Category: Vita

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Game Ramblings #41 – Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment

More Info from Yacht Club Games

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Vita
  • Also Available On: Windows, Linux, OS X, PS3, PS4, Wii U, 3DS, Xbox One, Fire TV

TL;DR

  • As mechanically tight and satisfying as the original Shovel of Hope campaign.
  • Fills a neat void as a prequel story to the original campaign.  Gives a lot of great backstory to one of the original bosses.
  • Changes to core mechanics greatly benefit traversal-based puzzle solving and bring a nice twist to combat.

Let’s get this out of the way.  If you’ve never played Shovel Knight, go grab the original campaign right now.  It’s one of the greatest examples in the past few years of a mechanically solid 2D platformer, regardless of the fact that it then goes even further and solidly represents an 8-bit style to great effect.  Specter of Torment is now the third campaign under the Shovel Knight umbrella, covering the prequel backstory to the Specter Knight boss from the original.  It brings some interesting mechanics with the change in weapon that really benefit the expansion overall.

The big obvious change here is that you’ve got a scythe instead of a shovel.  This has some pretty big ramifications to both combat and traversal.  Straight away the shovel bounce is replaced by a lock-on melee dash used for both traversal and combat.  For traversal, this ends up giving a lot more interesting and challenging traversal options.  Enemies, obstacles, and projectiles can all be used as traversal targets, meaning that entire rooms can be traversed without touching the floor.  This is used extremely effectively in getting the Specter through auto scrolling segments where falling down would mean death.  There’s also entire runs through boss fights where I would combo dashes the entire time without touching the ground.  While the original campaign was pretty quick paced, Specter had an entirely higher level of speed, and greatly benefited from this change.  While this will feel pretty immediately familiar to players of the original, at this point I’m leaning towards a greater enjoyment of this expansion purely because everything feels so fast.  It’s one of the best feelings a game can bring when I sit there comboing enemies while juggling them in the air, and it’s rare to see a game nail it so well.

Because of the emphasis on speed over safety, the items that are earned throughout the campaign also play into this.  Rather than being generally offense focused, a lot of the items are generally interesting helper items.  There’s a healing item that allows you to take greater risks and focus more on slash combos over a defensive play style.  There’s a hover item that lets you stay in the air to extend combos or get to a platform out of reach.  There are items that spawn a secondary clone of the Specter, as well as one that spawns a projectile firing skeleton.  In general, the items are used to effectively extend the speed focus on combat, rather than being used as purely secondary weapons, and all play into making sure the speed of encounters is kept as high as possible.

Overall this was a pretty solid expansion that I think ends up surpassing the original from a pure gameplay perspective.  Like Plague of Shadows, it’s also a nice touch to see the backstory to one of the original bosses, and give them more life than simply being a target of the Shovel Knight.  Given development of these campaigns seems to be continuing, with the King Knight’s campaign being up next, the Shovel Knight as a platform seems to have a lot of life.  We’ve now got three campaigns that all play fairly differently, and Specter of Torment shows to me that they are only improving as they go along.

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Game Ramblings #38 – Ray Gigant

More Info from Wikipedia

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS TV / Vita
  • Also Available On: Windows (Steam)

TL;DR

  • Decent battle system, a few changes not typical of the genre w/ move cost and HP regen made battles feel a lot more impactful
  • Battle animation was a clear focus for the visual needs of the game
  • Outside of the battle system, the game is significantly more average
  • Story works, but not much to write home about

Ray Gigant is for the most part a pretty standard first-person dungeon crawler JRPG.  It’s got a normal mapping system that generates as you wander around the dungeons.  The battles are for the most part a standard turn-based affair.  The visual-novel styled story hits a lot of points that are by and large not unusual for a sort of post-apocalyptic games out of Japan.  However, there are a few things that it does that are at least of note, even if they don’t really elevate this to anything more than average for the genre.

The biggest problem that I really had with this game is that it didn’t really do much with the dungeon crawling aspect.   The environments that I was walking through had occasional puzzles (forced teleports, one way entrances, etc), but they were never that challenging.  The art and enemies used for each story arc was the same the entire time, so once you did the first run for an arc, you knew what you were seeing.  The lack of being able to draw on the map was also a deterrent compared to 3DS games like the Etrian Odyssey series, where I could directly put traps and notes on the map as I progressed.  In general it was pretty clear that for as simple as the first-person dungeon crawling was, it was also the area that received the least amount of love, so by the end of a story arc, I was typically doing what I could just to rush through dungeons to get to the good parts.

Since this is a JRPG, the core of the gameplay is in its battle system.  This is where they really do some of the things that are less standard for the genre.  There’s a pretty basic elemental system, as well as differentiation between ground, air, and undead enemies, giving a nice amount of flexibility in how you take advantage of each character’s move set to get through the battles as quick as possible.  This is backed up by everything being based on an Attack Point value, rather than a more typical mana cost.  The AP regenerates by either waiting a turn with a character, or by taking damage, so the harder battles had an interesting play between preserving AP, using heals to keep the party going, then going all out in an attack pattern to get your bulk damage in at once.  The system also resets all HP in between fights, so each fight feels more impactful, rather than becoming more of a resource-management slog that a lot of dungeon crawlers fall into.

The visual treatment of the battles is also worth noting.  All the characters have pretty decent idle animations, both the player and non-player characters.  While it doesn’t extend to the basic attack animations, it adds a nice flourish to the battle while you’re setting up your turn.

This also extends into the Slash Beat system used for a generally boss-only massive special attack.  For reasons known only to the development team, the game turns into a rhythm game at this point, but it works out shockingly well as a distraction in the middle of larger fights.

The core leveling system also takes a bit of an unexpected turn.  There’s no XP to be had at all in the game, and tied to that there are also no distinct item drops.  All fights drop one of three types of core resources, ones used for upgrading gear, ones used for purchasing skills, and ones used for purchasing character levels.  Since these drop from any fight, there’s a really quick feedback loop between the fights you’re engaging in, and the upgrades the characters receive.  It also ends up allowing for highly flexible team builds.  Taking too much damage and need defense? Spend resources into the character’s shield upgrades and get better gear, or use the skill purchase resources to get damage mitigation.  Need more attack damage? Spend resources into the character’s weapons or purchase character levels in physical damage.  Rather than being on the fairly preset path typical of most JRPGs, this feels a lot closer in style to more western RPGs, where gear builds are typically more fine grained.

However, the little details start to show where the game lacks the polish of larger budget titles.  Aside from the environment art repetition mentioned above, the story itself leaves a lot to be desired.  It pretty much follows most character tropes (broody male that doesn’t want to interact with people, airhead girl that doesn’t pay attention to things around her, obviously evil older mustached guy, etc) without going into any interesting territory.  Although there are three distinct story arcs, each one is over within a few hours, so the characters don’t have the time to grow, even if they had been written to do so.  There’s also a subsystem in battles called Parasitism that activates periodically, changing attack cost from AP to character HP.  In general it activates at inopportune times during boss battles, but can be immediately cleared with a Slash Beat attack.  It seems to serve no purpose other than linking into the story and being annoying.

Overall this was fairly average, but a nice distraction from what I’ve been playing recently.  It definitely doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and there are far better dungeon crawlers out there for people being introduced to the genre.  However, it scratched the itch for me without getting heavily in the way, and at least had a few nice surprises for me along the way.

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Game Ramblings #13 – MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune vs. Zombies

More info from Idea Factory

  • Platform: Vita (PlayStation TV Compatible)
  • Genre: Action RPG

Blanc + Neptune as the long name implies, is an extension of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, this time acting as a side story focused on Blanc.  The gameplay is similar to Vita and Steam release Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed.  I’d also played that one, so went in knowing roughly what to expect, but generally left entertained but disappointed as it felt like it hadn’t picked up on the promise of that title.

Let’s get this out of the way first.  Like the rest of the Neptunia series,  the girls are all powerful female forms of various game consoles and properties, and the setting absolutely makes fun of some known videogame tropes.  In this case, the girls are part of a high school movie club, and spend most of the game filming movies that poke fun at the Resident Evil series.  Like the rest of the series, the story is generally pretty non-serious, but absolutely entertaining.  Also like Neptunia U, the minute to minute gameplay is relatively fast paced, and generally entertaining combo-based action RPG gameplay.  So then, where do things go wrong?

Neptunia U at its core was a game out along the lines of the various Warriors titles, where individual levels would often result in killing hundreds or thousands of enemies as I went around completing the story and various side quests.  Far as I can recall, the most enemies I was tasked at killing in Blanc + Neptune was 80.  That right there exemplifies a lot of the problem I had with this game.  It took what worked in Neptunia U, and made it all shorter.  There was less story, less action, less side questing, less progression.  The core game was there, but felt like a step back in the series.  In the end it definitely felt that this was a side game focused on a side character, where the game just didn’t receive the attention that a core Neptunia title would receive.

So, was it worth playing?  Probably, though I’d probably recommend waiting on the price dropping some.  End of the day, these games have always been pretty mindless fun, and this was no different.  I was generally just left feeling like they could have done so much more, even if they just went in with the goal to match Neptunia U.