Tag: ps5

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Game Ramblings #212 – Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Steam

Even for Yakuza side games this is a wild one. I can ignore all of the action melee combat parts of the game that were done just as well as the last time they had a side story and I’m still left with an entire new game of pirate shenanigans. This is just another entry in what has been a remarkably consistent series over the past couple decades, and one that seems to be able to just keep pulling new things out of its hat.

The nice thing about this being another melee-focused side entry is I can just skip all of that stuff for rambling. Read the combat ramblings on Like a Dragon Gaiden and you will know my thoughts there. Instead, I’m just going to talk about being a pirate. This game just does it so well. The thing that I want out of a pirate experience is basically two things – I want to fight things in a boat and I want to plunder treasure, and this game does it in spades. The basic combat loop of any pirate encounter is that you first engage in ship to ship combat, then after you defeat the boss ship you go crew vs crew. Now, I would never say that either of those phases is done at a particularly AAA quality level but the feeling of it is there.

On the ship side of things, you’re looking at a quick paced combat with three sets of weapons – a machine gun, left cannons, and right cannons. Each can be upgraded separately, allowing for things like freeze cannons on one side and poison cannons on the other with machine gun damage out of the front. The ships defense can be upgraded, which for me generally meant that I could do increasingly stupid things ramming into enemy ships. The ship’s ability to heal and boost (yes there’s a jet engine boost, complete with ship drifting capabilities – this isn’t realistic) can be upgraded to allow for more aggressive maneuvering.

As simple as it is, the chess game of this portion of the game is just incredibly tight. You’re basically using the boost and drift to avoid enemy fire while putting yourself into an advantageous position to fire back. You can certainly play in different ways – if you want to be defensive, you can stay at range and poke down weaker ships before focusing on the boss, or if you’re like me you will boost straight at the boss, ram it, and eat damage to nuke down the boss all at once – and they’re all kind of going to be equally the right way to play, besides situations where time is important. Importantly though, it’s not drawn out so it is always quick, full of action, and fun.

The crew fights are then about as chaotic as possible. If the normal combat gameplay is the tight Yakuza experience, this goes in the complete opposite direction. Crew fights are pure chaos. You don’t really need to play carefully. You don’t really need to focus on specific targets. You don’t really need to aim at anything. You just run in with your people, spam attacks, and watch pure chaos unfold. As a pure pirate fantasy it nails a lot of what I want in terms of building a crew and going in on anything as a whole.

Outside of combat this is then backed by your ability to interact with individuals to build the crew. A lot of the crew throughout my course of the game was built from people that I helped in side quests in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth so there’s an immediate sense of familiarity there. They then are recruited and end up on the ship while I’m out and about, allowing me to go around chatting with them. They are there during things like karaoke events on the ship or parties that I can throw as the captain reinforcing the whole idea of this being a crew supporting each other. It’s a lot of surface level stuff, but it’s effective at continuing to sell the feeling of this as a pirate game.

The rest of this is then all the normal trappings of a Yakuza title. There’s side quests all over that you can go after, most of which are absurd things like fighting zoo animals or robot vaccums. There’s activities ranging from karaoke to darts to Mario Kart-style go karting. Based on the location, there’s the return of some stuff from Infinite Wealth like photo locations. There’s sports like the golf driving range and explosives-based batting cages. There’s completely absurd things like a dating sim that you run for one of the members of your crew, complete with the live-action filmed segments that have somehow continued to end up in the series. There’s an entire series of arena-focused combat around pirate ships. It’s all there, but wrapped in some pirate clothing.

I’m not surprised that I enjoyed this game. I’m not surprised that it’s a good game. I’m not surprised that the melee combat was tight and a lot of fun. I’m more than 10 games into this series at this point, so this is all expected stuff. What I’m happy about is that for a series that has always turned the ridiculousness to 11, they’ve somehow been able to turn that dial even higher and yet it still doesn’t feel like they’ve hit a point where it’s all too much. It’s just worth playing.

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Game Ramblings #211 – Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

More Info from Level 5

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, PS4, Xbox Series, Steam

This game is the very definition of low friction. It has a ton of systems for crafting, a ton of systems for combat, a ton of systems for collecting, systems for building, and systems for customizing. From a high level view it looks like absolute chaos, but they all work together and they all work similarly so doing any particular thing constantly feels familiar. In building out the game this way they’ve created something that feels like Animal Crossing through the lens of RPGs and it just becomes an absolute joy to sit down and play.

If I look at the individual systems in place and tried to pull them out into its own game, it’s pretty clear that you’d have a series of pretty shallow games. Combat is fairly effective, but it’s clearly simple. You can do a set of different melee types and a couple of ranged types, but they generally play similar enough to be a preference selection. They have a handful of attack types for variety but largely play the same. The crafting side of the game is similar. Each crafting life has a whole huge list of recipes but they are all crafted the same way so 1:1 against each other it’s pretty irrelevant. Ultimately what really makes the game work is the loop tying everything together and how seamlessly you transition between the various lives.

To me the story is largely irrelevant. It’s something to push you forward into higher level zones – which has its use – but it’s not what had me playing the game. The Animal Crossing portion of this is really what did it for me. Like Animal Crossing, you’re essentially building a customizable town and recruiting people in it, but with more direct control over the things that you place. Rather than props coming up in the shop, you have to make them. If you want that fancy new staircase type to pull off a new block of housing? Go build it. You want that cool new wall art for your personal house? Go make it. What comes out of that is that each decision on what you’re adding to the town has a lot more impact than Animal Crossing. It’s a series of checklists to get to it. Do you have the recipe? Do you then have the materials? Do you then have the skill level to create it? If not, do you have a townsperson with the matching skill to assist you in creating it? That is where the simplicity ends up shining.

The individual lives that you work through to create a single thing don’t need complexity when the game loop is short. Recipes generally come out of quests of some sort, so completion of them is generally a small amount of item creation or enemy kills to complete. It doesn’t try to bog you down in a large grind. Each recipe has some handful of required items – maybe it’s some ore or some fish or some flowers or some wood, or some other craftable subitem like paints or boards or metal ingots. Rather than making that process slow and plodding, getting those items is relatively quick. Yes there’s leveling, but crafts or kills at the same relative level as you provide a ton of experience, so you aren’t grinding to earn new things. Each little piece of a whole item is its own couple minute game loop that is fast and fun enough without providing unnecessary friction to the player. At the end, you create your item, put it where you want, and move on to the next thing.

It is then helped that in the process of completing these mini game loops you’re also just generally grabbing other items as you go. On the way to some specific ore there’s probably some monsters or trees or any number of other things that you quickly dispatch to get more stuff that you can use later. It’s then easy to transition between all this because the fundamental controls are the same across the board. Each gathering life type has the same type of setup where there are weakpoints you can scan for and hit to more quickly dispatch the item. They all have the same setup of a critical finishing blow to gain more items. This extends to combat where the combat controls similarly have charge attacks on the same buttons for more damage to keep a similar sort of rhythmic flow to combat and gathering. On the crafting side, the setups are the same picture matching with the same clicks, hold, and button spam types so transitioning between woodworking and blacksmithing and cooking is all seamless.

This is ultimately what I mean by everything being low friction. The entire game is a series of small systems that are good enough on their own to be fun enough. They wouldn’t stand well over time isolated in their own game, but as the sum of parts to create a more advanced Animal Crossing experience they just all enhance each other. The systems have a short loop to keep you going to the next part of your checklist in a way that reminds me a lot of DS/3DS era games where everything was really tuned down to a 5 minute game loop that you can pick up and put down at any time, but can also just be played in hours long sessions because they are so smooth to get through. Creating your town is easy and fun but still requires enough effort to complete that it doesn’t feel trivial. It all just ends up working well in a way that makes this an easy recommendation for anyone looking for that Animal Crossing fix.

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Game Ramblings #208 – Shadow Labyrinth

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

For a game that has Pac-Man levels, I actually found those segments to be by far the least fun sections of the game. The platforming involved in there was just never fluid or interesting. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What is there most of the time is a melee Metroidvania that surprised me in how well it took simple combat and crafted it into something fun with a very limited set of mechanics.

I can’t really think of a boss fight in this game that had more than four or five attacks, and generally they had one or two. What that really meant was that learning and avoiding the attacks was the most important part of combat, and not actually doing damage. You could ultimately indefinitely extend a boss fight via well timed defense.

Where this came in for the player was dodging and a chosen defensive maneuver – parry, shield, etc. The dodge is really what made the game sing. It’s a very fighting game-style dodge where you get pass through and immunity frames. This pushes combat in a direction where timing is the most important element. During a new encounter I’d lay back, learn the attacks, probably die a couple times, then come back in and know my timing. You hit your defensive move, lay in a handful of attacks as necessary, maybe use some excess energy on bonus damage, then time the next attack. In action games that work for me I generally talk about how the combat has a good rhythm and this has that. Once learned, most of the boss fights have pretty reliable segments of two melee combos followed very quickly by an attack with little downtime in there.

So let’s go back to probably die a couple times. Normally that’s where I find a lot of issues and even going back to ramblings like Hollow Knight that was where the game fell flat for me. Shadow Labyrinth feels like it was designed to mitigate the downsides of death. For one thing, nearly every major boss fight had a save point immediately before its room, if not a full on teleport location. This allowed the boss fights themselves to be isolated in their difficulty and let you focus on going in, learning, and immediately executing on learnings instead of having to do a death run back.

The second thing that really stood out was how many places existed that could be opened as shortcuts through the world. The map when completed really feels like it’s a series of compact loops. There’s an obvious first path through an area that you run through and find a bunch of impassable doors. You then start hitting branches in that path that loop back and end at one of those doors. If I was to really visualize it, it would be like taking a winding river as the main path and a straight line through it as the path that gets opened once you finish all the loop backs. It highly encourages exploration, often leading to upgrades, while also encouraging fast retraversal. Combined with a really solid teleportation network, every time I earned a new traversal upgrade (hook shot, double jump, air dash, etc) was very quickly followed by me happily going back to past areas to find new stuff.

Where things weren’t necessarily as positive for me largely centered around progression. This is a game that just does not offer any progression hand holding. In some ways that’s good because it forces exploration. However, in a lot of cases I want to know vaguely what direction I should be going. At one point around the middle of the game I was tasked with finding two major power sources to move the story forward but it took me about 10 hours of gameplay to complete that. It’s not that I was having trouble, but that I just kept picking the wrong direction to go in. I would go down a path for 20 or 30 minutes and hit a wall, then have to wander back and find a new direction. This continued for a long time. It’s not that I was suffering for it, because I earned a ton of upgrades. However, what it generally meant was that by the time I found the right path to where I was supposed to go I was tremendously overpowered and had nearly completed the entire map in the game. The couple hours immediately following it were just a breeze. Had I had a little bit of direction to say “go roughly into this region” I think the flow of the overall game and my character’s power curve would have been more appropriately challenging and interesting.

I could also just do without the Pac-Man challenges and I think that really differs from a lot of reviews that I read. I just found these to generally be a chore. Platforming as Pac-Man was always some variation of stiff and inconsistent. Switching between the always moving default mode and player-controlled movement mode felt like switching between two modes with equally bad weaknesses – always moving had huge weaknesses in directionality of jumping and player-controlled really felt sloppy once in the air. Getting good completion times felt like it was just learning precise movement patterns instead of actually being good at the game, and later higher challenge levels felt more like fighting mechanics than actually having fun gameplay. It felt like a bad implementation of Pac-Man on the surface and a weird distraction from what was otherwise a really solid core Metroidvania game.

Wrapping Pac-Man into the wider Namco space force lore and turning it into a Metroidvania was certainly a bold choice, but I think more than not it worked out well. Combat was a real pleasant surprise for me in that it took a simple set of mechanics but did them incredibly well. Things around that experience may not have been as solid as other entries in the wider genre, but there’s enough that works out well here for me to give this a pretty easy recommendation.