Tag: PS4

Posted on

Game Ramblings #132 – Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout

More Info from Koei Tecmo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam

I’ve always been a general fan of the Atelier series, even back to the days of the PS2. There’s always been a fun loop there of going out into the world, finding materials, then coming back and using alchemy to create new items and gear. However, it wasn’t often that I was actually completing the games. They were generally pretty mechanically light, so while they were fun, they wore out their welcome before the end. Ryza is the one that feels like they’ve finally pulled it all together. This is still a distinctly AA JRPG, but improved combat and the return of the fun alchemy loop have really moved the series forward in a good way.

If all a JRPG has is good combat, it’s more than likely going to be a game that I enjoy, and Ryza really went and nailed that. This one has an interesting mix of different mechanics at play. It’s got a real time turn meter, a mix of skills and items for offensive and defensive maneuvering and front/back rows for some light positioning. Those mechanics should feel instantly familiar. It also brings in the stun meter that Final Fantasy 15 and 7 Remake used. What it does that’s unique is the tactics meter, combined with action points.

The action point system feeds into the rhythm of combat, and that’s something that I’ve mentioned here before. When combat is working well it feels like a rhythm, and that comes together here. Action points are built up by basic attacks. You’ve got two choices – you can use them to execute skills or you can save them up and increase the team’s tactics level. Increasing the tactics level makes skills stronger and opens up longer basic attack chains, at the cost of losing all existing action points. For boss fights, this is where the rhythm comes in.

You can play defensively and keep your action points around in case you need to dump them into heels. On the other hand, you can increase your tactics level to build up AP faster and make your skills stronger, at the potential cost of not having any AP ready for healing if the boss hits you hard. This puts the boss fights into a situation where you kind of play in waves – dump a bunch of AP to get a tactics increase, then hold back a bit to refresh the party before going back on the tactics offensive. The boss will then occasionally go into a mode where they have a telegraphed nuke attack, and at that point it’s all hands on deck dumping every item and skill attack into the boss to try to stun it before the nuke.

When executed well, this back and forth is extremely gratifying. You get to a point where you can really plan out rounds ahead what you’ll need to be doing, what your plan will be, and how to get there. When it turns out right, it’s as good as any turn-based JRPG out there. When it turns out wrong? Well, you learned something for the next attempt.

The alchemy side is just as gratifying, even if it’s where some UX improvement needs start to show up. Everything you do in the game ends up being important to alchemy. Killing things gets ingredients, gathering things in the world gets ingredients, side quests and activities get ingredients. You take all of that junk back and spin it into things that are actually useful for you. Crafting the right combination of ingredients to get a new weapon with a ton of extra stats? Fantastic feeling. Use the right material to get some life drain onto your gear? You’ve just actively made combat easier. Want to go into a high attack power glass cannon build? It’s up to you, add +attack instead of +defense to your armor, and play it how you want to. It’s a system that is incredibly good at allowing you to tailor your builds to how you want to play the game, and it really doesn’t do anything to prevent you from trying extremely stupid shit. It’s the best thing that can happen when a game lets you go nuts and in response the game rewards your freedom and exploration.

My main problem is that the user experience around this could use some cleanup. Need a specific crafting item? Well, you can dig through the journal to find out what zone it’s in. What it doesn’t tell you is where to get that item (is it in a rock? a plant? a tree?) or what action is needed (do I hit the rock with a hammer? an axe? my staff? These each grant different items). At the same time, if the item requires a crafted item you can’t just click on that item to start crafting it. You’ve got to dig around in your alchemy list and find it manually. When you start getting into having 100+ recipes to choose from and hundreds of potential materials, it’s a huge hassle to start figuring out where to get or make all of these things.

Luckily for me, once I’m down to complaining about small user experience cleanup, it’s really a sign that a series has reached a great point. I’m no longer worried about combat being a hassle or poor story getting in the way. I’m simply wanting things that work well to work even better, and Ryza has gotten the Atelier series to that point. This is the best that combat has been in the series by a long shot, and it’s combined with what has always been a fun alchemy loop to really push this series to a new high.

This also now means I can get around to starting Ryza 2….

Posted on

Game Ramblings #130 – Ys IX: Monstrum Nox

More Info from NIS America

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PC, Switch summer 2021 as of this post

The last time I visited the Ys series, I found an action RPG with a lot to like. Fast fluid combat was really the leading winner, but the rest of the game did its job well enough to keep me engaged. Ys IX is much the same. There’s some new wrinkles as to how the game’s world unfolds, but the combat is still as fast and fun as ever.

After my shelving of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I really needed something fast. Ys IX is definitely fast. If there’s any description I could give to someone that doesn’t know the series, it’s that it feels like the Sonic of RPGs. Movement is fast, combat is fast, things die fast, reactions happen fast. This game grabs you by the arm, drags you along, and doesn’t let up until you’re done. It was exactly what I needed.

Combat is largely the same as in past games, but it works so well. Your core moves are some direct melee attacks and AoE skills bound to face buttons. You’ve got parry and dodge on your shoulders. Timing either of those to an enemy attack gives you benefits (crit, regen, etc) that make it absolutely worth getting it right. For the most part that’s about it. Some enemies have weaknesses to specific weapons, but you can get by without really taking advantage of that.

It sounds pretty simple at face value, and to some extent it is. However, it’s largely necessary. Because of the speed of the action, that’s about as much as you can really balance at one time. You don’t really have the luxury of down time to plan out your moves or try to do anything complex. You’re watching for enemy tells so you can hit your defensive moves then hitting as many attacks as you can between that. On the attack side you’re going back and forth between skills that use resources and basic attacks that generate resources. That back and forth becomes your main combat rhythm, and timing your skill dumps with the enemy being stunned is the min/max setup that I really went after.

The rest of the game is pretty standard fare. Like Ys VII, the story isn’t the best ever but gets the job done. What ends up really being the thing to push you forward are all of the little gearing systems around. You can get through the game with just the base equipment, but there’s also a ton of potential in using the gear vendors to upgrade or craft new things. That leads you into wanting to open new areas for new crafting items, which leads you into exploring the map, which leads you into getting a bunch of cool loot. It’s a really tight loop, but there’s enough there to really push you to hit everything, rather than skipping content.

The gating of all of that is probably the most interesting mechanic. The world of Ys IX is basically gated behind barriers that can only be unlocked by battling monsters in-town or doing side quests. Getting to certain thresholds open up portals to the Grimwald Nox. Fights within this aren’t just your normal party – it’s every single character you have available, backed by additional support characters that you unlock along the way. These fights are absolute hilarious chaos, which is fun on its own. However, the fact that you can use characters unlocked via side quests gives you an additional reason to push for completion in a way that’s not grindy, but instead still a lot of fun.

Ys IX is a lot like the Tales of series for me. They aren’t the best games ever. They definitely have some rough edges. However, they are always fun. It’s the type of game that I know I can fall into if I’m looking to get past a game that bored me, and this was absolutely the case here. This was another entry with exciting, fast combat backed by enough of a story and good world systems to push me to easy completion, and with a much higher percentage of content finished than I typically would try to get through. It also got me past a wall of some amount of boredom that I got stuck in playing Sackboy and Valhalla. In that way it was the perfect refresher for me, but still one that I think I’d recommend at face value.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #125 – Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Rhythm
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch

I sat down to play the game and immediately got smacked in the face with a sense of having played this game before. The systems that I was going through; the interface at the end of songs; the way things were unlocking. I’d done it before. Then it hit me – this is a Theathrhythm game. I absolutely love the three Theatrhythm games on the 3DS and I don’t know why I never recognized what this was before its release. Ya the name isn’t there and they moved to a rear-camera 3D view, but it’s the same developer, the same systems, and the same pattern. Most importantly, it’s just as good.

Starting this as a comparison against Theatrhythm is really the place to start. The obvious change is the switch in view from side-scroll 2D to rear-scroll 3D, and that brings some oddities. Something about that change took me a long time to really grok, and I think it came down to a couple of main things.

The first is that there’s no mark to really establish the beat on the board. Looking at games with a similar viewpoint like Guitar Hero, having that scrolling beat indicator really just helps to establish some sense of depth to get some basic timing in your mind’s eye. It also didn’t help that the enemies popping onto the board didn’t have consistent timing. Some would be stationary as you scroll towards them. Some would walk towards the screen. Some kind jumped and weaved. Because of that I also couldn’t really depend on depth perception as a tool for timing the song out.

However, I hit a point probably about a third of the way into the game where I became less focused on hitting a beat, and more focused on hitting a melody, and that drastically changed how I played the game. There’s a tendency in these songs to use a bit of a Nintendo trick. The first time they introduce a melody, it’s a bit on the easier side. You’ve got enough of it to be able to hit the notes while listening to what is playing. The second and third time’s it comes around, it’s all-in and you’re responding to the full melody that you now recognize. They do this on even the highest difficulty, so you have an inherit ramp up in the song as you go through a couple loops of it. It works really well to allow you to learn on the fly, then really come back on a second go through fully knowing the song and ready to hit that full combo.

The rest of the core systems will feel familiar to players of Theatrhythm FF. Instead of directional swipes, you’ve got joystick flicks. Instead of screen holds, you have button holds. Instead of lanes per-character, you have attack buttons per-character. Instead of slide input segments, you’ve got in-air notes to catch while drifting Sora around on screen. There’s some nice additions there in terms of allowing you to do multiple attacks at once by pressing multiple buttons, but it still all feels familiar to me as a player of the Theatrhythm games.

If there was one last thing that really caught me off guard, it’s that this game did a fantastic job actually telling the Kingdom Hearts story. Ya, I’m not lying. This game covers the story of the entire franchise so far through cutscenes and voiceovers, and it does it in about 10-15 hours of gameplay. You’ve got coverage of all the main games, the important plot points from the spinoffs, and it’s all told in a concise way. In a series that effectively prides itself on being completely baffling, I retained more in one rhythm game than I did playing the entire rest of the series last year.

Now, because this is Kingdom Hearts, they couldn’t get away with not doing some stupid plot twist, and the end of the game has some important lore that ties the end of KH3’s DLC to whatever comes next. While I do recommend playing this one, if rhythm games aren’t your thing you’ll definitely want to catch up on the new lore via Youtube. It’s definitely a very Kingdom Hearts thing to have put new story into a recap game, just because they can.

I mean, I guess this is an easy recommendation. This is both really entertaining on its own as a Kingdom Hearts recap title, and a fantastic rhythm game. It takes systems that worked really well on the 3DS, and transforms them just enough to flow really well on a TV and gamepad, once I stopped trying to treat it like Guitar Hero. It’s also a great way to go back and hear how fantastically good the soundtrack of this series has been over the past 20 years.

Plus the game has One Winged Angel. That’s worth at least a +1 on the review scores.