Tag: jrpg

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Game Ramblings #62.1 – Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country

More Info from Nintendo

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a fairly enjoyable game overall. It had a great universe, enjoyable story, fun characters, and a ton of depth. However, it wasn’t without its issues. The game, like its predecessors was somewhat grindy. The UI was often in the way of streamlined leveling. Overall, despite its depth, the game often felt like it was pushing for more for the sake of more.

Torna however feels like they really embraced the idea of less is more, and the experience is much better as a result. This is an entirely standalone experience, billed as an expansion. It’s a much shorter experience with a significantly streamlined story, rips outs a whole bunch of extraneous systems to focus the leveling aspect, and narrows you onto two main titans. Some clever changes to the battle system really finish up the tweaks, and the total package ends up being much better than the base game, despite the reduction in bullet point features.

Welcome to Torna. After hearing so much about this land in the original game, it’s nice to finally be able to run around on it.

The most obvious immediate change is that almost all of the blade collecting, and therefore a lot of the metagame leveling is gone. You only get blades that are important to the story, and each party member ends up having two blades of different types. By the end of the expansion, you’ve basically got exactly what you need to finish the game with the full suite of ability types. There’s also no longer any special blades, no multi form blades, any robot blade replacements, and no mercenary guild to level up. This all sounds like a lot of removal, but that also meant that a lot of the tedious grind simply went away. It’s entirely addition by subtraction.

The rest of the leveling setup is maintained. You get XP from kills and quests, weapon points from kills, skill points from kills, and various things can be activated in each blade’s affinity chart. As a core set this ends up playing a nice balance between having a nice range of systems without having too many, and also gives you some specific subgoals to focus on, particularly with respect to the blade affinities.

Combat should feel extremely familiar to XC2 fans, though it has some tweaks.

The battle system has also been tweaked to generally feel more streamlined, as well as a fair bit quicker paced. For the most part, people familiar with XC2 will drop in quickly and feel right at home, and I suspect they will like the changes in place.

The first big change is that blade swapping is used as a way to switch the active passive attacker, and swapping between the blades and the driver activate an attack on swap. This is used to inflict a number of status effects, particularly things like topple or smash, as well as providing a full recharge of the blade artes. In practice, it basically means that you can do a combo as follows:

  • Activate Break on one character while using all of their artes.
  • Swap to another character to inflict Topple and quickly use the full suite of artes.
  • While this is happening, the AI will typically inflict Launch
  • Swap to the third character to inflict Smash, finishing a full chain combo.

This pattern is done way faster than any similar combo would have been done in the original release. In also having the blades be the primary attacker, there’s a much more direct feel to the swap, instead of it simply being the blade out of frame swapping out.

The elemental orb / chain attack setup has also been tweaked a bit to reduce clutter. There are still orbs applied on successful blade artes, elemental orbs can be broken in a final combo attack, etc. However, the elemental chaining no longer is used to seal attacks, so a big UI element that I generally ignored is no longer there, and honestly I didn’t miss it at all.

This is still a spectacularly gorgeous game, especially for an open-world Switch experience.

So in the end, this is both a great expansion on the XC2 universe, as well as a way to generally improve on the overall gameplay at the same time. As a prequel, this covers a bunch of story that was hinted at throughout the original game in a way that only improves the universe. On its own that’s enough for me to recommend it to fans of the original. However, the gameplay improvements definitely clinch it for me. This is a much better experience than XC2, and it’s clear that the dev team is learning some lessons from their past releases. Here’s to hoping whatever comes next continues that improvement.

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Game Ramblings #82 – Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch, Windows
  • Originally Released On: Xbox 360, PS3 (Japan only)

TL;DR

  • Roughly decade old Tales of title remastered for current generation, first time seeing expanded PS3 content in North America
  • Game that has aged well despite some of the improvements to the overall Tales of gameplay since its release

I had the weirdest lack of memory about the second half of this game as I was playing it, as if I hadn’t ever gotten that far in the original release. This is despite me basically finishing all Tales of titles since Symphonia. From playing it this time, I knew it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy the game – the combat in this entry is probably what I’d consider the best representation of the more classic side-scrolling Tales of combat. I also know it wasn’t because of a difficulty spike as I never really had a point where I felt like the difficulty curve was anything but correct. At the end of the day I never did figure that out and I never hooked up my 360 to figure out how far I had originally gotten, but in my 50 or so hours with this game, I came away knowing that this still holds up as a fantastic RPG worth playing.

Combat is still the main focus here to no surprise.

Combat in Vesperia is about as close as I could point to this series’ classic combat style still playable on a modern platform. Games after this added new elements that really played with the system – Graces removed TP and added a bunch of side stepping, Xillia played around a lot more with a 3D battle space, Berseria played around with swapping characters in real time while pushing further into 3D. Basically, Vesperia pretty closely represents the end result of years of them iterating on a 2D system, and it is still a thrill to play.

The main focus here is still some really fun and fast paced combos consisting of basic attacks and special attacks. Where this game really pushed things is in the use of gear skills. Some armor, and nearly all weapons have skills that can be earned over time. Once earned, the character permanently unlocks the skill as a toggleable item. These can range from passive stat boosts to attack replacements. The real fun ones for combat end up being the combo modifiers.

These can extend your combo, make parts of your combos different elements, make parts of your combo scale better and more. It basically becomes an involved metagame in trying to build out your attack combo in a way that best suits your style in order to maximize both damage, and in many ways maximize the amount of time you can stun lock your opponents. After all, more stuns equals less damage taken equals better chance at winning. The balance here is incredibly rewarding when you find the skill setup that best meets your style, and gives a lot of flexibility to the player in fighting specifically how they want.

Get used to these guys, you’ll be spending all your time with them.

That’s not to say that all parts of the combat system have aged incredibly well, but they’re in ways that are sadly familiar to Tales of players. The AI in general can basically be depended on to do the worst thing possible, even if you tweak their AI setup. In the end my best course of action was usually keeping one person on full time healing, and not allow them to attack, thereby keeping them out of danger and having to focus on healing only themselves. The other AI generally had their best result in using ONLY basic attacks, or they’d sometimes stand around just waiting to use skills. I’d much rather them be doing basic attacks to stun the enemies, and allow me to run around doing larger damage under my own control. The stun locks also work both ways, with some of the later bosses being basically stun lock management and a setup where I spent more time free running avoiding attacks, then doing poke damage when possible instead of actively being in combat. In a lot of points bosses can basically stun lock you 100->0 if you get hit with the wrong thing and your AI partners don’t interrupt the chain.

Visually the game has held up well, with a few more modern enhancements keeping this one up to speed despite its age.

The rest of the experience is unsurprising. Visually, the anime style that the Tales of series has always used has aged really well. The resolution bump on the new consoles has helped out a bit, and some light use of depth of field and similar screen effects has given this a bit more modern flair. The story is a bit take it or leave it, with the usual amount of incoming apocalypse melodrama typical of the series. However, the characters are generally likable and the banter between them is a lot of fun. This one also has pretty solid voice acting, and the entire set of skits has also gained the voice acting done for the PS3 Japan release. Overall, this one really didn’t need to do much to still hold up, but the little pieces done to remaster the title keep it up to modern expectations for the series.

I guess my end recommendation here is basically to play this, especially if you’ve liked any of the Tales of games on modern consoles. The battle system would be a bit different than those, but still has great flow despite its often 2D nature. The gear skills in particular are a customization wrinkle that I wish more games in general would take advantage of. The rest of the experience is typical of Tales of games, and that should frame whether or not you think you’d like it. However, even having played it before, I still put the 50 hours in to finish it again so that should give the best kind of idea of how much I think this is worth playing.

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Game Ramblings #76 – Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, 3DS (Japan Only)

TL;DR

  • Pretty traditional turn-based JRPG typical of the series, with a few nice modern features brought in
  • Fantastically gorgeous game thanks to using UE4
  • Solid story that kept me pushing forward, even if the “true ending” path got unnecessarily grindy

I’m pretty sure  I’ve made note of the fact that I’m a sucker for JRPGs in the past, and Dragon Quest 11 is about as JRPG as it gets.  The story is nonsense, the battles are strictly turn based, the grind is real, and the characters are still default Akira Toriyama.  Despite it all, this is clearly a modernized entry in the series from the visuals to some of the little gameplay elements that improve the overall experience, and it ends up going a long way to finally bringing the series into the current generation.

Combat is definitely familiar to traditional JRPG fans, but there’s a few nice things to minimize the tedious nature of this style.

Since this is a JRPG, I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with combat.  This is definitely a very traditional experience, even within the Dragon Quest series.  Turn order is based loosely on an effective speed stat.  Player characters have their basic attacks, skills, and magic attacks.  The general class archetypes of warrior, thief, mage, healer, etc are all present and each character definitely has their strong suit.  Behind it all is a skill tree for each character that the player can customize via skill points earned at each level.  Basically, it’s what you’d expect from a JRPG.

However, it’s the little things that this game brings that make this game an obviously more modern approach.  Auto battle makes its return from DQ9 to keep the pace of individual fights moving along.  It allows for setting priorities on how AI react, or can be turned off entirely on a per-character basis if more decision making detail is needed.  The party line up AND equipment can be changed at any time from within battle, allowing for very detailed strategies on harder content if a party or equipment setup isn’t working well.  Even more importantly, characters not in the active party gain 100% of XP from a fight, allowing the player to focus on the style that makes sense at the time without severely penalizing them for not using all characters at once.  In general, this is following a pattern of traditional but modern that is seen in a lot of other areas of the game.

I think most importantly though, this game has auto saves at pretty much every door and cutscene.  I couldn’t tell you if this was a technical or gameplay consideration, but simply knowing that I wasn’t going to lose a ton of progress to a boss death was a huge improvement to my overall play.  Rather than worrying about finding a save spot before a boss or worrying about my level, I simply always did boss fights.  Generally speaking this was fine and I would get through fights.  For a good portion of them, it also meant that I was going into fights at a challenging level, rather than grinding a bit more just to  be safe.  Overall it resulted in two really important changes to my usual JRPG game style; I did a lot less grinding so the game didn’t drag, and because of my level I was able to enjoy the challenge of level-appropriate or even underleveled fights without caring about whether I was going to die.  It may sound weird, but it just made the game more enjoyable knowing I was going to play this way.

Visuals are definitely distinctly modern. It’s obviously Dragon Quest, but it’s gorgeous.

The non-gameplay elements also fit well into the traditional but modern approach.  Visually, this is probably the best looking JRPG I’ve played, hands down.  Games like Final Fantasy 15 brought the flash in an open world setting, but definitely stretched the definition of what a JRPG really is.  Dragon Quest 11 doesn’t sacrifice visuals at all while still maintaining the JRPG gameplay.  Even better, the modern style allows for all enemies to be seen in the field in ways that make sense, so there are no random battles to be seen.  On the other hand, the music side of things is very traditional Dragon Quest.  Simply put, the game uses entirely MIDI audio instead of a fully orchestrated soundtrack.  Admittedly I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I can see why it’s been rubbing some people the wrong way compared to a lot of expectations of modern games.

It wouldn’t be a JRPG if all bosses were serious. Sometimes you just have to fight a mural.

Overall this was a pretty enjoyable romp.  On the story front there wasn’t much new; this is still the story of a convenient hero creating a gang to take out the big world destroying baddy.  On the gameplay front it was mostly tweaks to the existing formula.  On the artistic side, it was a blend of the old and new.  However, the total package is one that really hasn’t been seen at this quality for what has been a genre moving into much different territory at the AAA level.  This may be the best example we’re going to see for a long time of a strictly turn-based JRPG, so I can’t do anything but strongly recommend it if that’s what you’re looking for.