Tag: ARPG

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Game Ramblings #138 – Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime 3

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: 3DS

We’ve only been fortunate enough to get one of the entries in this Dragon Quest sub-series in the US. Luckily, an English patch has been created by a group called Fan Translators International, and it’s a quality one. I’ve been going through the process of backing up a lot of my older disc and cartridge games, and DS/3DS was up so I figured I’d take the opportunity to play through this one in English, and that was definitely the right choice.

The Rocket Slime games are kind of hard to describe, but the short version is that it switches between two main types of gameplay – an overworldish section where you collect items and monsters to build ammunition and crew and a battle-based segment where you engage in ship vs ship combat. The second one is definitely the thing that’s worth playing.

The overworld stuff is all well and good, but it basically exists to serve the purpose of grinding out ammunition for your ship. You use the same movement as ship battles in terms of flinging the player around and grabbing things, but there’s no real challenge here, even in the handful of boss battles. You go around, mop up everything, and send it off to your ship. Parts of it become pretty grindy as you get a bunch of parts to craft higher level stuff, but you get through it to make your ship stronger. If there’s anything to really point at as a major experience killer, it is that grind. Getting your ship together for the end game fight was really a hassle that I wasn’t expecting.

The ship battles just work so well. It’s a pretty basic loop, but has a really nice rhythm. You’re basically being given periodic dumps of ammo that you’ve collected throughout the world, picking it up, and chucking it into upper and lower shooting cannons. You’re doing this both offensively and defensively – hitting the enemies shots will knock them down, getting through to the enemy ship damages it. You can also fire yourself and your crew, allowing you to wreak havoc on the enemy ship, taking out their ammo feeds and really minimizing their ability to fight back. Once the enemy reaches 0 HP, you invade their ship and destroy their engine. That’s really all that there is mechanically.

That said, it works so damn well. On the ammo front, you get a feel for roughly how often you’ll get ammo and where on your ship it will show up, so you start picking out ship hulls that allow you to maximize your routing efficiency in picking up and chucking ammo. You start finding crew combos that work best with your play style. In particular, I had a combo where two crew split cannon duty and a third one chucked itself at the enemy ship to cause damage while I defended from enemies coming on board. It’s the kind of experience where even though a lot of the fights are generally the same, it doesn’t stop being fun.

The game we got as Rocket Slime on the DS was a really fun experience, featuring similar gameplay with tanks instead of pirate ships. Knowing that this game had been released in Japan and wasn’t being seen here – despite the popularity of the Dragon Quest main series – was a major bummer. I’d imported this one a while back, but kind of sat on it knowing that I was probably going to want to wait for a fan patch. Luckily some enterprising fan translators got that done, so I was able to play through it.

It’s tough for me to generally recommend importing JPN-only games, and in this case that still kind of stands. Playing this involved a number of things; importing the game in the first place, converting one of my 3DSs to custom firmware, going through the process of setting it up for custom game patches, getting this patch on there. It was a lot of stuff to play one game, but for me it was absolutely worth it. This is a hell of a fun game with a unique ship combat system that we could use more of, and I’m glad I stopped being lazy about getting this stood up to play.

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Game Ramblings #136 – NieR Replicant ver 1.22474487139…

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Steam

Playing remakes – and not just remasters – is always interesting. How do they modernize the game without ruining what people liked about the original? Do they choose to add or remove anything to change the game at all? Playing remakes when you didn’t really play the original is even more interesting. I bounced off NieR on the PS3 pretty hard, though I don’t remember why. However, I really enjoyed Automata so I figured it was worth a revisit. As it turns out, I definitely enjoyed Replicant a lot this go around, although it has some spots where it definitely shows its age.

In hindsight, this ones feels a lot like Automata, and that’s probably what makes it work out so well for me at this point. My Automata ramblings cover the basics, but to be sure the ARPG systems still work great here. The mix of melee and ranged combat, as well as your occasional bullet hell chaos works really well still. It’s generally clear whether a boss is more susceptible to what kind of attacks, and you plan accordingly to get your big damage dumps. It just works well.

However, the thing that struck me is how overwhelmingly fair it is. There just aren’t big fuck you moments. If you execute your offense well, you won’t have problems taking out enemies. If you execute your defense well, you won’t have problems avoiding damage. If you’re paying attention to enemy tells you’ll be ready to dodge things. The game just isn’t going to punish you if you’re paying attention.

Having talked to a few people about the original release, this seems like a big change. From what I understand, the original wasn’t necessarily unfair, but leaned into difficult tuning more than it should have. To me this feels like a conscious effort to align the game with both Automata, as well as a larger mass market. You can go to a harder difficulty if you want to, but the game doesn’t feel designed around punishing the player even on that harder difficulty. It just feels tuned to be right.

However, that was something they could absolutely control when remaking the game. What they couldn’t control was the overall metagame that was there, and that part is definitely showing its age. The first thing that stood out to me was how minimal gearing was in contrast to Automata. You have weapons that can be upgraded and some basic mods that can be applied to your gear (+damage, +defense, +magic, etc) but compared to the chip system it feels pretty slim. I just didn’t derive much gameplay out of it, because I basically picked a weapon that fit my style then applied the best mods and didn’t really think about it.

The general story flow also just didn’t age well. There’s a lot of mindless back and forth between the same areas just to finish story quests (run to coast town -> go back to your village -> go back to coast town -> go back to your village) and with so few unique areas, it wears out pretty quick. The lack of quick travel for most of the game also exacerbates the issue. You just spend a lot of time mindlessly running in comparison to the original.

This is pushed way to the forefront in the design of the game’s endings. Ending B is a replay of the second half of the game with a few unique story bits added. Ending C and D are replays of the second half of the game accessible only after you collect all weapons, which then adds a unique selection to the end boss. The new ending is the sole new addition, but frankly it wasn’t worth replaying the game so many times to get to it, so I just watched it on Youtube. Automata definitely learned a lot from this one in terms of making the chase towards multiple endings more fun and more unique. Replicant, even in modern form, is a bit of a drag.

That said, this game is worth playing even if you only get to the first ending. Even with its problems the combat is just that good. This and Automata have a combat flow that I’ve rarely felt nailed so well in other games. The closest that I could really compare it to would be something like Bayonetta in terms of mixing the grand scale and tight action. It’s just consistently fun and exciting to get to and fight through bosses, and each one leaves you wanting to push through the story problems just to get to that next adrenaline rush. For that alone, this gets the approval.

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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.