Category: PS4

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Shelved It #5 – Akiba’s Beat

More information from XSEED/Acquire

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Vita
  • Main Reason for Shelving: No reward grind

TL;DR

  • Lots of unnecessary re-traversal of dungeons for no reward
  • Gameplay is a lot different than previous title; Akiba’s Trip
    • Despite differences, solid ARPG gameplay reminiscent of the Tales of series.
  • Simple, but solid visual style with distinct dungeon designs

As the first RPG that Acquire has made, Akiba’s Beat is pulling ideas from other series in an attempt to provide some familiar gameplay, but in doing so it stumbled in the thing that can determine the quality of a lot of ARPGs and JRPGs; the grind between main story points.  While this one shows a lot of potential for the studio to continue doing RPGs in the future, it just didn’t provide enough incentive to continue through to the end with so many other quality RPGs available.

For anyone that has played Akiba’s Trip, the most obvious difference here is the gameplay.  Rather than being an action-heavy game reminiscent of a light-hearted Musou game, this is now very much a Tales of style ARPG.  The battle system is solid, but definitely not doing anything original.  Battles take place in a flat plane where the player moves side to side toward a targeted enemy, activating physical attack combos and skill attacks.  They can dodge in any direction, and unlock movement from the side to side movement to reposition in 3D space.  Yep, it’s pretty much a 1:1 copy of the battle system used in games like Tales of Vesperia, rather than the more free form systems in newer titles.  It even brings in the AI tactics system to set the skill type, resource usage, and target priority of the Tails games.  The fortunate thing is that this battle system still is extremely fun to play, and while fighting level appropriate monsters, is easily the high point of the game.

The 1:1 copy syndrome also extends to the story.  The core story revolves around Akihabara being stuck in an endless Sunday loop (hello Groundhog Day) in which people’s delusions manifest in Akiba, causing shenanigans to occur (hello Persona 5).  The main problem is that the story and characters just aren’t as good as Persona 5.  The core cast are basically rigid anime tropes, covering things like overly happy idols, brooding NEETS, the always positive athletic girl, etc.  The plot twists are telegraphed too hard, and the consequences of the cast’s actions are sort of brushed aside out of necessity.  In general, the story works, but it’s not going to blow anyone away, particularly when it’s to some extent copying a phenomenally good game that literally just came out.

The unfortunate thing is that the story ended up being the main drag factor on progression.  I put no reward grind as the shelving reason, but I don’t mean that in the typical JRPG fashion.  I wasn’t grinding to get levels, because typically I was around a pretty appropriate level for the things I was fighting.  As the story progressed, they forced you to retraverse the past dungeons repeatedly, typically all the way to the end room.  However, XP gained scales significantly down as the level gap between the monsters and cast increased, so retraversing the dungeons ended up being more of an exercise of how many battles I could avoid, rather than continuing to push the entertaining battle system.  This could have been fixed in any number of ways, whether allowing quick travel to story points, or even scaling up enemies to give players incentive to continue to fight in the dungeons they’ve already been in.  In the end, the story forcing retraversal was the game’s downfall, as it provided a lot of slow down and no reward.

That said, the dungeon visual designs were another high point in the game.  Like Persona 5, they took the concept of a person’s delusions quite literally, heavily theming the dungeon visuals around the person’s personality.  They were always visually pleasing, and really hit a high mark for playing with bright colors and strong designs.  Just for a quick couple of examples:

When the owner of the delusion was a cafe maid, the entire delusion was a twisted interpretation of what a maid cafe would look like.

For the audio hardware guy’s delusion, we got speakers, vacuum tubes, and visual equalizer’s in the skybox to fit the theme.

In general, Akiba’s Beat is a game that doesn’t necessarily do a lot of things that wrong, and isn’t that far from being a highly enjoyable game.  The things it does right, visually and gameplay-wise, it really hits high marks for.  Unfortunately, this is still an RPG, and the story failings immediately bring it down to the status of not worth finishing.  Given Acquire’s past experience with action games (Tenchu, Way of the Samurai, Akiba’s Trip), the change to a more formal RPG structure definitely seems to have tripped them up a bit, but if they take the right lessons from what went wrong here, they may be on to something with the genre change in the future.

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Shelved It #4 – Persona 5

More Info from Atlas

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PS3

Admittedly this is a shelved it, kinda sorta.  I fully intend to play through the rest of this in some form, even if it involves just turning down the difficulty to get through boss fights.  I’m at a point where my lack of patience for the boss fight structure makes me not care about spending the effort to get through the fights, but the world that was built for this game is so good that I still feel compelled to see it.  However, given I’m bending the rules to move forward, I felt like it was worth writing about this as a normal shelving incident.

I’ve played a lot of the Megami Tensei games, whether it’s the mainline titles, Persona titles, or even tangentially related ones like Tokyo Mirage Sessions. It’s worth noting in particular that Tokyo Mirage is probably the best straight JRPG I played in 2016. The biggest core problem that I typically run into is that while the shared battle system encourages smart planning to chain moves in killing enemies, it simultaneously encourages the enemies to have extremely high damage and the same chaining abilities as a balance point. The end result is a mix of fights where the difference between an extremely easy fight and one where I get one turn wiped is one that doesn’t involve player skill at all.

In general I like the battle system that these games use.  The general setup is that you have a collection of demons with varying stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities, as well as core physical attacks.  By taking advantage of the range of capabilities at your disposal, you can maximize damage and knock down enemies through attacking opposition weaknesses.  In doing so, you gain extra attacks for hitting these weaknesses, giving the ability to chain attacks through the entire enemy party.  Once they are all down, the group can attack the entire opposition at once, generally resulting in a complete wipe of the enemies.  This system works fantastically well for your normal trash fights, and I could generally do most trash fights without ever being attacked, let alone taking damage.  First times against new demons up being an interesting puzzle-solving opportunity in figuring out what weaknesses can be exposed, then further fights are usually a quick mop up.  Getting through dungeons generally then becomes limited more by a lack of resources, or a need to go buy more SP items, rather than a need to run away for safety reasons.

Boss fights in the game generally involve the same fight pattern, with the obvious difference of not being able to one shot the fight.  I’d go in with some assumed set of gear that I kind of hoped would be close to functional, then either win with no trouble or wipe immediately to some form of chain attack.  If I wiped, I’d reshuffle gear, make sure I had different Personas equipped, and generally get through the phase where I died.  This cycle would continue until the boss ran out of new mechanics and I won.  My problem with this is that at no point did I feel the challenge was actually in finishing the boss fights.  It was entirely in getting arbitrary gear to block mechanics, and having no trouble once those were covered.  Rather than wipes being something that were caused by lack of skill, wipes were something I fixed by changing my accessories.  The cycle of discovery in this was not something I was doing for fun, but something I was doing because the battle system actively seeks to punish you for not having specific setups.  Once that setup is achieved, the boss fights lose their challenge, and end up being simple rotation fights that are not any different than big number trash fights.

The unfortunate thing is that the world surrounding this is fantastic.  Persona games have always been good at mixing relatively believable characters with the Japanese lore-based fantasy and this one is no exception.  The cast of characters that I had seen thus far covered a pretty wide range of personalities from your jocks to the more reserved, as well as their typical animal that talks stand-in.  The visual style, particularly within the dungeons, is also about as fantastically stylish as you’ll see in a JRPG.  This is backed by another fantastic soundtrack that pretty seamlessly flows between rock and acid jazz to fit the situation.  On its own I don’t know that we’re going to see another game this year that will be so iconic in its visual and audio design as Persona 5.

Ultimately I’m not that surprised I’m at this point.  Since I’ve played this series before, I knew what my problems were going to be with the battle system going in.  I guess if there’s anything I’m surprised about, it’s that I’ve already hit the point where I stopped caring without being anywhere near the finish.

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Shelved It #3 – Yooka-Laylee

More Info from Playtonic

  • Genre: 3D Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Steam (Linux, Mac, Windows), Xbox One, Switch

Hit or miss is the best way I can describe Yooka-Laylee.  The team of ex-Rare developers clearly recognizes what made Banjo-Kazooie a good game, but at the same time it feels like they never did anything to pass that mark, and in trying to aim at nostalgia, they also didn’t fix many of the original flaws.  I got through the bulk of the first two worlds, as well as their expanded forms, and while there was definitely some fun to be had, the amount of boring fluff content, and somewhat subpar writing never really gave me a drive to plow through the slower areas of the game to see the better parts. The unfortunate thing is that there is some flashes of good here, but they tend to be balanced out by negatives at the same time.

While the various jump mechanics feel good and have a nice weight to them, the camera’s inability to not get in your way means a lot of missed jumps.  Even in areas where the camera is fixed, the sometimes strange angles and FOV selection ended up causing severe depth perception issues.  The most unfortunate thing is that the game is drop dead gorgeous, but I spent so much time fighting the camera that I never could really be at a point where I could fully enjoy it.

While the boss fights I did tended to be a lot of fun when I was doing them correctly, odd design choices on how damage occurs often frustrated me.  As an example, the World 1 boss involved leaping over rolling logs on a slope, where hitting a log would have you slide back down to the bottom.  All that was fine, but hitting a log at the top would still leave all the logs I had passed, and I could receive damage on my way back down while being significantly less controllable while sliding.

Individually some of the pages were in areas where puzzle or combat segments could be fun, but an equal amount simply involved using the duo’s powers to very slowly get up a path with little to no resistance.  The fact that the worlds are leveled up, rather than simply doing a larger spread of smaller worlds means that there’s a significant amount of retread through the environments.  Worst of all were the arcade games, which while curious, did not need to be given multiple pages to force replays.

I think if there’s anything that I found the most surprising, it’s that the writing was just not that good.  Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, or Conker’s Bad Fur Day were all examples of games out of Rare that, while goofy, had entertaining and solid writing.  The writing in this game seems to just lean on puns and self-referential one liners, a lot of which are not going to stand up 5-10 years from now.  It feels like they turned the humor knob of Conker too far, giving a story that even in the section I played never coalesced into something worth pushing me forward.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that this game proves that 3D platformers are dead, but I’m not convinced.  I think this game just missed the mark.  Even if we just look at core 3D platformers since Rare’s heyday, we have games like Jak & Daxter, the Sly Cooper series, Mario Galaxy, or the Skylanders titles.  We can even stretch from there and go into the heavy weapon action of the Ratchet & Clank games bringing new twists on the genre.  I suspect there’s a lot of life left in this stlye of platformer, but sitting on nostalgia just isn’t doing it, particularly if the problems of the original games are just going to be ignored.