Tag: metroidvania

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Game Ramblings #129 – Shantae and the Seven Sirens

More Info from WayForward

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam, Xbox One, Apple Arcade

I fucking love Metroidvanias. I fucking love the Shantae series. Guess what? I fucking loved this game.

Alright, that was probably too simple of an opening. A lot of what I’d say about this game matches with exactly what I said in the ramblings for Pirate’s Curse or Half-Genie Hero, and that’s a good thing. This is another iterative release in the series, and it takes what made the past games really work and moves it forward in important ways.

The first big one is that instead of being level-based, this is 100% a true Metroidvania. The entire game takes place on a single unified map and new areas open up purely based on upgrades you receive. While I definitely liked the way previous entries encouraged re-traversing levels once you gained new abilities, there’s just something to having a pure open environment. You see and make note of those open ends of hallways that you can’t quite get to or those things in the environment that are obviously something that you can interact with, and make mental notes to return to later.

Where they end up making use of their history of level-based gameplay is in the handful of labyrinths that come up. These act as pillars to the overall story and upgrade path, but also serve as mini-tutorials to learn new powers, as well as the core spot for the big boss fights in the game. It gives a nice on and off pace to exploration where you kinda futz around finding new areas and exploring for hidden stuff, then go into a labyrinth and really focus on combat for a while in a controlled linear environment.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how well integrated the transformations were into gameplay. In a lot of ways, this felt very much like Pirate’s Curse. That game required upgrades to be fast and easy to use due to story reasons causing the loss of transformations. In this one, the transformations are automatic. There’s things like the newt form which gives you a dash and wall climbing. There’s things like the frog form which the frog which gives you the ability to swim. Thematically they make a lot of sense, and the fact that they’re automated makes the game flow pretty much a non-stop affair, which is a huge benefit to the game pace.

That’s not to say there aren’t dances, but in the case of this game they’re all there as one-off attacks that don’t have permanent transformations. These are definitely useful in their own right – for example an electric attack does AoE damage to all things on screen, as well as powering up mechanical devices – but they definitely have a much more straightforward use that isn’t tied to moving through the world.

This is just a really fun game. There’s not been that many Metroidvanias that really have high pace gameplay and almost purely melee combat, and the Shantae series continues to be at the forefront of that style. Movement is fun, combat is fun, the bosses are fun. It’s just all fun and I can’t think of many better series to recommend in this genre right now.

….and don’t worry. Everyone’s favorite Squid Baron makes his return.

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Game Ramblings #126 – Replaying Ori and the Will of the Wisps

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch, Windows

I guess this is going to be a bit of a weird ramblings in that I don’t really plan to talk about the game, at least not directly. It’s been out for long enough that it’s been done to death. What I will talk about is the fact that playing this on the Series X redeemed the game for me. The first time I tried playing this I was incredibly disappointed. The gameplay was definitely there, and when it worked well it was really solid. But that was the problem, it generally wasn’t working that well. Framerate problems, load hitches, and crashes were all over, and it made getting through the game incredibly frustrating. Luckily we’re now back with faster hardware, not to mention a patch or two along the way. Now that the game’s unimpeded, it was exactly what I wanted – a Metroidvania with great flow, fun puzzles, and a lot of good reasons to re-traverse things as you gained new abilities. Simply put, this is now what I expected the first time around, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

I start here not because the screenshots are important to gameplay, but because I took damn near the same screenshot on the Xbox One and Series X, so it’s as good a visual comparison as I have. This level of change is indicative of the difference between the initial release and the one I played this second go around. It’s not just that things are clearer, but that certainly helps. Instead of running at 30ish, it now runs at flat 60 (or higher if your TV supports it). Instead of having load hitches all the time, there’s none. Where I was seeing crashes maybe every 30-40 minutes before, I didn’t see a single one this entire play through. It was such a completely different experience to play it without technical issues this go around.

The thing about me shelving the original one is that while it really came down to technical issues, it was ultimately a boss that did me in. The boss is against a large frog enemy in a sort of swampy area, and about half way through the fight you get sent underwater for good, which eliminates your ability to spend time healing in a pinch, adding a certain level of tension to the fight. Mechanically I knew the fight, but frustration absolutely got to me on it. The underwater phase just would not perform in a way that made the fight fun. In about a dozen deaths, I’d seen about a half dozen load hitches that would last for upwards of 3-5 seconds. The underwater phase itself basically guaranteed a framerate tank, which made fast movement difficult. At one point I’d gotten down to about 20% health remaining, and the game crashed.

Ultimately, frustration begets frustration. I get to a point when playing games where frustration at things just causes a landslide. Missing a jump can be frustrating in isolation, but is controllable. Dying to a boss is controllable when it feels fair. However, you start stacking these things up and I start losing those gaps where I have time to breathe and decompress. That causes impatience, which causes mistakes, which causes more frustration. When a game is crashing or having load hitches, all that’s happening is annoyances start to pile up that are not in my control, which just accelerates the problem. That is why I ultimately shelved it. It just wasn’t worth the cascade of frustration causing me to play worse.

This go around? I beat the boss on the third try, with the first two tries largely being me remembering the mechanics. No out of control frustrations, less annoyance, more patience, fewer mistakes. Now that I’ve beat the game completely, it turns out that for me that was by a long shot the most difficult fight anyway so doing it in the progression order I did the first go around was probably a recipe for disaster, but I did roughly the same progression this time and got through it. Not really because the game was different, but because it was now running great and I wasn’t pissed off about technical problems.

Cyberpunk was the big one this year that launched and had major obvious issues on console, but for me this one was my Cyberpunk months earlier. Metroidvanias are probably the one genre that comes close to JRPGs for me in terms of games that I will absolutely play above all else. Ori and the Blind Forest was such a spectacularly good game that shelving the sequel was something so unexpected that it blindsided me. Luckily, the current state of the game – especially on better hardware – has completely redeemed it for me. This is now the game I wanted to play, and not the game that crashed and burned. It’s now the mechanically fantastic game with incredible platforming flow. It’s now one of the flag bearers for the genre, instead of a game that wasn’t ready for launch.

It’s now a game that I recommend without question.

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Shelved It #8 – Ori and the Will of the Wisps

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox One
  • Also Available On: Windows

I really liked Ori and the Blind Forest. It’s still as good of an example of a modern Metroidvania as I’ve played in the last ten years. The gameplay of Will of the Wisps is just as good, and when it’s smooth this is an absolutely wonderful game. However, it just isn’t smooth very consistently, and it has periods where it outright freezes for 5-10 seconds at a time, including in the middle of boss fights. Simply put – this game should not have shipped.

This is 100% a game that I expected to love, and for the most part it did what I expected. It’s still a really mechanically tight Metroidvania with a ton of great traversal. Wall jumps, air dashes, slingshots, water dashes – it’s all there and it all feels really good. Combat is similarly tight, with a nice set of melee attacks and ranged helpers to give you great capabilities to fight a wide range of enemies.

In a vacuum, this would have been an easy recommendation, but the performance of the game just could not hold up.

From a general game performance standpoint, things aren’t typically all that great. I get it – I’m playing on a base Xbox One and that’s not going to be the optimal experience. However, I’ve also shipped games on the base Xbox One, so I’m at least familiar with the machine’s capabilities, and Wisps is not doing a good job of keeping up. There’s a lot of sections of the game that run at a stable framerate, but I’d wager that probably 20% of what I played isn’t hitting 30 FPS. If it was close, that wouldn’t be a problem, but it was noticeably not 30 fps. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if some of the sections were more around 15-20 fps. In normal traversal this was just annoying, but it was especially bad happening during the game’s signature escape sequences. In those you absolutely need performance, and having to redo sections because a framerate drop caused me to miss a jump were infuriating.

However, the worse problem was the flat out freezing that happened every few minutes. I’m not talking about hitches – I’m talking straight up 5-10 second freezes. Looking around at the Steam forums, it looks like this is similarly bad on PC if you aren’t installed on an SSD. Given that, and given the laptop drives in all models of the Xbox, I’m assuming they’re getting slammed trying to load content. It’s bad enough when it happens in just running through a level or playing a cutscene, where it’s simply annoying. However, I had it happen multiple times during a boss, where it can often guarantee a death and reset.

This was capped by a handful of crashes that were periodically setting me back, which just kinda burned any patience I had left with the game in its current state.

Being quite frank, I’m surprised the game shipped in the state it did. It would be one thing to have some spots where a patch could smooth out some lower framerate spots. It’s even more unfortunate, because the gameplay is great when it works. However, having obvious long period freezes that happen every few minutes is unforgivable. Stuff like that is what certification is supposed to suss out and prevent games from shipping with. This being a first-party Microsoft title, I’m tempted to put some of the blame on them for it. However, the developers have as much responsibility as anyone to make sure they’ve got their shit locked up. And ya, I’ve been there – sometimes you just need to get something to cert and start working on a day 0 – but things like this should also be in your day 0.

More often than not, I shelf games because I simply am not finding something in the gameplay worth moving forward on. This one is the complete opposite. The gameplay is fantastic, but the performance and stability absolutely killed my patience with this game. If they sort it out in a patch, maybe I’ll come back to this, but for now it’s just kind of a disappointment.