Tag: ps5

2024-11-222024-11-22

Game Ramblings #196 – Metaphor: ReFantazio

Genre: JRPG
Platform: PS5
Also Available On: PS4, Xbox Series, Windows

All I want to do right now is complain. I don’t want to talk about the great evolution of the SMT/Persona combat system. I don’t want to talk about the fantastic world design and writing. I don’t want to talk about the immaculate class system and the tons of variety you get with the class interactions. I don’t want to talk about how fucking incredibly cool the boss designs are being pulled from late 1400s paintings. I don’t want to talk about the fact that I managed to squeeze 60 hours out of this game. I just want to complain.

This is an Atlus game to its core, and that means a lot of things to me that I’d have hoped in the past 20+ years they would have started to improve on. The pattern for me with Atlus titles is always the same. I absolutely ADORE the first half of the game as combat finishes opening up and the game really settles into a pattern of diving into a dungeon and improving your party. I dig into the class designs and figure out party patterns that really fit my play style. The game then starts to add some dungeons that are just a little longer than it feels like they should be. It then starts throwing bosses at you that just….don’t have weaknesses, ruining the fun part of exploiting them during combat. It then throws dungeons at you that are egregiously long, making you fight the same 7 enemies for several hours. It then really pushes the power curve of enemies so you have to spend far more time grinding than you want to for very little reason other than what feels like game time padding. I then fight with not shelving the game, and just cranking it to the easiest difficulty to finish up the story.

That is my Persona path. That is my Shin Megami Tensei path. That is my Metaphor path.

You know what isn’t fun? Long dungeons. And I mean that in the literal sense. A dungeon really has a pretty specific shelf life. You go in and enjoy it for a while because you’re fighting new enemies, figuring out their weaknesses, and tweaking your party to fit the pattern. You then enjoy it for a while longer because you feel powerful having cracked the dungeon, able to go through effectively one shotting anything that comes your way. You then start running low on mana because you’ve been at this pattern for a while, and frankly you’ve killed the same things so many times that now you just want to see something new. That lasts about 30-45 minutes on the high end. The first half of the game, that’s about the length of time that you’re probably spending in the dungeons and it’s ideal.

The second half? Dungeons start creeping into an hour, then an hour and a half, then two hours, then three hours. Eventually they’ve just become so long that I was dreading going into them. The gaps between safe rooms that you can warp back to on a return trip become so far apart that it feels like a slog, rather than a bit of a stretch to get just that little bit further. That is not a fun way to end a game.

You know what isn’t fun? Bosses that simply have no weaknesses. The entire core of the Persona/SMT combat system that is present here is that you figure out weaknesses and exploit those weaknesses to get more turns and beat the enemies quicker. The entire power fantasy here is playing smart, making sure your party can counter most things, then hammering on it. For the first half of the game you can generally be sure that most bosses have at least a physical weakness and a magic weakness and things are fun.

As the game goes on, sometimes the bosses just reflect all magic which isn’t ideal if your play style is based on doing heavy magic burst. Sometimes they just have no weakness, which means the fight is simply a grind where you can’t really take advantage of anything. Then they start doing things where you’re chasing debuffs (wasting turns) while not being able to hit a weakness (not gaining extra turns) while also requiring specific focus fire mechanics so your party ends up being a bunch of Almighty magic dealers that can clear debuffs and at least most of them can heal, because at least THAT can’t be countered by anyone and gives you a safety net. It takes a fun combat system and distills it down to a really boring stripped set of mechanics – presumably because the big bad can’t have a weakness for story reason. It’s not a fun way to end the game.

You know what isn’t fun? The final dungeon of the game having a 15 level separation between the starting enemies and the final boss. What that immediately says to me is “hey, we ran out of time to really smooth out the power curve and the big bad had a target, so grind away.” The first half of the dungeon had enemies so weak that they could be killed in the overworld, the second half of the dungeon had stuff that was still reasonably strong and good for XP, but still a good 8-10 levels below the final boss, then the boss had a huge unnecessary jump that if I was to grind to get closer to it in level would have had the ENTIRE dungeon as too weak to even fight. By this point I’d already dropped the difficulty because I just wanted to finish but if I was playing on a normal difficulty I’d have been pissed at having to claw over that difficulty spike.

There’s some part of me that was thinking that a lot of my gripes simply came down to me getting older and less patient with games that take so long. With small kids in the house I just can’t really sit there and grind in JRPGs like I used to. I can’t really remember everything that I was doing the day or two or three days ago when I had to suddenly drop the game in the middle of a dungeon. I can’t really remember what I had intended my path through the game calendar to be when I had last picked it up. However, those things were not my problem with the game. My problems with the game are the same problems I had with Persona 4 when I was in college. They are the same problems I had when playing Shin Megami Tensei IV on the DS living alone in San Diego at my first videogame industry job. They are the same problems I had playing Persona 5 as an increasingly jaded game developer. They are the same problems I had when I shelved SMT 5 after my first kid was born when it was clear that it was just going to be about grinding.

I guess I just don’t understand why Atlus games are increasingly successful when they feel so hostile to the player. Maybe that is me growing out of touch with the general gaming public, but it’s a weird thing for me to look at from a developer perspective and not just go “you can smooth out these handful of things and have a much better game.” The SMT series and its offshoots just continue to feel like games that are literally small tweaks away from being great and despite it all their review scores just continue to improve. I just don’t feel like reviewers are actually completing the games and are instead stopping at the half way point where I still love the game.

But hey, maybe I am just that out of touch.

2024-10-172024-10-17

How’d It Age #11 – Epic Mickey: Rebrushed

More Info from THQ Nordic

Genre: Platformer
Platform: PS5
Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, PC
Originally Available On: Wii

I bounced off this game HARD when it originally came out. It’s not that the core game wasn’t good, but the forced integration of the Wii Remote really hampered the core painting mechanic. It made the camera miserable to control. It added unnecessary movement to painting. It was just a chore. Moving to standard controls frankly fixed the game.

Now I’m not necessarily saying that this is a modern masterpiece or anything but what a difference standard controls make. Platforming when you don’t have a good camera or good control of a camera just ruins the experience. You can’t hit your jumps quite right from lack of depth perception. You fall into danger because you couldn’t really see where you were landing. You get hit with things that weren’t necessarily in your camera view. It’s miserable.

Right on its own, having a camera stick fixes so much. You can run easily in different directions from your intended camera. You can look down when you jump to see the drop shadow for your landing spot. You can pan around during combat to make sure you have eyes on all the enemies. It just makes the game smooth. The worst part is that it’s not like this wasn’t solveable in the original title. Sure, the Wii Remote+Nunchuk combo was necessary as the default, but the Classic Controller add-on existed and offered dual-analog controls that could have been another useful control scheme to be used.

The other thing that really stood out to me was that this went beyond just moving to standard controls – it embraced modern touches with dual analog inputs. Since you no longer have pointer controls for the painting mechanic, it would have been easy for that to be incredibly imprecise. However, the game does two things that really improve the situation to do what I would argue matches the original game’s precision.

The first is simply that there is solid aim correction going on. The actual targetable area of things being painted is a decent amount larger than the actual target, and that sort of slushy space really makes quick targeting a lot more manageable. Obviously, this is something that most modern gamepad action games do, but it’s nice to see it here. The second is perhaps more important. The game just inherently supports motion controls during painting but not during normal movement. This is a really smart integration of that mechanic. Rather than the camera always darting around because of controller movement, the player is left to doing most camera movements on the stick. However, when the painting is activated, the camera stick movement is reduced and motion controls are enabled, allowing for really precise fine-tuned movement. This is a really smart touch as it makes combat precise in ways that even the original didn’t match and elevates it over a lot of “standard” action game control implementations.

What is on the surface a few small changes to core input really did end up fixing the game for me. It’s not like the original was all bad news anyway. The story and setting are wonderful, and that is still in place. The surprisingly dark story of Mickey effectively starting a cartoon genocide is still all here. It’s elevated by a pretty solid visual overhaul where everything is nice and high detail enough to now be a cartoon styled game in a modern engine. The platforming and combat are still good enough by modern standards and massively helped by the camera, so rather than being a downside it now serves to get out of the way of the really positive elements of the game.

The Wii was an interesting experiment to be sure, but now nearly 20 years later it’s pretty obvious that it didn’t really serve a lot of genres all that well. Wii Sports? Absolutely a banger for the console. First-person shooters? Metroid Prime on the Wii is probably the most precise way to play the game. However, more traditional genres like platformers really suffered from the lack of dual analog, and this is another example of that. Simply by moving to more standard controls, it took a game that had serious issues and made it pretty damn solid. It’s definitely no Mario Odyssey, but this is now a fun game on its own that can be played in a modern way without the frustration of poor input schemes.

2024-09-192024-09-19

Game Ramblings #194 – Astro Bot

More Info from Sony

Genre: Platformer
Platform: PS5

I was debating how to really start this because for me the gameplay of the game in a lot of circumstances is not worthy of the Metacritic score that this got. However, I was then thinking of the gameplay under the less normal circumstances and how playing a fully functional Ape Escape or Loco Roco level with its own mechanics ported over was incredible. I was thinking of how the challenge levels, despite their simplicity, brought in a sense of danger and speedrunning that was unique to those sections of the game. I was thinking about how playing a level themed around the Horizon series made me excited not for another title in that mainline – but instead, excitement for the possibility of the Lego Horizon game and how the Lego series typically adapts the various IPs that it uses. I was thinking about how exciting it was to find bots themed around games like PaRappa the Rapper or Space Channel 5 or Resident Evil or Ratchet and Clank or Sly Cooper or etc etc etc. This game really is a perfect example of the whole being better than the sum of its parts.

If I was to just talk about the core game, it’s simply a really good platformer. The jumping is solid. The exploration is solid. You get some occasional powerups that give for some fun changes to levels – for example, a chicken-shaped rocket jump, frog-themed boxing gloves, among others. However, on its own it’s still simply a really good platformer. Still worth playing for fans of the genre? Probably. However, the rest of the experience is what really elevates this to something worth playing for anyone. Lets talk about a few of those examples, because they are really what make this game click.

The most obvious example is the pure themed levels. You get one at the end of each world where the entire level and the powers you get during it are themed after the IP. Sure, the mechanics are simplified, but they’re effective. For example, God of War is reduced to the axe throw and return mechanic; Ape Escape simply has the radar and net; Loco Roco does not have any of the collecting mechanics. However, each level has just enough of the original IP’s mechanics adapted to the Astro Bot gameplay to be effective in really hitting that nostalgia while still feeling familiar within the scope of the core game.

Uncharted, God of War, and Horizon were not surprises. Those are arguably the biggest modern PlayStation franchises. Loco Roco and Ape Escape were absolutely surprises. Sure, those are past storied franchises – Ape Escape was certainly a PS1/PS2 era core platformer for Sony, and Loco Roco was a core franchise for the PSP, but both series haven’t had a new core entry in 15+ years. However, that gets at the real win here for Astro Bot. There’s something for everyone. Older PS1/PS2 fans are going to get a huge kick out of playing these levels because they are past memories. Newer PS4/PS5 fans are going to get a kick out of playing something new to them, and maybe introduce them to some series they should check out on PS Classics or through remasters. It works for both sets of fans because the levels are fun on their own due to the changes in game mechanics, but can still kick at the little nostalgia or curiosity boost for people playing.

Those little nostalgia spikes then extend to the act of simply collecting the Astro Bots. Each one is from some PlayStation game of the past so each one is another little tie to history. In most platformers it’s simply a core mechanic of the game, since you have to rescue them to progress to the end of each world. However, dressing it up like this is another way to open up memories for older players or new games to explore for newer players. It’s the perfect way to elevate a simple mechanic – the act of simply hitting a thing in a platformer – to a new fun height.

The boss fights are also worth talking about as an extension of the idea of the whole being better than the parts. Each world generally has a handful of boss or sub-boss type fights, and it’s here where I would argue the best combat mechanics take place. The boss fights are generally restricted to a small arena space with some power up, so rather than leaning on your core powers you’re leaning on the powerup as the core mechanic. For example, the snake fight above uses the chicken rocket to continuously jump over the snakes tail as it sweeps the arena, while the dinosaur fight above uses the Horizon IP to give you a bow to shoot at moving targets in the fight. They all do a great job of having a high action, fast response environment that still feels fair because of the fact that the actions are obvious. The powerups you bring into the fight will clearly be the main thing used in the fight. The tells by the enemies are well telegraphed, so I never felt like being hit was anything but my own fault. The set theming is all appropriately connected between the boss and its arena. They really are just all well done.

I also think it’s worth noting the challenge levels that are scattered around, because these are the real hard platforming available. However, they aren’t hard because they are being dicks. They’re hard for two reasons – there are no checkpoints and they demand precision. If you screw up, you are going back to the start of the level, regardless of the fact that you may have the end in reach. However, that’s balanced by the fact that complete runs of these levels are all under about a minute long. While these are absolutely testing your ability to execute the mechanics of the games precisely, they very much act like a speedrunning experience – very much a normal person digestable version of a Mario Kaizo game. Because of this, they act as nice breathers between longer levels. You can do a longer exploration, finish it up, then jump out to do a challenge level for a bit. Once you’ve hit a stress limit with these, jump right back into exploration. It’s the perfect way to break up the pace of the game.

If Smash Bros is a celebration of Nintendo’s history, this is the PlayStation representation of that ethos. Similar to later Smash Bros, it’s not just a celebration of Sony’s games, but a celebration of everything that has made PlayStation the brand that it is. It takes that celebration and adapts it to a platformer that is always good and often great. However, it’s absolutely true that the nostalgia is part of the experience and elevates the game beyond being a simply good platformer. The experiences they’ve crafted around specific elements of PlayStation history are incredibly detailed and well put together in a way that would never have happened without the tie in to nostalgia. Do I think that it reaches the heights of something like Mario Odyssey? Not quite, but it’s far closer than it looks on paper. What the team has created here is nothing short of spectacular and will likely be considered my surprise of the year when all is said and done.