DWGames

2025-01-072025-01-02

Game Ramblings #197 – Kunai

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.

2025-01-022025-01-02

Year End Ramblings – Things You Should Play From My 2024

This was just a busy year for me. Between the projects I was on at work or having a new kid at home, finding time to really power through games was not that easy this year. However, within that there were still some absolute highlights that I can point at as must plays.

Game Ramblings #190 – Dave the Diver

I know this isn’t an indie game and I know it came out a long time ago, but it’s the closest thing to an “indie” experience that I’d totally recommend this year. This one surprised me a lot in how well it blended an arcade-style sushi shop experience with surprisingly fun scuba diving segments into a game that I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did, much less actually complete it and play it for a couple dozen hours.

Game Ramblings #183 – Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

This was easily my Metroidvania of the year. This was the perfect mix of traversal and melee combat that allows the genre to work so well for me. Retraversing old areas was never a chore due to new shortcuts making things shorter and abilities opening new paths. Combat felt appropriately challenging but not unfair. Unfortunately it seems like the studio hasn’t made the cut at Ubisoft after its sales numbers came in, but hopefully we’ll see more things out of those folks wherever they end up because this was a winner.

Game Ramblings #195 – The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Look, it’s just fun to spawn a horde of crows to attack your enemies while you run in circles avoiding damage. This both is and is not a top-down Zelda game, but it just works. This being good wasn’t necessarily a surprise but it being maybe one of the best games I played this year certainly was. This is easily up there with the Oracle games in quality for on the go Zelda.

Game Ramblings #185 – Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Game Ramblings #184 – Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

These were my stand out RPGs of the year, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re both action focused. I’ve increasingly become less willing to sit around and grind in turn-based RPGs because to me it feels like they’ve increasingly become unnecessarily long. Both of these games don’t give me that feeling, and that’s with FF7 Rebirth still being a very long game. Modern action gameplay just continues to be more fun over time than a lot of turn-based combat setups even against similar levels of variety and I don’t doubt that that will continue.

In this year’s case, Gaiden is a return to the Yakuza series action combat that also just had incredibly good flow. FF7 Rebirth was an iteration on the gameplay of Remake. Neither were perfect games, but they were both ones that I wanted to continue when I finished, rather than being games that I was glad were over.

Game Ramblings #194 – Astro Bot

I’m probably lying if I say that this wasn’t my game of the year, or at least if there is a better game from last year I simply haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. This game just had such a great mix of platformer flow, nostalgia kicks, fun moments, and impressive level design. Could it have been a bit more difficult? Sure, probably. Could it have had more levels that were fully themed around games rather than one at the end of each group? Sure, probably. However, that would just be me nitpicking. This is one that I can point to from this year and go “when you get the system, play this first” and I think that’s the only one I can say that about on this list, so by that measure it should simply be game of the year for me.

2024-12-262024-12-26

Shelved It #21 – Mario & Luigi: Brothership

More Info from Nintendo

Genre: JRPG
Platform: Switch

It’s not unprecedented that I drop a Mario RPG on the final dungeon and boy was that the case here. If you’d have asked me about 10 gameplay hours ago how I was going to start this ramblings it would have been “this game would have been better received if it was under any other IP” but this game just did not know when to end. Since then I had two plot twists at the end boss, a handful of really unnecessarily long dungeons, and a final dungeon with so many wings and unnecessarily spongey enemies that I just said “forget it, I’m done.”

And honestly, that’s a shame.

But for now, let’s go back to where I thought this set of ramblings was going to start. I really do think that this would have been better off with even a different name. Calling this game Mario & Luigi has so many expectations that come with it. Sure, there’s the timing-based combat but that had been done outside of M&L to where adapting that to another RPG wouldn’t have been seen as weird. What that name really brings with it is an expectation of a certain metagame style with large scale exploration in a mushroom kingdom setting. That is completely not this game.

This game is a series of relatively loosely connected 30 minute segments that you can kind of leisurely play at a relaxed pace that eventually loop back to a core story every now and then. However, independent of the M&L baggage this is a really fun metagame loop. This works well as an RPG where you have some agency over what order you’d want to do things. In other genres it would work well as a puzzle game where you go to different spots to solve unique puzzles. In an action game this would work where each loop has new enemy archetypes to engage with. Various Mario games have already proven that this metagame loop works well for a platformer where each new area has fun new challenges to engage with. However, it is not Mario & Luigi. If they had simply called this Super Mario Brothers-ship a ton of expectations would have been dropped, and frankly it would have probably been better received.

That is, until the end of the game. So many RPGs that are simply good but not great have the same failings around sticking the landing and this really is just a whose who of failures to stick the landing.

At about the 20 hour mark the first signs of this start to show up with the introduction of a Glohm mechanic. It makes sense tied to the story, but from a gameplay perspective it’s a debuff that prevents brother actions and can make enemies stronger. The main issue I had is that this is a sign of them running out of enemy archetypes, to where the glohm is in place to re-use old archetypes, but stronger. Typically besides just stronger, this actually means faster, and often that doesn’t just mean faster, it means fast enough that when we multi-attack, you can’t actually dodge all damage because game mechanics prevent you jumping/hammering that fast. Unavoidable damage in a combat system built around avoiding as much damage as possible is really a huge problem.

Then at about the 30 hour mark the dungeons start to get noticeably longer. 30 minute dungeons stretch into 45 minutes, then 60 minutes, and it really starts to negatively impact the fun of getting through a dungeon. Fighting the same enemy archetypes has a certain shelf life before you get bored, and this really starts to hit that cap. In isolation, it’s simply annoying because the pay off of a dungeon is usually a cool boss fight. While that’s certainly the case here, they start being capped off by unnecessary plot twists. The plot twists are obvious that they are coming, so they are both not fun and just generally feel like they’re extending the game for no reason. Past the plot twists are simply revisits of existing islands, so you don’t get new cool stuff. You’re just fighting stronger things that you’ve already fought (see previous note) and you’re not meeting new people. It just feels unnecessary.

For me, at about the 35 hour mark I then hit the final dungeon. I got to the end of the first wing, saw a hub with seven extending spokes, and literally just said “oh no”. It wasn’t actually seven wings since they loop back on themselves at times, but it was enough to be negatively impactful. I started playing a bit of it, but it was clear that it was going to be a slog. The just normal trash enemies very quickly stopped being 2-3 attack kills and started being 5-6 attack kills. They stopped doing 20-30 damage and started doing 80-90 damage. They stopped being occasional glohmed enemies and started all being glohmed enemies. It just stopped being fun. It wasn’t that it was hard, and I guess that’s my problem. It just felt like it was setup to kill time. I was already overleveled and it was dragging, so grinding to overlevel more was not appealing. I got back to the central hub and went “I’m good.”

I’ve never worked on a JRPG but in my head it feels like something that shouldn’t be difficult to tune around. There are certain metrics that testing should identify as fun. How long can a dungeon be before players start to grow bored of it? How long do players identify as “fair” to defeat a trash enemy? How many fights feels like enough to learn how an enemy archetype works before mastering it, and how many times can the player fight it before feeling bored? These are things that all worked very well for the first 20 or so hours of this game. I totally get that there’s a need to finish on bigger and badder, but bigger and badder should still be served by metrics of what is found as fun. Is an extra turn to kill an end game enemy a bad thing? Probably not but double the amount of turns probably is. 30 minute dungeons extending to 60+ is probably a bad thing. Fighting an archetype 10 times is fine, but 20 times is probably bad.

JRPGs that are simply just good flex too much from what is fun. JRPGs that are great do not. In my head as both a developer and consumer it’s as simple as that. Find the metrics that are fun, and make sure that you follow within some close range of that for the entire game. Make difficulty come from difficulty actually ramping up, not from length. Brothership simply failed that test.