Category: PS4

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Game Ramblings #129 – Shantae and the Seven Sirens

More Info from WayForward

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam, Xbox One, Apple Arcade

I fucking love Metroidvanias. I fucking love the Shantae series. Guess what? I fucking loved this game.

Alright, that was probably too simple of an opening. A lot of what I’d say about this game matches with exactly what I said in the ramblings for Pirate’s Curse or Half-Genie Hero, and that’s a good thing. This is another iterative release in the series, and it takes what made the past games really work and moves it forward in important ways.

The first big one is that instead of being level-based, this is 100% a true Metroidvania. The entire game takes place on a single unified map and new areas open up purely based on upgrades you receive. While I definitely liked the way previous entries encouraged re-traversing levels once you gained new abilities, there’s just something to having a pure open environment. You see and make note of those open ends of hallways that you can’t quite get to or those things in the environment that are obviously something that you can interact with, and make mental notes to return to later.

Where they end up making use of their history of level-based gameplay is in the handful of labyrinths that come up. These act as pillars to the overall story and upgrade path, but also serve as mini-tutorials to learn new powers, as well as the core spot for the big boss fights in the game. It gives a nice on and off pace to exploration where you kinda futz around finding new areas and exploring for hidden stuff, then go into a labyrinth and really focus on combat for a while in a controlled linear environment.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how well integrated the transformations were into gameplay. In a lot of ways, this felt very much like Pirate’s Curse. That game required upgrades to be fast and easy to use due to story reasons causing the loss of transformations. In this one, the transformations are automatic. There’s things like the newt form which gives you a dash and wall climbing. There’s things like the frog form which the frog which gives you the ability to swim. Thematically they make a lot of sense, and the fact that they’re automated makes the game flow pretty much a non-stop affair, which is a huge benefit to the game pace.

That’s not to say there aren’t dances, but in the case of this game they’re all there as one-off attacks that don’t have permanent transformations. These are definitely useful in their own right – for example an electric attack does AoE damage to all things on screen, as well as powering up mechanical devices – but they definitely have a much more straightforward use that isn’t tied to moving through the world.

This is just a really fun game. There’s not been that many Metroidvanias that really have high pace gameplay and almost purely melee combat, and the Shantae series continues to be at the forefront of that style. Movement is fun, combat is fun, the bosses are fun. It’s just all fun and I can’t think of many better series to recommend in this genre right now.

….and don’t worry. Everyone’s favorite Squid Baron makes his return.

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Game Ramblings #125 – Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Rhythm
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch

I sat down to play the game and immediately got smacked in the face with a sense of having played this game before. The systems that I was going through; the interface at the end of songs; the way things were unlocking. I’d done it before. Then it hit me – this is a Theathrhythm game. I absolutely love the three Theatrhythm games on the 3DS and I don’t know why I never recognized what this was before its release. Ya the name isn’t there and they moved to a rear-camera 3D view, but it’s the same developer, the same systems, and the same pattern. Most importantly, it’s just as good.

Starting this as a comparison against Theatrhythm is really the place to start. The obvious change is the switch in view from side-scroll 2D to rear-scroll 3D, and that brings some oddities. Something about that change took me a long time to really grok, and I think it came down to a couple of main things.

The first is that there’s no mark to really establish the beat on the board. Looking at games with a similar viewpoint like Guitar Hero, having that scrolling beat indicator really just helps to establish some sense of depth to get some basic timing in your mind’s eye. It also didn’t help that the enemies popping onto the board didn’t have consistent timing. Some would be stationary as you scroll towards them. Some would walk towards the screen. Some kind jumped and weaved. Because of that I also couldn’t really depend on depth perception as a tool for timing the song out.

However, I hit a point probably about a third of the way into the game where I became less focused on hitting a beat, and more focused on hitting a melody, and that drastically changed how I played the game. There’s a tendency in these songs to use a bit of a Nintendo trick. The first time they introduce a melody, it’s a bit on the easier side. You’ve got enough of it to be able to hit the notes while listening to what is playing. The second and third time’s it comes around, it’s all-in and you’re responding to the full melody that you now recognize. They do this on even the highest difficulty, so you have an inherit ramp up in the song as you go through a couple loops of it. It works really well to allow you to learn on the fly, then really come back on a second go through fully knowing the song and ready to hit that full combo.

The rest of the core systems will feel familiar to players of Theatrhythm FF. Instead of directional swipes, you’ve got joystick flicks. Instead of screen holds, you have button holds. Instead of lanes per-character, you have attack buttons per-character. Instead of slide input segments, you’ve got in-air notes to catch while drifting Sora around on screen. There’s some nice additions there in terms of allowing you to do multiple attacks at once by pressing multiple buttons, but it still all feels familiar to me as a player of the Theatrhythm games.

If there was one last thing that really caught me off guard, it’s that this game did a fantastic job actually telling the Kingdom Hearts story. Ya, I’m not lying. This game covers the story of the entire franchise so far through cutscenes and voiceovers, and it does it in about 10-15 hours of gameplay. You’ve got coverage of all the main games, the important plot points from the spinoffs, and it’s all told in a concise way. In a series that effectively prides itself on being completely baffling, I retained more in one rhythm game than I did playing the entire rest of the series last year.

Now, because this is Kingdom Hearts, they couldn’t get away with not doing some stupid plot twist, and the end of the game has some important lore that ties the end of KH3’s DLC to whatever comes next. While I do recommend playing this one, if rhythm games aren’t your thing you’ll definitely want to catch up on the new lore via Youtube. It’s definitely a very Kingdom Hearts thing to have put new story into a recap game, just because they can.

I mean, I guess this is an easy recommendation. This is both really entertaining on its own as a Kingdom Hearts recap title, and a fantastic rhythm game. It takes systems that worked really well on the 3DS, and transforms them just enough to flow really well on a TV and gamepad, once I stopped trying to treat it like Guitar Hero. It’s also a great way to go back and hear how fantastically good the soundtrack of this series has been over the past 20 years.

Plus the game has One Winged Angel. That’s worth at least a +1 on the review scores.

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Game Ramblings #124 – Yakuza: Like a Dragon

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4 / PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox One / Series, Steam

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this series successfully moved into the JRPG genre, but it kind of is. The previous titles had a lot of things typical of the genre already in place – great story, characters, and settings, your typical array of shops for items and gear, a strong levelling system, lots of things to do on the side. However, they were always first and foremost an action game, and since they moved to a new engine on the PS4 they were perhaps the BEST action-focused series out there. Despite it all, they changed to a JRPG and still ended up with something that feels straight up fantastic.

Given the change, I guess combat is the place to start. The thing to really know is that the entire genre switch and the fact that I’m up there fighting a 7 foot tall pirate all comes down to one thing – the lead character is a huge fan of Dragon Quest and has delusions of leading a party of heroes throughout Japan, just like in the game.

How fucking perfect is that?

It sets your expectations of what combat should be – purely turn based. Now, it’s not exactly as classic as Dragon Quest, and that’s a good thing. It’s got a timing-based defense mechanic similar to games like Super Mario RPG. It’s got a D&D-style opportunity attack where enemies can interrupt you if you try to run past them to attack someone else. It’s got a strong job system with job-based skills, leveling, and permanent stat gains. It’s got weaknesses and resists to different types of weapons. Basically, it takes a bunch of features from a bunch of JRPGs, and wraps it all into a combat system that feels classic, but with a modern touch. And it works really well.

I think more than anything, the reason it feels good is that everything still feels impactful. There’s a clear sense here that they’re bringing their action knowledge to this genre in how things react to combat. Big hits don’t just throw a big number, they cause knock downs. Knockdowns don’t just cause an animation – they put enemies in a weak state that causes them to take increased damage. When characters go flying, they don’t just fly, they also hit and damage anyone else they hit (including knocking down your own friends if you aren’t careful). If there’s something in the environment, your attacks can take advantage of that and use it instead of your weapon. It’s everything that made sense and worked well in an action combat system, but now just turn-based. It’s a bit slower, it’s a bit more strategic, it’s a big less reactionary, but it all feels fantastic.

That’s not to say that they completely converted over well to a JRPG-style. This game’s biggest issue is really around grinding, and that happens in two places.

The first is really around equipment. you hit a point fairly early in the power curve of the game where you just can’t buy better equipment. I hit it around the 60% mark of the game. From that point on, you have to craft better equipment to improve gear stats. Crafting is fine on its own, but the crafting building requires significant investment to upgrade it far enough to craft the end game gear. From there, the gear then also costs a ton of money and crafting items to put together. I did one stretch to do an armor upgrade pass, and it required me to do about 4 million yen in investments, 2 million yen per-piece of armor, and approximately another half million yen in crafting item value. Keeping in mind that normal fights were dropping 3-5 thousand yen, you can see the issue.

Around the same time, I started needing to do XP grinding because the bosses were jumping 5-10 levels ahead of me. At this point I was probably needing to get around 100 thousand XP per-level and only getting around 1000 XP per fight. Again, you can see the issue. I could get some more permanent stat boosts by switching jobs, and taking advantage of the quick early job levels when switching, but it was a pretty slow process overall.

At this point in the game it basically resulted in me using one specific spot, floors 16-18 of the Sotenbori battle arena. That could net me about 300 thousand yen and about 150 thousand XP. It was fast, it was efficient, and it was boring. It was clearly what was intended for fast leveling, but it felt awkward compared to just having a higher XP/money curve in the wild and letting the player more naturally level.

On the other hand, the side content is both plentiful and a lot of fun if I needed a distraction. Some of it is just side quests where I get some entertaining side story content. Some of it is your standard item collection faire. However, there’s also things like the Mario Kart inspired mode above to keep me distracted. There’s also a really deep management simulation worth noting as another good distraction (and source of money later on in it). I knew I could fall back on these things when I needed a break, and it allowed me to fall off of doing the same content grind on repeat while still having some benefit to my team in the long run.

Ultimately this isn’t a perfect transition from ARPG to JRPG, but as a first-try at the genre I was super impressed with the game. It kept things that worked really well in the series in the past, gave a pretty entertaining reason to switch genres, and ran with it. If they felt they had reached the peak of what they thought they could do as an action title, this certainly gives them a strong reset. It also puts them in a place where they still have room to improve. If the next title is still a JRPG, they could do a much better job of managing their power and XP curves to make the experience more linear and less prone to slow grinds when power jumps occur. However, as a first-pass this is still one of the best JRPGs of the year and is definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre.