Tag: square enix

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Shelved It #135.1 – Fantasian: Neo Dimension

More Info from Square-Enix
Original Ramblings

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

My previous ramblings about part 1 are still 100% my feelings for the way the first half of this game went. Combat is generally incredibly fun, bosses are solid but can sometimes be a bit one-note, and the visuals work well. I never did get around to part 2 on iOS for whatever reason, but I’d seen some ramblings about it not being as good. I’d seen some ramblings about it having balance issues. I’d seen some ramblings about the open world changes not really working out well. And boy are those still the case.

The point at which you transition into part 2 of this game is incredibly obvious because you are just bombarded with new mechanics. The unfortunate thing for the game is that even though this is the effective director’s cut of the game, they couldn’t really fix these mechanics to be present in the whole game because they are so story related.

The first major one of these is the change from a linear game to an open world game. The end of part 1 has you having seen at least most of the major locations in the game, so structurally this makes sense. You’re revisiting old locations for new reasons – finding new items, searching out new people, etc. A lot of the progression through this section feels pretty arbitrary in terms of discovery, but that would be fine in isolation. It just doesn’t work out for the gameplay. Besides going to locations that you’ve already seen and ransacked, you get into awkward mixes of enemies that are at lower levels and enemies that now feel out of place from being high level. It ends up exacerbating what is already some weird balance to really slow down the pace of leveling in a negative fashion.

You are also granted access to the growth map system. This is essentially a skill tree tied to a story-important item for each character. The problem is sort of three-fold here. It feels like it was put in place to address power curve problems past level 30, rather than simply adjusting the power curve of core leveling to be better. It also comes in per-character, so you end up in places where some characters just feel underpowered relative to the rest of the party, relegating them to very specific uses. Finally, the system just doesn’t really give you any points to start with so it’s all based on growth from level 35 on, basically leaving you at an introduction point with no gains. Another mechanic that comes in around this time is gear upgrading. Again, it’s a system that feels like it was added to assist in the power curve above level 30 but because the items tied to the system only come in with the later game enemies and treasures you kind of can’t take advantage of it without grinding. This again continues to exacerbate balance issues.

So the thing that keeps coming up here is balance, and that’s tied to one simple change. Once your characters are past level 35, they gain less XP against “weaker” enemies. Again, in isolation this is not a huge deal and a ton of games do things along these lines. The problem as it were is that the levels of enemies in this section of the game just do not correspond to their power. At the point I shelved this, I was around level 40 going up against bosses that were around level 38 and they were doing AoE attacks that were doing 90+% of my health pool to the entire party in one attack. This just ends in a train of healing that is incredibly boring at best and generally just a slow slog to demise at worst. Assuming you then beat the boss, it’s “low level” so you get almost no XP from it. It’s all effort, no reward, and because of this very same system the walk to the boss also earns almost no XP because the trash are similarly low level, so even the fun Dimengeon mass fights don’t feel worth the effort. It ends up making the gameplay incredibly awkward in that you go to higher level areas to grind, then warp back to low level areas to progress the story even though you are “too strong”. It just does not work out.

Ultimately I suppose that is my problem. I wouldn’t mind a bit of grinding if I felt like I was being rewarded with progress, but part two gets you to a place where you’re just beating your head against the wall for small rewards to get past things that by level are “weak” compared to you, despite them obliterating the party. I just don’t have the time or patience for that anymore. There’s a gem of a game here if a few small changes are made – don’t reduce XP for weak enemies, increase the levels of bosses to make them “correct”, make gear upgrade items more common, grant a bunch of SP when gaining access to the growth map – but this just could not stick the landing. Given the potential shown in the original release of part 1 it’s really just kind of a bummer.

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Game Ramblings #173 – Final Fantasy XVI

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5

I was thinking about Final Fantasy XV a lot while playing this game. Not because they’re at all similar in gameplay – because they completely aren’t – but because they shared one thing in common in my head. They’re both glorious clusterfucks that I simply could not stop playing and ended up one of my favorite games of late. I can’t necessarily explain well why that is, but the game kept its hooks in me despite what are some fundamental problems with the overarching game.

It’s obvious at a glance that this isn’t your normal Final Fantasy. It’s distinctly not a JRPG. I would argue that despite it having leveling and gearing and stats, it’s not even an action RPG. None of that stuff actually ended up mattering to combat. What it is to me is a pure action game. It’s a weird blend of Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, which makes a lot of sense given members of both teams were involved, where neither side of that equation really wins out. That’s where the problems come in.

The DMC side is evident in the way that overall combat flow works. It’s heavily combo based with a strong emphasis on defensive parry and dodge mechanics to minimize damage. Overall this works very well. Enemy tells generally pretty obvious without being too easy, though overall there isn’t enough of a penalty for failing to avoid damage. There’s mechanics in place to stun enemies that really encourage smart use of your entire toolset. There’s a good mix of secondary abilities that allow you to modify your combat style to your preference, ranging from gap closing teleports to shields to elemental abilities that further help stunning. However, the combo system overall doesn’t have much depth, so it fails to live up to the full potential of DMC.

The Bayonetta side comes in during the very obvious set piece boss fights. Parts of most boss fights are traditional combat, but more often than not at least half the fight is a basically impossible to lose set piece where you’re fighting things of ridiculous scale. Those are the kaiju-style fights that were seen in a lot of preview footage. While they are ridiculously easy, they’re so exciting and visually spectacular and completely over the top that it really doesn’t matter that you can’t lose. It’s worth it for the experience of the fight, and in my brain was easy to rationalize away as the reward of getting to that point. However, because the game is fighting against the needs of the other systems, there simply aren’t enough of them. Their timing is predictable, but the time distance between them means you don’t get the pace of excitement of Bayonetta.

The traditional Final Fantasy side comes in leveling and gearing and side quests. Side quests (both NPC-granted and in the form of special hunts) is the way that you get materials to create the best gear. However, the NPC-granted quests at least are generally just in the form of boring fetch quests, so unless you’re a completionist there’s very little reason to want to finish them all. Leveling and gearing is gears at the inclusion of stats, but none of it ever felt impactful. Obviously by end game I had gained a large amount of stats in both to have an impact on my power curve, but the progression of it through each upgrade was so small that it was only the totality of it that felt important. Trash and bosses at the beginning of the game took about the same amount of time to kill as at the end of the game. If they’d have had a flat power curve and completely depended on player skill to get through the end of the game, I don’t think the experience would have been diminished.

I know reading that it probably seems that I shouldn’t have liked the game that much, but I really can’t explain why I ended up absolutely loving my time with the game. There’s an inexplicable pull to moving forward in the game that I can’t explain beyond it being one of those magic “good game” things. Trash was just fun to fight, despite having done it 1000 times before. Bosses were so spectacular that I wanted to see the next one. Exploring the way I could integrate new elements into the way I fought was interesting enough despite not having a ton of depth. If there’s really one criticism I would point at, it’s that I think the game wouldn’t have suffered from slimming down the side cruft and making it more linear of an experience. The core that is there is fun enough that it didn’t need the hamfisted smashing in of traditional Final Fantasy, because it just didn’t need it.

If there was one part that really missed for me though, it was the story. It’s not that it was bad, but it just felt underdeveloped. The whole bearers hatred in the game was an obvious attempt to hit on racism without actually tackling racism as a subject. It wasn’t even handled poorly, but felt kind of pandering to be doing a racism-focused story in 2023 where the focus of the racism could easily hide in their society. It probably didn’t help that a lot of the acting was pretty stiff, which may be an English problem but was kind of noticeable. The game also just ended at the end. This is unfortunately common in a lot of games, but wish that more games gave me a solid playable epilogue so I could at least see some of the results of what I did, rather than just leaving it to the imagination. I want to see the effect my actions had, and it feels hand wavey to the max to just end. The story just ended up being fine, which wasn’t really up to the spectacle of the rest of the game.

It’s likely to go down as one of the most controversial games in the Final Fantasy series, simply due to its departure from the style of the past, but I think Square has made a good decision here in reestablishing that Final Fantasy are at their core extraordinarily well produced games of any style at their core, and not just RPGs that have stick to a set of conventions to get by.

Game Ramblings #27 – Final Fantasy XV – DWGames

I said that at the end of my ramblings about Final Fantasy XV, and boy could I not have imagined how much further they would have gone with the next game in the series. This is an even more spectacularly far departure from the past, but I think it still holds true. Final Fantasy is where they show what happens when they put their whole studio effort behind a title. It may not be what everyone wants but the result of the effort is evident. The game is obviously the combined effort of Square pulling together members of a white variety of games and the result is something completely wild. This is a game that is a glorious clusterfuck, but it’s a game that I could not put down and it’s a game that I easily recommend.

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Game Ramblings #167 – Dragon Quest Treasures

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG / Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

When I’m travelling, I look for certain types of games to play. They don’t necessarily have to be the best game ever, and I’d honestly rather they not be since my play sessions are inconsistent. They should have a relatively short metagame loop so I can play in both 15 minutes and multiple hours as I can manage it. They absolutely need to be portable since I’m not lugging consoles or a desktop with me. Treasures ticked all those boxes. It’s definitely not going to win game of the year, but it’s a game that became so easy to fall into that I was surprised how fast I managed to complete it.

This game is the strangest mix of Pokemon and a treasure hunting game, and it somehow manages to work out alright. Your goal is ultimately to find treasure, but the other half the game can’t be ignored in the pursuit of riches. You use your party of typical Dragon Quest monsters to both fight things around, as well as to use their abilities to assist you in getting to and searching for more treasure. How that loop works out is really why this worked well for me as a vacation game.

The overall metagame is a series of treasure hunts where you go out, fill your inventory, and go back to your base. Each trip is capped by how much treasure your party can carry, and in some practical sense by the fact that the farther you get into each level the stronger the enemies are. During each hunt, you’ll eventually start getting attacked by rival hunters trying to steal your treasure. This ends up encouraging you to be fast in gathering treasures, and fast in getting back to base. As a loop this takes place in roughly 10 minute intervals and it’s incredible how infinitely repeatable this can be. If all you’ve got time for is one loop, it’s just a fun distraction but you still make forward progress. If you’ve got time for more, you can instead settle into achieving specific goals – grabbing specific treasures, finishing specific side quests, finding specific party members, etc – that you can focus on over longer periods of time.

In a lot of ways, the Pokemon aspects of it feel intentionally placed because this is one of the reasons that I really enjoyed Pokemon Arceus a lot. It never felt like my time in that game was being wasted and it also never felt like I had to really set aside time to make meaningful progress. Everything I did was valuable to my overall progress, and it allowed me to enjoy the game at any time in any situation. That is what makes a perfect travel game and this really nailed it, whether or not that was intentional on the developer’s part.

Because the core loop worked so well, the rest of the game just kind of had to not get in my way. Combat is simple, but effective. You basically attack and dodge, and that’s really all you need to worry about. There’s a neat slingshot secondary weapon that can be used for offense, but its more interesting use is to buff and heal your party on the fly. Your party have all of their own unique abilities tied to the monster design, but it’s all more or less irrelevant to the combat structure. The only one I really focused on was making sure I had a healer so I could focus my efforts on damage as much as possible. Monster collecting is more RNG-focused than I’d prefer, but you generally get monsters at a decent rate. Their ability to join your party is tied to a bit of a frustrating item trading system, but you end up getting so many items in a normal treasure hunt that it isn’t overly time consuming.

If there is one thing that I could point at as being incredibly frustrating though, it’s that your base can be attacked. It’s not that this was difficult, but the last thing I generally wanted to do after dumping my treasure back was to have to immediately be in combat. It was probably more frustrating that because it generally wasn’t challenging it just slowed down my pace and prevented me from getting back out into the field. There’s a similar annoyance while in the field where you can be attacked by random rival hunters, and it’s another case of not really being challenging and mostly just being something that slowed my pace. However, I didn’t really have major issues outside of those things.

This one I guess ends up being an easy recommendation in a lot of ways because it just kind of works pretty well. It’s got a fun core meta loop, a decent enough monster collection aspect, decent enough combat, and really tries its best to not get in your way. It’s no game of the year, but because of that I also wasn’t worried about trying to book large gaming sessions to dig deep into it. I just kind of hopped in and out as I could, and because I was having fun it became more hopping in than I really expected. Because it was a travel game, it also really just fit really well into some of the smaller gaming sessions that I had that were typical of my time availability. Given the holidays are over, there may not be an opportunity to play a kind of “travel ready” game for a while, but this is a good one to keep in mind the next time you’re doing so.