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Game Ramblings #199 – Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

More Info from Sega

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

The original mainline Yakuza series showed a very distinct progression in the quality of its gameplay through the series. The PS2 entries were good, but the PS3 entries were clearly better, and the PS4 entries better still. The combat got more refined. The power curve of the player and enemies got smoother. Grinding was reduced and friction points were reduced. That’s where I feel like this one landed relative to Like a Dragon.

Sequels should be similar, but refined and this definitely fits the bill. In my ramblings about the original Like a Dragon I made note of a few places where the game felt grindy, and I think that’s as good a place to begin as any.

My first point about grinding was specifically around equipment. In the previous title, I felt like I capped out too early on purchases and crafting was too expensive. This game definitely addressed that. I hit the end of the crafting shop investment before end game, but because I still had plenty of gear to purchase out in the world I never really hit a point where I felt like I capped out there. The gear I had wasn’t necessarily end game and could be beneficial to upgrade more for optional content, but for the golden path it felt appropriate. The actual cost of everything was also lower overall combined with significantly higher drop rates. In the previous title I was getting 3-5k yen for near end game trash fights. Here I’m getting more like 50-100k yen in Japan and $1000+ in Hawaii. You are simply getting wildly more money to play with.

I also made note of needing to XP grind. There’s a few things that felt like they addressed that problem here. For one thing, bosses are simply more in line with the levels of everything around them. They aren’t wildly jumping ahead in levels compared to trash mobs, so I don’t have to overlevel just to be on even ground with them. In addition, trash mobs are giving significantly more XP – rather than 1-2k per fight, I’m getting more like 5kl or upwards of 20k for special repeatable world boss fights. It’s a huge difference in terms of time allocated to simply fighting, allowing me to spend more time doing “time waste” side content while also keeping up with the rest of the game.

The rest of combat is similar, but again at least feels more refined. The game still has combo attacks and follow-up attacks with your party, but at least compared to my memory they happen more often so the squad feels more like an actual squad with good interpersonal relationships that you built. MP-based attacks – and importantly, MP regen – feels more consistent, really pushing me to use them more often to take down squads quickly. There’s some cool expanded options around tag teams and huge specials that feel like they’re tuned to really nuke bosses quick, giving a really cool power fantasy and payoff to your squad’s growth. Basically, it’s similar but again feels more refined.

And because this is a Yakuza title, I have to talk about side content. I don’t think it’s quite as good as past entries, but there are two standouts that I need to talk about. The first is Crazy Delivery which is a straight food delivery ripoff of Crazy Taxi. It’s stupid, it’s bright and colorful, it fundamentally makes no sense, but it totally fits in this series.

However, the standout is Sujimon. In the previous game it was basically a Pokedex-only system to collate the people you fought into a Sujidex. This game goes the full Pokemon treatment. You now capture Sujimon and add them to a party, with an entire set of Sujimon side quests. This goes the full Pokemon route with gym fights and badges, leveling, 3v3 battles, weaknesses and strengths, and an entire Pokemon Stadium side content block. It’s a completely ridiculous and over the top set of content, and frankly I would have spent more time on this than the main game if I wasn’t so hooked on the story.

I don’t really want to talk more about the game because I think the story is worth experiencing completely without spoilers, and it would be tough to talk more about the game without getting too deep into that side of things. However I can easily recommend this one. It takes what I thought was already a really solid JRPG transition for the Yakuza series and begins its iteration that the previous action-focused titles did. You can tell that they took feedback from the previous game seriously, and it shows that the next however many titles we get in this style are simply going to be instant plays.

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Game Ramblings #198 – Hogwarts Legacy

More Info from WB Games

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

This IP is obviously complicated by the fact that the original author has turned out to be a piece of shit and that wasn’t something I wanted to support, so I waited. I waited until it was so cheap that I would effectively not be putting money into the IP. I waited until I had a practical need to play it as a developer. However, it was time for me to get around to playing it and I’m glad I did. The team at Avalanche put something together that is pretty obvious on paper – make an open world RPG third person shooter – and unsurprisingly it works well. The level of polish behind this game puts it right up there with the best of AAA experiences I’ve played over the last several years.

There’s a really interesting push and pull here between childhood nostalgia of what Hogwarts is from the books and movies against what is expected of a playable videogame experience, and this one does a surprisingly good job of playing that balance. There’s sections that are heavy on puzzles that really lean into the lore. You’ll be solving puzzles created by Merlin or finding important objects to the universe or capturing magical creatures. There’s sections that are then heavy on combat where you’re fighting dark wizards and trolls and goblins. The game does a good job of balancing that back and forth to where you’re never doing one for a particularly long time back to back so you get into natural sort of peaks and valleys of action that allow rest between.

Underlying all of this is how it ties together the overall story with simply being a student. Yes, you’re doing something larger than Hogwarts as the meta experience, but within that are chunks of distinct classroom experiences. You’ll be given tasks by the professors that need to be completed. For example – use a specific potion and defeat enemies, capture some specific magical creature, defeat enemies with particular spell combos, etc. Those lessons then result in you learning new spells to use further in the game. It’s got a very Nintendo quality to it in that it’s naturally tutorializing parts of the game without being overtly in your face about it, then rewarding you with a new toy to play with.

None of this would work if the action that followed was bad, but that works extremely well. Ultimately, the closest thing I could compare it to would be something like Mass Effect. At the end of the day this is a third person shooter full of projectiles flying everywhere, but each attack is based in magic. Where Mass Effect would have a magnetic shield, this has Protego. Where Mass Effect would throw grenades at range, this has Bombarda. Where Mass Effect has cryo weaponry, this has Glacius spells. Where Mass Effect has poison dots, this has curses from Crucio.

From an experience standpoint it all just feels natural as a result. This may be an 1800s magic game, but it feels like something that almost any core gamer has played before. The control scheme is similar, the results of actions are similar, and the moment to moment gameplay is similar. That may sound a lot like “well it’s been done before”, and I suppose there is some truth to that. The thing that’s impressive is that it doesn’t feel like a retread, but instead feels like a perfectly natural blend of known gameplay and a completely unrelated IP.

However, they also really do hit that nostalgia hard in this. The thing about Hogwarts that was always pressed into my brain was how much it was a maze and this absolutely feels like a maze. There’s spiral staircases and unnecessary hallways and hidden hallways and all sorts of chaos, and at first it’s overwhelming. However, the game does a great job of leading the player via a “spell” that shows them the path to where they’re trying to go. Then over time as you explore you start to recognize spots and it continues to be a maze, but it’s a maze you know and in that sense you then start to appreciate how well put together the entire school sandbox is to feel so much like my expectations and yet still allow me to easily get around.

Places like Hogsmeade are the same. IT feels like an overwhelming place to walk into. All of the buildings are a little rickety and feel like they may fall over at any time. Places like Honeydukes look like an explosion of treats. Ollivander’s is floor to ceiling stacks of wands. The Three Broomsticks looks like the perfect pub to hop into on a cold day. Basically, it all works to hit that nostalgia of the series, but it also works incredibly well as the core upgrade hub of the game. Where Hogwarts is the place where you learn new stuff, Hogsmeade is where you improve things. You’re there to sell unused gear and get money to grab new potion recipes or conjuring spells or broom upgrades or combat items. What it ends up being is that you kind of end up hopping back and forth between the two in natural waves where Hogwarts kind of becomes a hub to learn for a while, then you’re off in the world and hopping back to Hogsmeade to bring your power curve up. In that sense, it’s gamifying nostalgia in a way that just works.

In continuing to play to both the game and nostalgia aspects, this ends up being one of the most impressive licensed titles that I’ve likely ever played. Licensed games are often hard to get right because the IP ends up having to be important enough to sell the game. In this case, I think the game benefited a lot from not having to tie itself to Harry Potter. It could simply be a game in the overall lore of the IP and live on its own in an impressive way. It took pieces that were important in the setting and the very loose lore of witches and wizards existing and crafted a game that naturally worked around that. The game is not appreciably different than it would be if it was not Hogwarts, but in doing so it allowed itself to be attached to something that was going to simply sell more with the same game, and in doing so it opened a path forward for the studio that had seemingly been left to die after the end of Disney Infinity.

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Game Ramblings #197 – Kunai

More Info from TurtleBlaze

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PC

Metroidvanias are usually an easy to pick breather for me in between longer RPG runs, and we were definitely in one of those. After Metaphor and Mario & Luigi back to back I needed a break. This one kind of fell into my lap via my backlog randomizer, but it chose well. This is a compact experience with solid combat and great movement that really hit what I needed out of it.

The thing that really stood out at the start was how fast the game was. This has such a smooth movement set that really just worked and continues to get better as the game continues. Core movement is fast on its own, which prevents the game from dragging. You then get the kunai that act like a typical grappling hook. This adds a bunch of possibilities for vertical movement up walls as well as even faster horizontal movement. You then get double jumps to cover gaps and eventually an SMG that you can shoot down to hover to cover even LARGER gaps. Finally, you get a dash to extend your movement even further.

All of the movement feels like it’s in service to reduce friction in moving through the environment. The unfortunate thing is that despite it improving the main story line, I don’t think it really does much to improve retraversal. Ultimately this feels like more of a problem of the core path than the movement mechanics but there just isn’t that much reason to retraverse most areas. You’ll go into an area, maybe hit a few areas a second time on the wya out, then really not see it again. In a couple of cases you retraverse through old areas late in the game, but for the most part the central hub of the game is so conveniently located that you just go through it instead of old areas. If I wanted to do a 100% run I’d have visited more, but just to complete the game there wasn’t much reason.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how much combat changed over time, but also how naturally the change felt. The first half of the game is entirely melee driven, and it starts that way early. You get a katana and learn to use it both at close range and for deflecting projectiles coming at far range. The use of it opens up more as you get traversal mechanics – for example using the kunai to grapple and reposition. This on its own feels incredibly tight and fun. It’s obviously pretty simple and wouldn’t have had legs to support an entire game, but it’s incredibly effective as the opening half. It’s when ranged starts to come in that things really change.

The first ranged thing you get is a throwing star. Its main use in combat is less for damage and more for its stun capability. Being able to stun larger enemies brings them from things that need at least a bit of thinking to something that you can run over, and as a power curve thing it felt well timed to right around when fighting the larger enemies is becoming a bother. Once the speed of stunning starts to become bothersome, you get the SMG. Besides its traversal hover utility, this is pure damage. This allowed me to start taking out enemies as I moved. In large packs I would still need to slow down a bit, but ultimately I was getting rid of targets quicker. The rocket launcher finished converting the game into something entirely different. Now rather than slowing down I was simply lobbing rockets and watching everything explode. The power curve changes allowed the game to slowly morph into a ranged-centric game in a way that felt entirely natural.

The thing that impressed me about this was that while it made getting through trash quicker, the bosses were clearly designed with this change in mind. Each boss felt like a test of the new things you gained. Early bosses were largely stationary, allowing you to dodge attacks and get in close range for melee damage. As you gained ranged weapons, bosses started requiring those because they were fast or had a lot of movement or just stayed out of range. By the final boss, I was basically using all traversal while lobbing rockets to get splash damage and focusing purely on dodging. It was such a smooth transition that I didn’t think about it, but in hindsight it was handled much better than a lot of games handle the change.

I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a game of the year candidate from the year it came out, but it didn’t necessarily need to be. In simply being good at what it did, it provided exactly what I wanted out of it – a breather from RPGs. In being short it also was something easy to run through without growing tired of it. Basically, it made itself easy to play, easy to finish, and easy to recommend.