Tag: ARPG

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Game Ramblings #109 – Dark Cloud 2

More Info from Level 5

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS2 (via emulation)

Admittedly the main reason I picked this one up was to test some backup and emulation options for PS2 games. I’ve been starting to notice a bit of disc rot on a couple of my older games, so I’ve been making a pass on backing all those up so I at least have some ability to play them in the future. Out of the pass I did, this was one of the games that I’d been putting off playing for a long time. This gave me an opportunity to test the emulator PCSX2 alongside some high resolution support, as well as clear the sequel to a game I really enjoyed when I played it nearly 20 years ago.

The main thing that popped out to me is how good the gameplay has really held up. Going back to a lot of older games can be tough as the gameplay is often fairly dated. This one really held up strong though. The melee combo system is basic at face value, but with modifiers in various directions and a backflip dodge on the same main attack button, there’s a lot that can be done without really moving your hand around on the controller. Ranged weapons also come in to play, with each character having their own to use.

There’s also a lot of benefit out of the character swapping, which ends up being the core of keeping combat going quick. Each character has some amount of their own core strength, and that grows in different directions as you build out their weapons. Max in particular can also pull out a giant mech, which gives some fun options around taking out larger enemies more effectively.

The way they handle the power curve also aged really well. There is no level on the characters. Defensively they gain stats by applying special items found during natural progression, so their shield and health values have a sort of built-in natural growth to them. The real core of the power curve is all around weapon building.

Kills grant XP that go straight into the weapon that dealt the killing blow. Over time this gives you weapon levels, which add to both a raw damage stat, as well as to a synthesis points stat. This stat is used to apply elemental upgrades to the weapon, which over time opens up new upgrade paths to boost a weapon to a new higher tier.

What is less documented but equally important is that these elemental upgrades play right back into the core combat. Enemies all have some amount of built-in weaknesses to specific elements, and applying upgrades to your weapons exploits that. Up against a fire elemental? Use a weapon with a heavy ice stat. Want to build out a weapon that is equal against all? Go ahead and do so. However, it was often more valuable to split the stats and let each character specialize a bit more than that.

In practice this ends up in a lot of potential variety in how you choose to build your weapon out. This sort of active building to establish a power curve instead of the more standard passive level gains of RPGs is a huge change that I really wish more RPGs adopted. While a lot of RPGs give some small crafting and upgrade options, having the entire weapon power based on your own decisions and ideas is a really powerful setup that still feels extremely modern.

The rest of the core loop around town building is still there, and is still somewhat interesting and important to the player. While the exact layout and style of the towns isn’t that important, it was enjoyable to try and craft the perfect town as I built away. As you progress through each zone’s dungeon, you grab items that provide hints in how to build out a zone’s town to progress the story. This tight loop of doing a dungeon floor, going back to your town and building a thing or two, and diving back in is really solid. Occasionally this process will hit some story points that unlock your defensive upgrade items, which becomes a driving force to really do the building process well.

Now of course, I was also using this to test out emulation, and that was a big success. It had been a while since I really tried PS2 emulation, and while performance was good the last time I tried, features generally weren’t. Luckily a lot of that has changed. The XInput emulation supported the full DualShock rumble set. The emulator had really solid support for memory cards and save states, both of which were handy for jumping in for a few minutes as I had free time. However, the visuals are the biggest benefactor. The PCSX2 emulator supported both resolution enhancements AND widescreen patching, so I was able to play this at 2560×1440 native resolution. It’s easy to brush off how important that change alone was to making this easier on the eyes, but it was huge for me and I hope the screenshots I posted really show that off.

Overall this was a big success. I was able to back up all but a couple of my PS1 and PS2 collection. I was able to test out the modern emulation tools suite. Finally, I was able to finally get around to playing this game years too late. The original Dark Cloud was a really special game that was one of the first RPGs I played on the PS2 since it came out a few weeks before Final Fantasy X. The sequel had always been in the back of my mind, but for whatever reason it kept on slipping. Luckily it really has held up well. The gameplay is still a lot of fun, and is doing things with the player stat progression that I wish more games would play with. Getting those resolution enhancements via emulation helps make it a little bit more modern to my eyes, and that really helped more than I can describe.

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Game Ramblings #100 – Indivisible

More Info from Lab Zero Games

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows, macOS, Linux, Switch

I’m glad that this game was a milestone number for my ramblings, because it’s the kind of game I really live for. It’s both instantly recognizeable, but completely unique. It’s kind of an ARPG, kind of a JRPG, kind of a Metroidvania, but really it’s none of those things alone and all of those things together. It takes a bunch of pieces that shouldn’t work together, mashes them together, and spits something out that is phenomenal.

The first thing that really stood out was that the game was flat out gorgeous, though that isn’t much of a surprise. This is the team behind Skullgirls, which gameplay aside, was always known for its visual style. Right from the start, it’s a great mix of 3D backgrounds and 2D character art that pops like very few games do. Particularly in battle, the animation is all ridiculously well crafted hand-drawn art that really brings a bright and fun visual style to life. Amidst the chaos of battle, it’s all a joy to watch.

However, it’s that battle that really pulls you into the game. This is a bizarre mix of two RPG subgenres that somehow mash together. On the one hand, the battle system is very much an almost ATB-style system, where the characters charge up attack slots at different speeds up to a cap. However, those attack slots are not your typical menu slots – they’re instead button presses tied to each character, which can be comboed with directional inputs to do any sort of mix of functionality. This is expanded by different characters having different capabilities to really bring a simple but extremely deep combat system to life. It’s not unlike Valkyrie Profile in a lot of ways, but it definitely feels very much its own.

For example, Ajna can break enemies that are shielding with an up+down combo. I used a healer named Ginseng that built up power with straight attacks, then activated a power scaled group heal with their up attack. For flying enemies, I had an archer named Zebei that could shoot enemies out of the sky to be attacked by the rest of the party. At one point I even had a dog named Lanshi whose sole fight pattern was to bark at the enemy party, dealing large AoE damage. This is backed by a charged special attack bar that the entire party could use to do significantly large and flashy attacks to all enemies, like the one below.

On the defensive side, it’s all timing based. Correctly timing a button press when being attacked can block incoming damage, starting with partial block and growing all the way to character heals by the end of the game. This ability to block damage means that missing the button press is absolutely hazardous, as the game is scaled around the player preventing incoming damage as much as possible. A good player will basically never take damage, while a lesser player will likely need to grind a bit to become stronger, so this also works as a pretty solid built-in difficulty mechanic to allow better players to simply move forward.

In general, this battle system was just straight up fun. I spent a decent amount of time when grabbing new characters playing around to see how they felt, but over time settled on a party that really fit my preferred style. For me it was all about fast charging characters with good single target attacks, backed by Ginseng’s healing capabilities, and very little defense other than good timing. It fit a really fun sort of zerg rush pattern that I leaned hard into by the end of the game.

The Metroidvania aspect of the game is generally the weaker part of this mash of genres. It’s not that it’s implemented poorly – the levels all have a ton of side paths that are slowly unlocked as the player gains new abilities. It’s that the level layouts don’t really feel tuned to Metroidvania-style retraversal. It was pretty much without fail that I’d start on one end of a region map, get all the way to the far other side of the region map, and hit a story block with no new power helpful to the current region, requiring me to go completely back across the map to get to a ship and move to a different region. More often than not, the new paths opened with new abilities were typically smaller side paths that existed to collect upgrades, and not necessarily new paths for traversing the level in a different fashion. By doing this extreme side to side layout design, it really ended up making me retraverse the levels with nothing new to do, rather than the more Metroid-typical pattern of earning powers often, and traversing a region with full new paths. Things opened up a bit more by the end of the game, but by that point it kind of felt like too little too late.

That being said, the traversal not being great didn’t minimize my enjoyment of the game. This was ultimately one of my rare PS4 platinums, clocking in at a bit under 20 hours to get the full trophy set. Within that, I got to experience a bunch of great combat, some fantastically flashy and memorable bosses, and more than a few laughs at the party’s expense. For me this is even better, as I was a backer of their Indiegogo campaign, so watching this one come to life, and having it live up to my hopes is something that I’m always wishing for. At this point, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a proper non-mobile Valkyrie series entry out of Square, and if Indivisible is the way that someone runs with the gameplay, I’m certainly excited about the end result.

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Game Ramblings #99 – Sparklite

More Info from Red Blue Games

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam (Windows/Mac), PS4, Xbox One

This one’s kind of been floating around in my brain for a while. One of the folks working on this did some contract work with my team a couple years ago at Tripwire, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see the game finally come out. I’m even more thrilled to find that it lives up to what I was envisioning back when I was hearing their plans. While it’s easy to look at this and shake it off as a Link to the Past clone, the game makes some clever use of roguelike mechanics to provide both a way to change the environment throughout the game, as well as a positive feedback loop to the process of dying. It’s an interesting change to a genre that typically penalizes dying, and it ended up working out well.

Let’s get the simple things out of the way in a real hurry. The game uses an entirely pixel-based visual style and it’s pretty damn gorgeous. The soundtrack is also fairly catchy and never started to wear on me despite hearing the same general set of themes throughout each region. Yes, the core gameplay loop here is LttP. You have a melee weapon that swings in an arc. You run around the environment killing things for upgrades. You eventually get to pattern-based bosses that you take out to get your big upgrades. That all is pretty familiar to fans of the genre, and really it’s done well here. It feels mechanically solid, and probably most importantly, I was never feeling cheated if I was taking damage. If I was taking a bunch of damage, it was entirely my fault. It’s worth noting that damage does ramp up REALLY fast here, and it’s easy to get one shot later in the game if you’re not paying attention. That’s entirely where the roguelike mechanics start to come into play.

Boss fights are where you typically die the most, and where the roguelike growth elements really come into play.

The first thing to note is that the world changes each time you play through it. This plays a nice balance of randomness and non-randomness in that the regions are always in the same general area (desert is west, snow is north, etc) but the regions themselves are fairly randomized each run. There’s always going to be a set of standard features in each region (boss dungeon, random enemy dungeon, an area to pick up an upgrade, etc) but the rest of the area is going to be pretty different between runs. Sometimes you’ll find random underground areas with currency to grab. Sometimes you’ll find areas with people that you can rescue. Sometimes you’ll find areas with side-quest collection stuff to do. Basically, you’ll always have some reason to both move forward to new spots, but also return to old spots just to see what else you can find.

The core hub that you end up at on death also follows the roguelike pattern of slow incremental upgrades. There’s a main shop with player upgrades for purchase that also serves as a spot to handle the equipment chain. There’s a spot that can be upgraded that provides some free consumable items (ex: health potions, bombs, etc) that you can grab before going down for a world run. There’s a shop that can be upgraded to build out secondary ranged items. This is also the core spot where you’re going to find a lot of the lore of the game. Overall the town serves its purpose well as a bit of a power curve spot for the player. It’s easy to get around in the town, the purpose of the shops is always super obvious, and you’re going to be finding some reason to dump all your currency into something before heading back down to the main game world.

The main weapon’s upgrade system is super customizable and ends up being an interesting way to build in limits and choices in a meaningful way.

However, the main power curve comes all together in the hammer equipment. The hammer is both the main weapon in the game, as well as the main equipment handler. It can be packed with a bunch of upgrades ranging from damage to armor to health to map helpers and more. However, this takes the form of a grid-based screen that honestly reminded me a lot of the sort of classic PC ARPG approach. These upgrades all have some specific grid size and shape, so you spend a bunch of time min/maxing both the upgrades themselves, as well as the space they take up within the grid to get everything you want packed in there. As an example, a shield upgrade is a 1×1 square, attack upgrades are 2×2, but something like the gadget power is a 2×1 bar. The upgrades of common types can also be combined at a cost into more powerful versions from bronze to silver to gold.

This process of upgrading and playing a bit of inventory Tetris is the core power curve loop of the game, and it’s really effective at playing into how I got through the game. I initially started off stacking health upgrades just to stay alive. As I got more comfortable with the game mechanics, I started backing off of health and going more towards offensive upgrades. However, boss fights started doing a lot of damage all at once, so I started pulling some direct armor in to keep the individual hits down to smaller amounts. It was a really fun way to manage my overall power, and is a lot more interactive than the typical ARPG style of hunting a dungeon for the same direct upgrade that everyone else was going to take.

I really just wanted an excuse to post this map, because damn is it gorgeous.

For as cynical as I can often be about working in the game industry, it’s always fun to see something come out made by folks you know and have worked on. It’s even better when the thing they’ve been working on as a passion project comes out and is a lot of fun to play. This is definitely one of those cases. It’s a game in a small niche genre mix made by a small team because it’s what they wanted to make. If the idea of playing a roguelike Link to the Past sounds at all appealing, this is definitely worth the play.