Author: schenksmill

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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 #202 – Stellar Blade

More Info from Shift Up

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PC

I’m not sure what I thought this game was and admittedly I was playing this entirely because it’s an Unreal Engine title on PS5, which is relevant to the fact that I’m largely working on console porting projects right now. In my head it was going to be slightly hornier Nier Automata, and I guess that isn’t entirely wrong. However, it’s generally got a much more deliberate combat pace. It’s got segments of ranged combat that feel far more like Doom 3. The boss fights are full of spectacle and challenge without feeling unfair. Frankly, this ended up being a far better game than I was expecting it to be.

A lot of what I’m going to say probably isn’t going to be much of a surprise for this type of game. When combat works the game is phenomenal, but it starts to fall apart when they throw multiple enemies at you. This has been the case for me in pretty much any melee action RPG – God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Breath of the Wild, etc. So many of these games work great in singular combat, but the systems just don’t scale up to multiple enemies. They try to UX their way through it with off-screen enemy indicators and things of that nature, but it really doesn’t work well because the enemies all just kind of attack when they want to, so it becomes dodge and parry spam with very few windows to attack. However, the upside of this is that fights like that don’t generally happen in pivotal moments and they start to give you so many tools to knock out multiple things quickly that it becomes much rarer as the game goes on. At that point, combat then gets into the big 1-on-1 fights where the game really shines.

The core tools at your disposal in a 1-on-1 situation are your two levels of melee attacks, parrying, and dodging. I’m going to ignore that you have guns because they are largely irrelevant to boss fights. The big solo fights end up being an incredible back and forth. You do a bit of damage, dodge/parry your way through an enemy attack pattern, then rush back in for the next set of damage. The style of it reminds me in a lot of ways of a slightly more frantic and over the top version of the Ghost of Tsushima 1-on-1 fights.

What these segments do is put a ton of trust in the player to learn and recognize attack patterns. Tells on basic attacks are super obvious, letting the player really lean into timing things properly. Larger attacks are preceded by color coded UI elements, but they aren’t things that can just be button spammed. For example, a blue enemy attack requires the player to dodge forward to avoid large damage, but if they don’t time it properly they will just eat the damage to the face. Some of these are warnings several seconds ahead of time, so it also really forces some patience into the combat pace where the player just should not be doing anything but paying attention to dodge timing. It’s easy during all of this to get tunnel vision on just doing damage, but the game will absolutely 100-0 your health if you get out of control so pulling back on damage in favor of a patient approach does wonders, and in practice it feels so good when you get chains of parries/dodges right to be rewarded with big damage opportunities.

The other part that really worked into this was how well gearing worked into combat. Traditionally I am awful at melee combat timing. However, the game has gear that extended the timing window for these to allow me to play it a bit more safe. Some gear gave me more shield to allow for a bit of safety. Some gear gave me back health on kills to allow trash segments to just flow better. However, the game absolutely gives you tools if you want to be a glass cannon. Some gear gives huge damage increases in favor of also receiving more damage. Some gear will only allow you to get increased damage if your HP is high. Basically, they give you a bunch of tools to play with and let you mold combat into somewhere you’re comfortable being based on your play style, but it all blends so well into the core set of capabilities that they developed from the start.

The rest of the game kind of just exists but worked well enough to push me forward. The overall plot is a pretty standard post-apocalyptic Earth scenario that isn’t frankly that different from a Horizon Zero Dawn where humanity created smart ass robots that inevitably realized that humans are the problem. Exploration and side quests exist as a way to get more upgrade materials, but for me they were largely there for me to find more optional boss encounters to go enjoy. The environment is mostly the same two sets of desert environments from Nier for exploration and city environments from The Last of Us for linear plot segments but both work well to push their style of game. Basically, the wrappings around combat don’t necessarily boost the game, but they also don’t drag it down.

I completely get if the main character’s outfits turn you off of the game because it can get pretty egregious with some of the options. However, for me it ultimately ended up feeling like an obvious marketing choice than anything else. Once I was in the core of combat, the outfit I had on didn’t matter to me and my focus was on the really good combat in front of me. There is a phenomenal action combat loop here that deserves to be brought into a different setting that isn’t blatantly sexualized, because in a lot of ways it felt like it was cracking the code of making parry/dodge based combat work for someone like me who is typically awful at these games without getting rid of possibilities for people who want to just glass cannon through the game with a completely different play style.

It’s pretty easy to read what I wrote and go “this sounds good, but not great” and that’s probably an accurate description. However, I was expecting the combat to also be good but not great and it so completely exceeded my expectations there. This one just ended up being a huge surprise.

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Game Ramblings #201 – Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Wii U

I never actually finished the original game. I hit some point where there was a huge difficulty spike and just couldn’t be bothered doing the grinding to get through whatever the block was for me. I don’t know if it was the platform being played on, other games coming out around then, or that this release got a rebalance but that was never a problem on this version. 95 hours later this game was an incredible joy to play.

Playing this game now really is a series of “I don’t remember…” moments, but I suppose that comes with the nature of this being a 10 year old game that I didn’t finish. The first thing that really struck me was that I don’t remember it taking so long to get the mechs. I was at least 30 hours in before I got the mech and at least 50 hours in before the mech could fly. However, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I spent so much time exploring on foot in ways that was absolutely fun and interesting.

The thing that struck me as impressive here that I didn’t remember is how much you can literally explore the entire world on foot relatively early in the game. Every zone has an entire level range of areas from low to high. However, high level enemies aren’t necessarily dangerous on foot because they will ignore you. They’re huge and level 60 and you’re effectively an ant. However, if you come back in a mech later on they absolutely attack you. What it did for me was allow me to just wander for the sake of wandering. Sure, I was also generally chasing some basic mission marker for extra XP or rewards, but it wasn’t like I was chasing a story mission. I was just wandering to see what was there and what I could find and generally doing it in areas that I wouldn’t get to in the story for dozens of hours. It was simply fun in the way that exploring the mainline Xenoblade games is fun, but in an even more open nature.

The thing I don’t remember about the original release is precisely where I shelved it. There’s a point about 2/3 of the way through the game where I think may have been it. In the fight I’m thinking of you fight what is effectively a gigantic floating fortress with a bunch of adds that spawn throughout it. It’s a bit of a fight of managing focus and a bit of a fight that is just checking your DPS, and it’s the one boss fight that I did manage to wipe in here.

In this release it felt appropriately hard but not impossible, and I think that feeling of balance being better exists throughout but I can’t really tell if that is a placebo effect. In classic Xenoblade fashion, balance is a wild mess of numbers that don’t really have any relation. A level 40 bug is different than a level 40 gorilla is different than a level 40 dinosaur is different than a level 40 flying blimp fish. You basically learn by dying what you should really be fighting, and the unfortunate thing about that is that there’s a lot of stuff that is hard to fight that earns you effectively no reward because it’s “low level” by the time you put up a fair fight. To me, that’s just Xenoblade and it’s a problem that every game in the series has had. The nice thing here though is that the game does a pretty good job of balancing the core golden story path to where if you’re at the level recommended in the quests, it feels appropriate. If you want a harder experience you go in slightly lower level. If you want an easier experience you go in slightly higher level. It all just works well, and that’s not something I remember of the original release. Frankly, it’s something that they didn’t really get that right until Xenoblade 2, and the remaster of this and XB1 show those learnings.

Tied into the balance thing is that I don’t remember doing as much of the “side” content in the original release, and frankly I don’t remember enjoying doing it either. In this release though, I was doing everything. I think some of that is tied into the fact that I was enjoying exploring in general. It’s easy to hit mission points incidentally when you’re just exploring anything and everything. However, I was also enjoying doing the little character side stories.

It struck me how important the character missions are to the actual plot of the game. Relative to the main entries, this is a very story light experience if you follow just the main story line. However, if you do the character stories – and importantly, are thorough in recruiting characters – you get a lot more world building. You get stories of how other alien races came to this world and are involved with the main antagonists of the game. You get back stories of how the humans got to know each other and ended up on the space ship that escaped Earth. You get to see the team building as it’s happening. In core Xenoblade games, these are things that kind of just happened as you played the game, but here are presented as side content, and I think the game experience is worse if they are treated like that by most players. There is a surprising amount of story content here if you go after it.

All that being said, the main draw for me was that there was new content in play here. It’s….fine. Ultimately the story portion of it was a better draw for me than the game portion. The game portion railroads you into a really long slog of a dungeon that takes place in a stereotypical JRPG floating island void and I could have gone without it. However, the story part closes a lot of plot holes that were never resolved in the original game and it sets them up for what now feels like an inevitable sequel and for that I suppose I’m thankful. I now want to see more of this style Xenoblade gameplay explored – although please change the combat inputs to be XC2 style instead of the hotbar. The mech gameplay is just such a fun experience that I don’t want to see them drop.

This remaster almost certainly exists because Monolith needed an excuse to do engine testing for the Switch 2 and Xenoblade 1-3 already existed on the Switch 1. If that is the justification for this existing, then hell ya. They wrapped the story of those games with 3, so opening up the story a bit here to maybe give them a path forward in the XCX story line on Switch 2 also feels like an absolute win. Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with going forward.