Tag: PS4

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Game Ramblings #25 – Shadow Complex Remastered

More Info from Epic Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows (Steam, Windows Store, Epic Games Launcher), Mac App Store, Xbox One, Xbox 360 (XBLA)

Back before they spawned the mobile juggernaut known as Infinity Blade, Chair Entertainment released a nice little Metroidvania title called Shadow Complex.  In honor of why the hell not, a remastered version has come out for PC and current gen consoles.  With the great folks at Limited Run Games releasing a physical version, I figured it was as good a time as any to make a run through this one again, and as it turns out, the game is still damn good.

If there’s one genre I’m a sucker for nearly as much as JRPGs, it’s Metroidvania-styled Action/Adventure games.  If you ignore the setting, this one definitely strays much closer to Metroid than a lot in the genre.  It’s got upgradeable guns and pickups that unlock ways to get through new doors, a computerized mech suit that tells you where to go, and eventually a chargeable dash that breaks through even more doors.  Basically, a lot of what is here is straight out of Metroid, but grounded in a somewhat more believable Earth-based setting.

That said, all its similarities are definitely not a detriment to this game.  They’ve captured a lot of the exploration magic that the Metroid series, and in the roughly 3-5 hour adventure, you’ll traverse a lot of the same areas multiple times, but always in new ways.  The pickups and upgrades are scattered all over the place, so returning to old places always brings side paths to grab things that were just taunting you out of reach before.  To some extent I was even going out of my way once I got some of my larger weapon upgrades just because I’d remembered a handful of upgrades that I wanted to get right away.  In addition, unlike some games in this genre, ammunition for secondary weapons (grenades, missiles, etc) are plentiful, and available for recharge at all save stations, so you never feel crunched into not using some of your more powerful arsenal.

That said, there’s definitely some things that are missing that I wish were explored more.  There’s really not much in the way of memorable boss fights in this game.  For the most part, you fight the same spider mech a handful of times, with a couple other fights that can be mechanically exploited to avoid difficulty.  As an example, one fight has you up against a giant mech wheel that is jumping around the walls of a ring-shaped room.  By positioning yourself just behind one of the corners of the room, you could avoid all damage, while still being able to easily shoot at the boss’ weak spot, giving an easy victory.  In addition, there’s some points, particularly in the final battle, where I would get shot at and effectively instant killed without much of an idea where damage sources were coming from.

All that being said, when this originally came out in ’09, it was one of the best Metroidvanias that had come out around that time.  In 2016, I’d still say that it’s one of the better Metroidvanias out this year.  While the upgrade didn’t bring much new to the table, other than some improved visual fidelity, the game itself has not lost anything in its age, and should definitely be played if you missed it the first time around.

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Game Ramblings #23 – World of Final Fantasy

More info from Square-Enix

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

Given the month and year we’re currently in, you’d expect that the monster capture RPG that everyone wants to play is Pokemon Sun/Moon.  However, Square-Enix decided to launch World of Final Fantasy anyway, so here we are.  WoFF is decidedly a monster capture RPG at its core, but with characters and a story that blend a large number of past FF games, and a battle system pulled straight out of the SNES and PS1 entries in the series.  Overall, while it may not end up being the best monster capture title this year, it certainly is worth playing for any serious JRPG fans.

WoFF takes place in the world of Grymoire, where pretty much everyone but the two main characters are little chibi folks.  The story is your usual overpowered bad dude taking over the world nonsense, but it generally works and provides enough of a reason to move forward.  The even better reason to move forward for FF fans are the constant cameos from past FF stars.  The cameos run the gamut from FF 1 through 13, and tend to hit all the big protagonists, including the return of the voice actors for the titles that had voice acting.  If you’re a fan of the series at all, you’ll get a kick out of the constant barrage of recognizable faces as you get to new areas.  It’s a fun time throughout, and ends up working out well enough to provide an entertaining backdrop to the core gameplay.

The setting also provides the depth of FF monsters for you to capture. You’ll be grabbing everything from Chocobos to Cactuars to Tonberries on the low end, all the way up to recognizable summons like Ifrit, Bahamut, and Diabolos at the high end.  The wide range of sizes and styles all feeds back into the way that you build out your team, providing both the fun of capturing all the things you’ve fought in the past, as well as a huge amount of depth to building out teams that mask each other’s weaknesses while boosting their strengths.

That said, the battle system is the real star here.  The core of it is the instantly recognizable Active Time Battle system from the FF4-FF9 games, and it essentially remains the same.  What is different here is how the party is built out.  The general idea is that each of the two main characters exists in a stack consisting of a small, medium, and large NPC.  Because the main guys can be normal human form or chibi form, they can fill the large or small slot.  The rest of the slots are then filled out by the monsters you capture.  This stack then combines its stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities to form the unified character stack that takes its turn in battle.

What this ends up doing is providing a pretty large meta game to how you build out your party.  While you may want some fire attacks, this would expose the stack to a weakness against water.  To combat this, you can then also place a character strong against water, eliminating that elemental weakness, and providing an overall better prepared stack.  On the other hand, you can combine the stack with another fire user to really increase the strength fire resistance, as well as providing boosts to the strength of fire attacks used by the stack.  This mix and match continues throughout the game, to the point where I would typically have entire new rosters each time I entered a new area.

The other nice system that came in from other FF games is the way that the monsters you capture gain ability and stat increases.  Beyond just gaining flat stats through leveling, every species has a grid-based upgrade system very reminiscent of the Sphere Grid system from Final Fantasy X.  Some upgrades in this system are flat stats as well, but by and large you use the system to gain active and passive ability upgrades.  The system also is used to unlock the evolutions of monsters, where the upgrades earned from one variant of a species carry over as you evolve into another variant.  Of note, the monsters can evolve up and down to any variant of a species that you have access to at any time, so there’s never the question of whether or not it’s worth evolving a monster.  You just change it to what is most useful at the time.

Overall this was a really solid JRPG to be playing, especially in the lead up to the Pokemon series’ next entry.  It certainly wasn’t immune to problems; the end game in particular got really grindy.  However, it showed that there’s still a lot of life in the FF series, while still allowing for them to branch out into other interesting gameplay types that aren’t just the core series.  While FF15 is going to be an incredibly different game from this one, WoFF also gives me hope that Square is giving their Final Fantasy teams all the resources needed to pull off incredibly high quality games, with the time needed to make sure they are in the right place to succeed.

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Game Ramblings #21 – Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens

More Info from WB Games

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Also Available On: Android, iOS, PC, 3DS, PS3, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One

I’m a glutton for punishment when it comes to games with tiny little icons all over the map.  Assassin’s Creed and its glut of side missions causes me to spend hours doing chores every time a new one of those comes out.  Any open world GTA-style game I’m almost guaranteed to get sidetracked from the story while doing random shit all over the world.  In Lego games, I have to collect every single little damn character minifig, and enjoy myself doing it.  Lego TFA is no different, with characters and vehicles galore to collect, and I made damn sure to get my platinum trophy doing it.

If you’ve never played a Lego game before, they generally follow the same pattern.  Take a movie, twist it a lot with comedic reinvisioning of the story, make everything explode into lego studs that act as currency, and good to go.  They’re generally light hearted games, with good puzzle elements, and surprisingly fun combat for a simple game.  They also generally have a LOT of side quests in open hub worlds, and upwards of a couple hundred character minifigs to find and purchase.  Short version; this is a Lego fan’s dream, even moreso if they are a Star Wars fan.

All that said, as a standalone experience, this is still easily worth recommending.  The combat is typical short-combo action game combat, but the variety of characters and difference in melee and ranged combat gives some nice flexibility.  In addition, all characters can activate unique powers to help solve puzzles, so having a large crew of characters for post-game completion is also a big benefit.  By the end, most free play levels going for completion, it wouldn’t be too uncommon for me to be rotating between 10-15 different characters to grab everything.

In the end, whether or not you’d like this style of game is entirely up to whether or not you enjoy sort of light-action and a lot of collecting.  I wouldn’t lie and say it doesn’t get monotonous at times, but this is one of the best of this type of game that I’ve played of late.