Tag: ARPG

2018-04-27

Game Ramblings #70 – God of War

Genre: ARPG
Platform: PS4

TL;DR

Phenomenally well made game that brings the series out of its brawler roots and straight into a full blown action RPG.
Well written characters and story, to the point where they effectively make you hate the son when he’s acting like an ass. Does a good job blending in Norse mythology to what was previously a Greek-focused series.

God of War is one of those series that screams Sony first-party, but it’s been eight years since the Greek timeline games ended. Ya we had Ascension, but that was a prequel and even that was give years ago. After such a long gap, announcing a Norse reboot / sequel was already a head turner. Announcing it as a drastic genre departure was another, with this game now being very much an action RPG with all the free roam trappings that come with it. Side quests, item collection, crafting, upgrades, skill trees and more are all there. Despite it all, this is both extremely fitting for the series, and quite possibly the best entry of them all.

The entire game is the story of Kratos and his son’s travels, and that’s where the differences begin.

This first screen shot says a lot about the differences in this game relative to the original. For one thing, Kratos now has a son and he hasn’t managed to accidentally kill him in a rage. Beyond that though, you start to see little details. The son brings in a set of ranged combat possibilities that add some new depth to the core combat. Kratos is wearing gear that was crafted at a vendor. We’re clearly no longer romping around in Greece. On the far left, Kratos is using an axe instead of blades (although the blades come back later). Basically, this is still God of War, but it’s not quite what we’re used to.

The combat front straddles that line between familiar and new in a really good fashion. This is still melee-chain combat, but it’s not quite as high speed as the original. You still have your light and heavy attacks, but there’s a much larger focus on parrying and dodging. Later on in the game, you end up juggling between frost and fire weapons based on the enemies that you are attacking, so there’s some built-in strategy. The skill tree that is there brings in some familiar special attacks, but the risk of being hit during them is much higher, so their timed use becomes much more important.

It’s the son that ultimately brings in some of the big changes. While his positioning isn’t directly controllable by the player, his basic move set is. He’s got arrows that can be fired at enemies, sometimes for additional damage, sometimes for the use of crowd control, sometimes for the use of stunning to allow Kratos to get damage in. He’s also got some special attacks that can be triggered on cooldowns. However, it’s his passive skill growth that becomes the most useful. By late game, he’s got skills that allow him to engage in melee combat more often, including things like hopping on enemies backs as distractions and doing his own quick hitting melee. Basically, as the son grows as a plot device, he becomes inherently more useful as a combat device, and it eliminates the frustration that typically comes with escort-based secondary characters.

Now, that’s not to say that moving to more of a core RPG combat has removed some of the flashiness. Case in point:

Holy FUCKhttps://t.co/xXmV2Nk4U5 pic.twitter.com/c7GgicGWvI
— Dan Weiss (@schenksmill) April 25, 2018

The big flashy scenes are largely reserved for finishers in battle, and more specifically generally against bosses and minibosses. Stun kills on trash enemies also have mini-cutscenes, but these are quick hitters and don’t try to keep you out of combat for very long.

Despite the changes, the flow of combat feels phenomenal overall. Most engagements are going to be a heavy mix of attacking, watching for enemy tells to parry, or really large attacks to dodge. Its a system of constant movement, rather than a system of waiting for moments, and it really works well.

If you want to, you can spend a lot of time in boats exploring

If you really have that RPG itch though, this is also a great game for that. Beyond the main story line, there’s side quests and collection galore. For the most part, these simply exist for purposes of getting more gear, but that becomes important for the post-game content. The end boss is by a long shot easier than some of the creatures out in the world and some of those fights are among the most fun in the game to engage in, so you have a lot of reasons to get out there exploring. If you’re a lore or collection nut, there’s also a lot there. Shrines, treasure hunts, rare ingredients, dragons to free, and more are there for exploring. If you’re really feeling brave, there’s also two realms that exist purely for the sake of side quests. Basically, once you finish the game you aren’t really finished if you think you want to get a bunch of hours out of this one.

At this point in the game I wanted to kill the kid, and that’s a lot larger of a complement to the developers than it sounds.

However, the thing that kept me coming back is that this was a well told story. The interplay between Kratos and his son starts off as somewhat hilarious on the surface as Kratos pretty much spends hours yelling BOY GET OVER HERE. However, once the boy finds out what he really is, he becomes effectively a pompous ass for an arc of the game. The fact that I was legitimately pissed at the kid says a lot about how effective their writing was. The gods they meet throughout, the secrets beneath the surface, and to the end of the game the little plot twists that were thrown in were all part of what would make this one great, even for folks watching it like a movie alongside someone playing.

So, I guess I’m somewhat surprised even if I shouldn’t be. The God of War series has always been somewhat of a hallmark for the quality of Sony’s first-party teams. However, it always was kind of a brawler with a cool theme, and not necessarily a super deep experience. This one turns all that on its head, giving us an extremely deep action RPG that still feels familiar despite all the changes. The fact that they so fundamentally evolved this series is a phenomenal achievement. This is the type of game that turns other platform traditionalists into PlayStation owners, and I can’t recommend it enough to go out and play it now.

2018-04-11

Game Ramblings #69 – Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

More Info from Bandai Namco

Genre: ARPG
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: Windows

TL;DR

Action-focused RPG battle system that is a lot of fun, even if it’s drastically different than its predecessor
Biggest negative is the ease of the main story path through the game
Kingdom-building content is the biggest focus for the player’s power curve improvements, but is going to be love it or hate it
Lots of side content between collecting citizens and killing tainted monsters

Ni no Kuni II is a bit of a strange game. While it’s technically a sequel, it only loosely shares a setting with the original, completely scrapped the original’s battle system, and more or less scrapped the originals Pokemon-style collection. While it also brought over the visual style of the first game, this one was not done in tandem with Studio Ghibli, so it’s missing a lot of the world charm of the first one. Taken on its own though, this is a really good game. Visually this is still fantastic and is obviously helped being on a generation newer hardware. The characters and story are still light hearted and enjoyable to play. In place of the first game’s combat, we now have a very Tales of action combat system that is strengthened by the inclusion of some collectible helpers. While it doesn’t necessarily succeed across the board, the fact that I got a platinum trophy on it says a lot about how much I enjoyed my time in the game.

While not necessarily as unique as the original was at the time, this is still one of the finer examples of visuals in an RPG.

While there are a lot of differences, it’s still pretty obvious this is in the Ni no Kuni franchise and universe. Visually, this is another pretty astounding game. While not directly a Ghibli product, it’s pretty clear that the employees they brought over into Level-5 have continued their legacy in the sequel. The writing also has a lot of that Ghibli feel. Despite the serious underlying story of a child king losing his rule to a coup, the interactions between the story’s main characters are often lighthearted and often pretty funny. It’s not shy about having serious moments, but it also doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s even a few nods for fans of the original game throughout, despite the sequel taking place presumably a few hundred years in the future.

However, that’s about where the similarities end.

Higgledys may not feel that useful, but they sure are kind of adorable.

The first obvious difference is that capture and collecting of monsters that you fight in the world is gone. In its place are the capture and collection of Higgledys. These act as little helpers in battle that for the most part act autonomously. Some are attack focused, some are healing focused, etc. While they do all have special attacks that can be used to provide additional support, they generally just kind of existed in my peripheral vision in-battle. Once I had a party of four that worked for me early on, I never switched them out for a new crew, despite the fact that there were dozens to collect. They could also be upgraded for better stats, but again I never really noticed the difference in practical use.

Combat is simple, but a lot of fun in practice.

However, the higgledys not being obviously useful didn’t really matter because the combat was a lot of fun on its own. At the end of the day this is pretty close to a straight rip of the Tales of series combat. You have skills and ranged attacks that use a mana resource, two kinds of basic attacks that also recharge mana, items that can be fired off if needed, and occasional special attacks. If that rings like Tales of it’s because it is, but the pace of combat is just as fast as the source and everything feels impactful.

If there’s one real problem with the combat, it’s that the core story path really is just too easy. Most trash can be cleared with an opening skill to clear away the bulk of the pack. Enemies that get killed end up dropping frequent mana and health orbs, so I didn’t really need to use items that frequently. Even on the boss end, the core mechanics around immunity during dodging often meant that I could take literally no damage in a fight if I was being even a little cautious. This is alleviated somewhat by the ability to fight 60 “tainted” monsters, which end up being the real difficult content in the game if done at appropriate levels. However, if you’re the type of player that skips side content in favor of breezing through the story, this won’t help you at all.

I’m a fan of city builders so when I was told to start building I couldn’t stop.

Also on the side content front is the entire ability to build your own kingdom. For me, building the kingdom and dealing with activities associated with it was very likely close to 50% of the time spent in the game. The core loop for kingdom building is to recruit characters, build buildings for their specialty skills, have them work in the buildings, and then either gather resources they find or have them research upgrades. On the upgrade front this could be anything from the ability to craft and upgrade weapons and armor, to buildings that allow you to upgrade your higgledys, to buildings that provide passive effects in battle, and more. In addition, characters must be recruited via completion of side quests AND the characters you recruit also often give their own side quests, so you’ll have the option of spending a lot of time directly dealing with your own citizens.

This is another section where if you don’t like side content, you’re going to simply miss out on a lot what is there. On the other hand, if you want the difficulty of the game to be higher, not upgrading your kingdom is a good way to miss out on a significant portion of your party’s power curve via all the available upgrades. However, if the completionist bug hits you, this is where you will be spending a lot of time.

Realistically I enjoyed the hell out of this game and want to recommend it to everyone, but I suspect it’s more niche than my brain is telling me it is. While the action combat system is probably more approachable than the first game’s system, you won’t really see it at its best unless you want to go searching for the actual difficult side monsters. While I enjoyed the kingdom building and side quest process of searching for new citizens, I can see where people would think it’s slow and grindy. While the story is entertaining for me, it definitely tends to lean into some pretty predictable results. If that all still sounds fine to you though, go give this one a try; you certainly won’t find me telling you not to.

2018-01-27

Game Ramblings #64 – NieR:Automata

More Info from Square-Enix

Genre: ARPG
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: Windows

TL;DR

Excellent story largely based around what it means to have a soul. Multiple endings work fantastically in keeping you coming back.
Excellent combat that takes a mix of action and bullet hell mechanics and somehow blends them into a cohesive whole.
Biggest downside is that enemy variety is pretty low, with the environments being fairly sparse.

Now that the winter doldrums are here, I’ve got a bit of time to get to games that should have been played before and NieR was high on the list. Having dipped my toes a bit into the overall Drakengard universe, I had some idea of what to expect but I was still surprised by how well this one was pulled off. NieR is a game that spends a lot of time making you think about what it means to actually be alive and have a soul, whether synthetic beings can actually be capable of emotion, and ultimately what would happen when you find out everything you knew was a lie. It wraps this into a fast-paced action combat system that seamlessly blends melee elements of standard ARPGs with ranged mechanics straight out of bullet hell games to create a game that is uniquely its own.

Combat mixes melee and bullet hell in a fantastic manner, usually to spectacular effect.

Since this is an ARPG and you’ll be spending the majority of your time involved in it, we’ll start off with combat. Rather than being a straight melee hack and slash game, NieR blends in a lot of ranged mechanics for both player and enemy to make the actual process of fighting enemies a lot more varied than is typical of the genre. Beyond the obvious picture of an enemy screen spamming bullets above, the player characters also have both a friendly pod that provides ranged damage as well as the ability on a lot of the weapons to do ranged attacks via slashing attacks that send out projectiles themselves.

The end result of all this is that directly hitting an enemy isn’t really all that important, and the movement ends up being the driving factor of battle. Regardless of what range the player is at there’s always at least some damage source that can be used, so the actual process of avoiding damage becomes the most important factor. The combination of all these attacks and an instant dodge with no cooldown gives the combat an extremely fun and fluid feel that I can’t really remember out of any other ARPG series.

Variety in battle is also a key, with multiple other battle types popping up to keep things from being repetitive.

It is worth noting that other battle systems do pop up from time to time to keep the player on their toes. At times, you’ll take over giant ass robots that act as bullet sponges just for the sake of blowing lots of things up. Sometimes you’ll enter a flight suit or hacking segments and switch between both vertical scrolling and dual-stick shooter modes to take out flying enemies. Sometimes even in standard combat you end up in camera-restricted sections, giving a more side-scrolling focus to combat. Just being able to hop into all of these things on the fly kept the game fresh when it could have otherwise been a long train of the same action combat on repeat.

It’s also worth noting that all of these combat types are tied into the same fantastic gearing system. While there are the basic trappings of the genre (player level boosts base stats, weapons are upgradeable, the player’s ranged pod helper is upgradeable, etc), the real core of the system is the game’s chip system. Chips are a customizeable feature where the player can slot helper items into a board. Each item has some effect and some cost, so managing the benefits of the chips that are applied allows the player to setup the character in a style that fits how they want to play without being stuck in one path the entire game. For my playthrough, I ended up applying a few basic increases (HP, Attack Power, etc), a few HUD helpers for convenience (in particular, one that revealed items on the overworld map), and most importantly for me a passive helper that gave me 40% of my own health back on a kill. For me this meant that I could go into any encounter, dodge around like crazy killing things, and not be overly worried about taking too many hits. If I took some hits it wouldn’t be a big deal. I’d get a kill, heal up, and continue on. A more passive player could load up on HP, defense, and ranged attack power, leaving it to their pod to whittle away enemies while they stay out of danger. A real glass cannon could go heavy into attack power one shotting enemies in their way, but without any real safety if they got hit themselves.

Visuals are generally pretty good but some standout areas are definitely there, such as this area built entirely out of untextured assets.

The rest of the game may not be as good as core combat, but overall the pieces are all on average pretty damn good, and certainly better than most ARPGs out there. Combat visuals are flashy but don’t interfere with the player’s ability to understand what is going on. Environments are generally kind of sparse but all look really good with solid differences in theme between them. Enemy variety is kind of low but the silhouettes always give proper immediate feedback as to what can be expected out of attacks. The soundtrack has too many instances of repeating songs but what is there is extremely well done and catchy. That’s kind of the overall end result where I can nitpick all day about specific things but end of the day what is there is all really high quality.

The story ends up being a great thinker if you pay attention, but it’s certainly not without its moments of comedy; intentional or not.

Ultimately I’d generally recommend playing this game if for no other reason than to play through the story. I really don’t want to say any more than I did in the opener to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say if you are a fan of stories that involve ponderings over the meaning of life, this one will likely stick with you. It’s also spread out over multiple characters to allow for great side-by-side comparisons of multiple viewpoints. For reference, the game plays through the first half of the story from the perspective of two main characters (listed as A and B routes in the game). It then provides a C/D route that plays through the second half of the story with two branching endings. An E route then provides an ultimate ending after the conclusion of the game. Because of the multiple viewpoints the story is able to give much greater depth to the overarching theme of what it means to truly be alive, with each character fighting their own struggle to figure it out. The rest of the alphabet is then filled with a number of secret endings, typically the result of some joke sequence. For example, the player can remove their OS core from the android player characters, immediately killing them and ending the game.

I suppose the question becomes, should I have gotten to this sooner? Ya, probably. NieR is a game that mixes a lot of action combat elements into a cohesive whole that somehow works. It adds a great sci-fi story from multiple viewpoints to keep you coming back to the game. A dash of comedy here and there keeps things light, while segments of other combat types keeps the variety strong. If you haven’t gotten to this one yet, I guess you can consider this my glowing recommendation. Just make sure you play after the first credits roll; there really is a lot more there.