Tag: nintendo

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Game Ramblings #207 – Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon

More Info from PlatinumGames

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

This game surprised me in a lot of ways. Unlike Bayonetta, it’s a low slower paced. Unlike many action/adventure games, it’s focused more on puzzle solving. Unlike most Nintendo titles, it has what initially feels like a complicated and confounding control scheme but trusts that its players will put the pieces together. It drops the series’ relatively realistic visuals for a storybook painter feel while also dropping as much of the over the top bombastic elements as a game about witches, demons, and fairies realistically could. If anything could be an anti-Bayonetta yet still exist in the IP, I suppose it makes sense that this is what it would come out being.

The control scheme is going to be the thing that makes most people pause when they look at this and go did Nintendo really allow this? It’s not bad, but it’s decidedly weird. The left analog stick and shoulders control Cereza. The right analog stick and shoulders control her demon. This is active at all times and a camera restriction forces them to be within a reasonable distance of each other. The thing that is unusual about this is that in an action game, splitting focus is typically wildly dangerous. I’m not going to say that I didn’t get into situations where I totally lost a character on screen, because it happened. However, I was often moving the two as a unit because of the mechanics that were chosen.

Cereza’s not really a combat unit in this case. What her powers are focused around is crowd control. She increasingly becomes able to stun lock one to multiple units throughout combat via her magic. This then lets her demon deal out extra damage, or in a lot of cases for my play style allowed me to focus damage on units that were not crowd controlled. The demon also has elemental powers to help specific situations – rock to break shields, water to kill fire, etc – so most of my time in combat was really a minimal portion of my brain dedicated to using my crowd control, then most of my brain focusing on demon attacks.

It surprised me how often this just worked pretty well. The game generally didn’t toss a ton of units at you at one time so losing focus on one of your characters wasn’t generally a huge issue. High danger situations for attacks typically involved boss fights, and in those cases there are lots of tools to deal with them as well. You can re-summon the demon to Cereza at any time and with later upgrades allow Cereza to move quicker when they’re together. This is really what made boss fights click. In those cases, the focus was always just the boss and playing around with their tells to stay out of danger vs using the right elements to open opportunities for Cereza to stun them and get damage in.

Ultimately it feels like combat was crafted for the control scheme rather than around it, and I get that feels like a vague distinction. In this case though, the combat is very clearly tuned toward a situation in which the player doesn’t have as good of focus as usual, so all the tools in play are to reduce the speed of needing to think. CC gives the player more safety and time. Damage buffs reinforce the use of CC. Limited enemy counts allow you to focus both characters on one spot with independent movement. Element requirements give you something specific to action upon that doesn’t involve a change in focus. It is all crafted to enhance the experience rather than a 2.5D combat experience being grafted into a weird control scheme.

The rest of the experience surrounding this is just kind of the cherry on top. There’s a decent upgrade system here to grant the player some feeling of a power curve that they can choose the direction of. There’s some light Metroidvania elements in the environment to make retraversal both beneficial and fun. There’s some light time attack elements to optional dungeons to give some side content to hit. There’s a good mix and rhythm to changes between puzzle sections and combat sections to keep the player engaged throughout. It all just kind of works well. Is it anything mind blowing? Not really. It’s all just kind of done at a high enough standard to not be a detriment, and that’s perfect for what it is.

However, this does bring up a thought that I had the entire time. Why does this game not have couch co-op? All of the entirely practical development reasons for couch co-op to not exist – screen real estate and performance with split viewports, game balance, mechanical oddities, etc – have been dealt with here. You always have two characters, they always exist independently, their UI elements are always present on screen, and there are mechanical reasons for the camera to be forcefully restricted to keep them nearby. Couch co-op is literally a drop in for this design. There are a tiny handful of spots that don’t have both characters playable for story reasons, but even then the mechanics of one or the other player having a short solo experience are fine in context for people playing together. Co-op simply just does not exist, and it’s a shame. This is a theoretically great title for people to co-op since you have two characters with two wildly different mechanic sets to allow players to choose the play style – offensive or defensive – that they prefer.

I played this on a whim and came away happily surprised. I’m generally a fan of the Bayonetta series but this was obviously something very different. Where Bayonetta is thematically as anti-Nintendo as they come, this game is for gameplay reasons as anti-Nintendo as they come. However, despite that it all works very well which leads me to believe that this was more carefully considered than I’m imagining. The controls are relatively complex but the gameplay feels tailored toward them. It ends up being an experience that feels like a well thought out package, rather than a game grafted onto a weird control scheme. It ends up just being a really pleasant surprise.

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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.

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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.