from time period to time period. It’s effective as a story telling device, but not much beyond that.

Where they did get some points back on this was the time travel mechanic. The core conceit of the game is that you are travelling between different time periods of the same area over a millennium in the past. The major changes all occur within the core city of the game and its transition from a small village to a magic city to a destroyed city to a rebuilt kingdom. However, there’s little changes throughout the world as you play through each time period. It all ends up being familiar enough to quickly traverse through but introduces enough new elements to still feel like you’re discovering things. At times this can just be a weapon upgrade that is in a branch of a cave that is unlocked for a specific time period, but in others it ends up being a completely new way to traverse the world. It fairly smartly takes advantage of expanding the use of a smaller set of content while avoiding feeling stale. Again, that’s not unlike Zelda with Ocarina of Time or the Oracles games.

What I would ultimately land on is that this is every bit a great competitor to existing 2D action RPG franchises, and particularly focused toward Zelda. I don’t know that I think it surpasses things like the Link’s Awakening remake, but I also don’t think that one is necessarily a better game. What they provide are two very different takes on the genre with different focuses, and which one is deemed better is something I would expect to come down to preference of pace. What it is is a great example of a gameplay style that is not seen often enough and one that can certainly hold its own in the industry today.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #216 – Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: ARPG/Musou
  • Platform: Switch 2

This was a wildly fun experience, but as I played it I was left with a particular thought – this is not a particularly good musou game. In isolation, this is a much better combat experience than your typical Warriors game but so much of it occurs in either 1-on-1 boss fights or small scale combat encounters, which is completely the opposite of what I expect out of the genre. So if it steers away from the core gameplay loop that much, is it still worthwhile?

When I think of your typical Warriors title I think about huge multi-person battleground combat maps where I’m trying to capture and keep hold of multiple camps while fighting off enemy commanders, leading to fights where I’m easily eclipsing 1000+ KOs in a single round. The first Hyrule Warriors certainly leaned into that for the most part. However, that screenshot above is more typical of your Imprisonment battle with large ones reserved for a few very particular story missions. Generally speaking, the bulk of content here is a 5 minutes or less game loop where you finish a couple quick objectives on the way to a solitary boss fight. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t play much of Age of Calamity but it caught me off guard.

If the musou experience is what you’re looking for, you just aren’t going to get it here. Even in the large fights it feels mostly lost. Sure, I capture camps but very few of them are ever in future danger of being recaptured by enemies. Sure, some secondary commanders spawn but they generally bee line right for one of my NPC commanders. Sure I have a party of people that I can command, but they are wholly incapable of taking out enemies or capturing points on their own, leading to a lot of swapping who is active as the player. If someone were to hop to this right from Dynasty they would probably be very confused as to why it’s carrying the Warriors name.

But then you play some more and the combat against bosses in particular starts to grab you. Boss fights are quite simply not just hack and slash encounters.

There are elemental attacks to take into account and chaining that you can do. For example, you can freeze an enemy with a series of ice attacks, then hit it with lightning for explosion. You can combine wind attacks with other elements to create tornadoes capable of hitting large groups. you can burn an enemy then hit it with water or ice to open it up for critical damage. Dodging takes on a ton of importance here relative to other Warriors games as well. Executing a perfectly timed dodge opens up the enemy for a flurry attack where the player can lay in a bunch of large damage, as well as knock down its stun meter. Once that stun meter is knocked down all the way, it also opens up the boss for a large attack generally capable of cutting down a quarter or more of its health at once. This is then combined with the ability for pairs of player characters doing combo attacks together for similarly large damage.

These one-on-one encounters then feel a lot less like a musou experience and more like a traditional action combat game, and that is greatly to its benefit. Where I enjoyed the original Hyrule Warriors for being a musou game, I started to enjoy this game because it was not. What it ends up being for me is a game that feels like a Hyrule experience shrouded in war, rather than the more individual experience that Zelda games typically have. It feels like it’s leaning on the action combat of the series, but not leaving away the fact that in war things are often going to be faster and more chaotic. The game loop then generally being short 5 minute segments ending in a boss makes a ton of sense. You are being encouraged to quickly dispatch with unimportant KOs and focus on the small handful of big bads that are really tuned to be fun to fight within the combat paradigm that they built for the game.

So that gets us back to the question – if it steers away from the core gameplay loop that much, is it still worthwhile? I think the answer that I arrived at is that yes it is still worthwhile, and it took the game continuing to beat me over the head with spectacle to get there. As the game went on I stopped thinking about whether or not I was playing a musou game and thinking more about timing my dodges correctly. It was less important that I was KOing 1000 things and more important that I was KOing the one boss. It was less important that I was doing hack and slash chaos and more important that I was chaining elemental attacks. The combat fundamentals end up being so much fun that the things that I initially felt were missing ended up fading into the background. Yes, this may not be a typical musou game, but in the process they’ve crafted something else that is a lot of fun on its own.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #215 – Pokemon Legends: Z-A

More Info from The Pokemon Company

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch 2
  • Also Available On: Switch

This is such a strange game. At a glance it feels like it should be terrible – a Pokemon game contained to a single city with limited zones in which to catch Pokemon. However, they made a crucial decision to focus on combat and boy did that benefit the game as a whole.

If you’ve played the previous Pokemon Legends: Arceus, there’s really nothing to talk about except for combat. Simply put, combat is now done in real time in all situations. There’s no difference between fighting a wild Pokemon and fighting a trainer battle and they really lean into that. You as the trainer run around and avoid being hit by stray attacks while simultaneously hitting buttons for relevant attacks. Pokemon are quickly hot swapped so trainer fights don’t lose the real time feel as you go through your lineup of Pokemon swapping out to gain type advantages. It plays a really tight line of familiar but new for the series, even compared against the same feeling of Arceus. However, I do think it has some rough spots in their first attempt at real time.

The first obvious problem is that I think the player’s active Pokemon has too little agency of its own to actively fight. All ranged attacks are relative to the player and the Pokemon tries to follow the player around if they aren’t being actively commanded, and that’s frustrating as hell. As a player, I have to reposition frequently to avoid being hit by attacks, which then causes the Pokemon to get into spots where it has to wildly reposition just to throw a ranged attack which is always at a fixed spot relative to the player’s position, wasting a bunch of time while it repositions. The Pokemon then often gets into spots where its ranged attacks hit things that it should simply be obviously avoiding. It might be an edge of a fence or a tree or the top of a stair that will clip the attack, blocking it from hitting. It’s just consistently dumb as shit that this occurs, because a Pokemon should clearly be instinctively smart enough to reposition itself a bit to avoid this.

Where this gets particularly frustrating is that they very clearly designed the big PvE boss fights to avoid this. Those fights are all just against a Pokemon on a flat surface, and they’re spectacularly fun. These fights become some of the more chaotic avoidance situations in the game, ranging from anything like pool avoidance to bullet hell situations. Some of the early ones are certainly more straightforward damage checks, but later ones start to test the player’s ability to not just faceroll the attack buttons and actually stay moving more often. And they WORK because they DO NOT REQUIRE THE POKEMON TO THINK.

This is then compounded by the large amount of trainer battles that the game pushes you into. If Arceus was about collecting and not having trainer battles as much as possible, this is about as far opposite as you can get. There are entire segments of the game loop dedicated to trainer battles, where sections of the city are cordoned off each night just for trainers to battle in. This is where you get a lot of mileage out of having a traditionally setup party to counter as many Pokemon types as possible, but it’s also where I have my second real problem with the combat system.

Trainer battles in traditional Pokemon games largely involve you guessing your way through the first Pokemon then distinctly having the advantage to switch Pokemon simultaneous to your opponent, leaving you with a type advantage as long as you can generally know or guess the upcoming Pokemon’s weaknesses. That isn’t present here, but it’s also combined with an annoying delay when switching Pokemon where the Pokemon has to play a spawn animation before it can even begin to move for both the player and NPC characters. Generally it leaves the Pokemon open to being hit at least a couple of times before it can even begin to move. This leaves the defending Pokemon with an always present inherent disadvantage to having been put into battle, which feels generally off in the spirit of Pokemon fights. It’s not necessarily that I want to have the guaranteed type advantage of the turn-based games, but I want to at least be able to quickly get a Pokemon into battle and fighting, rather than watching it slowly spawn and be hit.

However, the bulk of the trainer battles in this are inherently more interesting because of the open world and real time nature. You can sneak up on people and knock out their opener Pokemon before they even know you are there. It’s such a dick move if this was to be happening in real life, but as a videogame power fantasy it’s spectacularly fun and effective.

The thing is, despite me having what feels like real core problems with combat I still found this to be so tremendously fun that it again represents what I think is a better path forward for the series. If Arceus represented a quicker paced capture dynamic with an open world, this represents the feeling of Pokemon in a way that more closely matches the TV series. This feels much closer to what I think Pokemon is, with more trainer fights and less capturing but done in a much quicker paced setup inherently due to it being real time. This keeps important things about the core metagame for me – forming a party tuned to type advantages, swapping them out based on what my opponents bring in, making sure that I’m tuning my move set to take advantage of things that aren’t inherent to the types of my Pokemon – and reducing overall user friction by making everything easy to get to.

If I then take combat at face value and assume that some iteration could be done to smooth it out a bit, this represents a future that I think should be core Pokemon and not side game experiment. This combat applied to the Scarlet/Violet world design would work just as well, and in particular would allow them to eliminate their time saving measure of auto result-battles in the open world that always felt like a grinding crutch to me. This combat applied to gym battles in Scarlet/Violet would make those feel like even larger spectacles. This combat applied to Terastallized Pokemon fights would make those feel like skilled battles instead of dice rolls around picking the right overpowered Pokemon. There is just a lot to be gained from Game Freak paying attention to what they are creating with these experiments, and the hope is that they do pay attention instead of throwing it away again.