Tag: ARPG

Posted on

Game Ramblings #88 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – HD 1.5 Remix

More Info from Square-Enix

Long story short; I want to play Kingdom Hearts 3, but for the life of me I can’t remember the lore. I could just look the story up on the internet, but frankly I’d rather play the games again and in the process remember why each one had it’s own set of problems. For the time being, we’re starting off with the HD 1.5 ReMIX games of KH1 and Re:Chain of Memories

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • KH1 Also Available On: PS2, PS3
  • Chain of Memories Also Available On: GBA, PS2, PS3
This combo of series totally makes sense right?

Kingdom Hearts was always a weird combination love letter to both Final Fantasy and Disney. It mixed the two series in a way that never should have worked, but somehow doesn’t feel weird when in action. Each individual world has its own chance to shine and give focus to a specific set of Disney or FF characters. Despite its gameplay problems, the game did well enough to now be a series of more games and video tie-ins than I can keep track of. However, going back and replaying the original is definitely a weird gameplay experience.

This is an ARPG, so combat is important. Unfortunately it’s also kind of bad.

Even at release, the combat in Kingdom Hearts wasn’t fantastic, but it definitely shows some lumps now. Moment to moment, it has some fundamental problems relative to modern games. The camera isn’t great, so the game really leans into both soft and hard locks for attacks. Attacks can be pretty inconsistent in their ability to hit, but you end up gaining so many variations in ranges that by the end of the game you can really spam attack from anywhere to hit something. Donald as a character more or less just sucks, but you gain a ton of world-specific characters to replace him, and by end game he’s gained so much magic capability that he’s pretty useful.

This is also backed by a wildly inconsistent level of difficulty. What I’d consider the two hardest bosses in the game are the Tarzan world boss (roughly world 3) and the Little Mermaid boss (roughly the mid point of the game). The Tarzan boss is difficult entirely because of poor design. You can take immediate damage coming out of two cutscenes unless you’re spamming dodge. The arena that the fight takes place in has multiple points where dodge rolls can be blocked on bad collision, despite the fact that the fight is incredibly heavy on dodging to avoid fast damage, including instant-trace ranged attacks. Basically it’s a fight where the core mechanics of the game fight against the setup in place in a hugely negative situation. On the other hand the Little Mermaid boss fight is a pure damage nuke situation, and fought straight up is unnecessarily heavy in healing. However, the mechanics of the fight allow you to easily get behind the boss into a place where you take significantly reduced damage while easily hitting the main target point.

This pattern in particular is a common exploit in boss fights. I’d say probably about 50% of boss fights have a “safe” location behind them where the boss can neither hit you or turn to eventually hit you, while allowing you to lay in full damage. The friendly AI is also pretty good at following you into these locations, so you can often have a full party rotation simply unable to take damage. There’s signs that this was attempted to be fixed (fight adds, homing attacks, etc), but the attempts were pretty meaningless, and the fights just weren’t fun when not taking advantage.

Even if combat doesn’t stack up, seeing moments like this makes the experience worth it.

If this all sounds pretty bad, it’s because it is. This game simply hasn’t aged well from a gameplay perspective. Luckily it has aged well from a universe perspective, even if the lore is a bit nonsense. Without spoiling too much, KH1 basically exists to establish how all these Disney and Final Fantasy worlds are connected, but then future games go through and completely ruin any ability to make sense of the overall story. However, seeing moments like your party all dressed in-character for Nightmare Before Christmas or The Little Mermaid, or seeing Cloud fighting in the Olympus Coliseum makes it all worth it. It’s completely batshit crazy, and somehow it just works.

I didn’t get much further than this. If KH1 didn’t age well, then Chain of Memories REALLY lost it.

On the other hand, Chain of Memories really didn’t pass the worth it test. This was a GBA->PS2 remake where ARPG and cards mixed. Movement was in real time, where action selection was out of a card deck. Cards have a score value, playing a card against an enemy card of higher value would cancel their attack, and you go from there. In 2D on the GBA, this worked….alright. The view of the action was limited, so movement wasn’t super important, and you could still see to dodge while focusing on getting your card selection in order. In 3D this just doesn’t really work well at all.

Between manipulating the bad camera, trying to dodge attacks that you can’t really see, and trying to select the right cards, there just is too much going on to really effectively play the game. My best plan of attack ended up being a simple rotation:

  • Setup my deck specifically in high->low card value, with healing cards at the end.
  • Spam all my high-value cards to get off some easy attacks.
  • Spam stack the low value cards and activate some quick combos. This would remove low value cards over time, but I didn’t care.
  • Spam the healing spell cards at the end of my deck.
  • Refresh my active deck and repeat.

It was basically an invincible pattern as long as I kept my deck up to date, and in being invincible it wasn’t really fun. I wasn’t playing to effectively run the battle system. I was simply stacking my deck and going through the motions. In practice, this game would be better off being much slower paced, getting rid of movement, and having it be more around deck strategy, but we aren’t likely to see that anytime soon.

So the question then becomes, is it worth replaying these if you’ve really never played a Kingdom Hearts title? Honestly? Probably not. I could make a case for Kingdom Hearts 1, but you definitely want to go in expecting something a bit rough around the edges. I’d definitely skip Chain of Memories, although catching a cutscene movie on Youtube is probably not a bad idea. This is capped by a cutscene retelling of 358/2 Days which can also be found on Youtube to finish the story tie-ins between KH1 and KH2, and that’s where we’ll pick things up at some point in the future.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #77 – Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

More Info from Ubisoft

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

TL;DR

  • Another great entry in the series that iterates on the new AC style established in Origins
  • Stealth was still the most fun way to play, but both melee and bow combat were not detriments
  • Ancient Greek environment is a lot of fun to run through, especially for history nerds

Sailing is back, and it’s gorgeous.

While it would be easy to look at this game and assume it’s simply a mashup of Origins and the sailing from Black Flag, there’s a lot more going on under the hood here.  Where last year’s Origins explored the starting point of the assassins, this year’s Odyssey explores where some of the series artifacts come from.  In doing so, the game leans way into the supernatural/alien elements that have been hinted at for so long in the series’ back story, and really give us a game that fans of Greek mythology can dig into.

The place to start really is to just point at my ramblings about Origins last year as it covers a lot of what I normally would have said about combat.  That’s not to say that Odyssey is a straight copy, but really this is a solid iteration on the ideas from last year.  What this does differently is brings back the large scale sailing of Black Flag and really leans into the RPG side of things through skill trees, even more emphasis on gearing, and a lot less hand holding if you decide to go with the developer’s recommended options.

The game generally gives you an idea of where to go, but it’s up to you to find the goal.

It’s going to sound weird that such a simple change drastically changes the game, but the default style of this game doesn’t really give you goal locations.  Because of story reasons, you’ll often have a rough idea of where to, but if something isn’t in the dialog options presented to you, it’s often up to you to find the location.  What this ends up doing is really encouraging the thing that Origins started; the push to simply explore.  On your way towards a general area, you’ll run into any number of areas that can be cleared out of enemies and treasure, and it’s generally worth going through them.  One of the systems that was added to this game to also encourage exploration is a series of hunts against the Cult of Kosmos, which is basically a precursor to the series’ templars.

These cult leaders are the driving force behind the game’s story, and a number of them simply show up as targets during the story.  However, the rest have to be found.  They might simply be leaders of the various cities.  They may be out living on their own, taking care of a fort or a farm.  They may also be mercenaries sent to try and kill you.  However, behind all of it are clues that you can find by completing the small invasion areas; clues that lead you to the cultists location so you can take them out.

War is active, and it’s up to you to fight in it.

There’s also a large emphasis on war in this game, and you can generally get yourself directly involved in the battles.  This game takes place a few decades after the events of the movie 300, and Athens and Sparta are nipping at each other’s heels.  One of the consequences of you taking soldiers out is that the regions you’re in become weaker, exposing their leaders to be killed, and eventually the region for invasion.  In doing so, you can open up battles like the above screenshot for extra rewards, as well as to potentially turn over the region to the opposite side.  It’s a neat system that exists effectively as a distraction, but offers up something to do as a result of all the sneaking around you’re doing.

Mythology comes to life here, including a really fun fight against Medusa.

However, the lore behind the world is also a huge driving factor in exploring.  There’s fights against creatures like Medusa or Theseus’ minotaur.  There’s an entire segment of lore around the city of Atlantis and how it ties into the greater Assassin’s story.  There’s also the historic locations to see like the Parthenon in Athens or the famous people you meet like Sokrates or Hippokrates.  Basically, the entire game is a historian buff’s dream, and you’ll consistently be seeing things that you’d only ever seen in books.

All said, this is another great entry in the series.  It takes everything that worked about Origins and iterates in great ways.  The game has really leaned further into RPG territory than ever before, but it’s working out well for the series.  The fact that I can sit here having played it for 80 hours and still want to do more is a testament to them having really perfected their formula.  I guess I’m basically recommending this, especially if you liked Origins or Black Flag.

Also for what it’s worth, sync points are still great.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #36.1 – Horizon: Zero Dawn – The Frozen Wilds

More Info from Guerrilla Games

Original Ramblings

  • Genre: Open World Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4

Horizon: Zero Dawn – The Frozen Wilds does do a lot to generally continue what was great about the first one.  The setting is still fanastic and drop dead gorgeous.  The moment to moment combat is still a lot of fun with a lot of variety in ranged weapons.  Exploration is still always worth it, with things to find all over the place.  Basically, they didn’t screw up what was good.  Luckily, they also fixed my two biggest gripes with the base game, and that’s what I’ll talk about here.

This time around you’re running around Yellowstone and the surrounding areas. It’s definitely seen better days.

The end of HZD really annoyed the hell out of me, and it was because of two reasons.  The first was the lack of progression with the main melee weapon leaving the end hours of the game focused on much stronger ranged attacks, and the second was the design of many of the boss fights being an effective circular arena fight where you could generally stay safely at range the entire time.  While neither of these problems really ended up being a killer in the game’s overall result, they were definitely annoying problems that left me scratching my head a bit.

The melee weapon itself is definitely helped this time around by having an end game upgrade path.  One of the first side quests you come upon when entering the new area of the game ends with you upgrading your spear to support the modification system that the ranged weapons all had.  While I could definitely gripe about this being hidden behind a side quest, and I could gripe about the spear still not having inherent stat upgrades, this change alone is huge in changing how late game melee combat worked for me against higher level enemies.  Now I could build the staff to my play style, whether that’s a pure damage build, one focused on debuffs, or one focused on getting some ticking damage out on enemies.  While this was simply using a system that already existed for the ranged weaponry, gaining this system for melee was a huge change for the better.

While boss fights are still in relatively obvious arenas, they are much more varied landscapes, and the bosses themselves are significantly more aggressive against the player.

The handful of bosses in the expansion are also much improved over the base game.  While they still take place in relatively obvious arenas, there’s a much better variety in how the arenas are laid out.  In the example above, the player is sort of ducking in and around little outcroppings, giving a lot of line of sight breaking when fighting the boss.  In general, that is pretty common, allowing the player to fight in a much more stealth-based way.  This is really important based on a change in overall design of the boss AI.

The original game suffered from bosses that could generally be kept at range, letting the player just kind of tick away at them with the bow with very little danger.  The bosses here feel a lot more like large versions of the world machines instead.  They move around a lot to keep the player from being grounded.  They do a lot more melee and charge attacks, keeping the player’s dodging finger ready.  Even when the bosses are doing ranged projectile attacks, the danger of being hit and knocked down is a lot higher due to the ability of the bosses to close the gap and melee the player while they are down.  Overall the fights just feel a lot more dynamic, rather than the circle strafe grinds that the original game suffered from.

Since this is Yellowstone, lava is the name of the game. It looks even better in motion than it does in screenshots.

Overall this was really just a solid expansion.  It took what was great about the original and gave you more, and fixed a few of the larger problems while it was at it.  The new content was a lot of fun, the new weapons felt impactful and slid naturally into my arsenal (super bonus mention to the energy projectile cannon you get about half way through the expansion), and the handful of new enemies fit into the existing roster really well while giving some new mechanics to watch out for.  In general, this one leaves me wanting more of the series than the original game even did, and that leaves me excited for the future of the series going forward.