Tag: nintendo

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #186 – Princess Peach: Showtime!

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

I’m not going to claim that this game is a must play. I’m not going to claim that it’s even a great game. However, it has something to it that kept me playing it. To some extent it’s probably just that it worked generally well. To some extent it was absolutely that I just wanted to see the next costume change. A lot of it was honestly probably just that it wasn’t as serious as FF7: Rebirth was. At the end of the day it was just kind of consistently fun.

That’s honestly something that could be said about a lot of the past output from Good-Feel. Their projects with Nintendo are a who’s who of consistently fun experiences. Wario Land: Shake It was a fun platformer with incredible hand drawn visuals tied down with an obnoxious Wii Remote shake mechanic. Kirby’s Epic Yarn again had incredible visuals and solid platformers mechanics. Yoshi’s Woolly World again had a gorgeous unique visual style tied to fun platforming mechanics, and the same could be said about its followup Yoshi’s Crafted World. If you’re sensing a pattern here, that’s not an accident. Princess Peach: Showtime! follows the same pattern.

This game is just easy to jump in and play, which is made more impressive by the fact that each costume was different. They really took advantage of the core conceit of costume changing to keep the gameplay fresh. Every single costume can jump with the A button or take an action with a B button, so figuring out what to do is less about learning how to execute mechanics and more what those mechanics do. Swordfighter or Cowgirl? The action is a straight up attack. Detective or Patissiere? Neither of them attack so it’s a gameplay action button instead. It’s that variety of some things being really action focused and more things being slow puzzle focus that really keep the game fresh. It has a certain fast/slow back and forth that really works well. Some levels are higher stress combat and some are straight relaxation.

This is all backed by what is again a very unique visual approach. This is probably the game in Good-Feel’s arsenal that is the least unique since it’s inherently tied to modern Mario sensibilities. However, what it lacks in a unique visual theme it makes up for in pure flair. It takes the stage play Showtime! very seriously. Each level is tied to a stage play setting connected to the costume of the stage, and it’s super obvious that this is a stage play. Background elements are obviously made out of stage dressing like wood, cardboard, or stage curtains. Secret areas take you backstage behind the scaffolding. NPCs are all based around puppetry with moving hinged sections instead of organic bodies, as well as their control lines extending down from the ceiling. There’s even nice little touches here where friendly NPCs typically have white lines while enemies have glowing purple lines. This is all a company taking advantage of the theme to make an incredibly good looking experience.

However, like I mentioned – this game isn’t great and it has obvious issues that keep it in simply good territory. The most consistent problem is that a lot of the levels are simply too long for no reason. Each costume is broken into 3 levels. However, it feels like the pattern would have benefited from being extended to 5 shorter sections. The game also places a heavy emphasis on collecting, which is exacerbated by the level length. The game often blocks you from going backward, so missing a collectable can often be a 5-10 minute complete replay of a level. This would probably be fine if there was more variety, but again each costume has three distinct segments of one way to do things so there is no real replayability to any of this. It’s fun the first time and distinctly not the second. This is then wrapped into some real technical issues with low resolution and low framerate, and it’s pretty clear that this is more of a AA effort. It’s a fun one-time experience, but that’s all it is.

At the end of the day this probably hit the points I needed it to anyway. After finishing a game like FF7: Rebirth, I did not want a long or complicated experience. This is the kind of game you’ll fall into, hit your two buttons, have some fun, and be done. It’s fast and gets out of the way, so for me it was perfect. Just don’t expect an all-timer experience here, because that isn’t what you’re signing up for.

Posted on

How’d It Age #9 – Banjo-Tooie

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Originally Released On: N64
  • Platform: Xbox 360

When I pulled this one off my random list I realized that I don’t think I’d ever played it. I played the original for sure, and I definitely played Donkey Kong 64, but this one missed me for some reason. Going back and playing these kinds of games given the progression of the platformer genre is always interesting, and this one is definitely not an exception. However, I do think it’s showing its age at this point for a few specific reasons.

Within the context of 3D platformer games, it’s important to remember when this one came out. With it coming out at the tail end of 2000, it came out a little bit after some big hitters in the Crash Bandicoot triology and the first two Spyro games on PlayStation and the first Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast. However, it was also closely followed only a year later by the first Jak and Daxter and Sonic Adventure 2, and two years ahead of Super Mario Sunshine, Ratchet & Clank, and the first Sly Cooper title. Sitting where it is you can see it as a bit of a transition title where it showed off possibly the peak of what its hardware set was capable of. However, the 2001-2002 titles definitely show where Banjo was limited.

The first thing that really stands out is the act of traversing hrough the world. It feels absolutely glacial compared to modern games. It’s not even that it feels bad because it has plenty of weight and appropriate momentum. It just feels like there’s so much downtime going from important spot to spot. The games that came out immediately after it just had such better pace to their movement that really showed a generational leap in the act of traversal.

Jak leaned into a traditional collectathon platformer setup, but was just faster. You could rip through environments in a hurry collecting things at a high pace. Part of it was that the environments in Jak were just more visually crowded thanks to the hardware jump. However, they were also more vertical and more compact, so going to collect things had less down time. Sly Cooper on the other hand had larger levels, but encouraged the player to rapidly move in the shadows so more often than not the player wasn’t slowed down by interactions with NPCs. Ratchet and Clank had the slower movement but fed the gameplay with weapons to make moment to moment gameplay more impactful. Those three all took advantage of the better hardware to make different kinds of platformer gameplay that to me all have aged better than Banjo by simply having the player always be engaged in something.

The second thing that stood out to me was how much the game causes the player to spend time retraversing for small rewards. Obviously retraversing due to upgrades isn’t something I inherently dislike since I love Metroidvania titles. However, retraversal in those games often unlocks large swaths of new territory to run through. Retraversal here is because of small reasons that don’t necessarily feel rewarding. Talking to a mole to learn how to ground pound in a different way than your base ground pound just so you can break rocks to get jiggys feels like it’s just slowing your progress to make the game longer. Finding a magic spot that requires you to find and wander around as Mumbo Jumbo that simply causes a door to open feels like it’s significantly longer than necessary just to make the game longer. It’s all just low-reward ways to push progression that take longer than feels necessary.

Ultimately, newer games have really smoothed out things like this to increase game pace. The Mario games have always had individual stars be impactful. However, Mario Odyssey went inherently collectathon and smoothed things out by making sure the required powers were always incredibly nearby, reducing the need to run around. Ratchet & Clank literally just let you carry and swap everything at any time. Games like A Hat in Time kept some of the open nature of Banjo while reducing clutter to make the experience more streamlined. Even at the time, series like Spyro were compartmentalizing collecting into smaller more varied worlds that were less focused on powers and more focused on fun environmental interactions. These games have all resulted in better aging gameplay than the slow pace of Banjo.

All that said, it’s not like this game has aged to a place where it’s unplayable. It’s still a game that’s pretty easy to fall into. You can easily pop this in, play for an hour or two, and make meaningful progress. Playing at that pace – where you kind of come back to the game periodically – fits this game much better than treating it as a front to back experience. I think that’s the big distinction between Banjo and more modern experiences. This feels like a Sunday afternoon title, where modern games feel like they’re built as better continuous play experiences. I don’t think that’s all that accidental, and I think that’s ultimately a symptom of the industry’s growth out of the arcade. I think you can generally follow games from the NES to roughly the start of the PS2 era and see each generation moving further away from standalone or quick play experiences to something that can be played over longer continuous sessions. Games simply got better at being interesting for a continuous time, rather than being interesting in short bursts.

If this one does interest you, absolutely play the Xbox version. It’s on game pass, on the 360, on the Xbox One, on the Series consoles and it has a bunch of important improvements. Get it as part of Rare Replay and you’re going to have even more fun games to play alongside it. Framerate and resolution are the obvious boosts, but playing on something other than the N64 controller is a huge improvement on its own. Make this one your non-serious gap filler and you’re going to be in good shape.