Category: Switch

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Game Ramblings #161 – A Little Golf Journey

More Info from Okidokico

  • Genre: Puzzle
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam

It’s perhaps ironic that this one was published by Playtonic, because my enjoyment curve of this game reminded me EXACTLY of Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair. The game slowly added mechanics throughout that worked well. It felt like it had an appropriate challenge curve based on mechanics that enhanced the puzzle solving. I got to the end of the game with a high level of praise ready to be put to ramblings.

Then I hit the long level for the true ending of the game that felt like it turned the mechanics on their head.

This is a puzzle game through and through. Ya it’s got its golf coat on, but that part of it isn’t really the point. Each hole is a puzzle to figure out what specific locations you need to hit the ball to in order to finish it in the correct number of strokes. That’s ultimately all there is to it. Ya there’s some dealing with power. Ya you get some wind later on. Ya you’ve got to deal with some gravity shenanigans in a moon world. Ultimately though, it’s a puzzle. What makes this work is that the entire game is a zen experience. You’re thrown into a little diorama and can move all around to plan out your shots, but you go at your leisure as you plot your course.

The way I would describe this is that you’re succeeding through trial and experience. Failures in a case like this end up being a case of not having enough experience – whether that be a lack of knowledge of how wind is affecting your ball, or how a slope in an area will affect rolling distance. However, it’s never because you were lacking information. Succeeding is because you’ve learned and applied your knowledge. In this case, the variable involved is purely your aim and your imagination in getting through the course.

When this all is working well the game is phenomenal. It’s the type of game that you can just sit back and relax to. You’ve got a pretty light ambient soundtrack that adds to the relaxation. You’ve got a game that isn’t rushing you, but is instead just letting you enjoy the experience.

What ends up being the enemy of this is time. For the most part though, the time-based mechanics aren’t too egregious.

The main mechanic that hits this is actually the core power selection. If you aren’t specifically focusing, your power and aim selection occurs via a cyclic infinity symbol. You can use this to increase or decrease your distance beyond the core aiming, which adds a bit of flexibility to the aim selection. While this works fine, it largely feels unnecessary to me. I don’t see a case where allowing the player to select their power around a target wouldn’t be beneficial to the player. The challenge of the game to me feels like picking your shot selection precisely. You can still do that with the cyclic aim, but it adds a level of imprecision that adds friction to the experience. It doesn’t make the game harder, it just makes it slower. You’re missing shots that you shouldn’t miss purely because of timing.

Later on in the game, the levels start getting some time-ish mechanics. These largely revolve around some lights moving items – asteroids in the moon levels, blockers in a computer level. Things of that nature. Again, these largely work fine but don’t really improve the game. Your shot selection doesn’t change because of the moving stuff, it just causes your pace to slow down.

And then I got to the final level.

The thing about the last level is that it adds a bunch of dynamic geometry. In some cases it’s geometry being created in areas panning around the world, while in some cases it’s creating holes in geometry. I get why this is happening, because ultimately the last level needs some challenge. However, it just doesn’t work to me.

The first thing is that the core golf mechanic is just too dynamic for this. I can’t tell you the amount of times I would land a ball perfectly, then sit there having to wait for it to shed the last little bit of speed. By the time I was able to shoot again, the geometry would disappear underneath me and I’d lose my shot. I’d then do nearly the exact shot on my next attempt, but a little shorter or a little longer and the ball would immediately stop and give me plenty of time to shoot.

It also just adds a time crunch that doesn’t really vibe with the rest of the game. Instead of planning your shots and carefully aiming, you’re just kind of rushing to generally the right area for your ball to land, then rushing to the next shot. Rather than trialing and gaining experience, you’re kind of just flailing around and eventually succeeding. It’s less learning and more just doing and it feels awkward compared to the rest of the game.

I guess despite the last level, I still recommend the game. There’s enough there that I enjoyed that if I ignore the last level, I’m fine with what I got out of it. It’s the same thing that I ended up doing with Impossible Lair. Enjoy the parts that are great, and just don’t actually finish the game.

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Game Ramblings #160 – Xenoblade Chronicles 3

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

It says a lot about a JRPG that I still want to play it when I finish. It says a lot that despite playing 80 hours I never felt like I was grinding. It says a lot that I was doing side quests just for the sake of exploring the new spots that they would lead me that you would otherwise never see on the golden path. It says a lot that changing your party to other class types was so fun that I was actively trying to complete the roster. This is just a fantastically good game that is worth going out of your way to play.

There’s a lot to cover about this game but I want to start in a specific place. This game is incredibly streamlined for a Xenoblade title. I mentioned in my ramblings for XB2’s Torna expansion that it felt like they were starting to embrace a bit of a less is more notion and that feels like it’s continued here. In this game you’re down to three main forms of experience: XP for leveling, CP for leveling your classes, and SP for leveling a skill tree tied to a story thing that I’m not going to spoil. This also fell into a balance curve that felt fair the entire time. Xenoblade 2 and X both had really weird difficulty spikes at the end that felt more like unfair mechanics than any inherent difficulty. Xenoblade 3 on the other hand just generally felt like it was trying to be fair across the board and ramping difficulty as made sense, rather than throwing some BS one shot mechanics at you to finish the game.

What this gets me for XB3 is that I spent a whole lot less time in menus and a whole lot more time just playing the game. About the only time I was going into the menus was when I wanted to change the class setup of my team, either because I wanted to try something a bit differently or because someone hit the class level cap and I wanted to start leveling on something else. There’s some other mechanics like skill mastery and some light gearing (accessories and gems ONLY) but for the most part it’s incidental and I was only changing it at the same time as changing my classes, so it was all done in a single pass. In playing, this felt a lot more in line with the remake of XB1 than the over-complex XB2 set of systems. You’re rewarded for playing effectively, you’re rewarded for leveling up, and you just go.

And boy do you just want to go. Combat in this game felt like another high point in the series. The base combat has luckily brought over XB2‘s hot key selection where your attacks are simple button presses when ready on the d-pad and face buttons. It worked far better than XB1‘s scrolling menu and it’s good to see if return. However, that’s not the main point of interest. Without getting too spoilery, the core plot point of this game is that it’s smashed the two universes of the first two games together into one. What you end up with is some party members that use the time-based skill recharge of XB1 and some party members that use the attack-based skill recharge of XB2. This is where classes come into play.

Classes are earned by completing hero quests and using those classes starts to unlock the ability to equip that class’ arts while it isn’t actively being used. The main restriction is that you can only equip arts of the opposite universe. For example, if your active class is earned from a character in the XB2‘s world, you can only secondary equip skills from a class earned from an XB1 character. There are inherent power advantages to activating skills from BOTH at the same time, but because they are on different recharge mechanics you’ve got to be a little more patient with your timing that just hitting the button that is glowing and ready. There’s also some inherent advantages with mixing skills from different class archetypes to broaden what a member could do at any time. This gives XB3‘s combat its important feel.

What I started really getting in-tune with was seeing how many XB2 arts I could activate within a full XB1 art recharge period. If I could optimize my movement to get in three arts instead of two between dual-arts, then I just increased my power curve. If I could chain XB2 arts to cause them to recharge faster, then I just increased my power curve. Those all contributed to a really solid rhythmic feel of a fight as I found class combos that I really enjoyed. If I mixed some healing arts onto a tank, then I could go with fewer healers in my active party and power through with more damage. At the same time, I could use a DPS’s aggro reduction skill on a healer to reduce their incoming damage and give them more time to actively heal others, again allowing me to focus on more damage. It’s these types of things that let you to increase your power curve and ultimately your skill level that allowed them to get rid of all sorts of systems from XB2 and allow you to just be good at the game.

Luckily the streamlining also generally applied to combat. Chain attacks from XB2 are still there, and they’re still fun. However, elemental orbs are gone. The distinction between driver and blade arts is gone. Swapping blades is gone. What you’re doing is basically the following:

  • Apply your artes properly (ex: bonus for hitting a specific art from the back of the target).
  • Use the bonuses to charge up a chain attack meter.
  • Activate the chain attack.

That’s it. It takes the core fun of the big numbers and dramatic sequence from the XB2 chain attack system and gets rid of a bunch of complexity to just keep that part that worked the best while getting rid of some of the RNG nature of XB2’s orbs.

Story DLC aside, if this does end up being the end of the Xenoblade story they sure nailed it. This feels like a culmination of the story, but more importantly it feels like a culmination of the gameplay. It’s got things that worked from both of the previous mainline titles while getting rid of a whole bunch of extraneous nonsense. It results in a game that doesn’t get tiring despite its length. It’s one of those games that despite the Switch being old and underpowered compared to the current gen of consoles, it’s worth going out of your way to try out.

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Game Ramblings #157 – Kirby and the Forgotten Land

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

This isn’t quite the open world revelation that we all hoped it would be after the first trailer. It also isn’t at all a challenging game like Elden Ring. It doesn’t really do anything all that ambitious, even for the Kirby series. However, what it is is fun. It’s fun in that weird unexplainable way that so many Nintendo games just are and so many developers wish they could capture. It’s that fun that makes this worth playing.

Within the opening sequence of the game you become the car above and that really just sets the stage for the game. Kirby is taking his hoovering mechanic to a new level here and more often than not it serves as an outlandish way for the game to get you through a specific mechanic. Need to cover long distances fast? There’s a convenient car. Need to shoot at enemies or break through a wall from range? Why not becoming a soda shooting vending machine. Need to pierce through a weak point in the ground? Well, a traffic cone is the right shape.

The thing about all these instances isn’t necessarily that they are new mechanics. What they are wrapped in is a layer of magic. There’s something entirely unknown to me about why the simple mechanics are so memorable here, but a lot of it ultimately comes down to the attention to detail in the buildup of the world itself. It’s little things, like the way Kirby’s animations show squish and stretch when there’s changes in velocity. It’s things like the subtle freeze frames that occur when you smash through something as car Kirby. It’s things like seeing the same damn tree boss that every Kirby games has, but now with a tropical flair and a change to the camera angle to hit both nostalgia and mechanical interest. That attention to detail is so utterly hard to grasp as a developer, but is something that Nintendo has routinely done so well that allows its otherwise simple games to nearly universally be regarded as great.

Luckily, the game doesn’t just skate by on polish. Despite being easy, it’s got a surprising amount to do, which gives a lot of interesting content for players of all skill levels. Each level has your normal end point, but within that there’s also a bunch of hidden objectives. Each level has a collection of hidden waddle dees, but the rest of the objectives run the gamut from beating enemies with specific powers to finishing encounters without taking damage to beating bosses quickly to simply just finding cool hidden shit. It provides enough of a distraction for completionists to be chasing a bit of a carrot that’s beyond just simply finishing the levels. That’s not to say that it doesn’t start to wear a bit thin by the end, but it was nice to have something to strive for and even replay levels for

However, my favorite thing were the treasure road levels. These are effectively single-power time trials, and they’re a speed runner’s dream. Each one drops you into a level with a specific power and a handful of encounters to finish between you and the goal. Everything between that point is entirely up to your skill level. In doing these, you very quickly learn how to efficiently use your powers, allowing you quicker and quicker times through the specific level. That then leads to more efficient and more clever use of the powers in regular levels and boss fights, giving a positive reinforcement loop to the player’s skill in the game.

That kind of a loop is also a classic Nintendo thing. If you think about something like level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros – you run the right, see a Goomba, maybe you die, but if you jump and land on it you now know a core mechanic. As you keep running to the right, you see a few more as well as some pipes. You know how to jump, so now you’re learning how to jump well. Each little step along that way reinforces what you learned in previous things to become better at the game. Kirby treats the treasure road levels the same way. They’re run on their own, but the skill improvements you get in them just serve to improve how you play through the rest of the game.

All that said, if you want something ambitious or innovative, this isn’t it. This game should be played because it’s purely fun. It’s not fun in a new way, and it’s not often fun in an explainable way, but it just is. If you’re wanting something more forgiving after Elden Ring, give this a try. If you want something fun to just fill a gap, give this a try. End of the day it’s just a mindless title, but it didn’t stop being fun for me the entire time.