Tag: PS4

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Game Ramblings #39 – The Swapper

More Info from Facepalm Games

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows/Mac/Linux PC (Steam, GOG), PS3, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Fantastically well crafted puzzle/metroidvania style game
  • Interesting sci-fi driven story presented with a light touch, invites players to connect a lot of dots on their own
  • Great visual style based on a unique clay-model construction

The Swapper at its core is a game that derives straight from its title.  You play a lost explorer that finds a tool allowing them to create and swap with exact clones of themselves.  This is wrapped in a set of pretty simple mechanics and a Metroidvania-esque traversal that expand out into a huge amount of puzzle depth.  This is combined with some good visuals, and a simple but effective audio backing to create a really fantastic game.

When dealing with a puzzle game, the obvious question is whether or not the mechanics work to create interesting puzzles, and in this case, the answer is a resounding yes.  The swapper tool that the player has can only spawn new clones (to a limit of player + 4 clones) and shoot a projectile to swap to a clone.  Clones then all follow the same inputs that the main player character is doing, moving as a largely controlled herd.  However, the lighting in the levels can disable these abilities; blue lights disable clone creation, red lights disable swap projectiles, and purple disables both.  On its own, these combine to slowly ease you into the gameplay, with some of the early puzzles being some clever mix, with the player creating and moving around to platforms that are out of reach of just plain jumping.

One of the first things I noticed when I got the tool is that when I was creating clones, the game would go into a super slo-mo state.  At first this didn’t make much sense to me, until the puzzles started requiring multiple swaps in mid-air, then it became another fantastically fun ability to use.  Later puzzles started introducing gravity manipulation and pressure pads, mixing all of them together into rooms where the control of your clone herd became the ultimate goal.  By the end of the game, the puzzles were becoming a devious mix of creating clones, warping between them, and finding ways to either recombine with or kill clones in order to keep up completion of the puzzles.

The puzzles are backed by a really strong visual style.  One of the things that brought this game so much acclaim was that they quite literally created clay models for their source art, and that’s very apparent while playing.  The lighting they used was typically extremely dark, allowing for a great use of a flashlight to lead the path in hallways, then the strong colored lighting for puzzle mechanics.  I’ve thrown just a few screenshots I took below to give an idea of what the game looked like, though it certainly looks even better in motion.

It’s also worth noting that this has one of the more hilariously fucked up story endings I’ve ever played.

Story Spoiler

Given the core gameplay concept, it’s not too big of a surprise that there’s the possibility of swapping with other people, and there were some hints throughout that it had already happened. The end of the game takes full advantage of that. After crash landing on the planet below, a rescue ship finally finds you, but cannot rescue you due to lack of quarantine facilities. The game presents you with two options, die on the planet alone, or swap with the rescuer without anyone knowing what happened. The second option then takes this a step further, and gives you control of the rescuer you swapped with, causing him to fall off of a cliff to his death. Because of the rescue ship’s lack of knowledge of the swapping device, they simply saw it as the player character jumping off a cliff as a suicide.

In the end, hilariously unexpected, and a pretty fantastic way to wrap up the core mystery behind how you were going to actually get home.

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In general, I was somewhat caught by surprise by how much I enjoyed this game.  I’m generally a fan of Metroidvania-style games anyway, but without combat I wasn’t sure where this would fall fgor me.  However, the game had a really smart difficulty curve, introducing one or two mechanics, then doing a series of puzzles to reinforce the new mechanics. Ultimately, there were probably 30 or so puzzles to complete, interspersed with general traversal where story elements were introduced, and it felt pretty appropriate in length.  As far as puzzle-based games go, I can’t think of another I’ve played lately that I’d recommend as much as this unless I go back to Box Boy 3, and I think that says all that I need to say about it.

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Shelved It #5 – Akiba’s Beat

More information from XSEED/Acquire

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Vita
  • Main Reason for Shelving: No reward grind

TL;DR

  • Lots of unnecessary re-traversal of dungeons for no reward
  • Gameplay is a lot different than previous title; Akiba’s Trip
    • Despite differences, solid ARPG gameplay reminiscent of the Tales of series.
  • Simple, but solid visual style with distinct dungeon designs

As the first RPG that Acquire has made, Akiba’s Beat is pulling ideas from other series in an attempt to provide some familiar gameplay, but in doing so it stumbled in the thing that can determine the quality of a lot of ARPGs and JRPGs; the grind between main story points.  While this one shows a lot of potential for the studio to continue doing RPGs in the future, it just didn’t provide enough incentive to continue through to the end with so many other quality RPGs available.

For anyone that has played Akiba’s Trip, the most obvious difference here is the gameplay.  Rather than being an action-heavy game reminiscent of a light-hearted Musou game, this is now very much a Tales of style ARPG.  The battle system is solid, but definitely not doing anything original.  Battles take place in a flat plane where the player moves side to side toward a targeted enemy, activating physical attack combos and skill attacks.  They can dodge in any direction, and unlock movement from the side to side movement to reposition in 3D space.  Yep, it’s pretty much a 1:1 copy of the battle system used in games like Tales of Vesperia, rather than the more free form systems in newer titles.  It even brings in the AI tactics system to set the skill type, resource usage, and target priority of the Tails games.  The fortunate thing is that this battle system still is extremely fun to play, and while fighting level appropriate monsters, is easily the high point of the game.

The 1:1 copy syndrome also extends to the story.  The core story revolves around Akihabara being stuck in an endless Sunday loop (hello Groundhog Day) in which people’s delusions manifest in Akiba, causing shenanigans to occur (hello Persona 5).  The main problem is that the story and characters just aren’t as good as Persona 5.  The core cast are basically rigid anime tropes, covering things like overly happy idols, brooding NEETS, the always positive athletic girl, etc.  The plot twists are telegraphed too hard, and the consequences of the cast’s actions are sort of brushed aside out of necessity.  In general, the story works, but it’s not going to blow anyone away, particularly when it’s to some extent copying a phenomenally good game that literally just came out.

The unfortunate thing is that the story ended up being the main drag factor on progression.  I put no reward grind as the shelving reason, but I don’t mean that in the typical JRPG fashion.  I wasn’t grinding to get levels, because typically I was around a pretty appropriate level for the things I was fighting.  As the story progressed, they forced you to retraverse the past dungeons repeatedly, typically all the way to the end room.  However, XP gained scales significantly down as the level gap between the monsters and cast increased, so retraversing the dungeons ended up being more of an exercise of how many battles I could avoid, rather than continuing to push the entertaining battle system.  This could have been fixed in any number of ways, whether allowing quick travel to story points, or even scaling up enemies to give players incentive to continue to fight in the dungeons they’ve already been in.  In the end, the story forcing retraversal was the game’s downfall, as it provided a lot of slow down and no reward.

That said, the dungeon visual designs were another high point in the game.  Like Persona 5, they took the concept of a person’s delusions quite literally, heavily theming the dungeon visuals around the person’s personality.  They were always visually pleasing, and really hit a high mark for playing with bright colors and strong designs.  Just for a quick couple of examples:

When the owner of the delusion was a cafe maid, the entire delusion was a twisted interpretation of what a maid cafe would look like.

For the audio hardware guy’s delusion, we got speakers, vacuum tubes, and visual equalizer’s in the skybox to fit the theme.

In general, Akiba’s Beat is a game that doesn’t necessarily do a lot of things that wrong, and isn’t that far from being a highly enjoyable game.  The things it does right, visually and gameplay-wise, it really hits high marks for.  Unfortunately, this is still an RPG, and the story failings immediately bring it down to the status of not worth finishing.  Given Acquire’s past experience with action games (Tenchu, Way of the Samurai, Akiba’s Trip), the change to a more formal RPG structure definitely seems to have tripped them up a bit, but if they take the right lessons from what went wrong here, they may be on to something with the genre change in the future.

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Shelved It #4 – Persona 5

More Info from Atlas

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PS3

Admittedly this is a shelved it, kinda sorta.  I fully intend to play through the rest of this in some form, even if it involves just turning down the difficulty to get through boss fights.  I’m at a point where my lack of patience for the boss fight structure makes me not care about spending the effort to get through the fights, but the world that was built for this game is so good that I still feel compelled to see it.  However, given I’m bending the rules to move forward, I felt like it was worth writing about this as a normal shelving incident.

I’ve played a lot of the Megami Tensei games, whether it’s the mainline titles, Persona titles, or even tangentially related ones like Tokyo Mirage Sessions. It’s worth noting in particular that Tokyo Mirage is probably the best straight JRPG I played in 2016. The biggest core problem that I typically run into is that while the shared battle system encourages smart planning to chain moves in killing enemies, it simultaneously encourages the enemies to have extremely high damage and the same chaining abilities as a balance point. The end result is a mix of fights where the difference between an extremely easy fight and one where I get one turn wiped is one that doesn’t involve player skill at all.

In general I like the battle system that these games use.  The general setup is that you have a collection of demons with varying stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities, as well as core physical attacks.  By taking advantage of the range of capabilities at your disposal, you can maximize damage and knock down enemies through attacking opposition weaknesses.  In doing so, you gain extra attacks for hitting these weaknesses, giving the ability to chain attacks through the entire enemy party.  Once they are all down, the group can attack the entire opposition at once, generally resulting in a complete wipe of the enemies.  This system works fantastically well for your normal trash fights, and I could generally do most trash fights without ever being attacked, let alone taking damage.  First times against new demons up being an interesting puzzle-solving opportunity in figuring out what weaknesses can be exposed, then further fights are usually a quick mop up.  Getting through dungeons generally then becomes limited more by a lack of resources, or a need to go buy more SP items, rather than a need to run away for safety reasons.

Boss fights in the game generally involve the same fight pattern, with the obvious difference of not being able to one shot the fight.  I’d go in with some assumed set of gear that I kind of hoped would be close to functional, then either win with no trouble or wipe immediately to some form of chain attack.  If I wiped, I’d reshuffle gear, make sure I had different Personas equipped, and generally get through the phase where I died.  This cycle would continue until the boss ran out of new mechanics and I won.  My problem with this is that at no point did I feel the challenge was actually in finishing the boss fights.  It was entirely in getting arbitrary gear to block mechanics, and having no trouble once those were covered.  Rather than wipes being something that were caused by lack of skill, wipes were something I fixed by changing my accessories.  The cycle of discovery in this was not something I was doing for fun, but something I was doing because the battle system actively seeks to punish you for not having specific setups.  Once that setup is achieved, the boss fights lose their challenge, and end up being simple rotation fights that are not any different than big number trash fights.

The unfortunate thing is that the world surrounding this is fantastic.  Persona games have always been good at mixing relatively believable characters with the Japanese lore-based fantasy and this one is no exception.  The cast of characters that I had seen thus far covered a pretty wide range of personalities from your jocks to the more reserved, as well as their typical animal that talks stand-in.  The visual style, particularly within the dungeons, is also about as fantastically stylish as you’ll see in a JRPG.  This is backed by another fantastic soundtrack that pretty seamlessly flows between rock and acid jazz to fit the situation.  On its own I don’t know that we’re going to see another game this year that will be so iconic in its visual and audio design as Persona 5.

Ultimately I’m not that surprised I’m at this point.  Since I’ve played this series before, I knew what my problems were going to be with the battle system going in.  I guess if there’s anything I’m surprised about, it’s that I’ve already hit the point where I stopped caring without being anywhere near the finish.