Tag: ps5

Posted on

Game Ramblings #223 – Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined

More Info from Square Enix

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

This is an easy ramblings for me to write. In a lot of ways it boils down to one question – do you like traditional JRPGs? If the answer is yes, then frankly you’ve probably already played this game. However, for as good as the original and 3DS releases of this game were, the game is just unnecessarily long. That’s something that is incredibly common for Dragon Quest games in general, though it’s been getting better in recent years. That is really what my mind was focused on coming out of this.

I had put off starting this one for a while because I didn’t really want to tackle an 80 hour JRPG. I just don’t really have that kind of time to play games anymore. I’d heard some people recommend it and noting that it was shorter. I then noticed that its How Long to Beat page was seeing 40-50 hours as a more common time to complete. That kind of time investment is a bit more doable. That drop in length by about half comes about in a few ways. However, it’s not unfair to say that it’s simply because the game just loads quicker. Getting into fights is quicker. Getting into zones is quicker. Getting through the time portals is quicker. It just compresses the experience through lack of loading.

However, the more beneficial part was how much quicker leveling can be, and that’s entirely up to the player. One of the things that recent Dragon Quest titles have been doing is giving players more control over difficulty. It started with things like an “easy” difficulty that ramped up player damage, ramped down damage taken, and ramped up XP gained. It then added a lot more over world automatic battles when you as the player have gotten strong enough. DQ7R is the most granular control that they’ve given, and it’s much to the game’s benefit.

The way that I chose to play this title was with the following settings:

  • Damage: Normal for given and received
  • XP Gained: Increased
  • Gold Gained: Increased
  • Job Points: Increased

What this essentially is is a settings group that is the game at intended difficulty, but with significantly less grinding. I was essentially choosing to just have less combat for the sake of making the experience faster while preserving difficulty. This gets combined with the fact that battles are no longer random in recent titles, so you can choose to simply skip combat entirely if you’re at an appropriate power level.

This simply makes the game faster and it’s much better as a result. The pattern I like in JRPGs is to figure out the enemy setups, fight them a few times, then move on. I don’t need to fight things dozens of times to get my value. At that point it’s just boring. In a case like this where XP gained is high, I can simply fight things to get my entertainment, then move on.

There’s additional little gameplay things that are added like save/heal points that appear frequently right before bosses to act as safety and time savers for the player. There’s a weird side effect that comes out of this – I use MP-based skills far more often. Because I don’t need to fight as much, I can dump my resources for the sake of fun. Because I know I’ll heal before a boss I’m not preserving my resources for the boss. If I’ve used everything and don’t want to spend items, I can simply avoid fighting. The combination of these things further enhances the speed of playing the game because I can simply be aggressive on offense, which is something that a lot of older JRPGs didn’t really allow.

I’ve said similar things about recent JRPGs that have pushed into streamlining the experience for the player. A recent example includes Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. I just don’t buy arguments about JRPGs needing length to be of value. To me empty grinding is just fluff and I’d rather have a shorter experience. The DQ1-3 HD2D remakes and now this DQ7 remake show that Square is taking the idea of a cleaner experience seriously for the players. This is everything about the story and metagame that made the original great, now combined with modern sensibilities around not wasting the player’s time. It’s a far better game for it.

Posted on

Shelved It #22 – Spirit of the North 2

More Info from Infuse Studio

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

I so badly wanted to like this game more than I did. The first game is a perfect example to me of a sit and chill game. It had some puzzles along the way, but it was largely just a relaxing walking simulator that looked fantastic. This one made some major leaps in its iterative choices – it’s open world, it’s got a lot more lore to discover, a much longer length, and it even has some combat. The problem for me was that by and large the iteration just did not hit.

The first obvious change is the move to an open world. For the most part this didn’t really change how I approached the game that much since linearly wandering and completing puzzles doesn’t feel that different to me than aimlessly wandering and completing puzzles. However, there’s a few things that snuck in to compensate this design that really dragged the experience down for me, both of which are tied to needing to find things in the environment.

One of these was the collecting of soul wisps. These are dotted around the environment or purchaseable via shops and are used for other things. In some cases, it’s things like ancient trees for skill points or for unlocking gates to get into other puzzles. The problem I had with them is that they are not marked at all on maps like the puzzle areas are, so finding them is either luck of walking past them or a need to wander in a very precise manner to cover the whole area. This is compounded by your ability to carry a fairly limited stock of them (I was up to 7 by the time I shelved) so you could easily cap them out and not really be in a position to remember where new ones are to pick up later when you need them. It ends up being an incredibly tedious system where to really be smart with it, it made sense to immediately just go wander around dumping them into things when you cap out instead of taking the game at your own pace.

There’s also a number of situations where you have to carry things to specific places, and that almost always feels like a drag. Sometimes it’s a need to find a torch to light a thing to let you into a puzzle area. This requires you to a) find a torch, b) light the torch, then c) walk to the spot to use it. Sometimes this is crucial story items at the end of puzzles that you then have to carry to some temple and place down. Until you do that (often a pretty significant walk) you also can’t really pick up other things without the risk of losing the key item, so you can’t even always complete other puzzles along the way. In these cases it just feels like the game is dragging you down to slow the pace in a negative way. This is compounded by the lack of fast travel potential. The handful of portals and the ability to fast travel to your last den are not really sufficient given the scale of the environment.

What this really results in is that the game feels open world for the sake of open world with a lot of the design decisions compounding negative feedback for the player experience walking around completing puzzles. Compared against what was essentially really enjoyable linear wandering in the first game, it feels like a big step backwards.

The new boss combat also feels like an unintentional misstep. Where boss fights feel like a good idea on the surface to get a bit more of an action tie-in to the story, these fights end up feeling slow and unforgiving.

The screenshot above is an encounter where you have to avoid attacks while tethered to the center of the arena for 30-45 seconds before spirit walking to the pillars in the background to activate them. This fight had a few problems. One was practical – some attack tells were simply below the visuals of the arena making it impossible to see them. Another was balance – I could avoid getting hit for most of a phase, but then get hit once (see previous problem…) and I could easily be juggled from 100-0 health being bounced between attacks without an ability to get out of them. It never felt fun and finishing the fight was a relief instead of a triumph.

The last boss fight I did before shelving this was a set of two wolves. Each had their own attacks, but it was basically a very slow progression of them choosing a bite attack that I had to dodge, then a secondary attack that was a bit more randomized. Finally, they would move to a phase where they shot out rings of fire after which I could attack them. This was a case where I was able to again get through the fight completely unphased at full health, but a mistake in the last hit of the last phase of the fight meant that one of the wolves got its bite attack (which locked me in place) while the second wolf activated a fire beam (which I couldn’t avoid) and got knocked from 100-0 health without a chance to do anything.

As a developer this feels like a classic case of the team not compensating for their own skill at playing the game. Once you do a fight 5…10…100 times in development the fights become second nature to the point where it’s easy to forget what the experience will be like for a player getting to it for the first time. These are all cases of that for me. Stun locks are not fun. Being juggled without invulnerability after being hit is not fun. Randomized attacks that can flood the entire arena and sometimes just not allow dodging are not fun. However, these are things that are easy to miss when the fights are muscle memory, and that’s what it feels like happened here.

At its core this game didn’t really lose what made the first game enjoyable. The wandering and puzzle solving and beautiful visuals are all there. The problem I ultimately had was that that new things never felt like they stood up to the original game, so the experience kept feeling dragged down by them. The new things to support open world gameplay weren’t fun. The scale of wandering between things with nothing to do wasn’t fun. The boss combat, despite being well tied into the story, was not fun. It kind of just feels like a step to far for the series, where maybe a third title could have ultimately ended up here with a bit more of an iterative step in between.

Posted on

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.