Tag: mario

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Game Ramblings #210 – Donkey Kong Bananza

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch 2

What a treat.

I know I’m a bit late on this one, but I finally got a Switch 2 so I had to hop on this immediately. As more information was revealed it became clear that this wasn’t just a Donkey Kong title, but instead a prequel to and continuation of the ideas originating in Super Mario Odyssey. In practice, it absolutely feels like that, but given some iteration to really solidify the core meta loop that solved a lot of what I felt was unnecessary grinding in the original.

I enjoyed the hell out of Super Mario Odyssey but I didn’t really enjoy that everything was so heavily gated to collecting large amounts of inconsequential moons all over the place. I simply don’t play games to that level of care for completion anymore. Going into this I dreaded having to find 40 shines hidden in spots for the hell of it to get to the next area. Lucky for me, that is all gone. There is now such an obvious distinction between main path collecting needs and collecting for the sake of it. The main path has goal locations and you happen to collect things between those locations, and maybe the main location has a goal to collect a specific banana or a piece of a record during it, but they are goals and you beeline straight to them and you move on with your life, and if you happen to collect things on the way then that’s generally fun and cool. What I’m not doing is what felt like grinding out a counter to move on.

And I’m very serious about beelining. The fundamental mechanic that the game is built around is the ability to just dig through the environment and make your own path. That is generally what solved my collection dislikes about Odyssey. In this case, most things that you can collect have a clever solution and a chaotic solution. There’s tons of clues all over the place about places to explore – changes in the ground texture showing possible caves, people standing around talking about the possible location of bananas, suspiciously placed objects that seem like they can only hide something. If you’re paying attention you will simply find a lot of things, and that isn’t different from how it worked in Odyssey.

However, there is now also the dumb ape solution. Your goal is 300m in a direction and there’s a town, cliff wall, and a bunch of people in your way? Punch in a straight line! I cannot tell you how many times I would be bashing my way through a cliff only to find that I ended up in a cave that done “correctly” would have required me to search out something like an explosive to blast through a metal wall blocking entrance to the cave. In those cases, being a dumb ape going “lol punch everything” got me a faster reward than playing correctly, and I loved the fact that game is literally built to allow this style of gameplay.

That’s not to say that some things didn’t require me to actually pay attention, because there are certainly core story segments that do require some care. Bosses generally required me to pay attention to specific mechanics and execute them well. Story-specific bananas generally required me to execute mechanics well. Optional challenge rooms (of which there are a lot) generally required me to carefully get through them. However, the balance of gameplay felt a lot more tuned to where I am in life now. There are a lot of moments where I can just shut off my brain, be a dumb ape punching things, and have fun. I can then save those moments of paying attention for specific times where the situation required it. If I compare this to my memory of Mario Odyssey, I feel like I had more relaxed downtime and better specific periods of excitement in a way that struck a better balance for post-work post-kids bed time sitting in a chair and playing.

The weird thing to me is that that change in how I was playing the game changed what to me was a negative about Odyssey – the sheer amount of collection – into something that I largely think is a positive here. Where in Odyssey I felt like I had to collect a lot of things, here I simply happened to collect a lot of things. Where in Odyssey I felt like I had to weave around and explore everything to collect what I needed, here I collected enough simply being a dumb ape and barreling through the environment. Ultimately the change is that instead of feeling forced to explore, I simply was exploring for the fun of it.

This is very much a classic Nintendo first party title. It’s relatively easy in the mainline path, has plenty of challenge when you go off of that, and concludes in a place that left me wanting more. They took what was already a solid foundation and passed it through iteration of core mechanics and adaptation to another part of the Mario IP. What came out of that is a game that is surprising in how well it worked and is almost certainly going to be seen as a much higher point than Donkey Kong 64 in terms of pulling this part of the universe into 3D. I don’t know if I could recommend buying an entire new console to play this game, but if you’re going to buy a Switch 2 anyway this is where you should absolutely start.

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Shelved It #21 – Mario & Luigi: Brothership

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

It’s not unprecedented that I drop a Mario RPG on the final dungeon and boy was that the case here. If you’d have asked me about 10 gameplay hours ago how I was going to start this ramblings it would have been “this game would have been better received if it was under any other IP” but this game just did not know when to end. Since then I had two plot twists at the end boss, a handful of really unnecessarily long dungeons, and a final dungeon with so many wings and unnecessarily spongey enemies that I just said “forget it, I’m done.”

And honestly, that’s a shame.

But for now, let’s go back to where I thought this set of ramblings was going to start. I really do think that this would have been better off with even a different name. Calling this game Mario & Luigi has so many expectations that come with it. Sure, there’s the timing-based combat but that had been done outside of M&L to where adapting that to another RPG wouldn’t have been seen as weird. What that name really brings with it is an expectation of a certain metagame style with large scale exploration in a mushroom kingdom setting. That is completely not this game.

This game is a series of relatively loosely connected 30 minute segments that you can kind of leisurely play at a relaxed pace that eventually loop back to a core story every now and then. However, independent of the M&L baggage this is a really fun metagame loop. This works well as an RPG where you have some agency over what order you’d want to do things. In other genres it would work well as a puzzle game where you go to different spots to solve unique puzzles. In an action game this would work where each loop has new enemy archetypes to engage with. Various Mario games have already proven that this metagame loop works well for a platformer where each new area has fun new challenges to engage with. However, it is not Mario & Luigi. If they had simply called this Super Mario Brothers-ship a ton of expectations would have been dropped, and frankly it would have probably been better received.

That is, until the end of the game. So many RPGs that are simply good but not great have the same failings around sticking the landing and this really is just a whose who of failures to stick the landing.

At about the 20 hour mark the first signs of this start to show up with the introduction of a Glohm mechanic. It makes sense tied to the story, but from a gameplay perspective it’s a debuff that prevents brother actions and can make enemies stronger. The main issue I had is that this is a sign of them running out of enemy archetypes, to where the glohm is in place to re-use old archetypes, but stronger. Typically besides just stronger, this actually means faster, and often that doesn’t just mean faster, it means fast enough that when we multi-attack, you can’t actually dodge all damage because game mechanics prevent you jumping/hammering that fast. Unavoidable damage in a combat system built around avoiding as much damage as possible is really a huge problem.

Then at about the 30 hour mark the dungeons start to get noticeably longer. 30 minute dungeons stretch into 45 minutes, then 60 minutes, and it really starts to negatively impact the fun of getting through a dungeon. Fighting the same enemy archetypes has a certain shelf life before you get bored, and this really starts to hit that cap. In isolation, it’s simply annoying because the pay off of a dungeon is usually a cool boss fight. While that’s certainly the case here, they start being capped off by unnecessary plot twists. The plot twists are obvious that they are coming, so they are both not fun and just generally feel like they’re extending the game for no reason. Past the plot twists are simply revisits of existing islands, so you don’t get new cool stuff. You’re just fighting stronger things that you’ve already fought (see previous note) and you’re not meeting new people. It just feels unnecessary.

For me, at about the 35 hour mark I then hit the final dungeon. I got to the end of the first wing, saw a hub with seven extending spokes, and literally just said “oh no”. It wasn’t actually seven wings since they loop back on themselves at times, but it was enough to be negatively impactful. I started playing a bit of it, but it was clear that it was going to be a slog. The just normal trash enemies very quickly stopped being 2-3 attack kills and started being 5-6 attack kills. They stopped doing 20-30 damage and started doing 80-90 damage. They stopped being occasional glohmed enemies and started all being glohmed enemies. It just stopped being fun. It wasn’t that it was hard, and I guess that’s my problem. It just felt like it was setup to kill time. I was already overleveled and it was dragging, so grinding to overlevel more was not appealing. I got back to the central hub and went “I’m good.”

I’ve never worked on a JRPG but in my head it feels like something that shouldn’t be difficult to tune around. There are certain metrics that testing should identify as fun. How long can a dungeon be before players start to grow bored of it? How long do players identify as “fair” to defeat a trash enemy? How many fights feels like enough to learn how an enemy archetype works before mastering it, and how many times can the player fight it before feeling bored? These are things that all worked very well for the first 20 or so hours of this game. I totally get that there’s a need to finish on bigger and badder, but bigger and badder should still be served by metrics of what is found as fun. Is an extra turn to kill an end game enemy a bad thing? Probably not but double the amount of turns probably is. 30 minute dungeons extending to 60+ is probably a bad thing. Fighting an archetype 10 times is fine, but 20 times is probably bad.

JRPGs that are simply just good flex too much from what is fun. JRPGs that are great do not. In my head as both a developer and consumer it’s as simple as that. Find the metrics that are fun, and make sure that you follow within some close range of that for the entire game. Make difficulty come from difficulty actually ramping up, not from length. Brothership simply failed that test.

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How’d It Age #10 – Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Gamecube

It’s been long enough since the original came out that I only vaguely remember the feeling of playing this game, but not so much the specifics of playing it. I can remember the feeling of the combat being good. I can remember the feeling of the characters and story being funny. What I remember more are the places where newer entries in the series felt like they “fell apart” for me. However, replaying Thousand-Year Door is making me realize that a lot of what I don’t like about modern entries already kind of existed in this one.

Now don’t get me wrong; the combat is this game is still fantastic and was really the driving force behind me playing the game. I would still argue that the core Paper Mario combat is one of leading examples of how to make turn-based RPGs heavily engaging to the player instead of a passive activity. Tying each attack to a different series of inputs for better damage gives the player that little bit of action to keep them involved in combat in a way that keeps their interest and allows it to feel more rewarding to not skip combat. Tying a defense boost to learning and remembering the various enemy attacks gives the player that little constant reward for being involved in combat that makes fighting an enemy for the tenth time more than just a chore.

It’s such a little thing but it makes the combat so much more fun. Other JRPGs have tried different things to get similar feelings. The Persona and SMT series have used type weaknesses to grant the players extra turns to achieve a similar result. The Bravely Default series allows the player to manipulate turn order to stack attacks and blow away enemies. Heck, the combat in Paper Mario was a direct evolution of the standard set by Super Mario RPG. Just giving the player something to do other than pick the attack and fall asleep is such a better result than the norm for the genre.

However, combat is one of those spots where doubt started to creep in. One of the things that really bugged me about more modern Paper Mario entries was how odd the power curve felt. It always felt like it was going in really weird jumps because the numbers were always inherently small. You’d kind of get to a new area, be beat up a bit, then be given a magic power upgrade and suddenly be effectively overpowered by only gaining one attack. That absolutely exists in TTYD, and wasn’t something I really remembered.

The places that I really started to notice it were when the jump and hammer upgrades were not in alignment. I’d suddenly be in areas where one of the two attacks effectively did 2-3 less damage, which meant that it took trash fights from one to two turns per-enemy or would do so much less damage with flower point attacks that the weaker one would be effectively useless on bosses unless mechanics of the fight required the specific attack. This was likely exacerbated by the way I was building, which was to go all-in on badge points so occasionally I would just get a HUGE upgrade swath because I would stumble upon a badge or two that added attack power that would totally change the way I tackled fights. When a boss has maybe 50 HP, suddenly being able to do 3 or 4 more damage per-turn is enormous. It felt off in a way that made me realize I honestly kind of prefer the larger numbers and slower power curve style of the Mario & Luigi series to this, because that at least feels like I’m making consistent growth throughout the game.

The other thing that I really forgot about was just how much walking there is. Holy hell do they like sending you across the same environments about 10 times per chapter for no reason. Sticker Star and Color Splash were somewhat guilty of this in that you’d be walking around a lot simply collecting the right cards for combat. Super Paper Mario was definitely guilty of making the player re-traverse areas way too often. Thousand Year Door just does it too a level that I don’t remember, or perhaps just shut out of my brain. It was so jarring at points that I’d literally put the game down for the night because I was tired of going through the same areas. The island chapter in particular was egregious for this where the hub town for the chapter and the goal for the story were on entirely different ends of the world and you had to cross it at least 4 or 5 times for different reasons.

I guess all that is to say that while this game is still good, it definitely has rough spots. The remake is definitely a strong product, and it brings the game to modern consoles in a visually gorgeous package. However, this is still a 20 year old games with 20 year old problems that at this point hadfaded from my memory. The thing is though, this came out within six months of the Super Mario RPG remake and that game has aged so much better. That one has the nice combat advantages of this series, but was a lot less quirky in the remainder of its JRPG tendencies and has much better overall environmental flow. Like the Mario & Luigi subseries, I think up against this game it ends up being the victor because its mechanics have just aged so much better.