Category: ARPG

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Game Ramblings #100 – Indivisible

More Info from Lab Zero Games

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows, macOS, Linux, Switch

I’m glad that this game was a milestone number for my ramblings, because it’s the kind of game I really live for. It’s both instantly recognizeable, but completely unique. It’s kind of an ARPG, kind of a JRPG, kind of a Metroidvania, but really it’s none of those things alone and all of those things together. It takes a bunch of pieces that shouldn’t work together, mashes them together, and spits something out that is phenomenal.

The first thing that really stood out was that the game was flat out gorgeous, though that isn’t much of a surprise. This is the team behind Skullgirls, which gameplay aside, was always known for its visual style. Right from the start, it’s a great mix of 3D backgrounds and 2D character art that pops like very few games do. Particularly in battle, the animation is all ridiculously well crafted hand-drawn art that really brings a bright and fun visual style to life. Amidst the chaos of battle, it’s all a joy to watch.

However, it’s that battle that really pulls you into the game. This is a bizarre mix of two RPG subgenres that somehow mash together. On the one hand, the battle system is very much an almost ATB-style system, where the characters charge up attack slots at different speeds up to a cap. However, those attack slots are not your typical menu slots – they’re instead button presses tied to each character, which can be comboed with directional inputs to do any sort of mix of functionality. This is expanded by different characters having different capabilities to really bring a simple but extremely deep combat system to life. It’s not unlike Valkyrie Profile in a lot of ways, but it definitely feels very much its own.

For example, Ajna can break enemies that are shielding with an up+down combo. I used a healer named Ginseng that built up power with straight attacks, then activated a power scaled group heal with their up attack. For flying enemies, I had an archer named Zebei that could shoot enemies out of the sky to be attacked by the rest of the party. At one point I even had a dog named Lanshi whose sole fight pattern was to bark at the enemy party, dealing large AoE damage. This is backed by a charged special attack bar that the entire party could use to do significantly large and flashy attacks to all enemies, like the one below.

On the defensive side, it’s all timing based. Correctly timing a button press when being attacked can block incoming damage, starting with partial block and growing all the way to character heals by the end of the game. This ability to block damage means that missing the button press is absolutely hazardous, as the game is scaled around the player preventing incoming damage as much as possible. A good player will basically never take damage, while a lesser player will likely need to grind a bit to become stronger, so this also works as a pretty solid built-in difficulty mechanic to allow better players to simply move forward.

In general, this battle system was just straight up fun. I spent a decent amount of time when grabbing new characters playing around to see how they felt, but over time settled on a party that really fit my preferred style. For me it was all about fast charging characters with good single target attacks, backed by Ginseng’s healing capabilities, and very little defense other than good timing. It fit a really fun sort of zerg rush pattern that I leaned hard into by the end of the game.

The Metroidvania aspect of the game is generally the weaker part of this mash of genres. It’s not that it’s implemented poorly – the levels all have a ton of side paths that are slowly unlocked as the player gains new abilities. It’s that the level layouts don’t really feel tuned to Metroidvania-style retraversal. It was pretty much without fail that I’d start on one end of a region map, get all the way to the far other side of the region map, and hit a story block with no new power helpful to the current region, requiring me to go completely back across the map to get to a ship and move to a different region. More often than not, the new paths opened with new abilities were typically smaller side paths that existed to collect upgrades, and not necessarily new paths for traversing the level in a different fashion. By doing this extreme side to side layout design, it really ended up making me retraverse the levels with nothing new to do, rather than the more Metroid-typical pattern of earning powers often, and traversing a region with full new paths. Things opened up a bit more by the end of the game, but by that point it kind of felt like too little too late.

That being said, the traversal not being great didn’t minimize my enjoyment of the game. This was ultimately one of my rare PS4 platinums, clocking in at a bit under 20 hours to get the full trophy set. Within that, I got to experience a bunch of great combat, some fantastically flashy and memorable bosses, and more than a few laughs at the party’s expense. For me this is even better, as I was a backer of their Indiegogo campaign, so watching this one come to life, and having it live up to my hopes is something that I’m always wishing for. At this point, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a proper non-mobile Valkyrie series entry out of Square, and if Indivisible is the way that someone runs with the gameplay, I’m certainly excited about the end result.

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Game Ramblings #99 – Sparklite

More Info from Red Blue Games

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam (Windows/Mac), PS4, Xbox One

This one’s kind of been floating around in my brain for a while. One of the folks working on this did some contract work with my team a couple years ago at Tripwire, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see the game finally come out. I’m even more thrilled to find that it lives up to what I was envisioning back when I was hearing their plans. While it’s easy to look at this and shake it off as a Link to the Past clone, the game makes some clever use of roguelike mechanics to provide both a way to change the environment throughout the game, as well as a positive feedback loop to the process of dying. It’s an interesting change to a genre that typically penalizes dying, and it ended up working out well.

Let’s get the simple things out of the way in a real hurry. The game uses an entirely pixel-based visual style and it’s pretty damn gorgeous. The soundtrack is also fairly catchy and never started to wear on me despite hearing the same general set of themes throughout each region. Yes, the core gameplay loop here is LttP. You have a melee weapon that swings in an arc. You run around the environment killing things for upgrades. You eventually get to pattern-based bosses that you take out to get your big upgrades. That all is pretty familiar to fans of the genre, and really it’s done well here. It feels mechanically solid, and probably most importantly, I was never feeling cheated if I was taking damage. If I was taking a bunch of damage, it was entirely my fault. It’s worth noting that damage does ramp up REALLY fast here, and it’s easy to get one shot later in the game if you’re not paying attention. That’s entirely where the roguelike mechanics start to come into play.

Boss fights are where you typically die the most, and where the roguelike growth elements really come into play.

The first thing to note is that the world changes each time you play through it. This plays a nice balance of randomness and non-randomness in that the regions are always in the same general area (desert is west, snow is north, etc) but the regions themselves are fairly randomized each run. There’s always going to be a set of standard features in each region (boss dungeon, random enemy dungeon, an area to pick up an upgrade, etc) but the rest of the area is going to be pretty different between runs. Sometimes you’ll find random underground areas with currency to grab. Sometimes you’ll find areas with people that you can rescue. Sometimes you’ll find areas with side-quest collection stuff to do. Basically, you’ll always have some reason to both move forward to new spots, but also return to old spots just to see what else you can find.

The core hub that you end up at on death also follows the roguelike pattern of slow incremental upgrades. There’s a main shop with player upgrades for purchase that also serves as a spot to handle the equipment chain. There’s a spot that can be upgraded that provides some free consumable items (ex: health potions, bombs, etc) that you can grab before going down for a world run. There’s a shop that can be upgraded to build out secondary ranged items. This is also the core spot where you’re going to find a lot of the lore of the game. Overall the town serves its purpose well as a bit of a power curve spot for the player. It’s easy to get around in the town, the purpose of the shops is always super obvious, and you’re going to be finding some reason to dump all your currency into something before heading back down to the main game world.

The main weapon’s upgrade system is super customizable and ends up being an interesting way to build in limits and choices in a meaningful way.

However, the main power curve comes all together in the hammer equipment. The hammer is both the main weapon in the game, as well as the main equipment handler. It can be packed with a bunch of upgrades ranging from damage to armor to health to map helpers and more. However, this takes the form of a grid-based screen that honestly reminded me a lot of the sort of classic PC ARPG approach. These upgrades all have some specific grid size and shape, so you spend a bunch of time min/maxing both the upgrades themselves, as well as the space they take up within the grid to get everything you want packed in there. As an example, a shield upgrade is a 1×1 square, attack upgrades are 2×2, but something like the gadget power is a 2×1 bar. The upgrades of common types can also be combined at a cost into more powerful versions from bronze to silver to gold.

This process of upgrading and playing a bit of inventory Tetris is the core power curve loop of the game, and it’s really effective at playing into how I got through the game. I initially started off stacking health upgrades just to stay alive. As I got more comfortable with the game mechanics, I started backing off of health and going more towards offensive upgrades. However, boss fights started doing a lot of damage all at once, so I started pulling some direct armor in to keep the individual hits down to smaller amounts. It was a really fun way to manage my overall power, and is a lot more interactive than the typical ARPG style of hunting a dungeon for the same direct upgrade that everyone else was going to take.

I really just wanted an excuse to post this map, because damn is it gorgeous.

For as cynical as I can often be about working in the game industry, it’s always fun to see something come out made by folks you know and have worked on. It’s even better when the thing they’ve been working on as a passion project comes out and is a lot of fun to play. This is definitely one of those cases. It’s a game in a small niche genre mix made by a small team because it’s what they wanted to make. If the idea of playing a roguelike Link to the Past sounds at all appealing, this is definitely worth the play.

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Game Ramblings #94 – The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Original Versions: Game Boy, Game Boy Color (DX)
It was nice seeing this again after all these years.

This was the first game I got on the Game Boy. When my family got me the Game Boy for Christmas, Nintendo wasn’t doing Tetris as the pack-in, and boy was that a lucky thing for me. I played this for way too many hours as a kid, wracked my brain over the puzzles, and I’ve loved the Zelda series ever since. Even at the time of its release, this was a special game, and now that it’s been given the modern treatment it’s worth playing more than ever.

From a high level, there’s not much of a surprise here – it’s a 2D Zelda game. You go to dungeons, you get an item, you use that item to get through the dungeon, by the end of the game you’ve got a tool set to take out the boss. It’s not that this one was necessarily breaking totally new ground, but that it was doing so in a handheld game, and was STILL as good as (and I’d argue better overall) Link to the Past.

There was just something about this one that always hit better for me, and I think I figured it out with this play through. Link’s Awakening plays a constantly good balance of both telling you what to do, and giving you a bunch of leash to go exploring on your own. There’s always a bit of a hint coming out of a dungeon about where to go next. That gives you enough of a bread crumb to go on. But those spots you walk past that you don’t have an item for yet? That item you just got in a trade quest and don’t know who the next step is for? You’re always going to want to go off and explore. Even on the Game Boy that always worked better for me than Lttp‘s somewhat more open ended nature, and it hasn’t stopped working well here.

It helps that the items here are still a ton of fun to use. There’s some of your usual suspects here (bow, swords, shield, weight bracelets, etc) to get you into the game – and boy doesn the inclusion of dedicated sword and shield buttons REALLY help this remake. However, this game also had its weird items that just WORKED. Roc’s feather to jump over things? Fun item at the start. Combine with the Pegasus Boots to really jump far? Now you’ve got a great combo. A shovel to give you more of an excuse to find treasure? Why not. Some magic powder that you can use to stun enemies or turn a raccoon back into a human? Why the hell not. This game really just embraced the weird in a way that the rest of the 2D games often didn’t want to do and it’s all the better for it.

The dungeons themselves are also really solid. I’m assuming it was due to the limited nature of the system, but these dungeons really lean on puzzles over combat. You’ve got your usual puzzles tied to the dungeon’s main item, but this one also does a bunch of puzzles that slowly build upon each other across multiple dungeons. A lot of these end up being some variant of switch manipulation that modifies where you can go throughout the level. These are typically tied into the item puzzles to add multiple layers of solving in one. It ends up really reducing combat to boss fights, which is a benefit for how simple the combat really is. It leaves the boss fights down to puzzle solving with the right item and sword spam to kill, and the rest of the game to swinging only when necessary.

All that said, fuck adding physics to this damn crane game.

This one’s pretty simple – this is one of my favorite games in the Zelda series in general made pretty for modern consoles. The gameplay that made it so good 25 years ago has been tweaked a bit to feel up to date, but not changed where it wasn’t necessary. There’s a lot to be said about not messing with what worked and Link’s Awakening is definitely a good example of that. Where Breath of the Wild proved that a rethinking of the formula was a good direction for the series, this one proves that it’s not always a bad thing to be a bit classic.