Category: Switch

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Game Ramblings #178 – Super Mario Bros Wonder

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

It’s not that I thought the New Super Mario Bros series were bad, but they were incredibly safe. The platforming was fun and solid, but it wasn’t necessarily anything new and interesting. NSMB and NSMB Wii were clearly outclassed by the two Galaxy games. NSMB2 and NSMBU were clearly outclassed the also safe 3D Land and 3D World. It wasn’t really a bad thing that the series then went on effective hiatus while Mario Maker took over and Odyssey wowed the world. Wonder finally feels like the 2D series’ Odyssey moment.

If I was just going to sit here and talk about how Mario feels to run and jump and whatever, it’s basically NSMB for me again. The core physics still feels a bit slower than I’d prefer, at least to a point. There is a couple noticeable small changes that really help this feel snappier than the older titles, and they both have to do with stopping.

One of my biggest problems with NSMB physics is how slow stopping is. If I’m trying to hit a tight platform it was usually safer to jump when I landed in order to reset using air movement, because if I was to just let go of the stick I would generally fall off. Wonder has drastically faster stopping allowing me to usually just land. It’s a small change but makes the game feel incredibly better in precise spots. Reversing direction is similar. In NSMB reversing from a sprint would slide you for a while, then you’d reverse direction and accelerate normally. Wonder combines the quicker stopping with what I can only describe as a speed boost to make sure that if you’re reversing direction you are quickly reversing direction. It makes things like vertical segments hopping between platforms incredibly better.

However, the thing about Wonder isn’t so much that it ultimately feels all that different, but it embraces fun for the sake of fun. The key around all of that is the Wonder Flower system they’ve setup. What it basically is is a system that changes the level for a short period of time – typically 30 seconds or less. The media I’m posting in this rambling are all examples of that. Sometimes it’s just turning the level into a musical number for the sake of it. Sometimes you have fundamental shifts in the mechanics of the level, like the long Mario above. At some points you’ll take over the bodies of an enemy in segments very reminiscent of Mario Odyssey, such as taking over a Goomba who can’t jump but can hide behind foliage in the background layer. The thing about all of these changes is that they aren’t fundamentally changing the game away from being a platformer, but they’re providing a fun change of pace in a way that is entirely unique to the level. You never really know what you’re going to get into when you activate one of the Wonder Flowers, but what you do know is it’s going to be entertaining.

The other part of all this that is incredibly impressive is how much variety there is in this system, and that extends across the whole game. Besides the core platforming mechanics, most levels have unique mechanics that you might only see two or three times in the entire game. One flower that sticks out in my head is a segment in which you’re thrown into a box sublevel that rotates periodically, forcing you to keep up with the rotation as walls become floors and ceilings. The screenshot above transforms the entire game into a near direct copy of the SNES title Smart Ball and is only used in maybe three levels. There are segments where you’re floating in the sky avoiding lightning and enemies. There’s a spot where Mario literally becomes a walking piece of a platform that can bounce things away. There are a couple sections where you’re platforming around on a flying dragon. There are a couple levels where there is specifically an enemy that will eat things like powerups if you don’t get to them in time.

The list here can go on and on because there’s a ton of variety in the roughly 70 main levels you run across. However, the point I guess is that across that you might be seeing 30 or 40 mechanics that are used two or three times and seem like they were created simply because they thematically fit with the level they belonged in. It’s such a rarity for any game to have mechanics simply for the sake of it enhancing the rest of the surrounding experience. It’s even more rare for there to be such a wide array of low-use mechanics and still have them be both fun and quick to learn on the fly. Mario Wonder manages to pull that off to an amazing level of quality that just isn’t seen by most other studios.

That attention to detail extends to the visuals as well, and that’s hugely important coming off of NSMB. Visually I could only describe those games as being at best sufficient. They were generally overly safe and overly boring. Everything served a functional purpose, but it didn’t really feel alive. Animation was kind of stiff, the backgrounds were pretty static, and overall it felt kind of lazy,

Super Mario Wonder is so much the polar opposite that I can’t believe we didn’t see any of this before. It’s easy to look at Mario’s core animations and be impressed with the level of quality given to him. A lot of this is thanks to them switching from a pure side view to more of a three-quarter view, giving him a ton of facial detail that they use. However, it’s the little things that really caught my attention. There’s fun little moments everywhere, such as Goombas being asleep (with the requisite snot bubble) if they come in from off screen. There’s stuff like enemies emoting panic if they fall off a ledge or if a nearby enemy gets hit by a fire flower. There’s entire scenes like the first video where the entire world is singing and dancing. It all has just a ton of life that was missing from 2D Mario. And that’s all to say nothing of the backgrounds, which are full of color and full of a ton of depth. This feels like a modern gaming experience now, rather than the pretty safe and boring NSMB levels.

I really didn’t think that this game was going to be as good as it turned out. Early trailers gave me some hope that it would be fun, but it’s still surprising to me that this game isn’t just a much better visual treatment of NSMB‘s core gameplay. This feels like a studio that was given an incredible amount of time to deliver something fun, and really took that to heart to give players a game that is just packed to the brim with things serving that core goal.

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Game Ramblings #174 – Pikmin 4

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: RTS
  • Platform: Switch

I’ve always enjoyed the Pikmin series, but something about the time restriction never really clicked with me. For the original game it made sense given the story, but after it went away in Pikmin 2, it was frustrating to see it come back for 3. This game took the day limit away again leading to a game that feels like it’s built around exploration rather than rushing against the clock, and the resulting game has clicked for me more than any game in the series to this point.

The actual core loop of the game feels perfect for what Nintendo has been experimenting with since the DS days, where there’s a really tight small loop that can just be repeated while always making some sort of forward progress. In this case, it’s the same sort of core loop that Pikmin has always had – start at sunrise, collect as much as you can before sunset, repeat – but the removal of a day limit really changes how I thought about things. Each core loop is a really tight period of time so you can have a distinct start and end point for a single session, or do multiple loops for a longer session. Both scenarios work great and give you obvious progress with obvious break points.

Rather than having the goal of each day be a mad rush to collect as much as possible, I treated trips as sort of one of two phases. In a first run through an area, my goal was simply to unlock as much stuff and remove as much danger as possible. I would clear obstacles, kill enemies, and dig things up, but I would largely ignore it and leave it around. The things you kill and remove persist to future days so there was no danger of losing progress. Once I had a large area cleared, I would then go through and have my Pikmin collect everything and start clearing out the caves that I ran across. This was also important in that it allowed me to compartmentalize the squad build out a lot better. Rather than worrying about whether or not I had the right Pikmin for the situation, I could just make mental notes of spots that I didn’t have the right squad for and come back later with a different makeup.

I totally get where the removal of the day limit mechanic would bother people looking for more challenge, but I just don’t share the sentiment. Yes this game is easy, but it’s because fundamentally the difficulty of encounters is pretty low. Its lack of difficulty is definitely something that I would consider an overall negative to the game, because there’s very few points where I was actively in any danger, let alone felt like I was having a difficult time. I think there’s an opportunity for this style of game to be made difficult in a way where the mechanics of the encounter are the difficulty factor, because there’s a lot of tuning knobs that could quickly make this game very hard. Tighter timing on getting Pikmin off enemies, quicker deaths if you throw them into areas they are prone to damage in, less leniency on taking multiple hits before the Pikmin die, etc. I think there’s an interesting potential here for a true hard/new game+ mode here but I don’t think that limiting day count is the way to do it.

This change also led to what ultimately felt like more interesting environments. The individual areas were a lot more open than I remember them being in the past. It’s not that previous games were linear, but these areas felt truly open to me. Generally speaking environmental interactions were less about opening new areas, and more about opening shortcuts through the full level to make traversal back quicker or simpler. Some interactions did truly modify the environment – one particular example being a low/high tide transition in a beach theme level – but for the most part the changes you make are to make your life simpler in coming back to an area.

The return of caves from Pikmin 2 is also welcomed, though they are in a far more complete form here. Pikmin 2‘s were mostly randomized generic caves, but in the case of 4 they are generally fully formed and more centered around specific mechanics. In some cases it might be Pikmin restrictions to test your ability to effectively use some types. In a lot of cases, it’s actually the use of unique bosses. What this ended up doing for me as a player was to give the game something of a Breath of the Wild vibe where the overworld segments were for testing my overall knowledge and the caves were for hammering on specific segments. The caves are certainly more involved than a Zelda shrine, but it had a similar feel of always having something slightly different to play through.

I think overall this game feels like the sequel to Pikmin 2 that I’ve wanted for a long time. I didn’t necessarily have issues with 3, but it felt like a step back towards the original. Rather than being an exploration-focused game, that one felt like more of the restricted stress game of the original. 4 feels like where the series should be going to me. It’s built from puzzles and collecting and exploration of a large alien environment, encouraging the player to check every corner carefully, rather than rushing through to maximize things as quick as possible. The series has had its time as a series about rescuing, so going in the direction of exploration as a focus is something I’d like to see them continue to grow.

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Game Ramblings #160.1 – Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

Original Ramblings

This expansion is by all definitions for the fans. It’s got returning important story characters from past entries in Rex and Shulk. It’s got import returning locations like Colony 9 from the original Xenoblade Chronicles. It’s got the ancestors of some of Chronicles 3’s cast. Basically, it’s there to be a trip specifically for fans of the series, but in that way it feels like the perfect way to cap the series.

This is every bit an extension of the gameplay from XC3, with a few things that feel really tailored towards an expansion experience. The obvious thing is that you power level like crazy to the point that I finished the game around level 60 and maybe had about 20 hours of gameplay. This is all taking place within a single connected world with a single map that you can get through pretty quickly. There’s some environmental things that allow you to basically zipline through the regions, and by the end of the game you’ll have unlocked so many of them that you can get end to end through the entire world in a matter of a couple of minutes without fast travel. I’d actually like to see this explored more in a future Xeno title, as being able to get around between regions quickly without a map feels way more engaging and connected to the world than a typical fast travel system.

Besides that stuff, the big thing added was an affinity system where you earn points for doing normal things (exploring, collecting, etc) to get points to purchase upgrades. There’s been variations on this in the past, but it all feels very directly do thing -> get cool stuff that powers you up. XC3 was already a game that was light on gearing as a power curve, and this feels like it leans further into simplifying away from XC2’s mess of stats as it combines stats, ability purchasing, and ability upgrading into a single source of selection. It obviously benefits the speed of power curve for an expansion experience, but it also feels like it would benefit a larger game as a whole.

However, there’s also a bit of an ending thing that gets into the potential future of the series, and that’s where I’m going to hide behind spoiler tags.

Spoiler

The core plot of XC3 within the overarching series was that Earth had previously been split in two, becoming the worlds of XC1 and XC2. By the time of XC3, the worlds had drifted back towards each other in an attempt to recombine. The plot of XC3 then ends with the worlds re-separating. The end boss sequence and post credits scene shows this process, but it adds a few additional things that seem to imply the Chronicles series is more tied to the rest of the Xeno games than we’ve been led to believe.

One of the first things that catches your attention is a series of radio broadcasts while the cast is being led through a virtual Earth. The radio broadcasts mention a few things of note. One is humans being sent to Sagittarius, where Xenogears ends up taking place. One is Project Exodus – the process of sending humans away to other planets. This is directly the same name as a project from Xenoblade Chronicles X, as well as a similar project from Xenosaga. During these broadcasts Dmitri Yuriev is also name dropped, and he is directly one of the antagonists in the Xenosaga series.

The final set of things comes during the post credits scene. During this scene, you see the two earths recombining. However, they also are seen coming out of some sort of cloaking. I assume this was hinting at the plot of Xenosaga, where Earth is lost due to cloaking. This is then followed up by a blue object of some sort crashing towards Earth, which again to me seems to imply it’s KOS-MOS from the end of Xenosaga III falling to Earth.

All that is to say that this expansion really is for the fans. It adds more context to the Xenoblade series, but also seems to imply ties to the rest of the overarching Xeno series, even if Nintendo doesn’t own those IPs. It also puts us in a place where they’ve given a number of jumping off points for whatever comes next, whether that’s an XC4 or an entirely new branch of the Xeno games.

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If you at all enjoyed Xenoblade Chronicles 3, this expansion probably isn’t going to change that opinion. It’s still the same great core gameplay. As something that is simply more of a good thing, it’s enough to be worthwhile. As something for fans of the series, it’s even better. It clearly is there to both be a thanks to fans, as well as a nod towards what might come next and really puts an end cap on what I assume is the end of this set of Xeno titles.