Tag: Disney

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How’d It Age #11 – Epic Mickey: Rebrushed

More Info from THQ Nordic

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, PC
  • Originally Available On: Wii

I bounced off this game HARD when it originally came out. It’s not that the core game wasn’t good, but the forced integration of the Wii Remote really hampered the core painting mechanic. It made the camera miserable to control. It added unnecessary movement to painting. It was just a chore. Moving to standard controls frankly fixed the game.

Now I’m not necessarily saying that this is a modern masterpiece or anything but what a difference standard controls make. Platforming when you don’t have a good camera or good control of a camera just ruins the experience. You can’t hit your jumps quite right from lack of depth perception. You fall into danger because you couldn’t really see where you were landing. You get hit with things that weren’t necessarily in your camera view. It’s miserable.

Right on its own, having a camera stick fixes so much. You can run easily in different directions from your intended camera. You can look down when you jump to see the drop shadow for your landing spot. You can pan around during combat to make sure you have eyes on all the enemies. It just makes the game smooth. The worst part is that it’s not like this wasn’t solveable in the original title. Sure, the Wii Remote+Nunchuk combo was necessary as the default, but the Classic Controller add-on existed and offered dual-analog controls that could have been another useful control scheme to be used.

The other thing that really stood out to me was that this went beyond just moving to standard controls – it embraced modern touches with dual analog inputs. Since you no longer have pointer controls for the painting mechanic, it would have been easy for that to be incredibly imprecise. However, the game does two things that really improve the situation to do what I would argue matches the original game’s precision.

The first is simply that there is solid aim correction going on. The actual targetable area of things being painted is a decent amount larger than the actual target, and that sort of slushy space really makes quick targeting a lot more manageable. Obviously, this is something that most modern gamepad action games do, but it’s nice to see it here. The second is perhaps more important. The game just inherently supports motion controls during painting but not during normal movement. This is a really smart integration of that mechanic. Rather than the camera always darting around because of controller movement, the player is left to doing most camera movements on the stick. However, when the painting is activated, the camera stick movement is reduced and motion controls are enabled, allowing for really precise fine-tuned movement. This is a really smart touch as it makes combat precise in ways that even the original didn’t match and elevates it over a lot of “standard” action game control implementations.

What is on the surface a few small changes to core input really did end up fixing the game for me. It’s not like the original was all bad news anyway. The story and setting are wonderful, and that is still in place. The surprisingly dark story of Mickey effectively starting a cartoon genocide is still all here. It’s elevated by a pretty solid visual overhaul where everything is nice and high detail enough to now be a cartoon styled game in a modern engine. The platforming and combat are still good enough by modern standards and massively helped by the camera, so rather than being a downside it now serves to get out of the way of the really positive elements of the game.

The Wii was an interesting experiment to be sure, but now nearly 20 years later it’s pretty obvious that it didn’t really serve a lot of genres all that well. Wii Sports? Absolutely a banger for the console. First-person shooters? Metroid Prime on the Wii is probably the most precise way to play the game. However, more traditional genres like platformers really suffered from the lack of dual analog, and this is another example of that. Simply by moving to more standard controls, it took a game that had serious issues and made it pretty damn solid. It’s definitely no Mario Odyssey, but this is now a fun game on its own that can be played in a modern way without the frustration of poor input schemes.

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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.

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Game Ramblings #88.2 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance HD

Read Part 2 here.

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: 3DS

Dream Drop Distance is one of those classic games where I started it, played a whole bunch of it, then just…..stopped. I didn’t stop for any reason other than getting distracted. What I’d played I’d enjoyed, but it just never really gave me a reason to get back to it. In playing it again on the big screen, I’ve come around to this one more than I think I would have trying to replay this on the 3DS, and in doing so at the very least checked another game off on the way to playing KH3.

Summons have been replaced by a Pokemon-style collection system. I didn’t really use this a whole hell of a lot, but they’re pretty dang adorable.

Playing Dream Drop Distance after II definitely makes this game feel worse to some extent, but in the grand scheme of things this still played well. Like other KH games, it’s got a few tweaks to combat – some that worked well, some that didn’t – and a completely bat shit character split that does more harm than good in gameplay, but provides a pretty good grounding to the story. Realistically, the Kingdom Hearts series as a whole has always been a some things work, some things don’t and DDD isn’t any different.

Combat changes are really the key here, and the changes really fall into three main categories – reduction in chains, much greater use of the environment in combat, and changes to mana (again). The first feels purely like a change made for the limitations for the portable experience, and after KH2 it feels really unfortunate. Combos may last three or four hits on their own. On face value it feels sloppy but in practice it really encourages and forces the use of other new combat mechanics. Mana also sees some changes in this game, in so much as it no longer exists. In place of the recharging mana bar from KH2 are individually recharigng abilities that can be stacked into a scrolling list. This list grows as the player levels, giving a nice mix of flexibility in building out the active spec and some of the nice gains from the recharging bar of KH2.

Flowmotion and Reality Shift make the world a lot more of an interactive experience in combat, and it’s pretty key to being effective at avoiding damage in larger fights.

The real meat of the combat changes are around the Flowmotion system. The tl;dr here is that dodge rolling into pretty much any environment section (walls, poles, etc) or large enemies will put the player into a quick combo action. For walls, this is a linear flight move into a large attack. For poles, the player will circle around the poll and jump off into a tornado-like move. Different flowmotion attacks do different things and most of these moves provide some amount of immunity frames so this becomes the sort of default way to fight.

Unfortunately this is kind of a mixed bag. The moves are definitely super flashy and they’re entirely effective. However, it trivializes a lot of combat situations in really negative ways. On the other side though, the lack of combo attacks and boss fight patterns really makes it feel like there’s no other effective way to fight that doesn’t involve grinding and overpowering. It’s definitely a bit of good and bad, and it can get really repetitive during boss fights, but it’s at least still fun to watch.

The other mixed bag is the way the meta progression occurs in the game. The minimal spoiler version is that this game takes place around Sora and Riku trying to become key blade masters. In doing so, the two get split up in alternate dimension versions of the same world, with each needing to complete their version of the world to meet up at the end of the game. In practice, the switch between characters happens in a time-based forced switch. Realistically, this just feels shitty. There’s things you can do to slow down the countdown and give the other person boosts during their story segment, but even with that it kind of just feels like it always forces a switch at the worst time. I really like the story aspect for having this system too, but I’d so much rather it just switch characters at the end of the world, or let players switch as they want and simply introduce blocking points at a couple sections along the way. The worst part of all of this is that they HAVE those blocking points at a few spots along the way, so you have both the countdown AND progress blocking at the same time and the user never really has good control of their wanted flow.

If nothing else, this game still has sick costumes. I’ll take musketeer Mickey on my team any day.

Dream Drop Distance continued the pattern that we’ve been seeing. Kingdom Hearts will attempt some new things. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. At its release, this game proved that portable KH in Birth by Sleep was perhaps not a fluke in being a really deep experience, but on the TV it felt both more easily playable but also less forgiving in how its gameplay loop really worked out. Overall this is still a pretty entertaining game, and if nothing else this was at least a better sidetrack on the path to KH3 than when I went off track to Chain of Memories.