schenksmill

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.

2024-11-222024-11-22

Game Ramblings #196 – Metaphor: ReFantazio

More Info from Atlus

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

All I want to do right now is complain. I don’t want to talk about the great evolution of the SMT/Persona combat system. I don’t want to talk about the fantastic world design and writing. I don’t want to talk about the immaculate class system and the tons of variety you get with the class interactions. I don’t want to talk about how fucking incredibly cool the boss designs are being pulled from late 1400s paintings. I don’t want to talk about the fact that I managed to squeeze 60 hours out of this game. I just want to complain.

This is an Atlus game to its core, and that means a lot of things to me that I’d have hoped in the past 20+ years they would have started to improve on. The pattern for me with Atlus titles is always the same. I absolutely ADORE the first half of the game as combat finishes opening up and the game really settles into a pattern of diving into a dungeon and improving your party. I dig into the class designs and figure out party patterns that really fit my play style. The game then starts to add some dungeons that are just a little longer than it feels like they should be. It then starts throwing bosses at you that just….don’t have weaknesses, ruining the fun part of exploiting them during combat. It then throws dungeons at you that are egregiously long, making you fight the same 7 enemies for several hours. It then really pushes the power curve of enemies so you have to spend far more time grinding than you want to for very little reason other than what feels like game time padding. I then fight with not shelving the game, and just cranking it to the easiest difficulty to finish up the story.

That is my Persona path. That is my Shin Megami Tensei path. That is my Metaphor path.

You know what isn’t fun? Long dungeons. And I mean that in the literal sense. A dungeon really has a pretty specific shelf life. You go in and enjoy it for a while because you’re fighting new enemies, figuring out their weaknesses, and tweaking your party to fit the pattern. You then enjoy it for a while longer because you feel powerful having cracked the dungeon, able to go through effectively one shotting anything that comes your way. You then start running low on mana because you’ve been at this pattern for a while, and frankly you’ve killed the same things so many times that now you just want to see something new. That lasts about 30-45 minutes on the high end. The first half of the game, that’s about the length of time that you’re probably spending in the dungeons and it’s ideal.

The second half? Dungeons start creeping into an hour, then an hour and a half, then two hours, then three hours. Eventually they’ve just become so long that I was dreading going into them. The gaps between safe rooms that you can warp back to on a return trip become so far apart that it feels like a slog, rather than a bit of a stretch to get just that little bit further. That is not a fun way to end a game.

You know what isn’t fun? Bosses that simply have no weaknesses. The entire core of the Persona/SMT combat system that is present here is that you figure out weaknesses and exploit those weaknesses to get more turns and beat the enemies quicker. The entire power fantasy here is playing smart, making sure your party can counter most things, then hammering on it. For the first half of the game you can generally be sure that most bosses have at least a physical weakness and a magic weakness and things are fun.

As the game goes on, sometimes the bosses just reflect all magic which isn’t ideal if your play style is based on doing heavy magic burst. Sometimes they just have no weakness, which means the fight is simply a grind where you can’t really take advantage of anything. Then they start doing things where you’re chasing debuffs (wasting turns) while not being able to hit a weakness (not gaining extra turns) while also requiring specific focus fire mechanics so your party ends up being a bunch of Almighty magic dealers that can clear debuffs and at least most of them can heal, because at least THAT can’t be countered by anyone and gives you a safety net. It takes a fun combat system and distills it down to a really boring stripped set of mechanics – presumably because the big bad can’t have a weakness for story reason. It’s not a fun way to end the game.

You know what isn’t fun? The final dungeon of the game having a 15 level separation between the starting enemies and the final boss. What that immediately says to me is “hey, we ran out of time to really smooth out the power curve and the big bad had a target, so grind away.” The first half of the dungeon had enemies so weak that they could be killed in the overworld, the second half of the dungeon had stuff that was still reasonably strong and good for XP, but still a good 8-10 levels below the final boss, then the boss had a huge unnecessary jump that if I was to grind to get closer to it in level would have had the ENTIRE dungeon as too weak to even fight. By this point I’d already dropped the difficulty because I just wanted to finish but if I was playing on a normal difficulty I’d have been pissed at having to claw over that difficulty spike.

There’s some part of me that was thinking that a lot of my gripes simply came down to me getting older and less patient with games that take so long. With small kids in the house I just can’t really sit there and grind in JRPGs like I used to. I can’t really remember everything that I was doing the day or two or three days ago when I had to suddenly drop the game in the middle of a dungeon. I can’t really remember what I had intended my path through the game calendar to be when I had last picked it up. However, those things were not my problem with the game. My problems with the game are the same problems I had with Persona 4 when I was in college. They are the same problems I had when playing Shin Megami Tensei IV on the DS living alone in San Diego at my first videogame industry job. They are the same problems I had playing Persona 5 as an increasingly jaded game developer. They are the same problems I had when I shelved SMT 5 after my first kid was born when it was clear that it was just going to be about grinding.

I guess I just don’t understand why Atlus games are increasingly successful when they feel so hostile to the player. Maybe that is me growing out of touch with the general gaming public, but it’s a weird thing for me to look at from a developer perspective and not just go “you can smooth out these handful of things and have a much better game.” The SMT series and its offshoots just continue to feel like games that are literally small tweaks away from being great and despite it all their review scores just continue to improve. I just don’t feel like reviewers are actually completing the games and are instead stopping at the half way point where I still love the game.

But hey, maybe I am just that out of touch.