Tag: square-enix

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How’d It Age #8 – Star Ocean: The Second Story R

More Info from Square-Enix

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

In a year of wonderful remasters and remakes I’m finishing the year on another wonderful remake. This one is very similar to Super Mario RPG in that it left the gameplay largely intact while overhauling the visuals, but it took a decidedly more retro approach. Luckily, like SMRPG, it is also similarly still a ton of fun.

Having somewhat recently played some Star Ocean I apparoached this kind of knowing what kind of game I was getting into. I knew that combat wasn’t going to be overly complicated, but I knew it was going to be fun. What surprised me was how well this one scaled between low and high enemy counts, which is something that newer entries don’t necessarily do.

One of the big things that separates this entry is that there’s a very well telegraphed attack tell, which you can combine with a dodge button to knock away at a stun meter. You can also do that through normal attacks, but the dodge is way more effective. In a one-on-one or party-on-one situation, this is INCREDIBLY effective at knocking down the meter and stunning an enemy. However, you can also play a game of prioritizing attack cancels and just preventing the enemy from attacking nearly wholesale. This works great in multi-enemy fights as you can spread your party to focus on individual one-on-one fights. However, there are some fights that really penalize this and force you to set the party into full focus. Figuring out the fights with different strategies really works well to push some variety and keep combat from getting stale. It’s surprising to see how well this is achieved in such an old title, as the newer Star Ocean games really failed in this regard.

However, you start to see the age of the game when it comes to balance. It happens sort of slowly throughout the game, but over time the game’s intended balance of what you’re fighting and the practical balance of the bosses got clearly off. I never really narrowed it down to what I was doing wrong, but to not be one-shot by the end game bosses, I was ending up about 15-20 levels higher than the game was telling me was “appropriate” for my party, but it got me through. Luckily the game compensates – intentionally or not – with some grind reduction systems. Once an enemy icon changes from red to green, there’s a system to auto complete the fight in the overworld. This basically runs stretches of getting a level from minutes to 30 seconds or less, so the time to actually level up and move up is pretty forgiving. If you aren’t at the right spot in power, you just run around and auto battle a bit, adjust strategy a bit, and good to go.

This was ultimately probably a problem of me not digging deeper into the underlying crafting systems, partly because I’m lazy and partly because they are just too deep. There’s a three-page menu of crafting and helper-style stuff that you can level up per party member. It runs the gamut from actual equipment crafting to item creation to cooking to buff creation to stat up creation and more. It’s just so deep that unless I had time to really invest in a strategy to min/max my party, I was always going to fail on doing it right. As it stood I did it well enough to get decently high end items, but I think there was a clear path for me to do better and get more out of it to make my overall path through the game far more efficient.

The rest of the remake from a visual and audio perspective is extremely impressive. It’s obvious that Square is really leaning into the HD2D style that they started pushing in Octopath Traveler, but this one is a bit different. The environments are still pretty low-tech, but they’re a lot more traditional 3D with really good 2D character sprites to create a fairly interesting mix in styles. From an audio perspective it’s still the pieces you’d want with modern orchestration and voice acting. Where HD2D feels like a fun idea that can be a bit kitschy at full scale, this feels like a more practical middle ground that allows for them to be a bit separated from the environmental restrictions of the full HD2D titles. This is mixed with some modern UX touches (thank you wonderful maps) that really feel like they’re pointing at a way to do a SNES/PS1 style sprite RPG in a modern wrapping.

I guess if nothing else I’m glad this exists and I’m glad that it’s good. Star Ocean has had a pretty rough draw since the 360 era (and I know some people would also tell me that Star Ocean 3 was garbage). This one proves that there’s a place that the series should maybe go that’s a bit lower budget and a bit lower scope and really just make a fun sci-fi story that isn’t trying to reach to AAA status. The Divine Force felt like it was moving in that direction, but in full 3D. This title perhaps offers another path they could go. It feels like a game that is still worth playing despite being 25 years old, and that’s something to celebrate.

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Game Ramblings #155 – Guardians of the Galaxy

More Info from Square-Enix

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

This is a AAA B-Movie in the best way possible. It’s doesn’t necessarily have the best combat or the best story or the best pacing but as a sum of parts it’s fantastic. It was hard to go through most of this game without a stupid grin on your face. It’s a lot like the movies in that respect.

This one as a whole turned out much better than The Avengers did. A lot of that came down to its focus as a purely single player narrative experience. It wasn’t hobbled by the needs of being a live-service title – the need to XP grind to keep players in the game, the need to patch in new content to keep players returning, etc – so it ended up being relatively focused. You’ve got a 15-20 hour long narrative mostly consisting of set-piece combat with relatively predictable outcomes but a ton of spectacle. What it does gain from its length over the movies is better pacing. There’s a kind of on/off rhythm to the chapters. You’ll go through a long stretch of just combat, then a long stretch of general exploration / puzzle solving. It keeps the game from becoming too stuck in a single rhythm, which helps to break up the game into much more enjoyable chunks When the combat does kick in though, it’s a lot of fun.

This game really threads a good line where you feel powerful because of indirect things happening, but still feel like you aren’t just being led by an AI that can’t lose. There’s a few systems to that. One is that you’ve got absolute control over the timing of special abilities for the other team members. They kind of passively attack and are effective at clearing lesser enemies, but if you want big damage it’s up to you. You can definitely win without using these specials, but it becomes quickly obvious that all you’re doing is making your own life slower and more difficult.

Another is that you’re the only party member that can quickly break shields. Having shields tuned to specific elements that Peter can fire allows for the player to do non-damaging stuff that is vitally important while letting the rest of the team to take out unshielded, less dangerous enemies. This has the important side effect of reducing the time just needlessly fighting easy trash. The element system also has some nice crowd control effects. Ice can freeze enemies in place. Electric can hop between enemies and stun. Wind pulls enemies to Peter. Fire can add DoT damage. All of them allow for increased damage if the enemy is under the effects. They’re not necessarily large changes to just general weapon fire, but they serve well to give better situational handling to the arenas if you’re getting overran by too many enemies.

The final one that really stood out is combo attacks. For the most part, melee is generally the more dangerous route. However, because your AI teammates are mostly melee, there’s often opportunities to go in and help them out. Comboing with your teammates can get a bunch of big damage out quick, as well as increasing the likelihood of stunning an enemy, giving a better opportunity for some easy gun-based damage.

The pacing is also actively broken up in other ways. There’s sections like above that take place in actual space combat. It’s a very Star Fox type setup, with both on-rails and free fly sections but keeps the elevated combat pacing in another fun context. There’s sliding sections where the player is going downhill avoiding obstacles and jumping over gaps, giving a fun third-person auto runner type feel. There’s a handful of sections that do camera chases with a feel more reminiscent of the chase sections of the PS1 Crash Bandicoot games. These fall into the sort of on/off action pacing of the overall game, but because they aren’t just more combat for the sake of more they serve well to keep the entire game fresh as you go through it.

The rest of the game that surrounds the combat is just really well realized. The worlds are large and filled with bright colors. Everything has that kind of technically plausible but incredibly alien feel to it. Places like Knowhere feel like large space ports where you can run around buying all sorts of cool outer space shit, even if it mostly serves as a way to shuttle you to important story beats. The enemy designs again are close, but slightly twisted. Things like walking squids or cube-shaped jelly creatures bring the sea to land. Things like giant space dragons pull in a bit of fantasy elements. There’s the little callbacks to the story out of the comics with mentions of people like Thanos or Yondu, even if they aren’t directly in the game. It’s all just a love letter to the ridiculousness of this series, and it works well.

This game really just falls into a place where it should be played simply because it’s fun. Games like Hot Wheels Unleashed or Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart or Cadence of Hyrule come to mind in recent times that kind of fall into that area. They aren’t necessarily the best written or the best gameplay or the best visuals, but put together you just can’t help but enjoy your time with it. Guardians is definitely that. It’s got good enough combat, good enough visuals, good enough of a story. Put together you just smile the entire time, and you can’t ask for more than that out of a game.

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Game Ramblings #145 – NEO: The World Ends With You

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PC, Switch

I really liked the first game, both the original DS version and the Switch remake. For the sequel, it moved to full 3D. This did mean that combat had to change, but interestingly enough it still had a lot of the same rhythm of combat, so it still felt entirely familiar. This is definitely not a game without its faults, which I’ll get into a bit, but it surprised me how well they converted a uniquely touch experience into something decidedly gamepad-focused.

Combat had a unique rhythm in the original, particularly in the remake. In that one, you’d be trying to switch between using different pins to build up the sync meter, allowing you to throw down a large group attack and heal back up to full health. NEO follows a lot of the same pattern. The terminology has changed a bit, but the core system is the same. What has changed is the inputs to do so.

Rather than screen holds and swipes and taps, you have button hold auras and butt hold charges and taps. In practice it has the same feel and build out – find pins that allow you to get in a rhythm to both maximize opportunities to build up your groove meter, as well as minimizing the times when you have all pins on cooldown – but it’s all on the gamepad, and it’s surprising how easily I fell back into the rhythm of the game.

In a lot of ways, this does open up the first weakness of this game though, it takes a long time to not be incredibly easy. This one follows the same three week structure as the first game, and I’d say it took until about the mid to end of week two before the game, even on hard, didn’t feel like a pushover. The game definitely felt like it was expecting players to have a hard time grokking the combo system, and most of the enemies end up being somewhat pushovers as a result. There are ways for the player to sort of steer their personal difficulty – doing long fight chains without healing, reducing their party level, not buying gear, etc – but ultimately there isn’t a ton of combat challenge in the game until it introduces a few specific enemies types, the shark, the chameleon, and the rhinos. However, the game can generally be beaten via button spam once the player has become comfortable with the combo system and starts taking advantage of filling out the groove meter.

Even then the fights feel less like higher difficulty and more just lower bar for error. Missing the attacks that those types do just pushes a lot of damage on the party, so I had a tendency to slow down a bit more and actively avoid damage. The enemies themselves that are “harder” are more just annoying in mechanics, rather than being traditionally hard. The shark swims through the ground and can’t be attacked, the chameleon goes invisible and can’t be attacked, the rhino has front armor and has to be attacked from behind. It’s less hard and more slower, again causing be to slow down and avoid damage instead. Ya, my rewards weren’t as good, but it generally didn’t matter enough. Because you can sort of guess the enemy type from their overworld icons, you can also actively avoid those fights in order to more efficiently grind. To some extent it is nice that the player can kind of build their difficulty curve in these ways, but I’d have preferred seeing harder mechanics that were still fast paced.

In good news, the bosses don’t really fall into these problems. On hard they feel appropriately hard, and they tend to have more interesting mechanics in terms of the player having to avoid damage. The biggest thing that the bosses felt they did correctly is that there was simply parts where the player simply had to avoid damage, which was a bit change from trash fights where damage is generally shrugged off. This was sometimes achieved through world effects, sometimes through big enemy tells, sometimes through the enemy just being damage immune. However, it always came about as a way to force the player to not attack, which gave a bit of a seesaw feel between big damage pushes and big defense pushes. By the end of the game I was finding myself blazing through the game on normal just to speed things up, then pushing the difficulty up for boss segments and enjoying the difficulty there. That pattern was really rewarding and actually fit a pattern I enjoyed a lot more once I had my late game pin set kind of set for the party.

Narratively it’s also a bit of hit and miss. From an overall perspective, I really did enjoy the game. It plays a pretty good balance of nostalgia for the original and pushing new story content. You have a bunch of new characters and a bunch of returning characters, and the fact that they interact doesn’t feel forced. The gameplay being teams instead of pairs feels well explained. The new Reapers in charge of the current game feels well explained.

On the other hand, there’s a general turn back time mechanic that while important to the end of the story, feels poorly implemented. Going back in time restricts you to single zones and is pretty clearly a bunch of linear paths, so it feels like a forced restriction of exploration. Rather than letting the game continue as normal in these areas, I generally went into a no combat situation so I could see the story unfold as quickly as possible and get back to the more loose structure of general exploration that main segments had.

I think a lot of people will have problems getting into this one, but the original had similar problems. It takes a long time to get into full mechanics and full difficulty. It’s really easy to get into so much combat that you drastically out-level the game. The story assumes you know too much about the previous game and doesn’t really explain some really complicated shit to new users. However, despite all that I really enjoyed the game. Combat – once fully dolled out to the player – has a great rhythm that very few games today have, and when it all comes together in late game boss fights it’s super satisfying. It’s just unfortunate that the game trips a lot to get there, though again I would say the exact same thing about the original.