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Game Ramblings #225 – Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight

More Info from TT Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox Series, PC, Switch 2

If Lego Skywalker Saga felt like a big leap forward for the series, I would now consider it a trial run. Lego Batman has completely removed a lot of the old grind of the Lego games and now feels like something that can stand on its own separate from the cute visuals. Given the abandonment of the Arkham series, this is probably the best continuation of that type of game I could have otherwise hoped for.

There are things where this feels like a clever blend of Lego and Arkham, but because of that this definitely feels less like a Lego game than in the past. The first spot that really hits is in characters. Past Lego games have had lineups of literally hundreds of characters that share specializations, allowing you to kind of mix and match. That is now gone. You have a core set of characters that you unlock from the hero side of Batman IP and that’s it. The gameplay that you get out of them is still core Lego. For example, Batman has his batarangs, Batgirl can hack things, Robin/Nightwing can connect things together to pull obstacles or build bridges, but it’s purposeful and not just collecting.

The combat is also much improved here. It’s not that it’s necessarily full action game, but it’s deep enough to be sufficient and fun. For the most part combat is core punching, but you have counters and dodging timed by visual cues to give it a little more flair. You have your traversal skills and items that can also be used in combat. An example would be Catwoman’s whip being used to spin screws out of doors to open the way, but in combat can be used to spin enemies in circles causing them to be stunned or pinball off other enemies.

The fact that the game takes place in a single open world area instead of tailored levels is also fairly new within the Lego gameplay, but it works well. Skywalker started leaning in that direction, with sort of core hub levels. However, it was still distinct areas for each movie that weren’t that far off of what existed in past Lego games. Batman is just Gotham, and it’s the same Gotham for the entire game even though it’s a blend of various bits of a bunch of the films all packed together. Story segments go into specific tailored levels but they feel appropriate and still living within the open world that you’re presented with.

This is all tied together with the open world having very Arkham-style activities to do. There’s your general crime fighting with random events popping up where you can take out bad guys. There’s generally collectable things to get in true Lego game fashion. However, the real meat of the activities are tied into things like story content for Killer Croc or an entire set of puzzle activities tied to Riddler or street racing and combat AR trials created by Lucius Fox. It makes it feel much more grounded in traditional open world territory than in pure Lego game territory.

However, this being a Lego game does mean that it knows to not take itself more seriously. The writing of the game is way more in line with 1960s Batman than Christian Bale Batman, and that is a really fun setup against the backdrop of the movie plot points. Mr. Freeze may be threatening to freeze the entire city, but when Batman gets disabled in the fight it’s because he gets turned into a Lego brick made of ice. Enemies don’t die but get blasted into the brick parts of their minifigs. Large enemies aren’t just buff, but instead are comically larger than Batman and are defeated by things like clapping cymbals on their head or trapping their head in a net. Catwoman doesn’t just cut a circle out of glass when she’s robbing places, she’s cutting a perfect 8×8 circle plate Lego out. There’s just a constant barrage of these little details all over the place that the TT Games team have built up as expected behavior in Lego games that work so well because it’s simultaneously the opposite of the more serious side of Batman while also just working perfectly against the slapstick nature of its past.

But it ultimately comes back to the love of the IP. All of the expected baddies are here so it isn’t surprising, but it is fun and it makes it clear that this is a game for Batman fans by Batman fans. I probably wouldn’t go so far as to call this game a game of the year candidate, but it certainly is making a good push at it. It is distinctly enough of a Lego game where most systems are not fully fleshes out in a way typical of a AAA game, but there’s nothing there that stands out to me as bad. What it ended up being the entire time was just fun, and it’s fun in the same way that the Lego games always have been but turned way more seriously. It’s clear that TT Games’ pace of output was pulled way back for Skywalker Saga and that certainly was a risk for them, but that game and Lego Batman have both shown that they can grow the fun and silliness of Lego in ways that push it into more traditional games without losing what brought me to play them in the first place.

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Game Ramblings #224 – Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm

More Info from Cornfox & Bros

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: iOS, Mac, PS5, Xbox Series, PC

The first Oceanhorn title showed that an indie could tackle a 2D style Zelda game with a lot of success. It wasn’t without its faults, but it brought together elements of A Link to the Past and Wind Waker in a really successful way. This one I would argue is less successful. It’s still a reasonably fun game, but going fully 3D definitely shows where it can be difficult for small teams to scale up their ambitions.

There is no arguing that this is going straight after the dungeon-based Zelda market. The metagame flow is to get to a new location, gain access to a relevant dungeon in the area, and defeat a big boss. Along the way you generally get an item or upgrade relevant to traversal there – bombs to get through blocked areas, swords for more damage, hookshot for covering gaps. The one big change is that you’re often accompanied by AI companions that also can get into combat or help with puzzles, though admittedly their presence is often not that useful beyond forced opportunities to use them.

The main place where the 3D transition really shows an inability to scale is simply in scope. This game only has three core dungeons plus a bit of smaller side content and mini dungeons that you hit along the way. There’s simply not much there to play and if you really put your head down this isn’t much more than 10 hours. That can be padded out via collecting side stuff, but it all largely comes down to treasure chests with items that convert to gold and there’s not a very compelling reason to even have gold. You can buy ammunition from vending machines, but the bulk heavy costs are for small upgrades to existing items that really didn’t feel like they affected balance much.

So then we look at core gameplay. On the surface it’s pretty solid. Core sword swinging is fine and works pretty seamlessly. Enemies have good tells for when they’re attacking so the player can dodge away effectively. There’s a gun system that’s the equivalent of Zelda bow & arrows, including elemental bullets, that is well used both in core combat (ex: freeze enemies) or in traversal (ex: solid patch of ice to walk on in water). The AI companions attacking also means that there’s quite a few situations in which the player is mobbed in a way that feels fun, even if the AI companies and NPCs distracting each other means the player situation is similar from a gameplay perspective.

However, there’s a level of polish missing that is evident here that I think also ties back to this being 3D. The boss fights had kind of a pattern of exploiting a weakness then hitting weak points when the boss was dazed. In the example above, the player would use electric element bullets to hit a hook on the turtle and stun it, leaving open weak points on the legs and stomach. However, the pattern here was that you had to use bullets, which run out, which then resulted in me spending more time running in circles collecting more ammo instead of doing anything interesting. This was sort of fixed in the end game where the boss fight ended up just having a vending machine to use mid-fight instead of wasting time. It felt like a system leaning too heavily on limited resources with long grinding actions. This is accompanied by general lack of polish in camera use – for example, there’s no Z-lock – or movement where I was too often getting stuck on small collisions during combat.

That’s not to say I didn’t have fun though. The boss fights are legitimately cool. The overworld and story is legitimately solid. The companion system and elemental gun are both really good. Visually it even handles itself well on the Switch, with the bigger brother console and PC versions looking spectacular. It’s just not quite there, needing another iteration or polish pass in its current iteration. However, it does make me want to take a peek at Oceanhorn 3 now that it’s out on Apple Arcade and I suppose if nothing else, that’s a win for a franchise.

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Game Ramblings #223 – Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined

More Info from Square Enix

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

This is an easy ramblings for me to write. In a lot of ways it boils down to one question – do you like traditional JRPGs? If the answer is yes, then frankly you’ve probably already played this game. However, for as good as the original and 3DS releases of this game were, the game is just unnecessarily long. That’s something that is incredibly common for Dragon Quest games in general, though it’s been getting better in recent years. That is really what my mind was focused on coming out of this.

I had put off starting this one for a while because I didn’t really want to tackle an 80 hour JRPG. I just don’t really have that kind of time to play games anymore. I’d heard some people recommend it and noting that it was shorter. I then noticed that its How Long to Beat page was seeing 40-50 hours as a more common time to complete. That kind of time investment is a bit more doable. That drop in length by about half comes about in a few ways. However, it’s not unfair to say that it’s simply because the game just loads quicker. Getting into fights is quicker. Getting into zones is quicker. Getting through the time portals is quicker. It just compresses the experience through lack of loading.

However, the more beneficial part was how much quicker leveling can be, and that’s entirely up to the player. One of the things that recent Dragon Quest titles have been doing is giving players more control over difficulty. It started with things like an “easy” difficulty that ramped up player damage, ramped down damage taken, and ramped up XP gained. It then added a lot more over world automatic battles when you as the player have gotten strong enough. DQ7R is the most granular control that they’ve given, and it’s much to the game’s benefit.

The way that I chose to play this title was with the following settings:

  • Damage: Normal for given and received
  • XP Gained: Increased
  • Gold Gained: Increased
  • Job Points: Increased

What this essentially is is a settings group that is the game at intended difficulty, but with significantly less grinding. I was essentially choosing to just have less combat for the sake of making the experience faster while preserving difficulty. This gets combined with the fact that battles are no longer random in recent titles, so you can choose to simply skip combat entirely if you’re at an appropriate power level.

This simply makes the game faster and it’s much better as a result. The pattern I like in JRPGs is to figure out the enemy setups, fight them a few times, then move on. I don’t need to fight things dozens of times to get my value. At that point it’s just boring. In a case like this where XP gained is high, I can simply fight things to get my entertainment, then move on.

There’s additional little gameplay things that are added like save/heal points that appear frequently right before bosses to act as safety and time savers for the player. There’s a weird side effect that comes out of this – I use MP-based skills far more often. Because I don’t need to fight as much, I can dump my resources for the sake of fun. Because I know I’ll heal before a boss I’m not preserving my resources for the boss. If I’ve used everything and don’t want to spend items, I can simply avoid fighting. The combination of these things further enhances the speed of playing the game because I can simply be aggressive on offense, which is something that a lot of older JRPGs didn’t really allow.

I’ve said similar things about recent JRPGs that have pushed into streamlining the experience for the player. A recent example includes Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. I just don’t buy arguments about JRPGs needing length to be of value. To me empty grinding is just fluff and I’d rather have a shorter experience. The DQ1-3 HD2D remakes and now this DQ7 remake show that Square is taking the idea of a cleaner experience seriously for the players. This is everything about the story and metagame that made the original great, now combined with modern sensibilities around not wasting the player’s time. It’s a far better game for it.