Tag: nintendo

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Game Ramblings #228 – Splatoon Raiders

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Third-person Shooter
  • Platform: Switch 2

This is a nearly perfect modern version of what Nintendo championed for so long in their handheld console range – a game that you can pick up for five minutes or five hours and still make meaningful progress. It expands the Salmon Run mode from the core Splatoon games into something much larger while still maintaining the excellent shooting of the series. For me as a fan of single player Splatoon, it’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

This is a game that is inherently tied to a power curve loop from action RPGs and it’s probably the main reason why the game works. You’ve got leveling for core stats (health and base attack power) that feels impactful on its own. However, the meat of the game is the weapon system. Even if we ignore the wide variety of weapons, weapons themselves are upgradeable. Even if we ignore the flexibility of secondary gadgets, the gadgets themselves are able to be heavily modified with upgradeable customizations. This is a game where you will constantly be tinkering to get a build that you really stick with.

For my own personal example, I had ended up on a few specific things. As my weapon choice I ended up with Twincans – a variety of the dual shooting weapon that lets you dodge while firing. They have a bit more power than base dualies at the expense of higher ink use, which for me was nice to more quickly dispatch smaller mobs. I then paired this with gadgets featuring even more mobility, like the blast boot that lets me jump into an area while doing explosion damage to clear mobs and freeze effects to stall things that didn’t die, or the jump bomb that let me get airborne away from damage while doing similar impacts on landing as the blast boot. To some extent this build allowed me to simply pull mobs around the environment as I wished, but they also allowed me to change my initiation point to a new area if something more relevant was drawing my attention. However, this was simply my preferred way to play. Because there’s 11 core weapon types – each with at least a subtype – and 15 gadget types and dozens of gadget mods you can kind of build out how you prefer. You can build for speed or avoidance or power and find something that is just as effective and fun.

The important thing is how this is tied to progression and the core game loop. This is every bit a game that is built around loops that are 2-5 minutes. You jump into the world map, pick a location, go in and do some quick singular objective and get out. You get a bunch of currency or materials that you then go back to your base and use to upgrade any number of things. You tweak your gadget loadout a bit or switch to a new weapon, then get right back into it. This is classic Nintendo handheld loops where everything is fast but there’s always meaning. A run doesn’t feel wasted because you are always getting something towards increasing your power and it nearly always feels immediately impactful when you go back into the game. The meta loop also solves at least some of my problem with Splatoon 3’s single player in that the added context gives more meaning to ideas that feel recycled from past games where there’s still value beyond just discovery of the specific mechanic tied to the level.

So then this all ends up working because the game is fun on its own, but that isn’t really a surprise. The Splatoon shooting mechanics have been tried and tested now for years, and that’s still the case here. The core loop of laying down ink, swimming through it, and laying waste to anything that moves has always been fun. The Salmon Run mode in recent Splatoon games has proven that a horde of enemies coming at one person can be fun. This is now just more. This is a game that is taking advantage of the Switch 2 hardware increase not to really do new things but to do more. You have more enemies, more ink flying, more explosive attacks, more range to attacks, more long sight line areas due to level design. Visually I would say they took a huge risk in that nearly everything is a muted color scheme at odds with the series past, but it ends up highlighting how drastically different everything looks once you and the enemies end up covering it with bright ink. It ends up oddly being a really convincing exhibition for the power of the Switch 2 hardware compared to the previous generation.

I’m not entirely surprised I enjoyed this since I largely enjoyed past Splatoon single players. This is definitely taking ideas from those, as well as the ideas present in the Salmon Run mode. The combination of them tied to a much more expansive progression and customization loop just hit a really nice spot that makes this game incredibly easy to recommend.

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Game Ramblings #217 – Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: Switch 2
  • Also Available On: Switch

This is a game searching for a core, and that seems to be something that was recognized by the team. It is often a really good first-person shooter with level and boss segments that rival any recent story-focused FPS campaign. It is just as often an excruciatingly boring experience driving across a barren desert. It is also frustratingly in opposition with what a Metroidvania wants to be to the point that I would argue this has no real Metroidvania elements. I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is a bad game, and I admittedly did generally find it to be fun, but it is obviously something that had troubled development.

There’s points where this game just works and still feels like Metroid Prime and it’s brilliant. The first pass through each region when you have the right tools is pretty universally fun and is universally capped by a really good boss fight at the end of the segment. It’s in these places where the game really feels like Prime. You’ve got a little puzzling, a little combat, a little platforming, and a fun upgrade somewhere along the way. All of this is backed by it running at 120 FPS on Switch 2 and a modern refresh of controls courtesy of the Prime remaster to really support a better overall game flow than on the Gamecube. The problem is that things beyond the core didn’t really work out well.

Some of these things are small. For example – mouse controls. This is something that should have been dead simple. Implement the mouse like a mouse that exists on PC and FPS fans understand and has 30 years of working examples. Except they didn’t do that. They virtualized the Wii pointer controls – which were good when you had a physical object you were pointing and called it a mouse. You don’t mouse to turn, you mouse to push the cursor to the screen edge to start turning. Within the screen boundaries you’re basically moving a cursor. It is not mouse controls and it does not work well like it does on a Wii Remote. This is something that any PC FPS developer would point at and go “this is not right” and fix immediately.

But then there’s larger problems like the fact that this doesn’t do the Metroidvania thing well. The only times that I bothered to backtrack were the couple of times that I physically could not get into a zone because of an upgrade blocker. Both times it happened were particularly annoying because the game started by saying something along the lines of I can do things “in the order I want” only for that to be immediately obvious bullshit. I would spend 5 minutes trudging across the desert only to hit a blocker where it then becomes obvious that I needed to trudge 5 minutes in a different direction to a zone that had the upgrade I actually needed, at which point I then needed to trudge 5 minutes the other way to base camp to get the upgrade since it was provided as a data card.

Beyond those kinds of “oops” incidents, I really didn’t do any re-traversal or backtracking. I kind of went through each of the 5 core zones once – except for a couple very particular quick trips back to the electric area for short segments. There just isn’t really any pull in the game for me to go back and collect all the upgrades because they just aren’t overly necessary, and there weren’t any core upgrades that really required you to do anything other than the linear first-pass through zones.

And then there’s the largest problem of the open world changes that just did not work out. There’s multiple things that went wrong with this whole segment of the game.

One of them is the collection mess, where the player is required to collect a bunch of green crystals scattered about to get to the final boss fight. You do eventually get a green crystal radar, but the point at which I got it was after I had already gotten to about 80% of crystals collected and finished the rest of the game and was literally trying to just wrap the one specific section. It’s boring, tedious, and too long to be something that blocks progression.

The other thing is that general gameplay in here is just not that compelling. There’s occasional combat, but it’s against the same three or four enemy types so they wear out their welcome rather quick. There’s some upgrades that you can find in little shrines but compared to other open world Nintendo experiences like the latest two Zelda games they don’t come close to the same quality bar. There’s some optional story bits with the NPCs that you see in the game, but you stumble upon them so they are purposefully disconnected from core plot and don’t have a real push behind them.

The final nail in the coffin is then just how big the desert is. The thing that made the original Prime trilogy work is that everything was interconnected and getting between zones was relatively fast, but also that you could find new stuff and new shortcuts with the upgrades you just found. The desert completely breaks that. It’s just open so there’s no real blockers to unblock, and because it’s open it’s not fast to get around. Any need to get across the desert is just slow garbage time. I finished the game in around 10 hours, but it was pretty clear that compressed down without the desert this was a much smaller game than the original trilogy. The fact that there was no fast travel option – at least to get back to the hub – was a pretty egregious omission that would have at least resolved some of the issue of needing to get around and encouraged me to hop quickly back to other zones to check for new things.

I guess at the end of the day this is a game with problems. It’s not an unplayable mess, and the core gameplay within zones really is a lot of fun, but it’s just surrounded by things that prevent the game from reaching the heights of previous Prime titles. The team mentioned that given the extended development they chased gameplay elements that both didn’t work out and had already soured in the wider gaming community, and it’s pretty clear that this was just finished to allow the team to move on to better things. I hope that Retro gets a chance at a Prime 5, because the combination of quality in Prime Remastered and the technology that they have in place for Prime 4 show that the team is probably now ready to stretch its legs on the series again after having to rebuild, but this is definitely an unfortunate stumbling block along the way.

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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.