Game Ramblings #169 – Haven

More Info from The Game Bakers

  • Genre: RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Windows

This is a game that for me stretched how far one mechanic could work for me to carry the game. Sure, this game has some JRPG-ish combat. It has a bunch of crafting in place to handle items and upgrades. However, it was the overworld gliding that kept my attention, and oddly that was enough.

Looking at some reviews after the fact, it feels to me like I had the opposite experience of a lot of reviewers. I’ve seen a lot of places praising the combat and saying the overworld collecting was a drag. However, it felt like the opposite to me. I dreaded being in combat instead of just flying around the world – not because it was necessarily challenging, but because it just felt slow.

Combat in Haven is sort of a FF-lite. It’s effectively an ATB-style JRPG turn-based system. You have a couple attacks to choose from, you can combo them with your partner, or you can activate a shield to reduce damage. It works well enough, but you get all of it immediately and it never really feels….different. Every enemy type is basically a system of figuring out which attack they are weak to, recognize when attacks are coming up to shield, and then getting through it. The only real differences between early and late game are that a couple enemies require waiting until they attack to hit them while they’re dazed and most late-game enemies basically require you to always have one of your party members shielding.

As a core combat system it’s fine, but it left me wanting more. I wanted to have to use better strategy to defeat enemies. I wanted to be able to more rapidly mix attack types instead of waiting for the relatively slow attack gauge charge ups. Frankly, I wanted it to be easier to heal my party instead of having to always be crafting bandages and healing capsules at my base.

I suppose that’s another part of the game feeling slow to me. Even with shielding, you end up taking so much incidental damage over time that you have to find a camp or return to base to heal. The game requires you to eat to have the fastest combat pace which requires you to find a camp or return to base to cook. You often find items required for upgrades or plot reasons that require you to return to base to activate. You basically spend a bunch of time just having to return to base, and it all feels like padding for the sake of extending time played.

However, I kept pushing because it was fun just to glide around. The gliding is fast, but weighty. There’s a strong sense of momentum when leaning into turns, rather than just turning on a dime. There’s little flow lines all over that have you flying in the air following them that somehow bring on a sense of nostalgia of something like a Tony Hawk game, despite being clearly sci-fi. Some reviewers pointed out that all the collecting was a chore, but I often found it fun gliding around new zones simply to find all the flow lines and figure out where they went. I was having fun for the sake of gliding around, and forward progress in the game was often just incidental to that.

For me, that was enough. Gliding around was fun for the sake of being fun, and the rest of the game was there to happen when it happened. I expect most people will enjoy the combat more than I did and I also suspect that most people will be a little more streamlined with the overworld stuff than I was. So long as you can deal with the fact that story is often outwardly horny, I think there’s a surprising little gem to play here.

Shelved It #19 – Sports Story

More Info from Sidebar Games

  • Genre: RPG
  • Platform: Switch

I really enjoyed Golf Story quite a lot, so I figured this was going to be an automatic home run. However, it just never hit for me. It’s not that the core game is really that different from the original, but some minor changes cascade into a lot of unnecessary-feeling drudgery. This then gets combined with day-1 performance, stability, and bug issues to turn into an experience that really just made me tune out. To say it was a disappointment would be a massive understatement.

I could probably forgive a lot of things about this game if it ultimately didn’t just baffle me with a lot of what was going on when I did end up in the golf portion of the game. The previous one had some pretty wild gimmicky courses, but they were fun because of the gimmicks. In what I’ve seen of Sports Story, the gimmicks are way reduced, so the golf is just kind of normal. However, it’s wildly inconsistent. Take these two videos from a desert course:

This first one shows what is effectively a shot from the rough in this course going completely wild. Does it have something to do with the terrain I shot from? Maybe, but it’s not entirely clear why that would be the result of a pretty good shot. Even if that is intended, why is that a good idea? It’s incredible player friction to randomly penalize them for doing things correctly.

This second video shows me hitting a mine on my shot. Again, am I hitting it purely because I’m doing a relatively low driver shot? Probably. Does that make sense at all from a gameplay perspective to penalize a player that much? Not really. I was taking an allegedly safe fairway shot and just got hosed from it.

That sort of decision making is present everywhere in this game. Where the original had some amount of RPGish mechanics to lead you through some fun interactions, this one leans way too heavily on fetch quests. Worse, the fetch quests are generally vague and offer no actual direction, so you’ll find yourself wandering around trying to find the right target instead of simply playing the game. It’s simply increased player friction that does nothing to serve improving the player experience.

So then this gets into another point of frustration for me. The couple of times that the game leans into doing dungeon-style experiences, it’s a lot of fun. There’s the one from the pic above where you go through a Zelda-style top-down dungeon playing minigolf to complete puzzles. This is complete with your usual assortment of keys to find and a boss fight at the end. Another one of them is an NES Metal Gear style dungeon built heavily around stealth mechanics. Both of these are really well-crafted homages to past games, so seeing the rest of the game around it falter is hugely disappointing.

That’s to say nothing of the other sports involved here. Tennis is the biggest star, with its own entire academy side story. Unfortunately, as seen above, the actual tennis experience is wildly inconsistent with reality. The core rules of tennis aren’t respected. Who gets points is sometimes hard to guess. I also managed to break the quest line in the academy, so I was never actually able to finish it.

In terms of other sports, cricket and baseball are lightly represented but aren’t more than single button mash to hit with timing being loosely important. I played volleyball once and never came back to it. I played soccer penalty kicks a couple times, but it was pretty much ball will always curve left so aim correct to win. There is a neat Excitebike-style minigame that comes up once in each world, and that’s probably the best of the bunch. However, none of them ever truly live up to the promise of this being a bunch of well integrated sports. They feel like they’re there for the sake of being there, rather than for improving the game.

I’m cognizant of the fact that it probably sounds like I’m being incredibly harsh on this game and there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. However, I want to make sure that I’m getting across how disappointed I am. This is easily my letdown of the year. It’s not even that new things didn’t pan out, but the core of what made the previous title so good also feels like it’s taken obvious steps backwards. The RPG progression is not as fun, the golf game is inconsistent, the game is not stable and has framerate issues that come up during shooting. It just feels like a game that missed the mark and I’m sad for that fact because I’ve so been looking forward to playing this one all year.

Shelved It #17 – Bug Fables: The Everlasting Spring

More Info from Dangen Entertainment

  • Genre: RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series

As basically a clone of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door this one gets a lot right. The writing is entertaining. The combat has good action-based attack and defense perks. The visual style really hits a good place. However, at the 10 hour mark my attacks still did the same damage as the 0 hour mark. What ultimately did me in is that I wanted to kill some trash quicker, couldn’t find an item to do so, then did a bunch of side quests in search of similar things with my rewards only some small amounts of currency. It felt unrewarding in a way that made me question how much longer I’d have to go to get beyond the simple set of strategies available to me for the majority of my time in the game. The core choice in how they handled stats and how it impacted my power curve was something I couldn’t shake.

The way this game doles out stat upgrades really just doesn’t work for me. Level ups give you three choices – +1 HP, +3 badge points, and +3 special attack points. That’s it. What this ultimately means is that your power curve is tied to badges. Early on most of these are simple things – +1 defense to the back row character, automatic kills of weak enemies, etc. By the point I’m at, I can start to see some more interesting possibilities emerging – for example, a badge that causes a character to get poisoned and a badge that increases defense for a poisoned character. However, I don’t have anything resembling a complete set of badges to execute an actual strategy. For example, I don’t have anything to match with poisons that increases healing to mitigate the inherent damage or increase attack to reduce turns in the fights while poisoned. And sure, there’s food that can temporarily boost things to help you out more but they’re temporary, they’re consumable, and they require you to take up slots in an extremely limited inventory, so it also feels less than ideal to follow after.

In lieu of stat upgrades, strategies like these would be interesting and fun as a mechanical choice, but there’s just such a slow rate of giving out the more interesting badges that I don’t know when I’m going to actually be able to have fun using those types of things. It would be one thing if that was the late game goal and early to mid game were supplemented by stat increases, but I’m also not getting those. My 3 point attack at minute 0 is the same 3 point attack that I have at hour 10, and it’s largely what I do against any trash. The problem is that the trash has gone from 4 to 10 HP in that time, and the only thing I’ve gained is some HP to stay alive a bit longer. It’s caused the pace of battles to slow tremendously for no reason other than lack of power to push through the fights.

It’s such a small mechanical difference from most RPGs, but it’s really wrecking the experience for me. I want to have combat filled with interesting strategies, but I also want to feel like I’m gaining power. Sure, I’ve added some special attacks in that time so intuitively I have more tools at my disposal, but it doesn’t feel like I’m making progress. Something that took two rounds hours ago still takes two rounds, and it will continue to take two rounds until some currently undetermined time at which I find attack up badges or find a complete set to execute some fun strategy.

What it ended up doing was kind of a compound thing. I knew that I needed to do side content to hopefully find some cool rewards, but I didn’t want to do side content because so many of them don’t give cool rewards. I also didn’t necessarily want to push story content because I was getting to a point where normal trash fights were taking more time than I cared to get through, but because stats aren’t earned through leveling it made no sense to do even a small typical grinding pass to alleviate some of the slower pace. Spending a bunch of time fighting trash that gives no XP because it’s “weak” despite taking the same amount of time to kill as five hours ago is pretty discouraging. Finishing those combat sections and getting 20 or 30 berries instead of a useful badge is even more discouraging.

The unfortunate thing is that in a vacuum I really like what they did here. The combat clearly understood what people liked about old Paper Mario. You can reduce incoming damage with well timed button inputs, including a couple different tiers based on how precise you were. Each enemy has very different timing and tells, so you have to learn and memorize enemies. Attacks are similar, with each character having their own flavor of action inputs to increase the damage being done. Each character also has important strengths that play into combat strategy. The bee can knock down flying units. The beetle can flip over armored units. The moth can throw magic which is super effective against specific enemy types. Outside of the lack of power curve, the combat just works extremely well so it’s frustrating that stats are the thing really throwing me off.

This is ultimately a thing where my lack of patience is doing me in here. I get why people enjoy it and for the most part I really like the core mechanics at play but it just is hitting the wrong notes for me. I just want to feel like my time is being rewarded in a consistent manner, and typically for RPGs that would be through token stat increases and gearing. It doesn’t even have to be huge to feel effective in a game like this with such small numbers. Adding a +1 to one stat on one character each level would already be huge. Having the badges then supplement those stat increases to bring in interesting combat strategies would just be icing at that point. As it stands right now, the question mark of when I’ll feel more powerful, or even if I happen to do the right content to get those badges to do so is always just hanging over my head, causing me to fall off this game.