Category: Switch

Posted on

Shelved It #17 – Bug Fables: The Everlasting Spring

More Info from Dangen Entertainment

  • Genre: RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series

As basically a clone of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door this one gets a lot right. The writing is entertaining. The combat has good action-based attack and defense perks. The visual style really hits a good place. However, at the 10 hour mark my attacks still did the same damage as the 0 hour mark. What ultimately did me in is that I wanted to kill some trash quicker, couldn’t find an item to do so, then did a bunch of side quests in search of similar things with my rewards only some small amounts of currency. It felt unrewarding in a way that made me question how much longer I’d have to go to get beyond the simple set of strategies available to me for the majority of my time in the game. The core choice in how they handled stats and how it impacted my power curve was something I couldn’t shake.

The way this game doles out stat upgrades really just doesn’t work for me. Level ups give you three choices – +1 HP, +3 badge points, and +3 special attack points. That’s it. What this ultimately means is that your power curve is tied to badges. Early on most of these are simple things – +1 defense to the back row character, automatic kills of weak enemies, etc. By the point I’m at, I can start to see some more interesting possibilities emerging – for example, a badge that causes a character to get poisoned and a badge that increases defense for a poisoned character. However, I don’t have anything resembling a complete set of badges to execute an actual strategy. For example, I don’t have anything to match with poisons that increases healing to mitigate the inherent damage or increase attack to reduce turns in the fights while poisoned. And sure, there’s food that can temporarily boost things to help you out more but they’re temporary, they’re consumable, and they require you to take up slots in an extremely limited inventory, so it also feels less than ideal to follow after.

In lieu of stat upgrades, strategies like these would be interesting and fun as a mechanical choice, but there’s just such a slow rate of giving out the more interesting badges that I don’t know when I’m going to actually be able to have fun using those types of things. It would be one thing if that was the late game goal and early to mid game were supplemented by stat increases, but I’m also not getting those. My 3 point attack at minute 0 is the same 3 point attack that I have at hour 10, and it’s largely what I do against any trash. The problem is that the trash has gone from 4 to 10 HP in that time, and the only thing I’ve gained is some HP to stay alive a bit longer. It’s caused the pace of battles to slow tremendously for no reason other than lack of power to push through the fights.

It’s such a small mechanical difference from most RPGs, but it’s really wrecking the experience for me. I want to have combat filled with interesting strategies, but I also want to feel like I’m gaining power. Sure, I’ve added some special attacks in that time so intuitively I have more tools at my disposal, but it doesn’t feel like I’m making progress. Something that took two rounds hours ago still takes two rounds, and it will continue to take two rounds until some currently undetermined time at which I find attack up badges or find a complete set to execute some fun strategy.

What it ended up doing was kind of a compound thing. I knew that I needed to do side content to hopefully find some cool rewards, but I didn’t want to do side content because so many of them don’t give cool rewards. I also didn’t necessarily want to push story content because I was getting to a point where normal trash fights were taking more time than I cared to get through, but because stats aren’t earned through leveling it made no sense to do even a small typical grinding pass to alleviate some of the slower pace. Spending a bunch of time fighting trash that gives no XP because it’s “weak” despite taking the same amount of time to kill as five hours ago is pretty discouraging. Finishing those combat sections and getting 20 or 30 berries instead of a useful badge is even more discouraging.

The unfortunate thing is that in a vacuum I really like what they did here. The combat clearly understood what people liked about old Paper Mario. You can reduce incoming damage with well timed button inputs, including a couple different tiers based on how precise you were. Each enemy has very different timing and tells, so you have to learn and memorize enemies. Attacks are similar, with each character having their own flavor of action inputs to increase the damage being done. Each character also has important strengths that play into combat strategy. The bee can knock down flying units. The beetle can flip over armored units. The moth can throw magic which is super effective against specific enemy types. Outside of the lack of power curve, the combat just works extremely well so it’s frustrating that stats are the thing really throwing me off.

This is ultimately a thing where my lack of patience is doing me in here. I get why people enjoy it and for the most part I really like the core mechanics at play but it just is hitting the wrong notes for me. I just want to feel like my time is being rewarded in a consistent manner, and typically for RPGs that would be through token stat increases and gearing. It doesn’t even have to be huge to feel effective in a game like this with such small numbers. Adding a +1 to one stat on one character each level would already be huge. Having the badges then supplement those stat increases to bring in interesting combat strategies would just be icing at that point. As it stands right now, the question mark of when I’ll feel more powerful, or even if I happen to do the right content to get those badges to do so is always just hanging over my head, causing me to fall off this game.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #156 – Pokemon Legends: Arceus

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Adventure / JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

Look, this is a rough game. It’s hideously ugly. It still for some reason has Pokemon boxes without auto sorting. Balance is often entirely vague even with Pokemon 10+ levels apart. However, I can’t stop playing it. The core gameplay loop is so fundamentally changed but it works far better than I expected it to and in doing so represents a path forward for the series that I couldn’t have expected when Diamond/Pearl came out 3 months ago.

This game got ruthlessly shit on from the trailers, and frankly it isn’t entirely undeserved. This game is ugly more often than not. The Pokemon models are fine, and at least generally consistent. However, their art style doesn’t really match the world’s art style, and the world is atrocious. However, it doesn’t feel like laziness to me – it feels like a failing of technology. This is pretty clearly using some variant of the Sword/Shield engine stretched beyond its limits. The unfortunate thing as a developer, especially on an experimental title like this, is sometimes you just shoot yourself in the ass and this is one of those times. You get to a point where you can either delay a game by years and restart the core tech or just ship it with what you’ve got and move onto the next thing instead of cancelling a title. It’s time for this series to either move onto Nintendo’s own in-house engines or move to something stock, because it’s clear that Game Freak would be better served focusing on the games, rather than the engine.

However, once you get past that the game is a lot of fun, and it comes down to the core loop just really working. Rather than being gym-focused, the entire focus of the core game loop is research. You’re basically going out into the field, catching as much stuff as you can, and returning. That is the core of building the Pokedex here. The relatively non-linear nature of it means you can kind of wander off wherever you want, whether to focus on new areas or completing the entry of a specific Pokemon. The ability to fast travel back and forth to town means your play sessions are basically as long as you want them to be. The ability to craft (!!!!!!) Pokeballs, potions, etc means that as long as you’re collecting resources, you aren’t having to go shopping. If you run out, you just bring up the crafting menu and seamlessly keep your stock together.

It’s the type of loop that just works on the Switch in the same way that Breath of the Wild did. Your play sessions are as long as you want them to be and it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing a 30 minute or 3 hour block. In both cases you’re making appreciable progress that you can drop back into at any time. It’s a loop that just keeps you engaged and playing in an unexpected way.

Even within that loop, the changes work well though. The simple act of being able to catch a Pokemon without starting a battle while still earning XP for it is tremendous. It so completely speeds up the act of traversal that it allows the new gameplay push to just catch EVERYTHING to work. In the old style, the game would otherwise be a slog.

Even if it’s ugly, the environment being so open is also a huge change. Its openness isn’t quite BotW, but it’s also more than Sw/Sh wild areas were. From a gameplay perspective it’s a huge success. Different areas are visually distinct in a way that’s interesting on its own, but also allows for obvious placement of different types of Pokemon in a natural way. Bugs like Combee or Weedle live in the forest, which makes sense. Things like Spheal or Octillery can be found hanging out on the beach. Your Abomasnows are up in the mountain tops and your Magmars are by the volcano. It’s both obvious AND enjoyable. It’s not that they didn’t try to do this before, but it feels even further down the line of making the Pokemon world more natural than it even previously has been.

It’s also a nice change that the player is FINALLY ACTUALLY IN DANGER. You get attacked by Pokemon in the wild. You have boss fights where you as the player are physically attacking Pokemon and they’re spectacularly fun. It’s one of those things that for the past 25 years everyone has been going “well, why is the player immune?” and it finally happened.

That said, despite the big change to the core gameplay there’s a lot of rough edges here. I complained about it during Sword/Shield but the existence of boxes, let alone no way to auto sort them is still baffling. Even more so when your Pokemon are literally being sent back to an open pasture to live their best lives. A lot of the side content is fine in its existence and kind of attempts to drive completion of the Pokedex, but there’s very little variety or necessity to it. The combat that is there is fine, but I’d like to see the new core loop adapted to a game with a more traditional level of trainer battles.

Frankly, balance is also incredibly vague. One of the core changes is that all battles are now speed-based. Speed can mean that Pokemon go first, but also that they can go multiple times in a row. That alone can easily result in your Pokemon often getting one-shot before taking a turn, even when they aren’t at a type disadvantage. Pokemon 15+ levels below your active one can still do significant damage as well, so I spent a lot of time outside of battle healing or going back to camp to rest against things that really shouldn’t have been a danger. It feels like it was tuned to be difficult, but it instead comes across as odd, because type advantage is still the king and the changes made just make the exploration slower, rather than making the individual trainer battles more difficult.

If this represents a new path forward for the series then all the rough edges don’t really matter. It has its problems, but this pushes a new gameplay archetype for the series that just works. It’s familiar enough, but far more active and far more fun than the JRPG slog that the series has really become known for. If it’s instead just a sidetrack between entries, then hopefully it’s at least a lesson to them that it’s time to take a serious look at their tech stack moving forward. However, after how much I’ve been enjoying this one, I think it’d be a huge loss if this doesn’t represent the direction the series will be sticking to going forward.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #153 – Eastward

More Info from Pixpil

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam

Unless something drastic happens, this is likely my last completed game of 2021, and it really wasn’t a bad one to end the year on. I’d seen this one described as a Zelda-like, which is really what caught my attention. That’s not necessarily a bad description, but it’s definitely an oversimplification. There’s a much greater emphasis on narrative moments and linearity than the 2D Zelda games, and frankly the combat is a lot different. However, it does share the DNA. While it doesn’t necessarily reach those lofty heights, it’s still a title worth checking out.

Once you get into combat in Eastward, it’s pretty obvious that this isn’t really a Zelda-like. It’s simultaneously simpler in some ways, but more complex in other ways, and that really breaks down into the interaction between the two characters. John is basically your primary attacker – he’s got a pan for melee and a handful of guns with slightly different characteristics, as well as a handful of bomb types for AoE purposes. Sam is not a damage dealer at all, apart from one specific enemy type, but importantly can shoot out a magic attack that causes time to freeze for the enemy that got hit. That ability is where she becomes special.

A lot of the core enemy combatants are frankly annoying to try to hit. They move fast or jump around a lot or do dash attacks through the player. They basically exist to be annoying and deal as much damage as possible while staying at range. The rhythm of the combat then becomes a pattern of switching to Sam, freezing enemies, then whittling them down with John. That can be freezing to hit at range with a disc gun or to hit in melee with a pan, but the end result is the same. Sam is an incredibly effective crowd controller, John is an incredibly effective damage dealer, but their abilities work in tandem to maximize effectiveness. Large count encounters can still be somewhat chaotic in a less fun way, but this is outweighed by the fact that the combat really hits its mark well during boss fights.

The other interesting mechanic that comes out of two PCs with different abilities is separation for puzzle solving purposes. Sam is short and can fit through tubes, as well as activate magic switches. John is strong and can pull large crates and blow up walls with bombs. Separating the two during puzzles often means chucking things across impassable barriers to help the other person move forward just a bit more until they can eventually reunite.

This is put to the test very well near the end of the game. At that point, there’s a string of puzzles that are all time limited. These were by far the most fun puzzles to complete because of the added level of stress. You’re really pushed to be accurate and fast, while also minimizing the use of resources so you can crank through a puzzle before time runs out. You may need to drop a bomb, charge an attack, and launch it across a gap to hit a switch, but if you’re not accurate it’s going to send you back to the start. You may need to separate the two characters, but if you hit switches in an inefficient manner, it may mean you’re wasting precious seconds waiting for a platform to move back through the world to you, causing you to miss out on time. It really ended up proving out the systems in a surprising way to me, largely because I typically despise time limited segments that remove my ability to plan out my actions more carefully.

Ultimately it’s the progression that really separated this one entirely from Zelda. It’s not that it’s entirely linear, but it’s not far off. The game takes place across a number of smaller hub worlds, typically with a couple of specific types of shops (upgrades, food stuff, general goods) and you’ll spend a couple of hours in the general vicinity, but this isn’t the open world of something like Link to the Past. This becomes especially true in the last few hours where the game is totally linear. Once you leave an area, it’s also not somewhere you can return to. If you miss something, you’re not getting it later on. This wasn’t a particular issue for me as one of the first upgrades you can buy is a hidden item sensor and everything is generally near the golden path, but it’s worth noting.

It’s also worth noting that this game had some weird stability issues on Switch. Throughout my play, this crashed probably about a half dozen times in about 20 hours. Particularly annoying were crashes that happened at the end of boss fights on a few occasions. This was also combined with some odd framerate issues when the enemy count got high. Having done some work on Switch titles, I get that the hardware is limited, but this wasn’t the type of game that I would have expected these kinds of problems to crop up in.

So at the end of the day, this may not be a game that will totally blow your socks off but it’s still something worth playing. It’s got a charming story backing generally fun combat and generally fun puzzle solving. It takes the general Zelda formula and changes enough about it to make this game feel unique without being unfamiliar. It makes a two-character core loop work well without feeling like a neverending escort quest. In general it just proved that it was worth the time.