Tag: gust

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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….

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Mini Ramblings #2 – Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS2

Having played the prequel title Ar nosurge on the Vita, I ran through this one on a whim without really taking much in the way of notes or screen captures, so I’m preserving this as a mini ramblings. Definitely a solid choice to go back to as a PS2 play through.

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Game Ramblings #48 – Nights of Azure

More Info from Koei Tecmo

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Japan Only – PS3, Vita

TL;DR

  • Solid combat with multiple fighting styles
  • Good exploration mechanics that encourage taking risks without huge penalties
  • Small demon collection aspect that ends up giving a lot of party flexibility, adding good depth to combat

Nights of Azure is one of those games that I can best describe as being entirely competent.  It’s a game with solid combat, an entertaining enough story, and some nice systems to flesh things out.  It ends quick enough that it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and in doing so doesn’t do anything egregious to piss me off.  The visuals were decent, and it was clear what was going on.  The soundtrack hit the emotional notes of the story’s current progress, and the battle music kicked into high gear when necessary.  Given it was developed by Gust, this should come as no great surprise.  The DNA of their other more famous series (Atelier series, Ar Tonelico/Nosurge series) is definitely in place here, and the game benefits a lot from it.

There’s a lot on screen during combat, but you learn to look at important info quickly.

Being an ARPG, the most important thing in general is going to be the combat, and Azure definitely brings some solid combat to this.  In a lot of ways it can be described as a sort of Tales-lite system.  You’ve got a small party, some core melee combos, and some SP-based skills.  However, the party members revolve around a Pokemon style collection system instead of being core NPCs.  The other main thing that adds a lot of depth is that there are 4 different combat styles, giving some flexibility in picking the style that works best for the user.

However, the best thing that came out of all of this is the leveling system.  While it’s definitely a consequence of the game’s short length (< 20 hours for the core story), I ended up finishing the game around level 8, and my demons at their max level of 10.  Because of this, getting a level felt extremely important.  Each stat bump that came with it, as well as skills gained from leveling all had an obvious impact on my character, which is a nice change from the usual 50+ level slog of more high budget ARPGs and JRPGs.  The resource used for leveling was also a nice touch.  Killing enemies results in Blue Blood being gained, which can be used for leveling, summoning new demons for your party, as well as purchasing items from demon vendors throughout the game.  This gave a lot more consequence to the use of the resource, particularly because you could not use the blood you gained until you returned back to home base.

While that last note may sound scary, the game has other systems in place to encourage exploration, rather than making the resource gathering feel like a huge risk.  The main bonus here is that you can teleport instantly back to base at any point, and most quests also typically teleport you back to base for story reasons after finishing the goal.  The second thing they do is checkpoint your progress at the beginning of a room.  If you die, you lose all the resources you gained specifically within the current area, but you don’t lose everything from your current exploration session, and can choose to immediately go home, or pick up where you checkpointed.  In general, this allowed me to be slightly gung ho about going down side paths, because I knew at most I was only going to lose a few minutes progress, with the potential for a huge payoff defeating something optional.

I suppose my final note is that this definitely felt like a portable title, rather than a typical console title, and it being released on the Vita in Japan points to that.  Exploration was done with a time limit of 15 minutes, after which you’d teleport back to base.  However, I never really got close to that time limit, and the tasks I was chasing were typically done within a 10 minute or less window.  This would have been a perfect amount of time for a typical portable experience, and the sequel being aimed at the Switch leads me to believe they’re sticking with the system.  However, even on console the game loop there worked pretty effectively, letting me jump in in short bursts.

The outfit choices were sometimes questionable, and generally got a laugh out of me for their absurdity.

In a lot of ways, this was definitely a very typical Gust title.   The plot was very female-focused, the interaction between the two main characters was personal and positive, and the end of the game left it open for the since-announced sequel.  The outfit choices in some of the cutscenes (as seen above) were also generally pretty hilarious in how little was being worn.  However, it was more often than not hilarious in its lack of care, rather than being risque or offensive in any way.  End of the day, this was a game that was a lot of fun to play, even if it’s not chasing the AAA titles for game of the year.