Vulpes Valentine's Video Game Valley

Tag: reviews

  • Absolum – Review

    Absolum – Review

    Rogue-likes have a certain kind of magic to their design: this stationary threat at the end of the road that sits, patient and menacing, for you to walk into its lair and claim victory over the game’s greatest challenge. The final boss in a rogue-like is often the thing you think about the most, and actually encounter the least. In a game like Nightreign, you plan which locations to strike and what kind of build to work toward based on your knowledge of the Nightlord you’ll be facing at the end of the cycle. In Hades, you repeat the path through the rest of the game so frequently and with such speed that you can reach a flow state wherein you start thinking less about what’s happening in the immediate present and more about how everything you’re doing is going to save or condemn you later on. Hades himself is at the end of the line no matter what, so it’s best to have a plan. Through a more narrative-centric lense, The Binding of Isaac puts the game’s primary antagonist not only at the heart of the game’s loop but at the heart of its story. Mom is a vicious, unpredictable threat in the literal text of the game and in the ways that the runs themselves are so incredibly chaotic and deadly.

    These are games that really test the player, forcing you to repeat sections over and over and over again, to grind your blade to dust against the bosses until you break through just once, then again, and then again to the point of it being a foregone conclusion. They are often brutally difficult and punishing to those who do not think tactically, but by necessity they need to be pleasant to look at, hear, and play because the nature of the game demands an incredible amount of repetition.

    So along comes Absolum, a fantasy beat’em up rogue-like from developer Dotemu, and a game that not only understands the concept of the “run”, but heightens the enjoyment of each run to a degree I haven’t felt in a long time within the genre.

    There is so much about this game that brings me immense joy, from the intense and driving soundtrack (with a few extremely catchy tracks), to the delightful aesthetic that calls to mind various fantasy comics and cartoons, and the deep wealth of randomized and systematized events which can curve a run in unique directions or give the player special goals to try and achieve.

    Perhaps most noteworthy is the option to use what is called the “Active Assist” mode. This function allows you to raise or lower the amount of damage each player both outputs and receives, meaning that if you just want to goof around and experience the story you can drop the threat all the way down to zero and just have fun. The game features online and couch co-op, and Active Assist can be set to effect the players to different degrees for a truly custom experience.

    Absolum takes place in a somewhat typical fantasy setting: a vast and magical land overtaken by the shadowy forces of an evil ruler, this time being Azra the Sun King. Each run, you pick from between your available characters, select a special move, and set off on a quest to defeat two of Azra’s top soldiers before storming the capitol. You know, assuming you make it that far.

    What makes each run special is the amount of variety. Not only are there multiple branching paths to take on your journey (the first phase of the game offers almost a dozen unique combinations of levels to reach the first major boss) but with subsequent runs, new paths will open up and new events will play out in levels you’ve already passed through. One of the early levels is a dense forest full of scarlet trees and a horde of goblins to fight your way past. Standard fare, yes, but once I’d gone through it two or three times, an NPC pointed out that a new path had been cleared away by some loggers and a secret level was unlocked. Excited and intrigued, I took that path and found an alternate route to the Underking, the first of Azra’s most loyal subjects. Pretty neat on its own, but what really sealed the deal was that when I came back on another run through the secret level, a new NPC appeared with a special side-quest that took us to new parts of the level with some fun secrets to be found.
    It was, in a word, delightful. And if I had to pick one word to describe this game, that’s what I’d go with: delightful.

    There are so many secrets to uncover, new characters to unlock, skills to master, alternate routes and random events that’ll mix things up in exciting ways. Perhaps most important for Dotemu to nail was the combat (I mean, it’s what you’re doing basically the entire time) and nail it they most certainly did. Combos flow nicely together and characters feel agile and strong. Launching enemies into the air before unleashing a series of aerial attacks makes you feel like a god. Gaining a power that spawns throwing daggers when you successfully deflect an enemy attack and then hurling those daggers at your foes like an M60 machine gun at full force is one of the greatest beat ‘em up experiences I’ve ever had. Take into account that the Active Assist function lets you increase and decrease the difficulty to fit your preferences and this game oozes satisfaction.

    Perhaps my only real criticism is that it is occasionally a little buggy. I encountered two rather nasty glitches in my time with the game, one being when a group of chickens launched my character into the air and suddenly the framerate dropped to about 2 per second and it couldn’t seem to recover. On another occasion, talking to one of my other characters in the game’s central hub opened a dialogue box that was completely empty and impossible to escape, resulting in me having to reload the game. I didn’t lose any progress, but I can’t shake the feeling that I might be missing out on one of the few hidden questlines I have yet to unlock.

    The few nitpicks really aren’t worthy of much discussion though. Playing this game co-op is a frenetic rush, and the pure tactile joy of fighting through hordes of enemies was enough to keep me coming back until I snagged that platinum trophy. Not to mention, the game is nowhere near the cost of big releases, so there’s really no excuse not to make what will likely make my top ten games of the year.

    Absolum is, in essence, the primary reason why we play games. It’s just so damn fun.

  • First Time Final Fantasy – Final Fantasy III

    First Time Final Fantasy – Final Fantasy III

    There is a moment in Final Fantasy I where you’ve just finished rebuilding the bridge that spans a narrow channel separating two continents. You’ve spent a few hours fighting monsters, learning the structure of the game, and exploring the small portion of the world you’ve been given access to, so at this point you’re understanding of the game’s world feels like it’s filling out. You step across the bridge and a splash screen comes up showing your party of adventurers overlooking a gorgeous pixelated landscape and the iconic music plays, accompanied by this feeling that here, right here, is where the adventure of a lifetime truly begins.

    It’s an incredible moment. The world that seemed so small before suddenly explodes outward in all directions, expanding your understanding of the scale and scope of the game to an almost intimidating and certainly awe-inspiring degree. They even manage to repeat this trick three more times, once with the acquisition of the ship coupled with the opening of the channel taking you to the open sea, again with the canoe giving you the ability to sail along the currents of rivers, and again with the airship, taking not only the method of traversal but the speed at which you travel to unseen heights.

    Final Fantasy III looks back at the legacy of Final Fantasy I, the experiments and failures (and there are many) of Final Fantasy II, and says with a smile: “Yeah, I can top that.”

    And it does.

    There is a moment very early in the game where you acquire an airship. I remember thinking, “Wow, that was really soon! I wonder how they’ll incorporate this into-” and then it explodes into a million pieces and becomes unusable. It’s a gag that works because it’s completely unexpected, and when the game starts to build its traversal systems and overworld exploration back out again, there’s always this little chuckling voice in the back of your head that remembers the airship and wonders if it’ll happen again.

    It doesn’t, and that’s probably for the best, because the ways in which Final Fantasy III continues to expand its world are frankly astounding.

    You start the game on a continent that seems like a densely packed and populated realm. There are multiple dungeons (even some late-game optional areas), several towns, castles, and big set-pieces to capture your imagination. It feels like a complete game. So when the camera pulls back, you get a proper, functioning airship again, and you set out over the continent’s edge for the first time you discover that all that has taken place thus far took place on a floating island above a far more massive world than you could’ve predicted would await you. It’s jaw-dropping.

    AND THEY DO IT AGAIN. Late in the game you get access to a submarine and now there are multiple underwater dungeons to explore, mostly optional, with tons of cool treasures to find, new enemies to face, and environments to explore.

    There’s an interesting parallel between the world’s constant expanding and the game’s mechanics similarly growing, because Jobs are back from the first one and they’ve been totally reworked from something passably interesting to a full on highlight of the game.

    You start the adventure as four small children, all the same Job (the oddly named, Onion Knight), and you fall into a chasm beneath your home village wherein you find a magical crystal that grants them great power and access to the Jobs. With each crystal you find throughout the game, a batch of new Jobs gets unlocked, totaling in twenty-three unique classes for your characters to play, but we’ll come back to that.

    OK, you might think, so this was a cute little introduction and now I pick my four Jobs that my party members will master as the game progresses. Probably gonna need to some balance so not too many mages but we can’t have none. That classic party composition math begins ticking away in your head. Maybe they’ll advance to new forms like in the first game, but this is the configuration I’m working with, right?

    Wrong. Because in a masterstroke of design genius, FFIII allows you to freely change Jobs at will, meaning you can have a party of all White Mages, realize that this is untenable, and switch them around to various martial classes. Felt like switching one of your characters over to Red Mage for a while but now you’re not sure it’s working out the way you wanted? Switch them to something else! Try a Ranger! As the Job list expands periodically, you’re given multiple opportunities to entirely reconfigure your party and their skills, experimenting with different combinations, trying out the new mechanics that Jobs like the Bard and the Evoker bring to the table. And you’re encouraged to try all of these, since the only real cost is the time it takes to figure out if you like the Job for your character. You level up your party members separate from your level in a Job, meaning that while your mastery of a Job grows and you get new abilities, your stats are influenced by the equipped Job, but not pigeonholed by it. If you switch to a Knight from a Geomancer, get ready to watch your HP climb at a better rate. In theory, you could have a White Mage with more HP and Defense than your Knight. I don’t why you would do that but hey, it’s your game.

    Each Job also has a unique feel to it that changes how you approach combat, and the ability to swap these around freely is such a gift to the player, which is really no surprise when you look at the game’s structure as a whole.

    Because Final Fantasy III is the most impressive game I’ve played for this series and it’s not even close.

    And it’s weird how much of what good was in Final Fantasy II they are able to wring out and restructure for this game, because like FFII this one has a much greater focus on the narrative than the original game. There are distinct characters with motivations and stories of their own, and lots of them join your party for a brief while to go on some quest together. And while your party members also speak and have ideas of their own, none of it feels like the game is taking all the roleplaying out of your hands. You are still given enough empty space to fill in with your imagination that the creative expression of the game (although extremely rudimentary by today’s standards) works in a way that is not only similar to the first game, but that actually surpasses it.

    Advancement no longer feels like you need to be juggling spreadsheets and formations. Just grind for a bit. Level up. Watch your stats climb the way they’re supposed to. Sure, you can’t get as granular as you could in FFII (although for whom that is a problem I can’t imagine), but you still have a bounty of options at your disposal.

    Except when the game hems you into making all your characters the same Job for a dungeon, lest you face endlessly replicating monsters. Or when you are forced to make yourself small using the Mini spell, but now your physical attacks and defense are pitiful and you need to rely on magic or successfully escaping every encounter. Or when a boss can be defeated if you grind for a while and just brute force it, but it goes much smoother if everyone just switches to the one Job that’s kind of tailor-made for this situation. And I could be wrong, but in this specific instance I found that particular Job, the Dragoon, to be mostly useless outside of that fight.

    These kinds of setups are limited, but they are such a strange misstep in the design. It would be cool if one Job had a moment to shine, but the difficulty of these fights and areas for those not using that Job becomes frustrating and feels rather arbitrary.

    The game is also… like… really long? There were times when fatigue started to set in, and the amount of optional content (while impressive) started to resemble a chore list. This probably has more to do with my own brain chemistry than the design of the game, but a little quicker pacing would’ve appealed to me quite a bit.

    The story is mostly forgettable, being presented not so much as a continuous plot with growing stakes but instead as a series of small narrative arcs, usually revolving around an NPC you meet or the problems of a single town. It manages to evoke a kind of D&D feel, having your party bounce from location to location fighting various unrelated baddies and solving magical crises, but it lacks the kind of cohesion that would really elevate the emotional attachment you might get toward your characters and the setting. Ironically, it is this point that seems to undergo a complete turnaround in future games, though I’ll save my opinions for when I’ve actually played them.

    Perhaps my biggest criticism is the game’s final dungeon. It’s massive, gruelingly difficult even for a high level party, and there is almost nothing in the way of checkpoints, meaning that failure is going to send you really, really far back. And the final boss, while managing to capture my interest, is more of a brute force blast-fest than anything else, and there isn’t a ton of mechanical depth to the fight, which – to be fair – is true of most of the game’s combat.

    We’re still in an era where technological limits are tight, where modes of combat design that will become iconic to fantasy RPGs down the road simply haven’t been imagined yet.

    It’s sad to say, but the lack of depth to the combat, the lack of variety in what it is that you’re doing moment to moment, makes a lot of this game fairly monotonous to play. We seem to have settled into a rhythm here, a pattern that while enjoyable is beginning to get a bit stale. Now, playing them back-to-back is a far flung experience from what most folks would’ve had when these games were new, but my motivation to continue if things stay relatively fixed will definitely slip away.

    But don’t let that fool you into thinking that I had a bad time with this game. I didn’t. I had a great time, in fact! Much like the first game, it’s incredible to see the design methodology of fantasy games so clearly laid down so early on in the medium’s lifetime. I’m overjoyed at the game’s quality even when viewed from a modern lens, but I wonder if they will continue to innovate in ways that make the games interesting, or if they’ll fall into a repetitive rhythm that slowly fades into drudgery.

    Only one way to find out, eh?

    Next month: Final Fantasy IV

  • The DNF Report – Ni No Kuni

    The DNF Report – Ni No Kuni

    There are many reasons not to finish a game. For working adults like myself, free time is a luxury I can rarely afford, and I’d rather spend it playing a game that is interesting or exceptionally fun than one that isn’t really grabbing me. In other cases, a game can simply fail to entertain me at all, or can even go so far as to leave me irritated, frustrated, or disappointed.

    Or maybe I once tried getting into a gacha game and watched hundreds of dollars slip from my bank account before I grabbed hold of the emergency release lever and deleted the game, and now I have to live in fear of micro-transactions or other exploitative practices prevalent in the industry, sometimes starting to play whatever new, flashy game comes out only to run in abject terror the first time it asks you to pay $10 for blupee gems or bing-bong crystals.

    Just as a general example.

    Here on The DNF Report (DNF standing for Did Not Finish), I seek to work through why certain games fell apart like sand in a windstorm, losing my attention and ending up on the pile of games whose endings I will never reach.

    To inaugurate this new series, let’s take a look at my most recent DNF, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.

    This game has been out for several years now, but I somehow remained mostly unaware of the specifics. I knew the big selling point: that the art and many cutscenes were lovingly designed in collaboration with the highly acclaimed Studio Ghibli, famous for such movies as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. I was also vaguely aware going in that it was designed in the style of classic Japanese RPGs.

    What I didn’t know, importantly, is that it is boring.

    There’s something to be said about what it means to be a game “for kids” in the modern era, where games designed to be appealing to kids are often full of collection plate passing tactics like custom skins, battle passes, gacha pulls, etc. These games tend to be flashy, aimed at producing the most consistent dopamine hits that the medium can offer, and fast-paced to prevent kids from getting bored. And while Ni No Kuni is most definitely a game that seems eager to appeal to children, it is shockingly dull and slow-paced.

    The game’s basic premise is very familiar. A young boy in a humble town embarks on an adventure to magical world living in parallel to his own, guided by a jovial companion (in this case, a smart-mouthed fairy named Drippy), whereupon he fights monsters, an evil sorcerer, and teams up with additional allies he encounters along the way. There is a lot of charm in the early hours of the game, from the pleasant visuals to the inoffensive (but certainly insignificant) music which evokes a sort of classic ideal of fantasy stories for children. Characters tell jokes, there are anthropomorphic animal folk, and the action of combat is bloodless and cartoonish.

    It’s also, despicably clunky.

    You never feel like you have enough time to react to the attacks of enemies, as combat is set in a strange combination of active time and turn-based styles that more often than not leaves you on the back foot, reacting instead of pushing the enemy into a corner and committing to attacks that often leave you vulnerable to a swift pummeling. To summarize, the members of your party can fight as themselves, or send familiars to fight in their place. These familiars are admittedly charming in their visual design, evoking a sort of Pokemon/Digimon sort of style, and they function similarly to the monsters in those games, having elemental weaknesses and resistances, a set number of special movies to use in combat, and even evolution paths that change their form and grant them new abilities. The familiars are the same monsters you fight on your journey, but a random roll upon defeating a monster can grant you the opportunity to claim them for your party’s collection.

    When I first encountered the familiars, I was sort of surprised. I hadn’t expected this kind of gameplay, but I was open to it and kind of interested to see what the different monsters would play like.

    It didn’t take long to find out that the system is needlessly complicated and clumsy. You have to feed them to up their stats, with specific kinds of food granting specific upgrades. But don’t feed them too much or they get full and can’t eat anymore! And don’t raise their abilities with food too far, because there is a hard limit to how much they can increase their stats! And don’t let them get stronger without evolving them because they drop back to level one when entering a new form, leaving them almost always weaker than they were before with the promise of long-term benefits, benefits that never feel meaningful because you are (most likely) continuing to advance through the game and therefore encountering harder and more dangerous monsters that will wallop on your poor little under-leveled creatures with precision and brutality.

    And there are hundreds to collect but your party members can only hold 3! And for some reason, THEY ALL SHARE THE SAME HEALTH AND MANA. This means that if you send one familiar out and find that they’re getting absolutely stomped by the enemies you’re fighting, you have no recourse but to use items or spells to heal before you can switch to another creature, but that mana could have been better used on the other familiar if you had sent them out in the first place.

    Battles are also more often than not unavoidable, and enemies work with much more focus and aggression than you (and certainly more than a child for whom this might be their first RPG) can manage with the clumsy controls and interface.

    The story does even less to keep the player interested. The problems your party must solve are often connected to one of the game’s main antagonists only in a vague way, and the only real thread tying the events of the game together are the machinations of the aforementioned White Witch, whom you get remarkably far into the game before learning ANYTHING about. The dungeons are boring and might as well be gray hallways for as fun as they are to traverse.

    And I unfortunately got very far into the game before finally reaching the conclusion that it wasn’t going to suddenly get better. For all of protagonist Oliver’s magical acumen, he couldn’t make the game entertaining.

    He also can’t move at higher speeds than a brisk walk. Oliver, I have to work tomorrow! MOVE!!