Fire Emblem: Awakening is a strategy RPG put out by Nintendo that was recently released on the 3DS. The whole Fire Emblem series has a few unique things that make it stand out among most other strategy RPG's - the most obvious being permadeath to any unit that falls, making it a fairly unforgiving series, although in a series first, you can select whether you want permadeath or not when you make a new file. It also has very similar sets of classes across games - the horse, wyvern, and pegasus riders, archers, mages, thieves, armored fighters, "main character" lord class, berserker, and many others that don't really change from game to game. Units are frequently not terribly customizable, at least not compared to certain other RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea. Lastly, Fire emblem really shies away from long-range attacks (which makes sense, given the fact that permadeath is a thing) - almost all units can only attack at a range of 1-2 tiles away. There exist a few 2-3 range bows, and some very rare 3-10 range spellbooks, but the vast majority of combat takes place in adjacent or near-adjacent tiles.
First of all, I'd like to say that I'm really enjoying this game. The combat is fun (I'm playing on "classic" mode - which is to say, permadeath enabled, and I've completed my hard file and have started a Lunatic file), and very strategic. The characters are pretty entertaining, and the support system, where you can have characters become closer - which gives some nice combat buffs - is better implemented than ever.
There are a few complaints out there that there are a distinct game breakers, but aren't there always? They're quite small in number and pretty specific things, though, and it's fairly difficult to accidentally use them to destroy game balance (I'm looking at you, Skyrim). You can also use DLC to grind, which I do actually kind of have an issue with (especially on Lunatic or Lunatic+ difficulties, where it is quite difficult to grind without DLC), but it's not too bad. I'll also say that none of the maps really stood out in my mind after a playthough - they're passable, and fun, but not great.
The biggest complaint about the game I have is the difficulty curve. Especially on the harder difficulties (Lunatic and Lunatic+), the first few missions are just utterly ridiculous. When going through them on Lunatic, I felt like I was playing a puzzle game where I had to place everything just right in order to "solve" it (not to mention get the RNG on my side) rather than a strategy game. This eases up somewhat after the first 4 or so missions (especially if you aren't opposed to grinding on the DLC. but even if you are), but in some ways, that just makes it worse. I definitely feel that the hardest part of the game should not be the beginning of it; that should be the end, when you have mastered the system, rather than when you are just being introduced to it. I've heard that the game gets quite hard again on Lunatic as you approach the end, though, so we'll see about that.
Honestly, it's hard for me to find other big issues with the game. The difficulty curve is by far the biggest one, and I mentioned most of the others that I had issues with already. I wish Nintendo had done things a little differently with the downloadable (both free and paid) characters (namely, that they are allowed to switch to any class you want, while your story characters are restricted - and they also cannot get support bonuses), but I can kind of understand why they did it the way they did. I'd also change a few things about some of the maps, and maybe some of the classes, and maybe add a few supports (though this game already has far more support conversations than any previous Fire Emblem, making this a somewhat ridiculous complaint), as well as change a few things about how the DLC is handled. But overall it's a very well done game that other strategy RPGs could learn a lot from.
Things to remember about Fire Emblem: Awakening:
-Difficulty curves - make them go easy-hard, not hard-easy-maybe back to hard. If you're just introducing people to the mechanics, they shouldn't immediately be faced with the worst the game has to offer.
-Try to avoid making DLC open up completely new avenues of play (read: easy grinding) that make it feel like you're buying power.
-Good class variety and interesting characters bring a *lot* to a game. Character customization gives a game a fair bit of replay value in general and can definitely make up for other flaws in a system.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Saturday, November 17, 2012
My Thoughts on Grinds
So, I've recently been playing a few games (well, one in particular: Castlvania: Harmony of Despair, but also with some WoW and Diablo 3 thrown in) that rely on grinding as one of their main ways to keep players interested. Naturally, not every game needs to have grinding as a part of its gameplay - but any game that wants to keep the players interest for a long period of time has some sort of "rewards over time" system to keep the player's motivated. Some, naturally, work better than others. So I'm just gonna throw down a few different examples here and see where I feel they go right and wrong.
First, as I mentioned, is Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. It's a very fun (and distressingly addictive) game in which you can play as one of several Castlevania heroes in typical 2-d platforming style over a number of levels and gain power for them via loot, spell collection, or just generally using the same sub-weapons over and over (and over) in order to raise their power (occasionally granting them new properties) as well as raise the overall power of your character. Characters in the game build power in different ways - all the characters have equipment (and a large selection of rare drops), though some are more dependent on equipment for their power than others. Many of the characters build power through using their secondary abilities. One character absorbs spells cast by enemies (9 times for each spell to hit max power).
Personally, one problem I have with this system is that several of the characters take a long time to be useful - or at least, to be *interesting,* which is just as important to me. Soma, who uses a lot of equipment but also absorbs souls from enemies to power him, starts with an incredibly generic weapon and a pitiful selection of souls. Moreover, any souls that he happens to be lucky enough to absorb will likely be quite low power, as it takes 9 absorptions for them to hit max power (which in turn scales with your gear quality). Until you get good equipment, Soma is obnoxiously generic. Alucard, who learns a few spells but mostly gains his power from gear, is in a similar situation. Charlotte has it bad too, especially if you want to play multiplayer - making other people wait for you to try to absorb a new spell (9 times per spell!) just doesn't work. And the game definitely encourages you to play multiplayer in other ways.
So, one lesson to be learned from this is that if you're going to have characters gain power solely through long grinds, don't make them start at absolutely nothing. Give them a decent amount of power at the beginning, and then build from there. Another - make sure that your grinds are compatible with the playstyle of your game. Never make an entire group wait for you - especially for something that takes an indeterminant amount of time, based on how often they cast something and how lucky you are with absorbs.
Also, don't make your grinds *obnoxiously* long. Of course, what qualifies as obnoxiously long varies from person to person, but it should not take hours of grinding in a very specific, relatively boring way to level up one specific ability when the real reward is for leveling up *all* of your abilities, including the ones that you never use otherwise. Another point here - don't make the player use abilities that they would never otherwise use in order to gain power on the things that they actually do use. At least, don't go overboard with it.
Another thing that HoD sometimes succeeds at and sometimes fails at is having regular, meaningful milestones along the grind. Sometime abilities change after x uses, sometimes they don't. When you'll want to level all of them up to gain your max power, then having checkpoints that feel like genuine boosts in power - and not just numerical ones - is quite nice.
Balance different grinding paths. Characters should not be extremely useless compared to other characters at any point in the grind. Soma falls victim to this at both ends - at the beginning of the game, he is extremely generic and not especially effective, though he's workable. But once you get the thing you need to grind him properly, and do some of that grinding, he gains a ridiculous number of options, many of which are quite powerful, largely because his unique weapons power him up as well as the souls he collects to give him more abilities. He is well known for being the game's most powerful character, and for good reason - though a few particularly out-of-balance pieces of equipment are largely to blame for that as well, the sheer variety of abilities he has already makes him very powerful. At any given point, no character (or general grinding option) should feel significantly superior or inferior to any other. Or at least, don't make those points long - it's okay to give someone a big boost of power at certain singular points in a grind, but whatever they gain shouldn't be *too* huge a boost as to invalidate other options, and things should align themselves again not too long after that boost, if nothing else in a similar boost to the other options of grind.
I kinda got off track here, and only really talked about Castlevania. I've been playing it a *lot* lately, so cut me a little slack. I may well do a second post about this. But here's the gist of things:
-Grinds should have regular, genuinely rewarding milestones.
-The end of a grind should always be visible, even if its in the horizon. Don't make it in such a way as to overwhelm the player - don't make them do 12 separate *long* grinds to make their characters gain their full power.
-Reward the player for things that they already do; don't make them change their playstyle significantly to accomodate a grind. As a corollary, make whatever the grind is be based on the part of the game that is the most fun. The grinding itself *must be fun to start with*, otherwise you're dead in the water.
-In the case of grinds that can be chosen, one or the other, for theoretically similar end results (character classes, ability trees, what have you), keep them as balanced as you can for all points in the grind. And as a corollary, make the grinds of as close to equal length as you can.
First, as I mentioned, is Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. It's a very fun (and distressingly addictive) game in which you can play as one of several Castlevania heroes in typical 2-d platforming style over a number of levels and gain power for them via loot, spell collection, or just generally using the same sub-weapons over and over (and over) in order to raise their power (occasionally granting them new properties) as well as raise the overall power of your character. Characters in the game build power in different ways - all the characters have equipment (and a large selection of rare drops), though some are more dependent on equipment for their power than others. Many of the characters build power through using their secondary abilities. One character absorbs spells cast by enemies (9 times for each spell to hit max power).
Personally, one problem I have with this system is that several of the characters take a long time to be useful - or at least, to be *interesting,* which is just as important to me. Soma, who uses a lot of equipment but also absorbs souls from enemies to power him, starts with an incredibly generic weapon and a pitiful selection of souls. Moreover, any souls that he happens to be lucky enough to absorb will likely be quite low power, as it takes 9 absorptions for them to hit max power (which in turn scales with your gear quality). Until you get good equipment, Soma is obnoxiously generic. Alucard, who learns a few spells but mostly gains his power from gear, is in a similar situation. Charlotte has it bad too, especially if you want to play multiplayer - making other people wait for you to try to absorb a new spell (9 times per spell!) just doesn't work. And the game definitely encourages you to play multiplayer in other ways.
So, one lesson to be learned from this is that if you're going to have characters gain power solely through long grinds, don't make them start at absolutely nothing. Give them a decent amount of power at the beginning, and then build from there. Another - make sure that your grinds are compatible with the playstyle of your game. Never make an entire group wait for you - especially for something that takes an indeterminant amount of time, based on how often they cast something and how lucky you are with absorbs.
Also, don't make your grinds *obnoxiously* long. Of course, what qualifies as obnoxiously long varies from person to person, but it should not take hours of grinding in a very specific, relatively boring way to level up one specific ability when the real reward is for leveling up *all* of your abilities, including the ones that you never use otherwise. Another point here - don't make the player use abilities that they would never otherwise use in order to gain power on the things that they actually do use. At least, don't go overboard with it.
Another thing that HoD sometimes succeeds at and sometimes fails at is having regular, meaningful milestones along the grind. Sometime abilities change after x uses, sometimes they don't. When you'll want to level all of them up to gain your max power, then having checkpoints that feel like genuine boosts in power - and not just numerical ones - is quite nice.
Balance different grinding paths. Characters should not be extremely useless compared to other characters at any point in the grind. Soma falls victim to this at both ends - at the beginning of the game, he is extremely generic and not especially effective, though he's workable. But once you get the thing you need to grind him properly, and do some of that grinding, he gains a ridiculous number of options, many of which are quite powerful, largely because his unique weapons power him up as well as the souls he collects to give him more abilities. He is well known for being the game's most powerful character, and for good reason - though a few particularly out-of-balance pieces of equipment are largely to blame for that as well, the sheer variety of abilities he has already makes him very powerful. At any given point, no character (or general grinding option) should feel significantly superior or inferior to any other. Or at least, don't make those points long - it's okay to give someone a big boost of power at certain singular points in a grind, but whatever they gain shouldn't be *too* huge a boost as to invalidate other options, and things should align themselves again not too long after that boost, if nothing else in a similar boost to the other options of grind.
I kinda got off track here, and only really talked about Castlevania. I've been playing it a *lot* lately, so cut me a little slack. I may well do a second post about this. But here's the gist of things:
-Grinds should have regular, genuinely rewarding milestones.
-The end of a grind should always be visible, even if its in the horizon. Don't make it in such a way as to overwhelm the player - don't make them do 12 separate *long* grinds to make their characters gain their full power.
-Reward the player for things that they already do; don't make them change their playstyle significantly to accomodate a grind. As a corollary, make whatever the grind is be based on the part of the game that is the most fun. The grinding itself *must be fun to start with*, otherwise you're dead in the water.
-In the case of grinds that can be chosen, one or the other, for theoretically similar end results (character classes, ability trees, what have you), keep them as balanced as you can for all points in the grind. And as a corollary, make the grinds of as close to equal length as you can.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Review: Persona 4 Arena
Persona 4 Arena is a fighting game made by Arc System Works, makers of BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, with its story and character design being done by Atlus, who has made the Persona series. Even though I'm not usually one to play fighting games, I'm really enjoying this one - the characters and story that I recognize drew me into it, but the surprisingly easy to pick up gameplay has kept me here.
The first thing I'd like to talk about for this game is the story mode. As the game is a fighting game, you wouldn't normally expect that much from it - however, it is actually quite entertaining, and quite important to the Persona series. It connects Persona 3 and Persona 4, while setting the stage for another game in the series - possibly Persona 5, or perhaps another side game like this one. Regardless, the overall story is quite enjoyable - though the first of its flaws is that it is likely to be almost completely inaccessible to someone who has played neither of the previous games, and even missing one of them would significantly cut into your enjoyment of it.
Another problem with the story mode is the exceptionally high ratio of story to gameplay. It's not a deal-breaker, but the fact that after starting the story mode with most characters (each character has a separate story mode), you have to wait upwards of twenty minutes to get to the first fight. And, oddly, those fights are only ever one-round affairs, with no option to adjust this. Clearly, the game's developers wanted to get you back to the story and out of the fighting quickly, but I definitely don't agree with this decision. One of the stories has only one fight in its roughly two and a half hour duration - though it has the most engaging and interesting of the stories, so it can be forgiven for this. Regardless, I can see why they designed the game they did - having characters fight for no reason is a common problem in fighting game stories, and this game manages to avert that pretty well - but the fact that there's not even a way to increase the number of rounds in a story mode fight seems like a poor choice to me.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the stories of almost every character tell the same events, but from a slightly different perspective. This would be a difficult thing to change, but it certainly seems like perhaps some of the stories could have been combined in order to make the experience less repetitive. It's interesting to see every angle to each event, but it becomes overkill after a while.
But this is a fighting game, after all! So what about the fighting?
I personally find the fighting in this game to very enjoyable. As I mentioned above, I'm not really a fighting game guy - I've played a few, but the only other fighting games that I own/have spent a significant amount of time with are Marvel vs Capcom 3 and the Smash Bros series - the former of which enticed me with its interesting characters and "deckbuilding" aspect of picking your team, and the latter of which also grabbed me with its characters, but also its discarding of many of the things that make fighting games inaccessible (and typically uninteresting) to me. So, as a novice fighting game player, I'm very appreciative of some of the changes they've made in this game. Many of the more complex joystick motions of other fighting games have been cut out entirely - the only motion required for a single move is rolling the joystick from down to forward or down to backward - twice in a row for super moves. Most of the two-button and three-button combinations do something when pressed at the same time that, in some other games, would require a more complex input for at least a few of them - and several these two and three button inputs can conveniently mapped to shoulder buttons. Last, and perhaps most helpfully, there is an auto-combo feature - if you just keep mashing square (on the PS3), your character will do a five-move combo, ending with a super if you have the meter for it. These combos are far less effective than true, more conventional combos would be (though certain characters have more usable auto-combos than others), but they provide an excellent way to allow beginners to not be overwhelmed by the need to learn a relatively complicated (for a beginner) chain of moves to do more than trivial amounts of damage. Lastly, there is also a lesson mode to teach you the basic controls of the game, as well as a challenge mode for each character to show you some of their combos, further increasing the accessibility of the game.
However, I am not personally equipped to speak too much on the mechanics of the game beyond the newbie friendliness of the game. While I am sure that it has its flaws, and someone more experienced with fighting games could point them out to you, it is simply lots of fun to me. For once, it's a fighting game that makes it unintimidating to look at your character's command list, and it's not too hard to do any of the moves there for a novice to the genre. I feel like I'm using the full power of my character when I play him , even though I know that I'm not, and that's a great feeling. I think that attempting to capture this feeling (by making basic moves and combos easier to do) is what other fighting games should try to do in order to draw in a bigger audience.
And on a side note, the online play is amazingly lag free. It is exceptionally rare that I really notice a difference between online and local play (though I'm sure someone who relied more on real combos would notice it more), at least if you let the intro play long enough to sync the two players. While not a huge deal in terms of game design, it is very nice, and having netcode this good definitely helps to keep me playing online.
One last flaw I'd like to discuss is the DLC - specifically, four navigators (read: match commentators who are characters from the series) which are overpriced online, but are also unlockable in-game. I do really like this model (well, not the overpriced part, but the unlockable in-game or DLC part), but these four particular unlocks are all hidden behind the hardest portion of the game - score attack. Score attack mode consists of putting you up against extremely powerful versions of all 13 characters, one after the other, with any failure sending you back to the beginning of the mode. This is bad enough, but to unlock each of the navigators, you have to beat this mode with a certain combination of three or four of the characters. In other words, it really gives the sense that these navigators, while technically unlockable in-game, are so difficult to obtain that only an extremely tiny portion of the playerbase would be able to get them - but, hehe, if you really want them, you can just buy them online for a mere three dollars each! While I'm all for rewarding players for difficult feats, beating this mode with even one character is hard enough - beating it with several characters, many of whom play quite differently from the character you like to play as, is effectively impossible for those who don't want to spend literally days on this mode.
Anyway, as should be obvious, while this game definitely has flaws, I'm really enjoying it. I think that it's a great example of what fighting games can do to be more user-friendly, as well as having an interesting and engaging plot.
Things I can learn from this game:
-Make your player feel like he is using the full power of his chosen character. This can be accomplished by not making your character have crazy awesome moves that require appropriately crazy inputs - or at least by making the easier-to-use moves feel sufficiently powerful. This applies to any sort of combo system the game might have as well - have some sort of very easy but usably effective place to start.
-Try to avoid repetition in game modes - particularly story modes, where you'd just be seeing the same thing over and over, and with minimal combat gameplay. Combine separate stories into one, create further differentiation between them, whatever.
-Allowing things to be unlocked either in-game or by spending money is a pretty good model. However, don't use this to hide unlockables behind such ridiculous requirements that the content is effectively unlockable only by spending money.
-For games where each character plays significantly differently (and players frequently have the choice of which character to play as), don't force us to play at extremely high levels as multiple characters in order to unlock things.
The first thing I'd like to talk about for this game is the story mode. As the game is a fighting game, you wouldn't normally expect that much from it - however, it is actually quite entertaining, and quite important to the Persona series. It connects Persona 3 and Persona 4, while setting the stage for another game in the series - possibly Persona 5, or perhaps another side game like this one. Regardless, the overall story is quite enjoyable - though the first of its flaws is that it is likely to be almost completely inaccessible to someone who has played neither of the previous games, and even missing one of them would significantly cut into your enjoyment of it.
Another problem with the story mode is the exceptionally high ratio of story to gameplay. It's not a deal-breaker, but the fact that after starting the story mode with most characters (each character has a separate story mode), you have to wait upwards of twenty minutes to get to the first fight. And, oddly, those fights are only ever one-round affairs, with no option to adjust this. Clearly, the game's developers wanted to get you back to the story and out of the fighting quickly, but I definitely don't agree with this decision. One of the stories has only one fight in its roughly two and a half hour duration - though it has the most engaging and interesting of the stories, so it can be forgiven for this. Regardless, I can see why they designed the game they did - having characters fight for no reason is a common problem in fighting game stories, and this game manages to avert that pretty well - but the fact that there's not even a way to increase the number of rounds in a story mode fight seems like a poor choice to me.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the stories of almost every character tell the same events, but from a slightly different perspective. This would be a difficult thing to change, but it certainly seems like perhaps some of the stories could have been combined in order to make the experience less repetitive. It's interesting to see every angle to each event, but it becomes overkill after a while.
But this is a fighting game, after all! So what about the fighting?
I personally find the fighting in this game to very enjoyable. As I mentioned above, I'm not really a fighting game guy - I've played a few, but the only other fighting games that I own/have spent a significant amount of time with are Marvel vs Capcom 3 and the Smash Bros series - the former of which enticed me with its interesting characters and "deckbuilding" aspect of picking your team, and the latter of which also grabbed me with its characters, but also its discarding of many of the things that make fighting games inaccessible (and typically uninteresting) to me. So, as a novice fighting game player, I'm very appreciative of some of the changes they've made in this game. Many of the more complex joystick motions of other fighting games have been cut out entirely - the only motion required for a single move is rolling the joystick from down to forward or down to backward - twice in a row for super moves. Most of the two-button and three-button combinations do something when pressed at the same time that, in some other games, would require a more complex input for at least a few of them - and several these two and three button inputs can conveniently mapped to shoulder buttons. Last, and perhaps most helpfully, there is an auto-combo feature - if you just keep mashing square (on the PS3), your character will do a five-move combo, ending with a super if you have the meter for it. These combos are far less effective than true, more conventional combos would be (though certain characters have more usable auto-combos than others), but they provide an excellent way to allow beginners to not be overwhelmed by the need to learn a relatively complicated (for a beginner) chain of moves to do more than trivial amounts of damage. Lastly, there is also a lesson mode to teach you the basic controls of the game, as well as a challenge mode for each character to show you some of their combos, further increasing the accessibility of the game.
However, I am not personally equipped to speak too much on the mechanics of the game beyond the newbie friendliness of the game. While I am sure that it has its flaws, and someone more experienced with fighting games could point them out to you, it is simply lots of fun to me. For once, it's a fighting game that makes it unintimidating to look at your character's command list, and it's not too hard to do any of the moves there for a novice to the genre. I feel like I'm using the full power of my character when I play him , even though I know that I'm not, and that's a great feeling. I think that attempting to capture this feeling (by making basic moves and combos easier to do) is what other fighting games should try to do in order to draw in a bigger audience.
And on a side note, the online play is amazingly lag free. It is exceptionally rare that I really notice a difference between online and local play (though I'm sure someone who relied more on real combos would notice it more), at least if you let the intro play long enough to sync the two players. While not a huge deal in terms of game design, it is very nice, and having netcode this good definitely helps to keep me playing online.
One last flaw I'd like to discuss is the DLC - specifically, four navigators (read: match commentators who are characters from the series) which are overpriced online, but are also unlockable in-game. I do really like this model (well, not the overpriced part, but the unlockable in-game or DLC part), but these four particular unlocks are all hidden behind the hardest portion of the game - score attack. Score attack mode consists of putting you up against extremely powerful versions of all 13 characters, one after the other, with any failure sending you back to the beginning of the mode. This is bad enough, but to unlock each of the navigators, you have to beat this mode with a certain combination of three or four of the characters. In other words, it really gives the sense that these navigators, while technically unlockable in-game, are so difficult to obtain that only an extremely tiny portion of the playerbase would be able to get them - but, hehe, if you really want them, you can just buy them online for a mere three dollars each! While I'm all for rewarding players for difficult feats, beating this mode with even one character is hard enough - beating it with several characters, many of whom play quite differently from the character you like to play as, is effectively impossible for those who don't want to spend literally days on this mode.
Anyway, as should be obvious, while this game definitely has flaws, I'm really enjoying it. I think that it's a great example of what fighting games can do to be more user-friendly, as well as having an interesting and engaging plot.
Things I can learn from this game:
-Make your player feel like he is using the full power of his chosen character. This can be accomplished by not making your character have crazy awesome moves that require appropriately crazy inputs - or at least by making the easier-to-use moves feel sufficiently powerful. This applies to any sort of combo system the game might have as well - have some sort of very easy but usably effective place to start.
-Try to avoid repetition in game modes - particularly story modes, where you'd just be seeing the same thing over and over, and with minimal combat gameplay. Combine separate stories into one, create further differentiation between them, whatever.
-Allowing things to be unlocked either in-game or by spending money is a pretty good model. However, don't use this to hide unlockables behind such ridiculous requirements that the content is effectively unlockable only by spending money.
-For games where each character plays significantly differently (and players frequently have the choice of which character to play as), don't force us to play at extremely high levels as multiple characters in order to unlock things.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Review: Donkey Kong Country Returns
Donkey Kong Country Returns is a 2-d platformer for the Nintendo Wii, and a game that I very much enjoyed playing through. It isn't without flaws, but has incredibly few, and those handful are far outweighed by the excellent level design, solid pacing, good collectibles, and overall good character of the game.
First of all, as I mentioned, the level design of this game is generally just excellent. Each level has enough of its own uniqueness to really shine, and even the instant-kill-if-you-screw-up mine cart levels don't come off as too bad, usually thanks to conveniently-placed extra lives, as well as the general number of lives that you get in the game and relative lack of punishment for losing all of them. Individual gimmicks often don't leave the level they are introduced in, which is a little dissapointing when you've beaten them, but each level has enough replay value (usually in the form of collectibles) to make you happy to go back them; it's probably best this way anyway, as overusing some of the more unique gimmicks would probably make them stale. They are often difficult, but checkpoints are usually very well placed so that while you do feel punished for dying, it's not excessive. The difficulty in this game is handled quite well as well - the game starts out pretty easy, but about halfway really kicks it into high gear and only gets harder from there; however, there are items that can be used to make levels *much* easier, as well as a "super guide" option that is becoming more popular in recent Nintendo games, where the game will clear the level for you should you desire it to after a certain number of deaths.
Honestly, it's hard to find words to praise this game. It doesn't do anything incredibly out of the ordinary, it doesn't have any particular mechanic that makes the game incredibly fun (except, perhaps, for the unexpected (and welcome) high (but fair) level of difficulty), and no aspect of the game stands out as the most praiseworthy. It simply delivers incredibly solid base mechanics combined with extremely good level design sprinkled with enough gimmicks to keep it from becoming dull. It's just an all-around amazing game.
However, as I said, I definitely do not think the game could not be improved. Firstly, I think that the "hidden" items are too often hidden in exactly the same places throughout the different levels. After you've played the game for a while, it was frequently *very* obvious where a hidden item was just by glancing at the area. A certain amount of this is fine (and good, even), of course, and even late in the game the game did sometimes surprise me, but far too often it was just too obvious where the hidden items were. The biggest offender in this was heading left from the start of the level - something like a full quarter (maybe more) of the levels had something "hidden" right there. Additionally, the mini-games to get the hidden puzzle pieces became repetitive pretty quickly - there definitely could've been more variety there.
The co-op play, while definitely fun, also had some pretty large flaws, to me. The player who played as Diddy Kong received a jetpack and peanut-guns, but the player who played as Donkey Kong received nothing in return; making the second player noticeably more powerful than the first. Additionally, if they players chose to have Diddy ride on Donkey's back (a good inclusion in the game, as some of the puzzles become much harder if one tries to tackle them seperately), all the second player can do is shoot peanuts in a predetermined path - they cannot even aim their shots. My personal changes here would be to take away something from Diddy that only Donkey can do (probably give him a worse base attack and a weaker ground pound), and allow Diddy to aim his peanuts to make the second player more interactive while in a combined form - perhaps using an onscreen cursor. Another problem is that the final unlockable mode (1 health, no diddy, no items, mirrored levels), which serves as one last, long challenge to the player after having completed pretty much everything in the game, cannot be played co-op. While I don't see a good way to make it playable co-op and still maintain the intended level of challenge, it's still frustrating to see the (potentially quite long) final challenge of the game to be inaccessible to two people who have played the game together up until that point.
(On a side note, I wouldn't balance the co-op by adding new powers to Donkey when Diddy leaves his back, as that would be weird with the single-player and Diddy's status in it as just an upgrade. Rather, Diddy should simply have weaker abilities in certain areas than Donkey's standard ones.)
Two smaller complaints that I have is that 1) the final boss battle, upon death, denies you Diddy Kong, making him much harder on later attempts than your first attempt on him, and 2) the reward for beating all the hidden levels is somewhat unsatisfying. You get one new (incredibly bizarre, and not nearly as difficult as some of the levels you had to beat to access it) level, and then you unlock the above-mentioned extremely difficult final mode of the game. The single level feels tacked-on due to its relative shortness and lack of extreme difficulty (and, as I mentioned, just has a very strange design), and the unlockable reward, while good on its own, feels like a strange prize for beating that level. I have heard, however, that that one level was initially supposed to be an entire new world and was cut for time purposes, which would explain it.
All in all, as I said, this was a great, fun game with only couple of minor flaws. My lessons learned would ultimately be this:
-As if it wasn't already obvious, a game doesn't have to have big innovations to be great - sometimes playing it safe is perfectly fine. Solid gameplay with extremely good level design can make a great game all by itself.
-Co-op should be balanced - ideally, if there are different characters, they should have different (but at least theoretically balanced) abilities.
-If a player respawns right at the beginning of a boss (or any particularly challenging area) upon death, he should do so at full power or at the power at which he first made it to the boss. This could probably be expanded further into a whole post covering when to give the player expendable things for free (and when to deny the player them), but that is a post for another time.
First of all, as I mentioned, the level design of this game is generally just excellent. Each level has enough of its own uniqueness to really shine, and even the instant-kill-if-you-screw-up mine cart levels don't come off as too bad, usually thanks to conveniently-placed extra lives, as well as the general number of lives that you get in the game and relative lack of punishment for losing all of them. Individual gimmicks often don't leave the level they are introduced in, which is a little dissapointing when you've beaten them, but each level has enough replay value (usually in the form of collectibles) to make you happy to go back them; it's probably best this way anyway, as overusing some of the more unique gimmicks would probably make them stale. They are often difficult, but checkpoints are usually very well placed so that while you do feel punished for dying, it's not excessive. The difficulty in this game is handled quite well as well - the game starts out pretty easy, but about halfway really kicks it into high gear and only gets harder from there; however, there are items that can be used to make levels *much* easier, as well as a "super guide" option that is becoming more popular in recent Nintendo games, where the game will clear the level for you should you desire it to after a certain number of deaths.
Honestly, it's hard to find words to praise this game. It doesn't do anything incredibly out of the ordinary, it doesn't have any particular mechanic that makes the game incredibly fun (except, perhaps, for the unexpected (and welcome) high (but fair) level of difficulty), and no aspect of the game stands out as the most praiseworthy. It simply delivers incredibly solid base mechanics combined with extremely good level design sprinkled with enough gimmicks to keep it from becoming dull. It's just an all-around amazing game.
However, as I said, I definitely do not think the game could not be improved. Firstly, I think that the "hidden" items are too often hidden in exactly the same places throughout the different levels. After you've played the game for a while, it was frequently *very* obvious where a hidden item was just by glancing at the area. A certain amount of this is fine (and good, even), of course, and even late in the game the game did sometimes surprise me, but far too often it was just too obvious where the hidden items were. The biggest offender in this was heading left from the start of the level - something like a full quarter (maybe more) of the levels had something "hidden" right there. Additionally, the mini-games to get the hidden puzzle pieces became repetitive pretty quickly - there definitely could've been more variety there.
The co-op play, while definitely fun, also had some pretty large flaws, to me. The player who played as Diddy Kong received a jetpack and peanut-guns, but the player who played as Donkey Kong received nothing in return; making the second player noticeably more powerful than the first. Additionally, if they players chose to have Diddy ride on Donkey's back (a good inclusion in the game, as some of the puzzles become much harder if one tries to tackle them seperately), all the second player can do is shoot peanuts in a predetermined path - they cannot even aim their shots. My personal changes here would be to take away something from Diddy that only Donkey can do (probably give him a worse base attack and a weaker ground pound), and allow Diddy to aim his peanuts to make the second player more interactive while in a combined form - perhaps using an onscreen cursor. Another problem is that the final unlockable mode (1 health, no diddy, no items, mirrored levels), which serves as one last, long challenge to the player after having completed pretty much everything in the game, cannot be played co-op. While I don't see a good way to make it playable co-op and still maintain the intended level of challenge, it's still frustrating to see the (potentially quite long) final challenge of the game to be inaccessible to two people who have played the game together up until that point.
(On a side note, I wouldn't balance the co-op by adding new powers to Donkey when Diddy leaves his back, as that would be weird with the single-player and Diddy's status in it as just an upgrade. Rather, Diddy should simply have weaker abilities in certain areas than Donkey's standard ones.)
Two smaller complaints that I have is that 1) the final boss battle, upon death, denies you Diddy Kong, making him much harder on later attempts than your first attempt on him, and 2) the reward for beating all the hidden levels is somewhat unsatisfying. You get one new (incredibly bizarre, and not nearly as difficult as some of the levels you had to beat to access it) level, and then you unlock the above-mentioned extremely difficult final mode of the game. The single level feels tacked-on due to its relative shortness and lack of extreme difficulty (and, as I mentioned, just has a very strange design), and the unlockable reward, while good on its own, feels like a strange prize for beating that level. I have heard, however, that that one level was initially supposed to be an entire new world and was cut for time purposes, which would explain it.
All in all, as I said, this was a great, fun game with only couple of minor flaws. My lessons learned would ultimately be this:
-As if it wasn't already obvious, a game doesn't have to have big innovations to be great - sometimes playing it safe is perfectly fine. Solid gameplay with extremely good level design can make a great game all by itself.
-Co-op should be balanced - ideally, if there are different characters, they should have different (but at least theoretically balanced) abilities.
-If a player respawns right at the beginning of a boss (or any particularly challenging area) upon death, he should do so at full power or at the power at which he first made it to the boss. This could probably be expanded further into a whole post covering when to give the player expendable things for free (and when to deny the player them), but that is a post for another time.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Review: Theatrythm Final Fantasy
With a rather odd name and an appropriately odd concept to go along with it, Theatrythm Final Fantasy is (in my opinion) the latest in the small-but-growing number of non-rerelease/remake 3DS games worth purchasing. It is a hybrid RPG/Rhythm game, using the music from final fantasy games in a very Elite Beat Agents way.
Personally, I think the RPG and Rhythm game elements could be better integrated in this game. The game does a fairly good job of making them relevant to each other, but ultimately doesn't do it in as good a way as you would hope. For instance - the scoring system doesn't care about the RPG elements of the game at all; any character, item, or ability selections that you make for the level are completely irrelevant in terms of your final score. That isn't to say they're completely irrelevant overall - your characters' collective HP (and any defensive items/abilities you choose) determine how many notes you can miss and still live, and various abilities will help you kill monsters more quickly or walk further in different types of levels, giving you better loot or more experience for your characters. It's nice that there is progression for your characters, but the fact that they don't actually help you get the highest scores for each level (other than letting you live longer) is frustrating.
Similarly, in the Dark Note mode, the game is all about character advancement - this mode is much more focused on leveling your characters and collecting loot. You go through a "field" level first, getting some loot and experience and determining which bosses you can then face in the second, "battle" level. You definitely want to kill the bosses in the battle levels, as they drop the best loot - including the crystals that unlock more characters. As you level up, you get dark notes of a higher difficulty that give correspondingly better loot.
As an aside, the dark note sections use a mere 20 of the 70+ songs that come with the game, and never use DLC songs. Personally, I think designing the game this way was a rather foolish choice, especially considering this mode will be one that more hardcore players will sink a *lot* of time into.
In the dark note sections, the two parts of the game are integrated better, but it still isn't perfect. For one, you're still assigned a score based solely on your rhythm game performance, but it isn't saved and is therefore essentially completely irrelevant. However, it does take a combination of RPG prep and rhythm game skill to actually get good loot from this system, which is nice; however, one problem I have is that the battle songs are still of fixed length in this mode, meaning that you finish them without ever getting to the bosses if you stack defensive abilities or simply aren't using high enough level characters - meaning you can "win" without actually getting what you want. Personally, I'd make the songs loop until either your characters or the boss is dead in this mode.
Indeed, I'd consider making the battle music loop until a boss enemy is dead for every mode. Really, the battle levels end up feeling less like battles and more like, well, rhythm game levels in which you happen to be watching some guys beating up some other guys with little investment in the outcome. You do want to kill the enemies to get loot, but really, while you may care a little bit about how your guys are doing, the game really doesn't seem to give a hoot, which is frustrating. No record of how well you did in battles is recorded anywhere, in any mode - only the scores in series and challenge mode, as well as simply if you completed the level or not. In dark note mode, the boss's identity and loot is recorded when you defeat them, but there's really no tangible, lasting reward from defeating bosses beyond loot that they happened to drop when defeated. Mind you, the loot can include new ability scrolls and collectibles that can unlock new characters once you get 8 of them, so there is definitely progression, but there is still a distinct feeling that the game doesn't really care how well you do (which you do care about, in dark note mode especially), and in the dark note mode, doesn't even really care too much if you do win any particular level, as it just throws a new level at you whenever you beat one - which, after you beat 50 or so of them, is kind of underwhelming as a reward.
But it is quite a fun game, most definitely; don't get me wrong. The music quality seems to range from above average to outstanding, the character selection (though I might have fewer unlocked from the get-go, and give them more distinct abilities and stats at level 1) and rpg customization is nice, the difficulty range is very solid (though I might unlock the middle difficulty from the get-go, rather than requiring the, for veterans, yawn-inducing basic difficulty to be defeated first), there is quite a lot of content and rewards for completing it (mostly in the form of new characters, but also other collectibles), and the core gameplay is quite solid as well. I definitely like it, but it has distinct flaws.
On a side note, this isn't the first Rhythm Game/RPG hybrid that I've reviewed here - I have also reveiwed the fun little indie game called "Sequence." Sequence is much heavier on the RPG side of things - it has an actual story, VA's, equipment, and fights that end when the monster dies, rather than when the song ends. Of course, those are just design choices, but I do think that Theatrythm could've benefited from an increased RPG focus, and Sequence shows a way that that could've been done. Similarly, Sequence could've benefited from having more (and better) songs to lay its RPG systems on top of, as well as better and deeper character customization.
Overall, here's my design lessons of the day for this game:
-If you're going to have a mode that the players are going to play over and over, try to make is as varied as possible (while still keeping it true to the game, of course).
-Align the rewards and acknowledgements your game gives with the goals of the players. Oftentimes, this isn't a problem by the structure of the game, but if you have optional objectives that you put in place for the player, be sure to properly acknowledge when the player hits them.
-If you're going to hybridize two genres, make sure you incorporate the best aspects of both (that fits in your concept, obviously), and incorporate them in a way that does them justice, rather than just slapping the trappings of one onto the other.
-While unlocking higher difficulties by beating lower ones isn't a bad idea in principle, forcing players to start at the absolute lowest difficulty and work their way up from there - especially in genres where skills from one game are transferable to other games (rhythm games being among the best examples of this) - is something that should be avoided.
Personally, I think the RPG and Rhythm game elements could be better integrated in this game. The game does a fairly good job of making them relevant to each other, but ultimately doesn't do it in as good a way as you would hope. For instance - the scoring system doesn't care about the RPG elements of the game at all; any character, item, or ability selections that you make for the level are completely irrelevant in terms of your final score. That isn't to say they're completely irrelevant overall - your characters' collective HP (and any defensive items/abilities you choose) determine how many notes you can miss and still live, and various abilities will help you kill monsters more quickly or walk further in different types of levels, giving you better loot or more experience for your characters. It's nice that there is progression for your characters, but the fact that they don't actually help you get the highest scores for each level (other than letting you live longer) is frustrating.
Similarly, in the Dark Note mode, the game is all about character advancement - this mode is much more focused on leveling your characters and collecting loot. You go through a "field" level first, getting some loot and experience and determining which bosses you can then face in the second, "battle" level. You definitely want to kill the bosses in the battle levels, as they drop the best loot - including the crystals that unlock more characters. As you level up, you get dark notes of a higher difficulty that give correspondingly better loot.
As an aside, the dark note sections use a mere 20 of the 70+ songs that come with the game, and never use DLC songs. Personally, I think designing the game this way was a rather foolish choice, especially considering this mode will be one that more hardcore players will sink a *lot* of time into.
In the dark note sections, the two parts of the game are integrated better, but it still isn't perfect. For one, you're still assigned a score based solely on your rhythm game performance, but it isn't saved and is therefore essentially completely irrelevant. However, it does take a combination of RPG prep and rhythm game skill to actually get good loot from this system, which is nice; however, one problem I have is that the battle songs are still of fixed length in this mode, meaning that you finish them without ever getting to the bosses if you stack defensive abilities or simply aren't using high enough level characters - meaning you can "win" without actually getting what you want. Personally, I'd make the songs loop until either your characters or the boss is dead in this mode.
Indeed, I'd consider making the battle music loop until a boss enemy is dead for every mode. Really, the battle levels end up feeling less like battles and more like, well, rhythm game levels in which you happen to be watching some guys beating up some other guys with little investment in the outcome. You do want to kill the enemies to get loot, but really, while you may care a little bit about how your guys are doing, the game really doesn't seem to give a hoot, which is frustrating. No record of how well you did in battles is recorded anywhere, in any mode - only the scores in series and challenge mode, as well as simply if you completed the level or not. In dark note mode, the boss's identity and loot is recorded when you defeat them, but there's really no tangible, lasting reward from defeating bosses beyond loot that they happened to drop when defeated. Mind you, the loot can include new ability scrolls and collectibles that can unlock new characters once you get 8 of them, so there is definitely progression, but there is still a distinct feeling that the game doesn't really care how well you do (which you do care about, in dark note mode especially), and in the dark note mode, doesn't even really care too much if you do win any particular level, as it just throws a new level at you whenever you beat one - which, after you beat 50 or so of them, is kind of underwhelming as a reward.
But it is quite a fun game, most definitely; don't get me wrong. The music quality seems to range from above average to outstanding, the character selection (though I might have fewer unlocked from the get-go, and give them more distinct abilities and stats at level 1) and rpg customization is nice, the difficulty range is very solid (though I might unlock the middle difficulty from the get-go, rather than requiring the, for veterans, yawn-inducing basic difficulty to be defeated first), there is quite a lot of content and rewards for completing it (mostly in the form of new characters, but also other collectibles), and the core gameplay is quite solid as well. I definitely like it, but it has distinct flaws.
On a side note, this isn't the first Rhythm Game/RPG hybrid that I've reviewed here - I have also reveiwed the fun little indie game called "Sequence." Sequence is much heavier on the RPG side of things - it has an actual story, VA's, equipment, and fights that end when the monster dies, rather than when the song ends. Of course, those are just design choices, but I do think that Theatrythm could've benefited from an increased RPG focus, and Sequence shows a way that that could've been done. Similarly, Sequence could've benefited from having more (and better) songs to lay its RPG systems on top of, as well as better and deeper character customization.
Overall, here's my design lessons of the day for this game:
-If you're going to have a mode that the players are going to play over and over, try to make is as varied as possible (while still keeping it true to the game, of course).
-Align the rewards and acknowledgements your game gives with the goals of the players. Oftentimes, this isn't a problem by the structure of the game, but if you have optional objectives that you put in place for the player, be sure to properly acknowledge when the player hits them.
-If you're going to hybridize two genres, make sure you incorporate the best aspects of both (that fits in your concept, obviously), and incorporate them in a way that does them justice, rather than just slapping the trappings of one onto the other.
-While unlocking higher difficulties by beating lower ones isn't a bad idea in principle, forcing players to start at the absolute lowest difficulty and work their way up from there - especially in genres where skills from one game are transferable to other games (rhythm games being among the best examples of this) - is something that should be avoided.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Review: Kid Icarus: Uprising
Kid Icarus: Uprising
Kid Icarus: Uprising is an action game that was released a few months ago on the 3DS, and it very quickly became one of my favorite games. It simply has a ton of content, and its basic gameplay mechanics are quite a lot of fun. Add on a relatively solid online multiplayer, you have a real winner. Of course, it's still not without flaws - the online multiplayer isn't as good as it could be, and the controls, while usable, are difficult to use.
First of all, the single-player content is extremely extensive. There are twenty-five levels, most of which consist of one aerial, star-fox ish part, and a ground part which isn't as easily comparable to any other game, but kind of resembles God of War - the closest analogy I can think of is a 3-d Mega Man X. Regardless, both gameplay styles are fairly fast-paced, and both are pretty solid. The controls for the ground section are a bit dodgy, though - aiming and shooting without two joysticks, or a keyboard and mouse, takes some getting used to. Also, holding the 3DS in such a way as to use the controls (and not being extremely uncomfortable after a few minutes), while definitely possible, requires the use of a non-standard grip or using the 3DS stand that came with the game. Personally, I don't really know how they could have improved the controls. They definitely put a lot of effort into making them customizable, and clearly tried to make it work (thus the stand). But they're still awkward, regardless.
But anyway, the actual replayability for the single-player game comes from three things - forging custom weapons (along with collecting weapons and powers), the difficulty slider increasing the difficulty of any level to an extremely high level, and the achievement system. Forging custom weapons typically requires a fair bit of farming to collect weapons with properties, and then finding a way to combine them into something that you want. Fusion is very fickle, though, and to get a weapon with *exactly* what you want, you'll need to do a *lot* of farming. Personally, I generally like how they did it, but I feel that some greater degree of control over the final product would be very helpful. It is almost entirely out of the player's control if a weapon fusion results in anything usable or not, and while that does add replayability, it also really hurts usability. Also, power collection is quite uncontrollable as well - some way to exert some sort of control over the powers you collect would be very helpful.
The difficulty slider in this game is one of my favorite in any game I've ever seen. The difficulty goes from completely trivial (0.0) to brutally difficult (9.0), and everywhere in between. They really nailed it here. The difficulty scale primarily controls how much damage the enemies do, how much health they have, how fast (and how homing) their bullets are, how often they shoot, and how fast they are. Sadly, it very rarely (if ever) changes any abilities that enemies have, and it almost never adds any new ones. It also only rarely increases the number of enemies that spawn. Still, the changes that are there change the game enough to make it a very different experience when you jump up 2 or more full numbers in difficulty. Honestly, I would change extremely little about the difficulty slider. I will say that the bosses have (far) too little health on anything but the highest difficulties, so I'd increase that, and I would probably add a new ability to each boss if they were played on 9.0 difficulty. Still, those are relatively minor changes to a very good system.
Lastly, the achievement system. It's pretty typical stuff, and encourages you to play in ways that you normally wouldn't, making the game more interesting, and rewarding you for your accomplishments. I'd change one or two things about it - one, the trophies (idols, technically) that you receive through achievements can still be found other ways, which I think is silly - they should be exclusive, in order to be more significant rewards - especially the ones that you get by accomplishing some of the most difficult tasks in the game, like boss battles on hard - perhaps the single hardest thing to do in the game, and your only tangible reward for it is a trophy that you're almost guaranteed to already have at that point. Secondly, I'd get rid of the achievements that more or less amount to "Run through this level on 0.0 using a certain weapon." They're not hard, they're not particularly exciting, and I don't think that they really add anything other than a bit of mindless replayability. Don't get me wrong, I was having enough fun with the game that I did them anyway, but there was definitely room for improvement with them.
And, of course, there's the online multiplayer. Fast-paced, fun, with a solid degree of customization - the gameplay itself is great. However, it really suffers from the lack of any sort of ranking system - meaning that without hunting down people to add to your friends list, the level of challenge the online multiplayer gives will vary greatly from game to game. Additionally, a few more modes would have been nice - FFA and Team Vs are nice, but adding in some sort of co-op, ideally in the form of a horde mode, for example, would have been amazing. What's particularly frustrating is that there is a level in the game that is, more or less, a horde mode, and you even do it co-op with a computer-controlled ally. I really surprised that they would have something like that in the game, but then not make the obvious leap to putting it into multiplayer.
In regards to the online ranking system, though, I have one theory as to why they didn't add it - because the game, I think, is not very balanced, and thus the online multiplayer could devolve into using one of a handful of broken strategies (and not always fun ones - extreme homing shots coming through wall, invisible, invincible snipers, etc), or just dying. If this was the case, and there was then an intentional design decision to not put a ranking system in, then I do respect that decision, but I still disagree with it. Even if online multiplayer at high skill/gear levels wasn't very balanced, I still think that having both a ranked and unranked system would be preferable to the current system. I personally (though I haven't tested the system extensively) don't think that the ranked multiplayer at high levels would be too incredibly overcentralized to suck the fun out of the game, and even though there would be less people in unranked multiplayer if there was a ranked option, I think there would be enough that it would be a viable alternative to playing ranked if you didn't want to deal with ranked shenanigans.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game. But it does have its issues, as I've detailed, and I think that it could have been a noticeably better game with a few changes. Here's what I feel I learned from this game:
-Having a *good* difficulty slider (and ideally, a gear system to support it) adds a great deal of replayability to a game.
-Online multiplayer needs a ranked option in order to remain fun over the long-term for anyone that doesn't feel like seeking out people to play with on the internet.
-More multiplayer modes, more better. Having some sort of PvE cooperative multiplayer that emulates the single-player game could be a good way to get people to transition from single-player to multi-player.
Kid Icarus: Uprising is an action game that was released a few months ago on the 3DS, and it very quickly became one of my favorite games. It simply has a ton of content, and its basic gameplay mechanics are quite a lot of fun. Add on a relatively solid online multiplayer, you have a real winner. Of course, it's still not without flaws - the online multiplayer isn't as good as it could be, and the controls, while usable, are difficult to use.
First of all, the single-player content is extremely extensive. There are twenty-five levels, most of which consist of one aerial, star-fox ish part, and a ground part which isn't as easily comparable to any other game, but kind of resembles God of War - the closest analogy I can think of is a 3-d Mega Man X. Regardless, both gameplay styles are fairly fast-paced, and both are pretty solid. The controls for the ground section are a bit dodgy, though - aiming and shooting without two joysticks, or a keyboard and mouse, takes some getting used to. Also, holding the 3DS in such a way as to use the controls (and not being extremely uncomfortable after a few minutes), while definitely possible, requires the use of a non-standard grip or using the 3DS stand that came with the game. Personally, I don't really know how they could have improved the controls. They definitely put a lot of effort into making them customizable, and clearly tried to make it work (thus the stand). But they're still awkward, regardless.
But anyway, the actual replayability for the single-player game comes from three things - forging custom weapons (along with collecting weapons and powers), the difficulty slider increasing the difficulty of any level to an extremely high level, and the achievement system. Forging custom weapons typically requires a fair bit of farming to collect weapons with properties, and then finding a way to combine them into something that you want. Fusion is very fickle, though, and to get a weapon with *exactly* what you want, you'll need to do a *lot* of farming. Personally, I generally like how they did it, but I feel that some greater degree of control over the final product would be very helpful. It is almost entirely out of the player's control if a weapon fusion results in anything usable or not, and while that does add replayability, it also really hurts usability. Also, power collection is quite uncontrollable as well - some way to exert some sort of control over the powers you collect would be very helpful.
The difficulty slider in this game is one of my favorite in any game I've ever seen. The difficulty goes from completely trivial (0.0) to brutally difficult (9.0), and everywhere in between. They really nailed it here. The difficulty scale primarily controls how much damage the enemies do, how much health they have, how fast (and how homing) their bullets are, how often they shoot, and how fast they are. Sadly, it very rarely (if ever) changes any abilities that enemies have, and it almost never adds any new ones. It also only rarely increases the number of enemies that spawn. Still, the changes that are there change the game enough to make it a very different experience when you jump up 2 or more full numbers in difficulty. Honestly, I would change extremely little about the difficulty slider. I will say that the bosses have (far) too little health on anything but the highest difficulties, so I'd increase that, and I would probably add a new ability to each boss if they were played on 9.0 difficulty. Still, those are relatively minor changes to a very good system.
Lastly, the achievement system. It's pretty typical stuff, and encourages you to play in ways that you normally wouldn't, making the game more interesting, and rewarding you for your accomplishments. I'd change one or two things about it - one, the trophies (idols, technically) that you receive through achievements can still be found other ways, which I think is silly - they should be exclusive, in order to be more significant rewards - especially the ones that you get by accomplishing some of the most difficult tasks in the game, like boss battles on hard - perhaps the single hardest thing to do in the game, and your only tangible reward for it is a trophy that you're almost guaranteed to already have at that point. Secondly, I'd get rid of the achievements that more or less amount to "Run through this level on 0.0 using a certain weapon." They're not hard, they're not particularly exciting, and I don't think that they really add anything other than a bit of mindless replayability. Don't get me wrong, I was having enough fun with the game that I did them anyway, but there was definitely room for improvement with them.
And, of course, there's the online multiplayer. Fast-paced, fun, with a solid degree of customization - the gameplay itself is great. However, it really suffers from the lack of any sort of ranking system - meaning that without hunting down people to add to your friends list, the level of challenge the online multiplayer gives will vary greatly from game to game. Additionally, a few more modes would have been nice - FFA and Team Vs are nice, but adding in some sort of co-op, ideally in the form of a horde mode, for example, would have been amazing. What's particularly frustrating is that there is a level in the game that is, more or less, a horde mode, and you even do it co-op with a computer-controlled ally. I really surprised that they would have something like that in the game, but then not make the obvious leap to putting it into multiplayer.
In regards to the online ranking system, though, I have one theory as to why they didn't add it - because the game, I think, is not very balanced, and thus the online multiplayer could devolve into using one of a handful of broken strategies (and not always fun ones - extreme homing shots coming through wall, invisible, invincible snipers, etc), or just dying. If this was the case, and there was then an intentional design decision to not put a ranking system in, then I do respect that decision, but I still disagree with it. Even if online multiplayer at high skill/gear levels wasn't very balanced, I still think that having both a ranked and unranked system would be preferable to the current system. I personally (though I haven't tested the system extensively) don't think that the ranked multiplayer at high levels would be too incredibly overcentralized to suck the fun out of the game, and even though there would be less people in unranked multiplayer if there was a ranked option, I think there would be enough that it would be a viable alternative to playing ranked if you didn't want to deal with ranked shenanigans.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game. But it does have its issues, as I've detailed, and I think that it could have been a noticeably better game with a few changes. Here's what I feel I learned from this game:
-Having a *good* difficulty slider (and ideally, a gear system to support it) adds a great deal of replayability to a game.
-Online multiplayer needs a ranked option in order to remain fun over the long-term for anyone that doesn't feel like seeking out people to play with on the internet.
-More multiplayer modes, more better. Having some sort of PvE cooperative multiplayer that emulates the single-player game could be a good way to get people to transition from single-player to multi-player.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Review: Skyrim
So often I review cool but obscure games, this time I thought I'd take on something a little more mainstream.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is, for those of you living under a rock, an action-RPG that was released for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. I played it on the PS3 (and am still technically playing it there, as I never did finish everything I wanted to, but who does in this game), and first of all, I'd like to say that I had a ton of fun with it. The biggest draw of Skyrim, and the Elder Scrolls series in general, is the gigantic fantasy world sandbox of things to do. Coming up right below the world is the different ways you can customize your character - rather than a class, in this game, you can pick and choose from many different talent trees, and thus create a unique playstyle that fits you.
The game's huge world has so much to do, it's extremely easy to be drawn off track by something interesting - and indeed, I'd argue that that is the whole point of the game. Getting from point A to point B becomes something else entirely when you pass 8 dungeons along the way that you can clear out and loot - often finding something tied to a bigger quest there. The scope of the game is simply incredible, both in terms of the number of things to do and each of these things remains interesting.
With that said, the game has numerous faults. The two biggest problems with this game are bugs and balance. The game is simply inexcusably buggy, even 3+ months after being released. Companions don't level to your character properly. Quests can bug out and become incompletable, preventing progress in fairly major ways. Companions can become stuck in certain zones of the game, meaning that you lose access to them forever - particularly fun if you've also married them. This is to say nothing of the lag issues that plagued the PS3 version until the most recent patch. I understand that a game this large is going to have some bugs, but there is a difference between some bugs and what Skyrim has, especially what it shipped with.
The "balance," such as it is, is also something of a joke. At least in my experience, I had to actively refrain from doing activities I otherwise would have in order to keep the game moderately challenging. Indeed, I'm using what is considered to be one of the weaker playstyles, blaster mage, and on master difficulty I'm still finding the game to be pretty darn easy. And it's simply the easiest thing in the world to ruin the game's balance for yourself by leveling up smithing or enchanting particularly early on (especially smithing - or, god forbid, both). Conjuration is also ridiculously powerful if powerleveled, as I understand it, and in general I'm given to believe that bow-using stealth characters are a particularly broken archetype. Vampire illusionists, from what I understand, can render every single enemy in the game except for dragons completely harmless. And dragons in general are surprisingly anticlimatic fights. Again, in a game this large and characters this customizable, there are bound to be issues, but Skyrim kicks it up a few notches above that.
But, as I said, I did really enjoy the game. I just think that it could have used a lot more time on bug-fixing and balancing.
Some of the lessons I've learned from this game are:
-Having a very customizable character is indeed great. I mentioned the idea in one of my earlier posts, regarding the ability to create your own class for an RPG, but this game takes that and really runs with it.
-Open worlds, as long as they don't feel empty, can make games all by themselves. Throw in enough decently interesting quests here and there, make the many dungeons each at least a little bit unique, and you've got a really fun game pretty much ready to go.
However, I also learned a few more lessons from this game. These lessons I hope that I am never reduced to using:
-A game can incredibly buggy and still ship to great reviews if it is fun enough. In particular, an open world game with lots of content, so that you can at least theoretically avoid the bugs, lends itself to this particularly well.
-Game balance, at least in single player games, can be almost tossed out the window in favor of other aspects of the game, especially at higher levels.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is, for those of you living under a rock, an action-RPG that was released for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. I played it on the PS3 (and am still technically playing it there, as I never did finish everything I wanted to, but who does in this game), and first of all, I'd like to say that I had a ton of fun with it. The biggest draw of Skyrim, and the Elder Scrolls series in general, is the gigantic fantasy world sandbox of things to do. Coming up right below the world is the different ways you can customize your character - rather than a class, in this game, you can pick and choose from many different talent trees, and thus create a unique playstyle that fits you.
The game's huge world has so much to do, it's extremely easy to be drawn off track by something interesting - and indeed, I'd argue that that is the whole point of the game. Getting from point A to point B becomes something else entirely when you pass 8 dungeons along the way that you can clear out and loot - often finding something tied to a bigger quest there. The scope of the game is simply incredible, both in terms of the number of things to do and each of these things remains interesting.
With that said, the game has numerous faults. The two biggest problems with this game are bugs and balance. The game is simply inexcusably buggy, even 3+ months after being released. Companions don't level to your character properly. Quests can bug out and become incompletable, preventing progress in fairly major ways. Companions can become stuck in certain zones of the game, meaning that you lose access to them forever - particularly fun if you've also married them. This is to say nothing of the lag issues that plagued the PS3 version until the most recent patch. I understand that a game this large is going to have some bugs, but there is a difference between some bugs and what Skyrim has, especially what it shipped with.
The "balance," such as it is, is also something of a joke. At least in my experience, I had to actively refrain from doing activities I otherwise would have in order to keep the game moderately challenging. Indeed, I'm using what is considered to be one of the weaker playstyles, blaster mage, and on master difficulty I'm still finding the game to be pretty darn easy. And it's simply the easiest thing in the world to ruin the game's balance for yourself by leveling up smithing or enchanting particularly early on (especially smithing - or, god forbid, both). Conjuration is also ridiculously powerful if powerleveled, as I understand it, and in general I'm given to believe that bow-using stealth characters are a particularly broken archetype. Vampire illusionists, from what I understand, can render every single enemy in the game except for dragons completely harmless. And dragons in general are surprisingly anticlimatic fights. Again, in a game this large and characters this customizable, there are bound to be issues, but Skyrim kicks it up a few notches above that.
But, as I said, I did really enjoy the game. I just think that it could have used a lot more time on bug-fixing and balancing.
Some of the lessons I've learned from this game are:
-Having a very customizable character is indeed great. I mentioned the idea in one of my earlier posts, regarding the ability to create your own class for an RPG, but this game takes that and really runs with it.
-Open worlds, as long as they don't feel empty, can make games all by themselves. Throw in enough decently interesting quests here and there, make the many dungeons each at least a little bit unique, and you've got a really fun game pretty much ready to go.
However, I also learned a few more lessons from this game. These lessons I hope that I am never reduced to using:
-A game can incredibly buggy and still ship to great reviews if it is fun enough. In particular, an open world game with lots of content, so that you can at least theoretically avoid the bugs, lends itself to this particularly well.
-Game balance, at least in single player games, can be almost tossed out the window in favor of other aspects of the game, especially at higher levels.
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