Tag: ps5

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Game Ramblings #176 – Sea of Stars

More Info from Sabotage Studio

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series

This is an interesting game, not the least of which is because it’s distinctly a JRPG not developed in Japan. It very clearly takes inspiration from games like Chrono Trigger, with which it shares a composer. It also clearly leans into games like Suikoden, FF6, and Lufia. However, the one it really brings to mind to me more than any of those is Super Mario RPG.

It was pretty early on when my brain went straight to “this is SMRPG” and the video above is indicative of that. Sure, it’s not exactly the same attack but the cadence of the deflection there is the same kind of cadence in executing a super jump and getting the full combo. Those little details are all over in combat. Timing your own attack bonuses is different with each person’s basic and special attacks, giving a bit of skill in making sure you stay fresh in using everyone. Learning the attack timing of enemies is even more crucial in order to reduce incoming damage. All of that is straight SMRPG in my brain. Sure it isn’t the only game to ever do things with attack timing in a JRPG, but it is the one that stuck for me.

Sea of Stars does it all wonderfully well. The animation tells on both sides of the equation are at a level of fidelity that I could only have dreamed of 25+ years ago and really enforce learning the timing of everything well. The precision of all of it feels just right – with it rewarding the timing but not making it too loose. The rewards for successful execution beyond just normal attack+ and defense+ on an attack are also nice, with it opening up combos and ultimates quicker if you’re good at executing the timing. That set of things in particular is where SoS starts to feel like a modern take on the genre. The way combat is setup feels distinctly more active than a lot of the “classics” of the genre.

MP is regenerative via attacks, which goes a long way to enforcing actual use of skills. Since you aren’t trying to horde items, you’re instead doing what you can to mitigate attacks entirely. That ties into the little icon panel above the targeted creature in the screenshot above, where successfully executing those types of attacks before the creature’s turn effectively wipes out their turn. That then ties into the successful execution timing, where a successful hit generally instead does multiple hits instead of just being a number++. That then also ties back into the use of combo attacks, which take multiple characters and multiple types of attacks and unify them into one turn.

I suppose what I’m ultimately getting at is that each part of combat feels like it’s supportive of the rest. Unlike a lot of classics of the genre, which often leaned more into numbers games, Sea of Stars legitimately feels like you can skill your way to victory. Smart attack timing allows you to be more aggressive, because building up the combo meter quicker means that you’ll have rapid access to a large party heal. Concentrating on cancelling enemy attacks means that you’ll reduce incoming damage just by not being attacked, again encouraging aggressive play styles. Being able to swap your party on the fly like more modern games have done means that you’re always encouraged to use very specifically the exact person that is useful right now instead of trying to make best guesses as to what party setup will be most useful over time within a dungeon. I’ve mentioned it as recently as One Piece Odyssey, but hot swapping is one of my favorite things that is becoming more common, as it means that you use your entire party all the time instead of being stuck on just a subset that is convenient.

That said, there were definitely some things that didn’t hit for me as well as combat. A decent portion of the game is spent without the ability to reasonably fast travel, which is a bit of a bummer. Rather than feeling natural within the game, it ended up just kind of reducing me wanting to explore areas that I’d been to to find new things. Very late in the game you gain the ability to go anywhere you want, but it felt a bit too little too late. The game also kind of dragged by that point anyway. You open up your full arsenal in combat by probably about the midway point in the game. Up until then you’re slowly being given new capabilities that allowed me to be spending time in new dungeons experimenting with interesting combat flows. However, once I was at full capability combat kind of started to drag. Other than bosses, a lot of the trash enemies are pretty samey, which is fine when you’re trying new things but is kind of slow otherwise.

There’s also something to be said about the fact that the story is often very convenient. It’s not that I found it bad or anything, but a lot of the plot points kind of resolve themselves quickly and with little effort on the main party’s part. For example, at one point an entire city basically gets leveled by the main antagonist, but within an hour or less it’s basically rebuilt, everything is back to normal, and you move on with your life. One of the main character’s story beats revolves around him not being able to fight in some specific battles, but he’s perfectly able to tell you exactly what you should be doing. Things like that kind of keep happening throughout the game. Obviously the things need to happen, but the way in which they occur just always feels like the shortest way out, rather than the way that makes sense for the world.

I suppose where that ultimately ends up is that the sum of the game’s parts were more than good enough for me to want to get to the credits, but not good enough for me to really want to push for full completion. There is a true ending that I knew about having backed this on Kickstarter, but I didn’t want to go throught the tedious process to finish the checklist of things to do. Combat wasn’t going to grow and the story wasn’t going to change that much, so I confirmed that via watching it on Youtube. From a plot perspective it kind of made me wish that they had skipped the alternate ending and just made it the core plot.

That said, I think this game is absolutely one worth playing if you’re a JRPG fan. The combat mechanics alone are good enough for fans of the genre to enjoy without needing to worry about anything else, and the game surrounding it is at least good enough for a core playthrough. It took me about 25 hours or so to get through, so it’s not even a particularly long entry to the genre. It may not quite live up to the bar set by its higher budget inspirations, but it leaves me in a place where I continue to be excited about where this studio is going after its shipped this and The Messenger.

There’s also something to be said about another game giving me fishing!

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Shelved It #20 – Tunic

More Info from Isometric Corp Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, Steam

Tunic is one of those games that just convinces me that somewhere along the way I’ve been left behind by a certain subset of games. It’s the type of game that I can see why people enjoy, but for the life of me I just cannot wrap my head around. There’s little things that annoy me that should be relatively minor, but as a whole just frustrated me to the point where I go, “nope, this isn’t for me.” I guess for me it comes down to too much Souls in a Zelda game ruins my fun.

This is absolutely the type of game that I should love since I’m a huge fan of the 2D Zelda games. It’s got a similar approach to combat. It’s got a similar approach to world design. It’s got a similar approach to exploration. However, I just could not grok any of that in the same way that I could a Zelda game. In a couple of nights of sitting here trying to suss out my frustrations playing this, I’ve been able to narrow it down to two specific things that really got under my skin – core combat delays and overworld design.

Core combat is really down to one thing for me, and it’s an inherent difficulty of the game, not necessarily because the game is hard, but because of how they handle specifically the attack animation. Anything that happens after the attack animation must wait for the animation to complete. In particular that means you can’t dodge and you can’t defend with your shield. Because of this, I found myself taking a lot of what I thought were unnecessary hits. I could start an attack, see that the enemy is about to attack themselves, and be unable to do anything about the incoming damage. I would just have to eat the damage and hope for the best. This is the same issue I have with the Souls series, which is another one that has me convinced that some part of gaming has left me behind.

Ultimately, I guess my frustration here isn’t so much that I can’t dodge when I want to and cancel the attack animation – although frankly I think that is a good option to have – but that it slows the pace down in a way that feels not fun. Rather than being in the attack and actively using my defensive measures, I’m staying back in a full defensive posture, making sure that I’m in an absolutely safe position to attack, and getting in a single swing. If I happen to notice that I knocked an enemy back I could go for a combo, but it often wasn’t worth the risk. There’s too many situations where the game has you fighting 1v3 or more, so getting a combo in on a knocked back enemy just opens you up for damage from other targets. This sort of pace of play is something that I never enjoy, and having it be because I simply can’t play at a faster pace safely is something that I really don’t enjoy in modern Souls-ish games.

The other thing that really killed a lot of my enjoyment ended up being the overworld design, and this can be traced to a culmination of a few things. The first is that there’s not really an effective map in place. You get a sort of overworld map early on, but it doesn’t show where the player is so you have to contextually know roughly where you are to make much use of it. It also doesn’t extend to the sort of dungeon areas at all, which is less helpful. The second part is that the overworld is intentionally built like a maze, so it doesn’t exactly match up with the provided map anyway. This is then tied to a distinct inconsistency in finding save points. In the main overworld area, the only one that I actually found was the one in the first picture, which I happened to accidentally keep looping back to while I wandered around lost like an idiot, or when I died running into something that I wasn’t ready to fight.

I guess ultimately I feel like you kind of have to pick your poison. If you want difficulty, I feel like you need to be consistent in the player’s ability to save their progress as they make it. If you want to avoid hand holding their progress, then you need some clarity over where the player has been. If you want to not really give an effective map, the player should have a pretty clear path through the world. It’s not like the genre has never had these things. Even the old Game Boy Zelda games had pretty clear maps, pretty clear idea of what the player needed to do (follow the dungeons in order, but we aren’t telling you precisely where they are), and pretty fair difficulty. The combination they picked is none of that, and in doing so it just kind of felt like the worst kind of 90s gameplay where you’re wasting time for the sake of wasting time in trying to figure out what you’re doing, and more often than not accidentally going the right way eventually.

As I was playing through the first sort of side dungeon area, I thought I was getting to a point where I was starting to wrap my head around the game, but getting back into the main overworld made it clear to me that it just wasn’t coming together for me. I think there’s something there when the game works, because a legitimately harder 2D Zelda I think is something I want to like, but this one just didn’t hit for me. It felt like the worst combination of things that I don’t enjoy in the sort of Souls-adjacent rush to market that’s happened in the last few years and it just left me wanting to move on.

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Game Ramblings #175 – Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: Action
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Windows

I get that this is an incredibly early ramblings for me. At the point that I’m writing this I’m not even halfway through the game. Normally at this point I’d be shelving a game and yelling about it or continuing on. However, I think I’ve already hit on what is sticking in my mind about playing this game – I totally love the core loop here, and it often feels better than any game in the series, but it feels like they stopped halfway modernizing the moment to moment gameplay, and it feels like a missed opportunity.

The actual core mech movement feels INCREDIBLY better than it did in past titles, and a lot of that is down to modern hardware allowing them to do more graceful and faster moving combat overall. It’s incredibly easy to pick up the game and be dashing around dodging stuff. Movement is incredibly fast and the mechs feel incredibly nimble to a point that it feels kind of weird for the series. However, in terms of it trending toward a modern action focus, I don’t think it’s particularly unwelcome.

The weapon buildout is as good as it’s ever been, and I’ve been enjoying the process of building out a mech tailored toward the particular mission. It’s pretty clear after getting your face punched in whether or not a boss is more tailored towards a safer ranged approach or an aggressive melee approach, and getting used to the different types after years away from the series has been the best part of being back in it. Each type has obvious strengths and weaknesses with different approaches, and being effective at them is simply fun.

However, where I think things sort of fall apart is a little bit in the balance of what I’ve played so far combined with a camera that just feels ancient.

In saying balance, I don’t actually mean difficulty. Yes, the game is often hard but it doesn’t often feel completely unfair. Where I say balance it’s that overall it feels like the game is leaning incredibly far into combat being twitch focused – see a warning of an incoming attack and immediately dodge – with huge penalties towards missing those dodges. What this ends up doing is creating this wide range where I either have no problem at all with a mission or feel like I’m slamming my head against a luck barrier based on whether or not the incoming attack pace is fast or not, and that often comes down to whether or not I can actually see what is incoming.

In terms of the camera itself, it’s a pretty standard 1P/3P dual-stick camera. It’s got a bit of user options in terms of camera speed, but it’s pretty barebones. The weapons themselves use the core camera aim with a bit of an angle to allow for soft targeting assists and make aiming a little bit less precise. There’s a lock on R3, but this is my biggest gripe. The lock is not a traditional hard lock in so much as it doesn’t really pull your camera, and it is incredibly easy to lose the lock target if they get anywhere near the edge of your view. Frustratingly, some weapons are also just better if you don’t have a camera lock because they will aim more effectively without a fixed target. It all feels like penalties to playing on a gamepad, which is weird given the series past on the PlayStation family.

The strange thing about the game is that it feels like it wouldn’t actually be that hard playing on keyboard/mouse where I had more ability to rapidly change my viewpoint. Where I’m kind of struggling on console is in actually achieving both defense and offense in equal measure. I’m finding that I can concentrate well on audio cues and really have no problem staying alive for extended periods of time, but then I’m fighting the camera to even find my target, let alone have consistent lock ons. Even at max camera speed, I’m finding that by the time I rotate towards my target on sub-boss/boss combat, they are already dodging past me again, causing me to need to heavily rotate my camera again. This has been somewhat alleviated by the quick turn upgrade, but that ultimately feels like a bad patch to the problem.

I think there’s sort of two things in my mind that are solutions here if the current pace of the game is where they want to take the series – less reliance on aiming to achieve offense, or really leaning into the fast-paced combat and making dodging the core focus. For me, I’d like to see the second one, despite the fact that it feels like it would pull the series even further away from what it used to be.

If I look at two early bosses that I didn’t necessarily find hard but found frustrating – the Juggernaut and the Sulla portion of the Watchpoint mission – the thing I found frustrating wasn’t that they were hard, but that they dodged out of view. This more often than not resulted in me having to pan my camera, figure out where they ended up, and plod my ass over there. In the first example you’re getting back onto a camera stick, removing your ability to rapidly dodge. The Juggernaut was also pretty clearly setup as a boss that required dodging to get behind the enemy and quickly do burst damage with melee, which was made difficult by the fact that I was spending most of the boss’ vulnerable time just trying to adjust my view. Even with quick turn on the second one, the process of quick turning feels pretty clunky to pull off (hold sprint button and move in that direction). If I then compare it to what’s supposed to be a harder boss (Balteus at the end of Chapter 1), that boss didn’t feel frustrating because I had a much better ability to track the enemy through the attack patterns and spent my time simply getting better at recognizing what the boss was doing.

I think what I’d much rather see at this point is a distinct hard camera lock option where the game then leans into dodge as a core mechanic, allowing the player to remove the whole stick <-> button transition and lean into smart avoidance of incoming attacks. In the two noted examples, it would allow me to spend less time adjusting my camera and more time fundamentally attacking, which opens up opportunities for there to be more difficult attack patterns. Under the current attack setup for those bosses, I think they would be fundamentally easy with a hard lock in place, so their perceived difficulty to me feels like an artificial setup caused by a camera that does not feel in sync with the rest of the gameplay.

The problem of important things being on both the sticks and face buttons is something that I think a lot of modern games are running into, and unfortunately I don’t have a good solution at this point other than tailoring the experience around using only one of them at all times. Having camera panning being a core feature and dodging be a core need means that the player needs quick access to both simultaneously, and moving from sticks to face buttons is always going to be clunky. The unfortunate thing is that because they have four possible attacks, the other control schemes that are offered just create different problems. Type B puts dodge and jump on the shoulder triggers which is great, but puts shoulder weapons on the face buttons which is not great if you need to also aim. Type C swaps shoulder and hand weapon slots from Type B. Custom mappings on standard pads don’t solve the problem because of the same thing – you only have so many shoulder buttons. Ultimately there’s just too many things for not enough buttons and there’s bad compromises in any selection. The best solution here unfortunately is a pro style controller that moves bindable face buttons to back triggers so you never have to leave the stick.

I guess in a lot of ways what I’m getting at here is the same problem I have with the Souls games. They have extremely good fundamental core gameplay that didn’t always click to me because of one or two very specific things. In the case of Souls, it was always the large periods of time where I couldn’t readjust what the character was doing because of an existing action – for example, being able to better dodge cancel a long attack. Armored Core in general has always been a series that was closer to my heart in terms of core gameplay anyway. In the case of AC6, it feels like they’ve tried to modernize things but haven’t really settled in a place where it quite nails it, so rather than feeling like a better version of past AC games or a reimagining of the core game, it feels stuck a bit in the middle. I’m ultimately enjoying it but spending a lot of time thinking about what it could be instead.