Tag: ps5

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Game Ramblings #219 – Yooka-Replaylee

More Info from Playtonic Games

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox Series, Switch 2

There’s a quote often misattributed to Shigeru Miyamoto that goes something along the lines of a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is bad forever. This game is an example of why that quote exists in the first place. I didn’t particularly like the original Yooka-Laylee release, but this one was easy for me to sit down and just play. It was a huge transformation.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I couldn’t really point at many specific things that were improved. If I’m looking at the things in my other ramblings, I can definitely get a sense of where iteration occurred. I didn’t noticeably have problems with the camera this go around – it largely just worked and didn’t get in the way. I didn’t have problems with the writing, and frankly it felt minimally present compared to my recollection of the original. I didn’t have problems with odd mechanics in boss fights – they generally felt obvious and appropriately challenging, but without some of the oddities I saw in the original game.

I didn’t really have problems with how many pages were supposed to be collected or it feeling overboard. The pages that were there generally felt attached to some objective or getting to the end of a specific puzzle/platforming segment instead of simply being there. This one alone was surprising because there are double the page count from before, making this more in tune with how Mario Odyssey was handled. If I were to guess at what actually changed here for me is that the total sum of improvements elsewhere just made the experience of existing in the world more fun, so collecting more stuff happened naturally while I was having fun.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that all of these things are signs of iteration done right. Every part of the original game has clearly seen some amount of work done to it to improve it from the original launch. Going back to the original quote, these were all things that felt bad and rushed that now are simply good, and when things are simply good they are out of the way of my interaction with them. What I was left with then is a game that was simply easy to play.

That said, there are two very specific things that I can point at that I know improved things. World expansion is gone and all platforming moves are unlocked from the start. These changes allow for open exploration from the start, removing what was a hugely frustrating progression blocker in the original. The original game was very obviously not meant to be a Metroidvania, so running into progression blockers was never a fun thing. Seeing a grapple point in the original without having the grapple power was a signal that I was going to have to come back later. Having to choose whether to expand the current world you are in or unlock another world was a sign that I was just going to have to do both anyway.

A lot of what ended up happening with these two changes is that the game just got rid of friction. I could certainly see arguments about games needing some friction to push players forward, and I largely agree. However, I also absolutely hate manufactured friction. In a 3D exploration platformer, both of those felt like manufactured friction. They both restricted the player from exploring in a way that felt negative in the genre. Not having explosives to take out specific doors feels appropriate in a Metroidvania where you’re starting from nothing and slowly building up your arsenal. Not having a grapple in a game where you play as a lizard with a very clearly extendable tongue that will be used for grapple felt out of place. Retraversing an area with new abilities to find more stuff feels appropriate in a Metroidvania. Unlocking an entire section of the world via magic pagies to find more stuff felt out of place.

This is probably as close to the game they intended to make as possible. Sure, it’s very clearly the culmination of a lot of effort on their part. However, it’s also the culmination of a lot of feedback. The changes made here are obviously targeted at things that reviewers and players of the original did not enjoy. They are changes clearly targeted at making the game better to play, easier to get through, and reduce negative friction for the player. This is now a game that should be celebrated for what it is, rather than a game that is negatively compared against the past. This is an example of the delayed game will eventually be good, even if there’s a slightly asterisk of it having been released once before.

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Game Ramblings #218 – Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter

More Info from Falcom

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, Steam

I played the original release of this game on PSP but admittedly it’s been long enough that I don’t really have much of a consistent memory of the experience. I do know I enjoyed my time with it, but I feel vaguely not enjoying the grind of leveling. Going into this I was a bit suspicious of whether that would happen again. Luckily what I found was a game that felt like a heavily modernized JRPG in terms of how it respects the player time, but this is definitely not a game without problems.

The thing that increasingly makes JRPGs live and die for me is combat, but not necessarily how good it is. It’s more often than not how much I need to engage in combat at this point. In particular, how much I need to engage in useless combat. I hate combat for the sake of combat because it feels like wasted time to me. The remake of Trails 1st really does a lot of good things to reduce that.

Similar to PSP, enemies are visible in the overworld, which on its own does a lot to reduce my need to engage in combat. However, there’s a number of things that reduce my need to be in combat. For one, there’s XP scaling based on level. At a surface level this allowed me to simply avoid combat with enemies that are lower level than me by knowing that the rewards are no longer relevant. On the opposite side though, this meant that I could effectively power level by engaging in combat with things higher level than me. What this really meant is that I was always in a level band that was relevant to the gameplay of the story around me. As a balance point it reduced my need to be in combat to just when it was important or worthwhile.

This is combined with the fact that you can do some basic real-time combat in the overworld, allowing me to mow through weak enemies simply to get rewards without being in the slower turn-based combat. If I needed specific items for cooking or Sepith, I could quickly dispatch a bunch of weak enemies and get them. This change also meant that running past enemies allowed me to simply run past them because the game no longer has the JRPG mechanic of battle starting immediately on first contact. It’s a small mechanical change with huge implications to the flow of the game.

Once in combat, there’s then a highly enjoyable system in place. It’s the same type of combat on PSP where the player has a mix of skills and magic. However, it leans into two things that I don’t think are seen as much as I would prefer – positioning and turn order.

The player has a wide variety of shapes of attacks from AOE circles to lines to cones, as well as bonuses for some attacks from the side or back. All of this allows the player to enforce positioning as a benefit. There were many times where I would knowingly drag some of my own units into different areas in an attempt to pull mobs into the line of fire and increase total damage output. The flip side of this is that defensively it’s also important to pay attention to where magic attacks from enemies will be so that you don’t leave your own party in range of attacks.

The reason this is important is that turn order is not static and magic attacks are not always immediate. Under normal circumstances magic attacks require a turn to start and a turn to execute. While that is happening, it’s obvious where the attack will go due to targeters on the ground. This gets into turn order manipulation. Some attacks can delay turns or reduce player “speed” that leads to determining turn order. Attacks can be cancelled by executing some moves that impede the target. Stuns can cancel a target’s turn if timed correctly. Basically, combat becomes a balance of getting damage out while also attempting to delay or cancel the enemy’s turn as much as possible, allowing the player to get through any battle with as little damage taken as possible.

Generally speaking, this all works great – right up until it doesn’t. That gets into my one big problem with the game. The boss fights in the game are just not tuned well, and it all comes down to the rage mechanic. Pretty much every boss in the game has some rage trigger where they gain a ton of basically every stat in the game. They gain speed to attack more often, typically several turns in a row. They gain attack and defense to be tankier and hit harder. They gain healing buffs to get their HP back up. It’s a good idea to make boss fights more dynamic. The issue comes in with the fact that the rage mechanics are universally able to send the player’s party from 100% to dead without the player even getting a turn to mitigate the situation.

It’s incredibly frustrating to be 5+ minutes into the fight, feeling like you’re in control, then having a rage turn kick in and send the party to its death. If it was generally avoidable that would be one thing, but a lot of them simply happen because of health drop. What ended up being my go-to was to just save all of my big attacks up until I had nearly stunned the boss, then dump them all at once. In a typical boss fight, I could get the boss to around 50% health, let it have a turn, then just absolutely nuke it with every attack I had – full 200 combat point attacks, party combo attack, etc – and get it to 0. That would generally avoid the rage mechanic, whether it was health based or due to killing off one of the enemy’s party members. However it was slow to grind out to the point where I felt comfortable doing that attack dump and when it didn’t work and I would be sent from 100 to 0 with no ability to do anything to prevent it, it was infuriating.

The nice thing is that unlike the original release, I could immediately retry the fight with lowered enemy strength. Boy did I take advantage of that option to just get through fights without the time spent on it again.

So I suppose at the end of the day this is a really good and generally fun JRPG that feels tuned to inherently screw over the player specifically during boss fights. I don’t remember that of the original, but I suspect that’s just a consequence of time since I played it. It’s so close to being a great game if a little more care was put into the tuning of boss fights. They can be difficult normally and still allow the player to actively avoid being nuked. It’s a thing I hope they look at before 2nd chapter comes out because it felt like the one thing heavily holding this game back.

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Game Ramblings #214 – Ghost of Yotei

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5

For all intents and purposes, this is a perfect iterative sequel. It’s familiar enough to not be different from what I enjoyed about the original, but it’s got enough changes to feel fresh. In some ways that is probably something that people would criticize as feeling safe, but for me it’s hitting a fine line of moving the gameplay forward without losing what it was, and that’s a tough balance to hit.

If I put this up against what I thought of Tsushima there really isn’t a huge difference in my mind. They both do the Assassin’s Creed combat hub and free range stuff meta loop very well. They both have incredibly good combat aligned with some really effective stealth moments. They both have the same general discovery loop of looking for landmarks in the world (ex: steam -> hot springs, big fire -> inn, for all of them you can find a yellow bird to follow). Where this one improved for me really did end up being in the iterative nature of its combat.

In Tsushima I specifically mentioned that duels were where I felt combat really hit its stride, and while that is still largely the case here I do think that the wider group combat saw enough of an improvement to be of note. My problem with the previous title was that group combat never felt like I had a good way to focus on where to look, and a lot of that came down to what felt like a lack of obvious prioritization of incoming damage. That feels much improved here.

Part of it is that NPCs simply are better at taking turns. I know it sounds weird for a group of enemies to attack one-on-one, but from a gameplay perspective it makes sense for the player. Spamming dodge or parry buttons because multiple NPCs come after you more or less simultaneously is not a fun experience. Having the NPCs take turns – and more importantly giving the player time to attack the NPC that they successfully dodge or parry – is a big win in playability and letting the player feel powerful against a larger group of enemies. From a danger perspective it also felt like the NPCs would attack more quickly in succession if I wasn’t correctly dodging or parrying, so it encouraged me to be precise in order to not be overwhelmed. Another part of it for me is that rather than using stance switching to go against enemy weaknesses, Yotei uses weapon switching. From a result perspective this is exactly the same – you switch stance/weapon in both games to give yourself an advantage. However, recontextualizing this to something even more obviously visual feels better in a way that I can’t really place my finger on.

It also may just be placebo or fading memory, but it also felt like the general tells about incoming attacks were more obvious. Visually there were fewer large feints to make you guess incorrectly. The visual language of things that are dodgeable or parryable felt more clear. The audible tells of ranged attacks felt like they punched through the general noise of combat better. These are all things that were important to the larger group combat scenarios to make them feel more immediately manageable compared to the original title to really elevate that part of the experience to allow it to shine. It may not quite match the spectacle of duels yet, but rather than feeling like a negative of the experience I was generally able to enjoy combat in all situations much more easily in the sequel.

If there was one thing that I felt did take a step back here it would be the presentation of the story. The story is a generally non-linear set of sections sandwiched between a fixed start and end. What this means for the player is that once they get into the world, they can generally pick the direction they want to go. Each smaller region of the overall game world was its own self-contained experience where entering the zone triggers some story moment to occur, with the zone having its own plot line, side characters, and wrap up moment. However, that section of the game could occur in any order, so it had very little in terms of ties to anything else.

The practical impact for me is that this title felt like what would normally be a series of smaller independent expansion packs, rather than a whole new title. Each section kind of gets you an upgrade path of some sort and a character that ends up being important later-ish but because they have to work independently it often feels a lot like the zones are – for lack of a better description – nerfed down to just kind of be played through. Narratively it works well, but I’m not sure it was the best for gameplay purposes. On the other hand, when it does tie together for the final zone of the game, the toolbox as a whole works incredibly well so I’m not sure I’m overly fussed that each tool you gained had its own zone to learn the thing in with repeated use.

In some respects it also felt like this change might have forced a bit more simplification of side content, which was something I enjoyed about Tsushima over the larger Assassin’s Creed games. There is still some side content in place, but apart from a couple small specific places there isn’t side content that reaches across zone lines. It helps keep the side content locked to very specific upgrade-focused bits, alongside some side quest lines that deal with things specific to zones – for example, all upgrades for kunai take place in the zone where you earn kunai. I can’t tell whether it was an intentional change to match the narrative setup, but I do think the reduced stuff continues to be a benefit to reducing boredom in games of this scope.

I said this of Tsushima:

I certainly won’t sit here and claim that this is generally an original title, but it didn’t necessarily have to be. It takes the framework established by the recent Assassin’s Creed titles, and iterates enough on it to feel like its own thing.

I think that is particularly relevant here. Ghost of Yotei feels even less original, but I don’t think it needed to be original. Tsushima was a wildly successful and fun game. This takes the core put in place there and iterates on it, and in doing so didn’t lose what made the game a standout. Yotei is a wildly gorgeous game with extremely tight combat and that’s all I really needed it to be.