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Game Ramblings #231 – Hi-Fi Rush

More Info from Krafton

  • Genre: Rhythm/Action
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox Series

This was one that I kind of figured I would enjoy a lot. It’s a high-style action game built around rhythm-based inputs. It should match my love of music and love of rhythm games. However, I was having a real hard time with enjoying it fully by the end, and I think I narrowed that down to a few specific things.

The main thing I’d point at is, quite frankly, the soundtrack. For a game based on rhythm gameplay, the soundtrack is incredibly important and I don’t think it hits. Importantly, I think it feels limited by the gameplay. The soundtrack feels based around two specific things – 4/4 count and a very small range of difference in the actual BPM of the songs. This is then further restricted by the music needing to loop as its the constant background beat of the levels and needing to be simple enough to not be a distraction during combat, which pushes it into sort of simple rock territory. It often feels like it might as well be a background metronome instead. For level stretches that are 30+ minutes on the same basic track with some layers fading in and out, it gets repetitive and boring.

The simplification problem extends into combat though, which is particularly frustrating. Attack combos are combinations of one (fast) and two (strong) beat attacks and that’s basically it. Some attacks have rest beats after a fast attack input that take the place of a strong attack, but there’s no more variety than that. There’s no eighth-note inputs to do more complex rhythms. There’s no attacks that are tied to the music at all. Dodge and parry take the place of light attacks on the beat. There’s so many options here to do more interesting things with the musicality that just weren’t taken, so the rhythm integration feels shallow.

I also found it incredibly annoying that quick time events didn’t start on the 1 of a measure. To me that feels like such an obvious music tie-in, but they would just start on the nearest beat to when they are triggered. It ultimately made the QTEs feel disengaged from music when an enemy attack chain that you need to block could start on the 1 or the 3 or the 4 and not care about the music track, again going back to “this could just be a single-tone metronome”. The QTEs would take five beats to show the incoming button combo, then give you a beat of gap to start inputting the button combo. It just felt all arbitrary and disconnected from the music. This is especially egregious for boss fights that used licensed music where tighter integration would have been even more desired.

I guess what it really boils down to is that I don’t think the game benefits in any particular way from the rhythm integration. I get that it is core to the story and tied up in that fashion, but I think the game would play better if it was 25% faster and using combos in a way similar to Devil May Cry. The rhythm integration just pulls down the pace of combat in a way that ends up feeling forced and kind of lifeless. This could absolutely just be a story based around a world where the music is well integrated into the world without being forced into the gameplay, and games like Jet Set Radio have proven that possibility. The platforming aspects could still be tied into the music as timing mechanisms. The visuals of the world could dance with the beat like they do now. I just have a hard time really thinking that the rhythm aspects have made the gameplay better here.

Realistically the reason that I kept playing through the end is that the stuff around gameplay is so good. The visual design of the game and the way that literally everything moves to match the rhythm of the music is incredible. The characters are goofy and fun and have great interactions with each other. The story is slightly predictable cliche science fiction, but it’s effective and fun and a perfect accompaniment to everything else. The world that they’ve built here is fantastic. The integration of secondary characters that can jump into combat for special attacks adds a nice dimension to combat. The tuning that you can do with combat add-ons gives good personalization to the way you fight.

This is one of those cases where I’m not entirely sure where the critical acclaim is from. There’s a lot I can forgive and still internally rate a game very highly, but this one makes me think I’m missing something that other people are seeing. Maybe I’m just too critical of gameplay over experience. Maybe I’ve been a musician for too long and the rhythm ties bother me more than a typical user. Maybe I want something faster paced than this just for the sake of it. Whatever it is, the biggest surprise here for me is how much this just did not click.

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Game Ramblings #230 – Mouse: P.I. For Hire

More Info from Fumi Games

  • Genre: First-person shooter
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox Series, Switch 2

Is it weird that the first game that popped into my head when playing this was Quake? This is obviously a first-person shooter, but at a glance it doesn’t really feel like it would share much in common given its black and white 1930s cartoon style. When I sat down to play that was all I kept coming back to.

The release timeline of about Doom 2 through the original Unreal was when I was first really getting into PC gaming so I have a certain fondness for FPS games that are just run and gun. You take a lot of damage, deal a lot of damage, and have to find health and armor to keep you up. It’s not about avoiding everything coming your way but instead about managing long enough to get through the current wave of enemies so you can run around the room and grab any health packs and ammo that you see. It’s not about sitting on a favorite weapon but being good enough to dump all the ammo in your current weapon and switching to whatever is next and continuing on as ammo rebuilds in the rest. That is what I get out of Mouse P.I. This game wraps that gameplay archetype in such a good package to marry the old and new.

The thing that really stuck out to me was how good the enemy archetypes were at signaling their intent. Across the lifetime of the game you end up facing several different factions of enemies but the visual language of the archetypes are consistent across the board. Every faction has its big round guy that is going to be melee and charge at you. Every faction has its broad shoulder guy that is going to be a shotgun guy. Every faction has a tall slender guy that is going to be a sniper. Every faction has the short guy that is going to run at you with a bomb. For the run and gun style, this removes so much inherent thinking. Once you have the general visual language engrained in your head, you are thinking of the mechanics of the situation instinctively rather than trying to suss out how to approach fights. The thinking becomes how you are moving in and taking advantage of shielding in the environment rather than how you are going to approach specific enemies. It allows them to absolute unload enemies at you without it feeling overbearing.

Like those older games, the environment definitely plays into the core gameplay as well. Explosive barrels in older corridor FPS games are such a mainstay of the genre, even though they fundamentally make no sense in reality. That is played up to an incredible effect here. Besides simple explosions there are other environmental effects like fire or poison. However, my absolute favorites are two that play into the comedic visual style of the game. The freeze effect (which is mirrored with a freeze gun) locks enemies in an ice state where you can run up and punch them to shatter them into a million pieces. The paint thinner effect (again, mirrored in a gun) allows you to deal damage over time that literally melts the enemies away. All of these sources of environmental damage play into the overall feel of the game. I can hit some barrels on one side of a map and effectively control and eliminate the enemies in that area while focusing my firing in an entirely different spot. It’s something that you don’t often see in a modern 1 vs many situation where the AI are for lack of a better description trying to be “smart”.

So then the final piece of the Quake puzzle is pace, and that is maybe where this diverges a little bit. Core movement is still very much in the pace of Quake. Outside of combat scenarios the search for secrets and the push to move forward is also still very much in the pace of Quake. However, combat scenarios themselves are much more arena-focused, and I think that’s a good thing. Rather than always pushing forward and expecting enemies to be around a corner and rather than enemies popping out of impossible to see closets behind you, combat is much more arena-focused. Within those arenas though, enemies are spawning in a 360 around you. There are your typical spawn closets in each arena, but they are telegraphed visually both in location and when they are opening. This changes the combat specifically from one of surprise to one of quick planning, and if you are paying enough attention between waves you can absolutely lock down all spawning enemies before they can attack, but the other side of this is because spawning is often around the entire room you can absolutely have enemies sneak up behind you quickly. It’s a change to core gameplay that feels more in line with arena-based melee action games that really adapts well to the Quake-style shooting mechanics.

This one was a real pleasant surprise. I expected something charming just based on the visual style, but I wasn’t really anticipating something that had core gameplay that I was going to vibe so well with. It’s a game that feels like a modernized take on something 30 years old and I say that as an absolute positive. It pulled me in and gave me an experience that felt completely unlike anything I’ve played recently while hitting enough of nostalgia points to feel familiar.

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Game Ramblings #229 – The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales

More Info from Square Enix

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

My takeaway after playing this is that 2D Zelda can learn a lot about combat. This game doesn’t reach the same highs in dungeon design or puzzle design, but the combat is leagues above what 2D Zelda has done. That alone makes this worthy of consideration.

While it’s easy to pull in other action RPGs like Ys into the talks here, the Zelda games are much more obviously the target here. The dungeon layouts and combat pace are much more in line with Zelda games where everything is on a neat grid, attacks are singular instead of fighting-combo based, and particularly boss battles are focused on single screen experiences. In my head that puts it much more in line with games like Link’s Awakening than Ys.

Where Zelda always felt like it concentrated on tools and puzzles with combat largely being secondary, this feels the polar opposite. This is a game that concentrates on weapons the entire time. Some things that would traditionally be generally tools in Zelda like the bomb also appear here – and certainly have their traditional use to blow holes in walls – but are also generally weapon-forward as well. The more practical difference is that there is more than just a sword. This is a game that lives by giving you a bunch of weapons and letting you loose. There is a sword and it’s important to the story, but there’s also weapons like a spear or a sickle. The game provides the player with a bunch of options and then you just go and find which ones you like the best.

The weapons are backed by two things that are really important as distinct differences. The first is weapon charges. Zelda has its sword spin, but there’s more here. Each weapon has a core charge up ability to mirror Zelda. This then gets modified by each weapon upgrade to add additional stages of charge. Each charge ends up giving more power to the attacks or more range to a dash tied to the charge or something along those lines. This then extends to more modifications through the use of what the game calls Magicite, which are essentially modifiers added to weapons. Some are straight attack boosts, but others do more exotic things. The particular weapon I latched onto was the spear, which I then modified with Boar Rush that provided immunity while hitting a special attack, Three-Headed Dragon that split my attack into three providing more lateral range, and Magic Spear that provided an extra attack when I was at near full health. It’s this kind of flexibility that really brings a lot of life to what is often an overlooked part of gearing in Zelda.

It then extends to fights that are generally just better than 2D Zelda. The one thing I would say is obviously different here is that the bosses are much quicker to move and attack. It brings a sense of danger that really frankly isn’t present in a typical Zelda game. What it also does is bring pace. A lot of the boss fights were frankly quick to defeat, but not because they were easy. It was because I often had one of two choices – lay back and avoid attacks to play it safe or take incredibly stupid and risky chances to lay in full-charge special attacks and try to burst the boss down before it could kill me. I generally took the second choice, it was often a bad idea, it was incredibly fun.

The flipside of this is that the focus on combat has reduced the complexity of the rest of the game. Some of that is admittedly good. Everything is quick and efficient to run through, and like the pace of combat being fast, the pace of traversal is fast. However, that does also mean that dungeons are generally pretty compact and don’t really have puzzles to solve. You kind of just follow the one path, which will generally loop back toward the entrance to open a shortcut and give you a key to move forward. The game does get some legs out of re-use of locations through the time travel mechanic, but besides the core city the changes tend to be pretty minimal from time period to time period. It’s effective as a story telling device, but not much beyond that.

Where they did get some points back on this was the time travel mechanic. The core conceit of the game is that you are travelling between different time periods of the same area over a millennium in the past. The major changes all occur within the core city of the game and its transition from a small village to a magic city to a destroyed city to a rebuilt kingdom. However, there’s little changes throughout the world as you play through each time period. It all ends up being familiar enough to quickly traverse through but introduces enough new elements to still feel like you’re discovering things. At times this can just be a weapon upgrade that is in a branch of a cave that is unlocked for a specific time period, but in others it ends up being a completely new way to traverse the world. It fairly smartly takes advantage of expanding the use of a smaller set of content while avoiding feeling stale. Again, that’s not unlike Zelda with Ocarina of Time or the Oracles games.

What I would ultimately land on is that this is every bit a great competitor to existing 2D action RPG franchises, and particularly focused toward Zelda. I don’t know that I think it surpasses things like the Link’s Awakening remake, but I also don’t think that one is necessarily a better game. What they provide are two very different takes on the genre with different focuses, and which one is deemed better is something I would expect to come down to preference of pace. What it is is a great example of a gameplay style that is not seen often enough and one that can certainly hold its own in the industry today.