Tag: jrpg

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Game Ramblings #204 – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

More Info from Sandfall Interactive

  • Genre: Turn-Based RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox Series, Windows

All this game really needs to be an all timer for me is more granular gameplay settings.

….ok lemme back up a bit, but this is truly going to be full on rambling today.

This game is simply exhausting. That isn’t necessarily as negative as it sounds. Really what it comes down to is a need to be focused at all times, and that ultimately leads into both the things that really burned me out on the combat in this game, as well as where I think they are a couple tweaks away from being simply a very good game into something that is truly timeless.

This game’s combat is really focused around actively avoiding damage. That’s something that’s been done before in JRPG-style combat, but it’s incredibly present here. Being hit in boss battles is often 20+% in one hit, and bosses often have entire attack chains, and later bosses in particular have multiple turns of entire attack chains, so you are always in a condition where screwing up your dodge/parry timing at the start of a chain is potentially immediately deadly. The problem for me is in how precise this all needs to be, and that’s totally a me problem.

Being extremely precise in this combat is a factor of a few things:

  • Learning the attack tells is part of it.
  • Leaning the specific timing is then part of it.
  • Quickly processing what type of defense you need to do is then part of it – is it a dodge, jump, or parry? You’ve got 4 buttons to choose from very quickly.
  • Consistently achieving that so you aren’t wasting your turns on healing is then part of it.

To some extent I just generally don’t think their combat tells are that well telegraphed. A lot of the animations do this thing where they run incredibly slow to start, then speed up without notice to do the attack. When you combine inherent input latency, frame latency to the screen, and inherent fatigue this can really quickly get to a point where I was just always a couple frames late on attacks. This is something that I think they got a better handle on later in development because later bosses particularly start making much better use of sound as part of the tells instead of pure animation, but it felt somewhat like too little too late. However, that really was not my core problem.

The issue that I consistently ran into was that whether or not I actually enjoyed combat or whether or not I wanted to spike my controller was generally based on how much sleep my 1 and 3 year olds let me get the night before. The very precise timing here both required very good focus, but also good memorization and reflexes. Those go away quickly with weird sleep patterns. That focus then causes me to mentally get exhausted quickly especially when I am already tired, leading to further degradation of my experience. Normally my instinct is to then reduce difficulty a bit, but this game simply has one setting – story mode difficulty. This does a few things, one of which is aggressively increase the dodge/parry timing window. The other is that it basically cuts damage by what felt like 90%. This is not what I want.

I see an opportunity here for the game to very quickly allow the player to tune combat to what their comfort level is:

  • They clearly have the tech to change incoming damage, so rather than being a core nuke on story mode why not allow the player to tune this a bit more? Frankly this isn’t something I wanted to change at all, but being able to tune this separate from timing would allow for more granular tweaks to my gameplay. This also then inherently opens up an opportunity for players that want a harder base level experience to take more damage without necessarily having to go to expert mode.
  • They also clearly have the tech to change the timing window on dodges and parries. I don’t want to tune the timing window all the way to where story mode landed. Really what I wanted was just a couple frames more to account for what felt to me like local latency that I was constantly fighting against.

Ultimately I suppose I think that timing-based gameplay that the user can’t tweak is bad design. It completely ignores the reality that there is a huge disparity in people’s setups that can add a lot of latency. TV screens are wildly different from each other. Adding amps can add latency. Even just the difference between the development environment on low latency PC screens can wildly throw off balance when moving over to a console. It’s pretty frustrating to not be able to modify this a little more specifically when this is not an entirely new thing. Hell, this is entirely why Guitar Hero has their timing configuration screen!

This is something that I really fight for in games I develop. I really hate on/off settings. If I’m putting tech in to modify settings then sure – have a set of easy values that players can just poke at for preconfigured settings. However, the tech is there to give more granularity so use it. It’s such an easy accessibility win that really lets players find the game that they want to play. My vision of where difficulty should land for me? Same damage as normal difficulty, 3 or 4 frames extra window for dodge/parry. Other players may want low damage but precise timing. Other players may just want to really ramp it beyond where even expert difficulty is. The tech is there, so use it.

The entire reason these ramblings came together like this for me was that as the game went on the fights clearly got longer and the rewards relative to time spent in combat clearly got worse. It turned into a grind where the game in its early stages was not. This even extended into boss fights where I was spending 3 or 4 turns effectively waiting while the bosses just got chains of attacks off that I had to be perfect on or wipe before I could have a chance at healing. It was just too much focus required for me outside of very short periods of time, which under normal circumstances is not a great way to even play a game where skill via repetition and remembering is important.

The reason why this is all so frustrating is because this is a game that is absolutely worth playing for the setting alone. This is such a good game from the story to the characters to the world. When the combat works for me it is simply world class in terms of JRPG-style combat. All of that makes it just incredibly frustrating when the difficulty choice for me is so easy I’m bored or maybe I got enough sleep today? The thing that gives me some hope is that they are clearly already tweaking difficulty. A recent patch made story mode even more forgiving on timing, so they are at least poking at it still. I just hope that they take it a step further and really allow players to refine their experience with tech that is already underlying the existing difficulties.

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Shelved It #135.1 – Fantasian: Neo Dimension

More Info from Square-Enix
Original Ramblings

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: iOS, Xbox Series, Windows, Switch

My previous ramblings about part 1 are still 100% my feelings for the way the first half of this game went. Combat is generally incredibly fun, bosses are solid but can sometimes be a bit one-note, and the visuals work well. I never did get around to part 2 on iOS for whatever reason, but I’d seen some ramblings about it not being as good. I’d seen some ramblings about it having balance issues. I’d seen some ramblings about the open world changes not really working out well. And boy are those still the case.

The point at which you transition into part 2 of this game is incredibly obvious because you are just bombarded with new mechanics. The unfortunate thing for the game is that even though this is the effective director’s cut of the game, they couldn’t really fix these mechanics to be present in the whole game because they are so story related.

The first major one of these is the change from a linear game to an open world game. The end of part 1 has you having seen at least most of the major locations in the game, so structurally this makes sense. You’re revisiting old locations for new reasons – finding new items, searching out new people, etc. A lot of the progression through this section feels pretty arbitrary in terms of discovery, but that would be fine in isolation. It just doesn’t work out for the gameplay. Besides going to locations that you’ve already seen and ransacked, you get into awkward mixes of enemies that are at lower levels and enemies that now feel out of place from being high level. It ends up exacerbating what is already some weird balance to really slow down the pace of leveling in a negative fashion.

You are also granted access to the growth map system. This is essentially a skill tree tied to a story-important item for each character. The problem is sort of three-fold here. It feels like it was put in place to address power curve problems past level 30, rather than simply adjusting the power curve of core leveling to be better. It also comes in per-character, so you end up in places where some characters just feel underpowered relative to the rest of the party, relegating them to very specific uses. Finally, the system just doesn’t really give you any points to start with so it’s all based on growth from level 35 on, basically leaving you at an introduction point with no gains. Another mechanic that comes in around this time is gear upgrading. Again, it’s a system that feels like it was added to assist in the power curve above level 30 but because the items tied to the system only come in with the later game enemies and treasures you kind of can’t take advantage of it without grinding. This again continues to exacerbate balance issues.

So the thing that keeps coming up here is balance, and that’s tied to one simple change. Once your characters are past level 35, they gain less XP against “weaker” enemies. Again, in isolation this is not a huge deal and a ton of games do things along these lines. The problem as it were is that the levels of enemies in this section of the game just do not correspond to their power. At the point I shelved this, I was around level 40 going up against bosses that were around level 38 and they were doing AoE attacks that were doing 90+% of my health pool to the entire party in one attack. This just ends in a train of healing that is incredibly boring at best and generally just a slow slog to demise at worst. Assuming you then beat the boss, it’s “low level” so you get almost no XP from it. It’s all effort, no reward, and because of this very same system the walk to the boss also earns almost no XP because the trash are similarly low level, so even the fun Dimengeon mass fights don’t feel worth the effort. It ends up making the gameplay incredibly awkward in that you go to higher level areas to grind, then warp back to low level areas to progress the story even though you are “too strong”. It just does not work out.

Ultimately I suppose that is my problem. I wouldn’t mind a bit of grinding if I felt like I was being rewarded with progress, but part two gets you to a place where you’re just beating your head against the wall for small rewards to get past things that by level are “weak” compared to you, despite them obliterating the party. I just don’t have the time or patience for that anymore. There’s a gem of a game here if a few small changes are made – don’t reduce XP for weak enemies, increase the levels of bosses to make them “correct”, make gear upgrade items more common, grant a bunch of SP when gaining access to the growth map – but this just could not stick the landing. Given the potential shown in the original release of part 1 it’s really just kind of a bummer.

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Game Ramblings #201 – Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Wii U

I never actually finished the original game. I hit some point where there was a huge difficulty spike and just couldn’t be bothered doing the grinding to get through whatever the block was for me. I don’t know if it was the platform being played on, other games coming out around then, or that this release got a rebalance but that was never a problem on this version. 95 hours later this game was an incredible joy to play.

Playing this game now really is a series of “I don’t remember…” moments, but I suppose that comes with the nature of this being a 10 year old game that I didn’t finish. The first thing that really struck me was that I don’t remember it taking so long to get the mechs. I was at least 30 hours in before I got the mech and at least 50 hours in before the mech could fly. However, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I spent so much time exploring on foot in ways that was absolutely fun and interesting.

The thing that struck me as impressive here that I didn’t remember is how much you can literally explore the entire world on foot relatively early in the game. Every zone has an entire level range of areas from low to high. However, high level enemies aren’t necessarily dangerous on foot because they will ignore you. They’re huge and level 60 and you’re effectively an ant. However, if you come back in a mech later on they absolutely attack you. What it did for me was allow me to just wander for the sake of wandering. Sure, I was also generally chasing some basic mission marker for extra XP or rewards, but it wasn’t like I was chasing a story mission. I was just wandering to see what was there and what I could find and generally doing it in areas that I wouldn’t get to in the story for dozens of hours. It was simply fun in the way that exploring the mainline Xenoblade games is fun, but in an even more open nature.

The thing I don’t remember about the original release is precisely where I shelved it. There’s a point about 2/3 of the way through the game where I think may have been it. In the fight I’m thinking of you fight what is effectively a gigantic floating fortress with a bunch of adds that spawn throughout it. It’s a bit of a fight of managing focus and a bit of a fight that is just checking your DPS, and it’s the one boss fight that I did manage to wipe in here.

In this release it felt appropriately hard but not impossible, and I think that feeling of balance being better exists throughout but I can’t really tell if that is a placebo effect. In classic Xenoblade fashion, balance is a wild mess of numbers that don’t really have any relation. A level 40 bug is different than a level 40 gorilla is different than a level 40 dinosaur is different than a level 40 flying blimp fish. You basically learn by dying what you should really be fighting, and the unfortunate thing about that is that there’s a lot of stuff that is hard to fight that earns you effectively no reward because it’s “low level” by the time you put up a fair fight. To me, that’s just Xenoblade and it’s a problem that every game in the series has had. The nice thing here though is that the game does a pretty good job of balancing the core golden story path to where if you’re at the level recommended in the quests, it feels appropriate. If you want a harder experience you go in slightly lower level. If you want an easier experience you go in slightly higher level. It all just works well, and that’s not something I remember of the original release. Frankly, it’s something that they didn’t really get that right until Xenoblade 2, and the remaster of this and XB1 show those learnings.

Tied into the balance thing is that I don’t remember doing as much of the “side” content in the original release, and frankly I don’t remember enjoying doing it either. In this release though, I was doing everything. I think some of that is tied into the fact that I was enjoying exploring in general. It’s easy to hit mission points incidentally when you’re just exploring anything and everything. However, I was also enjoying doing the little character side stories.

It struck me how important the character missions are to the actual plot of the game. Relative to the main entries, this is a very story light experience if you follow just the main story line. However, if you do the character stories – and importantly, are thorough in recruiting characters – you get a lot more world building. You get stories of how other alien races came to this world and are involved with the main antagonists of the game. You get back stories of how the humans got to know each other and ended up on the space ship that escaped Earth. You get to see the team building as it’s happening. In core Xenoblade games, these are things that kind of just happened as you played the game, but here are presented as side content, and I think the game experience is worse if they are treated like that by most players. There is a surprising amount of story content here if you go after it.

All that being said, the main draw for me was that there was new content in play here. It’s….fine. Ultimately the story portion of it was a better draw for me than the game portion. The game portion railroads you into a really long slog of a dungeon that takes place in a stereotypical JRPG floating island void and I could have gone without it. However, the story part closes a lot of plot holes that were never resolved in the original game and it sets them up for what now feels like an inevitable sequel and for that I suppose I’m thankful. I now want to see more of this style Xenoblade gameplay explored – although please change the combat inputs to be XC2 style instead of the hotbar. The mech gameplay is just such a fun experience that I don’t want to see them drop.

This remaster almost certainly exists because Monolith needed an excuse to do engine testing for the Switch 2 and Xenoblade 1-3 already existed on the Switch 1. If that is the justification for this existing, then hell ya. They wrapped the story of those games with 3, so opening up the story a bit here to maybe give them a path forward in the XCX story line on Switch 2 also feels like an absolute win. Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with going forward.