Category: ARPG

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Game Ramblings #133 – Persona 5 Strikers

More Info from Atlus

Persona 5 Ramblings

  • Genre: ARPG / Musou
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam

It’s always been fascinating to me how Omega Force has taken their Warriors gameplay and warped it into other series. Hyrule Warriors did a surprising job of integrating the Zelda items into the chaotic gameplay. Fire Emblem Warriors made great use of the weapon triangle to give advantages in combat. Dragon Quest Heroes and One Piece Warriors feel right at home within the source material of their series. However, Persona 5 Strikers may be the damndest of them all. It’s not just a musou conversion of P5. It straight up has the metagame feel of the JRPG, while still taking place within large scale musou fights. It’s an uncanny conversion that has resulted in a special sequel to what was already a pretty special source game, even if I had some complaints about boss balance in that one. Luckily, some choices were made to really smooth out the experience here, resulting in what is possibly an even better experience as a result.

There’s a certain rhythm to a JRPG experience that just doesn’t jive with what I typically think of with the Warriors gameplay. Those are large battles where you’re running around taking over smaller zones on a larger battlefield. That also wouldn’t jive with the Persona series expectations. Luckily the team seems to have recognized that. Up until you’re actually in a fight, this feels like Persona. The terminology may have changed a bit, but this game’s palaces – now called jails – have the same setup that we already saw. You spend some time exploring the jail, hit some key locations to move the plot of it along, get to the point where you send out a calling card, and then fight the boss of the jail. It’s instantly familiar and easy to fall into, right up until you actually start a fight.

Combat is where the musou influences come into play, and boy is it as fun as ever to be in large scale fights. Trash fights will be anywhere from a handful to dozens of enemies, typically scaling based on how difficult the things you’re fighting are. However, even here it feels familiar. Personas still come hugely into play, as the elemental weaknesses from the previous game are still present. All-Out attacks are there, but they’re instead triggered via stunning enemies with attacks of types matching their weaknesses. Showtimes have returned from 5 Royal, but are now based on charging them up via damage and kills. Gearing and items are also both there in a very JRPG fashion. Basically, all the pieces are there, but now taking place against a ton of enemies in real time.

The real thing that surprised me is how all of those mechanics mesh well within the context of the new combat. The combat is fast and frenetic, but not overwhelming. I spent a lot of time dodging around as a default instinct, helped along by really good enemy targeters giving you a clear indication of when you should be dodging attacks instead of focusing on damage. Magic attacks with your Personas pause the combat, giving you a bit of time to strategize around hitting enemy weaknesses. All-out attacks do a short pause and ping the enemy that can be hit with it, giving you a clear indication that you should be shifting focus. It’s all fast and fluid, but very clear in terms of what’s going on. For a musou title, that’s actually kind of surprising, since they can often be large periods of mindless spam, where the strategy is at a metagame level instead of the actual combat.

It’s also kind of surprising how well this scales down to battles of one. Boss fights are largely one vs the party, and it just kind of works. The bosses have bigger mechanical pieces and a much larger chance to nuke the party if you aren’t paying attention, but it feels fair. Boss nuke mechanics can be interrupted by hitting their weakness, which encourages a pretty diverse Persona squad. However, the boss locations also typically have environmental pieces that can attack those weaknesses as well. I had problems with Persona 5’s bosses, where it often felt like a pattern of die once, figure out the weakness, then easily win. Here, the bosses uniformly felt tough but fair. Going into a fight without the right Persona made the fights significantly harder, but I could still win. Going into a fight without SP generating items meant that I would want to preserve SP for healing, but I could still win. As long as I was committed to dodging mechanics I would get through it based on skill, and not need to cheese the fights.

This is also kind of a hot take but they got rid of the time limiting calendar mechanic and I couldn’t be happier. I get that limiting your activities and forcing you to focus on some subset of things is kind of a Persona standard at this point, but I’ve never been a fan of it. In general I don’t like time gating mechanics, as it feels like an unnecessary forced stress point on players. P5S only has the calendar for story purposes. You can jump in and out of dungeons as much as you want and the calendar won’t move forward. It feels like a best of both worlds. The calendar is there to act as a framing device for the plot, but it’s no longer there to be a limiter on the player.

I’m hoping to see something like this done for future mainline titles, even if it just means that you get a little more freedom to do multiple things within a phase of a day in a future P6. Want to talk to multiple people in an afternoon because they all go to your school and why the hell couldn’t you do that? Yes please. Taking a Persona 5 example, want to do make some progress in a palace then switch over to Mementos because the palace is too high leveled for your current party? Sure why the hell not? Don’t waste an entire day because you were going into the unknown. It feels like there’s options for them to make the calendar less punishing without losing the heart of the series, and I hope that the mechanic being entirely gone in a spinoff allows them the ability to rethink what they want with the mechanic.

This is both a sequel and a spinoff, and it works well in both cases. As a sequel to Persona 5, we get a fun story that makes sense in-world and gives more time with a set of characters that I really enjoy watching. As a spinoff it gives an entirely different type of gameplay, while still feeling familiar in its inclusion of specific mechanics from the previous title. As a Warriors game, it also shows some of the largest range in terms of pulling two series together. It’s just a fantastically well made experience that I can’t recommend enough.

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Game Ramblings #130 – Ys IX: Monstrum Nox

More Info from NIS America

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PC, Switch summer 2021 as of this post

The last time I visited the Ys series, I found an action RPG with a lot to like. Fast fluid combat was really the leading winner, but the rest of the game did its job well enough to keep me engaged. Ys IX is much the same. There’s some new wrinkles as to how the game’s world unfolds, but the combat is still as fast and fun as ever.

After my shelving of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I really needed something fast. Ys IX is definitely fast. If there’s any description I could give to someone that doesn’t know the series, it’s that it feels like the Sonic of RPGs. Movement is fast, combat is fast, things die fast, reactions happen fast. This game grabs you by the arm, drags you along, and doesn’t let up until you’re done. It was exactly what I needed.

Combat is largely the same as in past games, but it works so well. Your core moves are some direct melee attacks and AoE skills bound to face buttons. You’ve got parry and dodge on your shoulders. Timing either of those to an enemy attack gives you benefits (crit, regen, etc) that make it absolutely worth getting it right. For the most part that’s about it. Some enemies have weaknesses to specific weapons, but you can get by without really taking advantage of that.

It sounds pretty simple at face value, and to some extent it is. However, it’s largely necessary. Because of the speed of the action, that’s about as much as you can really balance at one time. You don’t really have the luxury of down time to plan out your moves or try to do anything complex. You’re watching for enemy tells so you can hit your defensive moves then hitting as many attacks as you can between that. On the attack side you’re going back and forth between skills that use resources and basic attacks that generate resources. That back and forth becomes your main combat rhythm, and timing your skill dumps with the enemy being stunned is the min/max setup that I really went after.

The rest of the game is pretty standard fare. Like Ys VII, the story isn’t the best ever but gets the job done. What ends up really being the thing to push you forward are all of the little gearing systems around. You can get through the game with just the base equipment, but there’s also a ton of potential in using the gear vendors to upgrade or craft new things. That leads you into wanting to open new areas for new crafting items, which leads you into exploring the map, which leads you into getting a bunch of cool loot. It’s a really tight loop, but there’s enough there to really push you to hit everything, rather than skipping content.

The gating of all of that is probably the most interesting mechanic. The world of Ys IX is basically gated behind barriers that can only be unlocked by battling monsters in-town or doing side quests. Getting to certain thresholds open up portals to the Grimwald Nox. Fights within this aren’t just your normal party – it’s every single character you have available, backed by additional support characters that you unlock along the way. These fights are absolute hilarious chaos, which is fun on its own. However, the fact that you can use characters unlocked via side quests gives you an additional reason to push for completion in a way that’s not grindy, but instead still a lot of fun.

Ys IX is a lot like the Tales of series for me. They aren’t the best games ever. They definitely have some rough edges. However, they are always fun. It’s the type of game that I know I can fall into if I’m looking to get past a game that bored me, and this was absolutely the case here. This was another entry with exciting, fast combat backed by enough of a story and good world systems to push me to easy completion, and with a much higher percentage of content finished than I typically would try to get through. It also got me past a wall of some amount of boredom that I got stuck in playing Sackboy and Valhalla. In that way it was the perfect refresher for me, but still one that I think I’d recommend at face value.

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Shelved It #9 – Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

More Info From Ubisoft

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, Stadia, Luna

Kotaku has an article called Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Is Too Damn Long. That really is the crux of the problem, but it’s not that simple. Yes it’s too long, but for me a lot of it being too long is that this game didn’t do anything new. It’s the same as Assassin’s Creedy Origins and Odyssey. While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – after all I really enjoyed Odyssey – Valhalla falls in a place where there’s been better in the intervening years, and that’s the biggest thing that caused me to give up. I put about 30 hours into this one and kind of didn’t feel like I needed to move on from there.

The first problem I ran into is that combat wasn’t that fun and stealth was systematically nerfed, so I didn’t feel like I had a gameplay path that really fit anything. My past tendency in AC games was always to go full stealth – sneak into places, pick guys off one by one, finish my objective, and sneak on out. However, a lot of the main storyline in Valhalla requires straight combat. There’s viking raids that force the entire area into active combat. There’s story missions that have AI buddies that cause active combat. Basically, I spent a lot of time in places that forced me to fight or do some extraordinarily annoying things to get to a point where I could try to stealth while chaos was going on around me. It actively fought how I wanted to play the game, which is not really something I want to be doing in an Assassin’s Creed title.

This would be all well and good if combat was fun, but frankly it just wasn’t. Ghost of Tsushima had its combat problems, but it felt like a logical progression in combat in this type of subgenre. Valhalla has a lot of the same core elements, but a couple main things really felt like a step backwards. For one, the lack of stances made combat feel like it lacked variety. Beyond some light defensive aspects of some shielded units, the difference between enemy weapon types or trash vs. brutes felt minimal to the point of irrelevance.

However, the AI in groups felt like the biggest oddity to me. Group combat in the AC genre has never been that great, and frankly it was the biggest downfall of Ghost of Tsushima as well. However, group AI really feels like it doesn’t do anything to divvy out who is actively going to attack. It results in a situation where the group AI feels less opportunistic and planned, and more random happenstance. Sure it’s probably more realistic, but it’s also boring. Attack avoidance becomes dodge spam as the practical option instead of better parry timing or intelligent target selection. It’s effective, but it’s boring. The lack of unique duels from Tsushima really then pulls away one of my favorite combat setups in that game, so there’s no real payoff moments, even in big story moments.

It doesn’t help that Immortals: Fenyx Rising by Ubisoft was one of my recent played titles, and despite similar combat, was simply more fun due to much better grouping tactics for AI, doing one at a time attacks with good tells, instead of seemingly random spam.

The exploration metagame was also a big disappointment here, and felt like a step back even within the series. Origin and Odyssey both had camps and towns with distinct goals – take out a leader, kill all enemies, eliminate a legendary animal. Valhalla just…..doesn’t. All of the location stuff is there, but without goals it all feels irrelevant. You’ll go to your Assassin’s Creed viewpoints and it will find a bunch of stuff, but it’s scattered everywhere. Your three main collectibles – wealth, mysteries (side quests), and artifacts – are scattered randomly around, so there never feels like a real focus to going to a location and clearing it out. You can just kind of set your sights in a direction and you’ll inevitably run into things. Going into a camp is more of a run to a dot on the map where you can ignore the enemies in the camp. Mysteries exist as one-off events instead of more interesting side quest chains. And ya, there’s longer side quest chains but they feel less present than in the last two titles, which was a big disappointment.

The collectibles themselves also just have a distinct lack of importance. Gear isn’t inherently level-based anymore, so going out and finding new armor isn’t necessarily helpful. Once you find your preferred gear and upgrade past a point, going out and finding new materials isn’t necessarily helpful anymore. It just puts a drag on the game when you get to the point where you inherently outgear an area, because it doesn’t scale as smoothly as the past couple of games – much to Valhalla’s detriment.

All of this is also not helped by the existence of Immortals. That one did such a good job of integrating cool traversal into exploration that it was simply more fun just to run around. Happening upon legendary units and animals in that one meant a really fun one on one fight. Happening upon a shrine meant a really fun puzzle segment or arena segment. All of the things you ran into in that game felt like a nice change of pace that provided a really good rhythmic flow to running between quest locations. Valhalla on the other hand feels like a huge step back where traversing for the sake of exploration feels like a hassle, and going to places for the hell of it feels like a chore.

Valhalla feels like an inflection point for the series overall. AC3 felt like a stale experience after the Ezio games, and that led to Black Flag. Unity and Syndicate felt like games that ran out of ideas, which led to the series reinvention in Origins. This feels similar. While Valhalla is a far better game than either of the last two problem areas, it feels similarly stale. This is a game that feels like a retread, instead of a game that feels like a step forward. Other games in the interim have done it far better. Immortals did a much better job of making exploration fun. Ghost of Tsushima did a far better job integrating stealth and combat in a way that both paths were interesting and worth playing. This series is ready for that next step forward, and it’s got some great examples to look at if they’re ready to make that push.