Category: Switch

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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.

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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.