HotPocketHPE
1996
An experienced dev team's first foray into true 3D that, shockingly, gets it right all the way back in June 1996.
Absolutely rock-solid fundamentals which set the tone for the rest of the genre. Analog controls enable precise adjustment of angles which have huge downstream effects. A signature focus on momentum, combined with tricks both intentional and unintentional, birthed one of the most legendary and iconic speedrunning scenes of all time. Systems like this in a casual single player context, balanced to enhance rather than subvert challenges, are rare to find, and even the devs themselves never quite managed to recapture this particular flavor.
The level design here is emblematic of the early 3D era "golden age": enough detail and representation to evoke sense of place, but with the abstraction necessitated by the time's technology both facilitating dense layouts and imbuing the atmosphere with a surreal, dreamlike quality. No established formulas for success existed yet, so levels aren't overly concerned with providing the player a frictionless experience. Each expresses their own quirky character, something felt even more strongly than usual since gameplay is so contextualized by the precise placement of nearby geometry.
Shortcomings mainly occur in obtuse progression/secrets and a handful of stages (more concentrated in the latter half) that don't play to the game's strengths. Luckily, the huge modding scene has leveraged this fantastic foundation and learned from these mistakes to create a veritable cornucopia of visions, both vanilla-like and experimental, for you as a player to explore.
Yup, Quake is a pretty great game!
Absolutely rock-solid fundamentals which set the tone for the rest of the genre. Analog controls enable precise adjustment of angles which have huge downstream effects. A signature focus on momentum, combined with tricks both intentional and unintentional, birthed one of the most legendary and iconic speedrunning scenes of all time. Systems like this in a casual single player context, balanced to enhance rather than subvert challenges, are rare to find, and even the devs themselves never quite managed to recapture this particular flavor.
The level design here is emblematic of the early 3D era "golden age": enough detail and representation to evoke sense of place, but with the abstraction necessitated by the time's technology both facilitating dense layouts and imbuing the atmosphere with a surreal, dreamlike quality. No established formulas for success existed yet, so levels aren't overly concerned with providing the player a frictionless experience. Each expresses their own quirky character, something felt even more strongly than usual since gameplay is so contextualized by the precise placement of nearby geometry.
Shortcomings mainly occur in obtuse progression/secrets and a handful of stages (more concentrated in the latter half) that don't play to the game's strengths. Luckily, the huge modding scene has leveraged this fantastic foundation and learned from these mistakes to create a veritable cornucopia of visions, both vanilla-like and experimental, for you as a player to explore.
Yup, Quake is a pretty great game!
Mmmmm, tasty slaughter. Pack of Doom style slaughtermaps (minus the first two maps, which were obviously not made by Tronyn) with custom weapons, powerups, and enemies. Favs: Chain Thunderbolt and Amulet of Reflection. Shotgun starts too which I love!
Enemies are generally well-considered, mostly low health medium damage stuff that rounds out the roster for high enemy count mapping. Not a huge fan of the dragons though. Their AI tries to dodge projectiles which can be cool to play around using hitscan weapons or the environment, but gets finicky when they fly away and snipe with their high damage output.
Worth checking out just for map 3, that one is amazing.
Enemies are generally well-considered, mostly low health medium damage stuff that rounds out the roster for high enemy count mapping. Not a huge fan of the dragons though. Their AI tries to dodge projectiles which can be cool to play around using hitscan weapons or the environment, but gets finicky when they fly away and snipe with their high damage output.
Worth checking out just for map 3, that one is amazing.
2020
(Played on Nightmare, mods used: Original TAG1, AI Restoration, Fixed Immora)
Doom Eternal feels like it should be the greatest single-player FPS ever for me, and I really admire its ideas and ambitions, but instead it's just a pretty good game. Why?
My main problem is that most of the encounters have a "soupy consistency": they feel similar despite me ostensibly making different decisions in the moment. I am still not sure what precisely is causing this, but I think most of the complaints about this game aren't getting at the core issues, so I'm just gonna throw out a bunch of things that I think are primarily contributing.
Movement in Doom Eternal is just ridiculous. For comparison: Quake allows for building momentum and doing crazy jumps, but this is very geometry dependent and difficult to execute while in combat. Doom's movement is more straightforwardly fast, but enemies have large hitboxes which easily bodyblock you, and the vertical axis is off-limits. Halo (and many other FPS) simply have slow movespeed that forces you to commit to positioning. DE has fast immediate movement + easy height and momentum boosting with meathook and ballista + 2 dash charges that cancel momentum and can go any direction. Faced with this kit, enemies have an extremely difficult time contesting you, especially in the air, and it's more likely that you'll get clipped by some random projectile than from misjudging a situation per se.
The level design is exacerbating this problem! Almost all the arenas you fight in are huge spaces filled with monkey bars/jump pads/ledges/etc which allow you to easily run in big circles, flee when threatened, and glide over enemies' heads. Cooldowns incentivize this too! TAG1 and the Master Levels try to combat this somewhat by using more environmental hazards, shrinking arena sizes, and placing major encounters in the comparatively cramped areas between arenas.
In the former context, the enemy roster generally struggles to pressure you. This is a real shame, because in many basic ways they are quite well-designed and differentiated (some writeups here, here). The Marauder has strong (and annoying) defense that demands you hold specific spacing, but even then it's not all that hard to just run away and ignore him. Most everyone else will let you flit around whatever range you want to be at and fire away, as opposed to the melee-oriented action games that Doom Eternal is drawing on, which require spacing and attack commitment.
There are a few exceptions. Carcasses subvert the issue by hiding and spawning energy shields at a distance which can abruptly block your path, i.e. actually contest your offense. Blood Makyrs reuse the annoying traffic light mechanic to prevent you from bursting them, but shoot massive, fast, movespeed-reducing projectiles that are dangerous and predictable enough to warrant playing proactively around. Cyber-Mancubi at least incentivize closing into melee range, where they can easily deal damage to you (unless you use the very silly chaingun shield).
The Spirit, in fittingly maximalist fashion, brute-forces the issue by just cranking up the health and speed of possessed enemies. Suddenly ranged enemies are difficult to dodge without cover, and melee enemies become relentless harassers that can actually keep up with you. On top of that, you need to make sure that you have ammo + time + space to kill the ghost itself, or let it possess something else. I wouldn't say it totally fixes the aforementioned problems, but it helps.
I say this about almost all fast FPS but this game really needed an enemy similar to Doom 2's Archvile or Quake's Shambler, something that can control space without the player just reactively dodging. Obvious, persistent homing missiles like Doom 2's Revenant or Quake's Vore might have helped complicate movement too, and the Glory Kill iframes couild even be used to avoid these big attacks (see: Ninja Gaiden incendiary shurikens).
Watching high-level play of DE is kind of weird, because of how ridiculously powerful weapon switching is. Nonstop swapping between ballista/rocket/precision bolt/SSG dilutes their individual characteristics as tools and turns them into one giant DPS hose. Almost all enemies can be bursted down near-instantly, especially with the various swap glitches that have been discovered over time, and meathook + ballista boosting to create sightlines quickly. Most players of course won't reach this level, but even for me I could feel the echoes of this playstyle when tackling the hardest content.
This game has a weird relationship with difficulty in general. Not being able to scale intensity isn't a critical flaw IMO (arguably original RE4 is like this). But I don't generally find Doom Eternal most compelling when the fights are easy, for reasons mentioned above, and trying to make the game extremely difficult presents issues. Because enemies move and fire so erratically:
* Initial placement is generally unimportant, and cannot be used as a design lever
* Single enemies struggle to exert pressure, but if the mapper places too many enemies at once, it becomes difficult to discern order from the chaos, and generic "just keep moving" strategies will dominate
Environmental hazards and AOE spam can work, but don't always feel like they change your decisionmaking that much, and feel vaguely annoying for many people, including myself at times. Limiting access to your tools, as seen in the Classic Mode for Master Levels, certainly does, but this is rarely used so far, and certainly not to the level of e.g. Doom maps.
Sometimes though I think that everything I wrote above actually doesn't matter that much, and the real problem is some difficult to pin down game feel issue. The game feels vaguely "floaty," in a way that makes it less satisfying to move around and fight. Sadly I can't identify exactly why this is, but it really does matter, even for a game near-exclusively focused on combat depth. For example, even after putting thousands of hours into Monster Hunter, the way the classic games control still feels viscerally enjoyable to me, and hurts my experience with the new games in comparison.
I found this game very difficult to analyze, so forgive any shortcomings. Check out Durandal's writeups here and here to hopefully fill in some of the gaps. Hopefully this team's next game can somehow overcome these issues and fulfill the potential of this style of design.
Doom Eternal feels like it should be the greatest single-player FPS ever for me, and I really admire its ideas and ambitions, but instead it's just a pretty good game. Why?
My main problem is that most of the encounters have a "soupy consistency": they feel similar despite me ostensibly making different decisions in the moment. I am still not sure what precisely is causing this, but I think most of the complaints about this game aren't getting at the core issues, so I'm just gonna throw out a bunch of things that I think are primarily contributing.
Movement in Doom Eternal is just ridiculous. For comparison: Quake allows for building momentum and doing crazy jumps, but this is very geometry dependent and difficult to execute while in combat. Doom's movement is more straightforwardly fast, but enemies have large hitboxes which easily bodyblock you, and the vertical axis is off-limits. Halo (and many other FPS) simply have slow movespeed that forces you to commit to positioning. DE has fast immediate movement + easy height and momentum boosting with meathook and ballista + 2 dash charges that cancel momentum and can go any direction. Faced with this kit, enemies have an extremely difficult time contesting you, especially in the air, and it's more likely that you'll get clipped by some random projectile than from misjudging a situation per se.
The level design is exacerbating this problem! Almost all the arenas you fight in are huge spaces filled with monkey bars/jump pads/ledges/etc which allow you to easily run in big circles, flee when threatened, and glide over enemies' heads. Cooldowns incentivize this too! TAG1 and the Master Levels try to combat this somewhat by using more environmental hazards, shrinking arena sizes, and placing major encounters in the comparatively cramped areas between arenas.
In the former context, the enemy roster generally struggles to pressure you. This is a real shame, because in many basic ways they are quite well-designed and differentiated (some writeups here, here). The Marauder has strong (and annoying) defense that demands you hold specific spacing, but even then it's not all that hard to just run away and ignore him. Most everyone else will let you flit around whatever range you want to be at and fire away, as opposed to the melee-oriented action games that Doom Eternal is drawing on, which require spacing and attack commitment.
There are a few exceptions. Carcasses subvert the issue by hiding and spawning energy shields at a distance which can abruptly block your path, i.e. actually contest your offense. Blood Makyrs reuse the annoying traffic light mechanic to prevent you from bursting them, but shoot massive, fast, movespeed-reducing projectiles that are dangerous and predictable enough to warrant playing proactively around. Cyber-Mancubi at least incentivize closing into melee range, where they can easily deal damage to you (unless you use the very silly chaingun shield).
The Spirit, in fittingly maximalist fashion, brute-forces the issue by just cranking up the health and speed of possessed enemies. Suddenly ranged enemies are difficult to dodge without cover, and melee enemies become relentless harassers that can actually keep up with you. On top of that, you need to make sure that you have ammo + time + space to kill the ghost itself, or let it possess something else. I wouldn't say it totally fixes the aforementioned problems, but it helps.
I say this about almost all fast FPS but this game really needed an enemy similar to Doom 2's Archvile or Quake's Shambler, something that can control space without the player just reactively dodging. Obvious, persistent homing missiles like Doom 2's Revenant or Quake's Vore might have helped complicate movement too, and the Glory Kill iframes couild even be used to avoid these big attacks (see: Ninja Gaiden incendiary shurikens).
Watching high-level play of DE is kind of weird, because of how ridiculously powerful weapon switching is. Nonstop swapping between ballista/rocket/precision bolt/SSG dilutes their individual characteristics as tools and turns them into one giant DPS hose. Almost all enemies can be bursted down near-instantly, especially with the various swap glitches that have been discovered over time, and meathook + ballista boosting to create sightlines quickly. Most players of course won't reach this level, but even for me I could feel the echoes of this playstyle when tackling the hardest content.
This game has a weird relationship with difficulty in general. Not being able to scale intensity isn't a critical flaw IMO (arguably original RE4 is like this). But I don't generally find Doom Eternal most compelling when the fights are easy, for reasons mentioned above, and trying to make the game extremely difficult presents issues. Because enemies move and fire so erratically:
* Initial placement is generally unimportant, and cannot be used as a design lever
* Single enemies struggle to exert pressure, but if the mapper places too many enemies at once, it becomes difficult to discern order from the chaos, and generic "just keep moving" strategies will dominate
Environmental hazards and AOE spam can work, but don't always feel like they change your decisionmaking that much, and feel vaguely annoying for many people, including myself at times. Limiting access to your tools, as seen in the Classic Mode for Master Levels, certainly does, but this is rarely used so far, and certainly not to the level of e.g. Doom maps.
Sometimes though I think that everything I wrote above actually doesn't matter that much, and the real problem is some difficult to pin down game feel issue. The game feels vaguely "floaty," in a way that makes it less satisfying to move around and fight. Sadly I can't identify exactly why this is, but it really does matter, even for a game near-exclusively focused on combat depth. For example, even after putting thousands of hours into Monster Hunter, the way the classic games control still feels viscerally enjoyable to me, and hurts my experience with the new games in comparison.
I found this game very difficult to analyze, so forgive any shortcomings. Check out Durandal's writeups here and here to hopefully fill in some of the gaps. Hopefully this team's next game can somehow overcome these issues and fulfill the potential of this style of design.
2001
(Replayed on MCC on PC with gamepad, Legendary, skipped The Library)
Honestly a lot better than I remember. I think the common praise and complaints about this game are mostly correct in kind if not always magnitude, so let me discuss some interesting specifics.
The Library is awful and you should skip it if possible. The campaign's pacing is significantly improved without it, it emphasizes everything bad about the game while downplaying everything good, Bungie devs have stated multiple times that it shouldn't have been shipped, etc. Everyone knows it's trash and I'm going to pretend like it doesn't exist now, moving on.
Weapon balancing here is my favorite in the series. Everything feels powerful and situationally useful. The pistol, shotgun, and power weapons are obviously good, but the plasma pistol has great accuracy and damage even with the primary fire, the plasma rifle stuns enemies who take sustained hits, and the needler is a great Elite killer if you have the positioning for it. Even the assault rifle occasionally comes in handy against Grunts or Flood.
A huge issue with this game is the difficulty balancing. Heroic is hilariously easy for some reason, with even high-rank Elites quickly melting to plasma pistol fire. Legendary has a lot of nice changes to health (Elites don't die instantly), enemy encounters (more enemies with higher ranks), and AI (dodges grenades and fire more often), but you also take tons of damage, especially on your shield. This makes it easy to get stuck on one health pip for long periods, which makes the game into more of a cover shooter, encourages the linear playstyles like plasma pistol overcharge sniping, etc. This could have been fixed by simply placing more health packs (occasionally this does happen, why does Keyes have so many?) or perhaps raising the minimum health value like Reach did. All that being said, if you are good at single-player FPS I would still recommend Legendary, or maybe Heroic with some specific skull combination.
Enemy design and AI (of the Covenant) is stellar. This is well-known and discussed, see here and here for some other people's writeups.
Flood, not so much. A melee-focused swarming faction is an okay idea on paper, but they don't have anything close to the Covenant's differentiation, AI behaviors, or health/shield tradeoff. Fighting them isn't horrible, but I'd be lying if I said I ever looked forward to it. Special dishonorable mention to the infection forms, which block checkpoints and are constantly a chore to clean up. Thankfully, many of your encounters with the Flood are in infighting scenarios where they can be toyed with or ignored.
The level design isn't as bad as most suggest IMO. It's less that they reuse environments, and more that a bunch of the missions are too long. Assault on the Control Room has you fight in the same room + bridge geometry 3 times, but they try to mix it up with different enemy compositions (especially notable: the bridge with Elites blocking your path while Hunters on the other bridge shell you across the gap). But there aren't enough unique ideas to totally sustain the momentum, and I suspect they would have had difficulty adding more.
Let me elaborate. There are broadly two styles of FPS enemy design. On one end is Doom, whose enemies are simple but highly differentiated, and form interesting situations with how they are placed and combined by the mapper. On the other is Half-Life and FEAR, whose enemies are complex but similar, and present new situations via the dynamism of their AI. Halo is great because its AI belongs to the latter school, but its enemy designs bring in much of the former's differentiation.
A side effect of this though is that the levels in general don't feel as distinct from each other as e.g. Doom maps might, since the enemies and weapon economy are less sensitive to small tweaks in placements and terrain. Halo 3 gets around this by using tons of setpieces, though this has the tradeoff of needing more budget and potentially feeling gimmickier (and 3 has the unforced error of worse fundamentals than 1). Perhaps they could have made more arena geometries, but I suspect the lowest hanging fruit was all picked, so the game should have just been a bit shorter.
After this playthrough, I'm comfortable calling Halo my favorite of the "dynamic AI driven FPS", (with classic Doom the king of the opposing style) and Halo 1 tied with 3 for my favorite entry in the series. Great stuff!
Honestly a lot better than I remember. I think the common praise and complaints about this game are mostly correct in kind if not always magnitude, so let me discuss some interesting specifics.
The Library is awful and you should skip it if possible. The campaign's pacing is significantly improved without it, it emphasizes everything bad about the game while downplaying everything good, Bungie devs have stated multiple times that it shouldn't have been shipped, etc. Everyone knows it's trash and I'm going to pretend like it doesn't exist now, moving on.
Weapon balancing here is my favorite in the series. Everything feels powerful and situationally useful. The pistol, shotgun, and power weapons are obviously good, but the plasma pistol has great accuracy and damage even with the primary fire, the plasma rifle stuns enemies who take sustained hits, and the needler is a great Elite killer if you have the positioning for it. Even the assault rifle occasionally comes in handy against Grunts or Flood.
A huge issue with this game is the difficulty balancing. Heroic is hilariously easy for some reason, with even high-rank Elites quickly melting to plasma pistol fire. Legendary has a lot of nice changes to health (Elites don't die instantly), enemy encounters (more enemies with higher ranks), and AI (dodges grenades and fire more often), but you also take tons of damage, especially on your shield. This makes it easy to get stuck on one health pip for long periods, which makes the game into more of a cover shooter, encourages the linear playstyles like plasma pistol overcharge sniping, etc. This could have been fixed by simply placing more health packs (occasionally this does happen, why does Keyes have so many?) or perhaps raising the minimum health value like Reach did. All that being said, if you are good at single-player FPS I would still recommend Legendary, or maybe Heroic with some specific skull combination.
Enemy design and AI (of the Covenant) is stellar. This is well-known and discussed, see here and here for some other people's writeups.
Flood, not so much. A melee-focused swarming faction is an okay idea on paper, but they don't have anything close to the Covenant's differentiation, AI behaviors, or health/shield tradeoff. Fighting them isn't horrible, but I'd be lying if I said I ever looked forward to it. Special dishonorable mention to the infection forms, which block checkpoints and are constantly a chore to clean up. Thankfully, many of your encounters with the Flood are in infighting scenarios where they can be toyed with or ignored.
The level design isn't as bad as most suggest IMO. It's less that they reuse environments, and more that a bunch of the missions are too long. Assault on the Control Room has you fight in the same room + bridge geometry 3 times, but they try to mix it up with different enemy compositions (especially notable: the bridge with Elites blocking your path while Hunters on the other bridge shell you across the gap). But there aren't enough unique ideas to totally sustain the momentum, and I suspect they would have had difficulty adding more.
Let me elaborate. There are broadly two styles of FPS enemy design. On one end is Doom, whose enemies are simple but highly differentiated, and form interesting situations with how they are placed and combined by the mapper. On the other is Half-Life and FEAR, whose enemies are complex but similar, and present new situations via the dynamism of their AI. Halo is great because its AI belongs to the latter school, but its enemy designs bring in much of the former's differentiation.
A side effect of this though is that the levels in general don't feel as distinct from each other as e.g. Doom maps might, since the enemies and weapon economy are less sensitive to small tweaks in placements and terrain. Halo 3 gets around this by using tons of setpieces, though this has the tradeoff of needing more budget and potentially feeling gimmickier (and 3 has the unforced error of worse fundamentals than 1). Perhaps they could have made more arena geometries, but I suspect the lowest hanging fruit was all picked, so the game should have just been a bit shorter.
After this playthrough, I'm comfortable calling Halo my favorite of the "dynamic AI driven FPS", (with classic Doom the king of the opposing style) and Halo 1 tied with 3 for my favorite entry in the series. Great stuff!
First Quake map I've played so far that really evokes the feeling of a great Doom combat map. Constant bombardment from Ogres that's difficult to contest keeps you moving and leads into hectic, freeform fights as you scramble for health. Awesome stuff.
2023
Edit 3/29/24: Reduced to 7. Too formulaic, especially in level design. Souls stuff continues to sour on me.
---
Probably the funniest game this year. A ridiculous dark fantasy Pinocchio setting is played completely straight and infused so deeply with all the modern Fromsoft trappings that it almost comes across to my bitter heart as parody. Everything from general game structure, to the level up lady in the hub zone you warp to, down to even individual animation cadences, is lifted wholesale.
If that's the setup, then the punchline is that Lies of P is better mechanically than everything it's ripping off. For a more exhaustive overview, check out this writeup, but let me throw some out myself:
* You can restore lost HP by attacking, like in Bloodborne, but only the chip damage from blocking
* The mana used for weapon arts from DS3/ER is gained by hitting enemies
* If you are out of Estus flasks, you can gain another by hitting enemies
* Enemies can be "posture-broken" through perfect guards and damage, but to actually trigger the downed status you must land a charged heavy attack
* Parrying and dedicated ranged weapons have been completely removed (these systems have always been broken and/or cheesy in Souls)
* Red attacks cannot be iframed or blocked, and must be perfect guarded or outpositioned
The general flow of the game is: perfect guard on predictable attacks that are easily timed, block or dodge when you are unsure, and try to outposition and attack when possible to restore guard chip and land charged heavies. Red attacks are a somewhat natural extension to this dynamic, in that they encourage you to anticipate them and get out of the way, which is really what you should be doing for a lot of attacks. There's no need to play this like a parry simulator, and the fun of the game is in trying not to!
The best examples of this are the large bosses, who generally offer a lot of options for getting in hits during strings. My favorite is the Green Monster, whose AI can be somewhat predicted based on spacing and whose attacks have a lot of different arcs and blind spots to consider, almost like a weird Souls-ified Valstrax from Monster Hunter.
That being said, this is still a Sekiro-brained game at its core; you've gotta be buying what they're selling, even if this is a far better implementation than its inspiration. Occasionally the devs will fully succumb to the evil whisperings of the Sekiro demon on their shoulder, and use heavy tracking and obtuse timings to force brute memorization. A few red attacks in particular (Black Rabbit eldest, Laxasia) earned disapproving glares from me for this.
I was going to comment on weapon systems, level design, etc. but honestly you should just read that writeup from before.
Let me make a general point about the Souls series. The selling point for me is their holistic quality: they do a bunch of things passably and a few things well, but combine them into a greater cohesive whole. Dark Souls 1 is an insanely flawed game, more than most would admit, but the way the world design, level design, resource management, and themes wrap into each other makes me willing to overlook a lot of issues. Later Fromsoft Souls-type games are frustrating to me because they place an emphasis on combat that the mechanics aren't strong enough to support, while either failing to improve the persistent shortcomings of other elements or outright regressing in them.
Lies of P is nice because it improves the combat enough to justify a Dark Souls 3/Sekiro balance to me, while everything else is at least good enough. Bosses in Souls type games are pale shadows of Monster Hunter fights, and player toolkits and expressivity are pale shadows of Nioh 2; I would even say those games are "better," because I value their excellence in those single areas enough to overlook their flaws. But Lies of P is a solid, respectable, enjoyable overall package that actually iterates on its inspirations. It's fun!
---
Probably the funniest game this year. A ridiculous dark fantasy Pinocchio setting is played completely straight and infused so deeply with all the modern Fromsoft trappings that it almost comes across to my bitter heart as parody. Everything from general game structure, to the level up lady in the hub zone you warp to, down to even individual animation cadences, is lifted wholesale.
If that's the setup, then the punchline is that Lies of P is better mechanically than everything it's ripping off. For a more exhaustive overview, check out this writeup, but let me throw some out myself:
* You can restore lost HP by attacking, like in Bloodborne, but only the chip damage from blocking
* The mana used for weapon arts from DS3/ER is gained by hitting enemies
* If you are out of Estus flasks, you can gain another by hitting enemies
* Enemies can be "posture-broken" through perfect guards and damage, but to actually trigger the downed status you must land a charged heavy attack
* Parrying and dedicated ranged weapons have been completely removed (these systems have always been broken and/or cheesy in Souls)
* Red attacks cannot be iframed or blocked, and must be perfect guarded or outpositioned
The general flow of the game is: perfect guard on predictable attacks that are easily timed, block or dodge when you are unsure, and try to outposition and attack when possible to restore guard chip and land charged heavies. Red attacks are a somewhat natural extension to this dynamic, in that they encourage you to anticipate them and get out of the way, which is really what you should be doing for a lot of attacks. There's no need to play this like a parry simulator, and the fun of the game is in trying not to!
The best examples of this are the large bosses, who generally offer a lot of options for getting in hits during strings. My favorite is the Green Monster, whose AI can be somewhat predicted based on spacing and whose attacks have a lot of different arcs and blind spots to consider, almost like a weird Souls-ified Valstrax from Monster Hunter.
That being said, this is still a Sekiro-brained game at its core; you've gotta be buying what they're selling, even if this is a far better implementation than its inspiration. Occasionally the devs will fully succumb to the evil whisperings of the Sekiro demon on their shoulder, and use heavy tracking and obtuse timings to force brute memorization. A few red attacks in particular (Black Rabbit eldest, Laxasia) earned disapproving glares from me for this.
I was going to comment on weapon systems, level design, etc. but honestly you should just read that writeup from before.
Let me make a general point about the Souls series. The selling point for me is their holistic quality: they do a bunch of things passably and a few things well, but combine them into a greater cohesive whole. Dark Souls 1 is an insanely flawed game, more than most would admit, but the way the world design, level design, resource management, and themes wrap into each other makes me willing to overlook a lot of issues. Later Fromsoft Souls-type games are frustrating to me because they place an emphasis on combat that the mechanics aren't strong enough to support, while either failing to improve the persistent shortcomings of other elements or outright regressing in them.
Lies of P is nice because it improves the combat enough to justify a Dark Souls 3/Sekiro balance to me, while everything else is at least good enough. Bosses in Souls type games are pale shadows of Monster Hunter fights, and player toolkits and expressivity are pale shadows of Nioh 2; I would even say those games are "better," because I value their excellence in those single areas enough to overlook their flaws. But Lies of P is a solid, respectable, enjoyable overall package that actually iterates on its inspirations. It's fun!
2021
In a vacuum, this game is pretty good: that's what you get for inheriting one of the best combat systems of all time. But as a Monster Hunter game, it's hard not to see this as a big misstep in 2023, especially after Sunbreak. In retrospect, Rise reads like a 5th gen regression from GU, which is insane considering how scattershot and unpolished that game is. Some of it is undoubtedly because of Covid development issues (they literally had to add the last fourth of the game in post-release), but a lot is fundamentally misguided.
Last year I discussed many of my problems in the context of Sunbreak, and those all still apply to base Rise, but with even greater severity in some cases. Some additional points:
The nicest thing I have to say is probably the structure, which streamlines by picking some low-hanging fruit (minimal gathering quests, skip some overlapping village/hub progression). Of course this is also undermined by annoying aspects like Rampage (a worthless dev timesink similar to Zorah Magdaros in World) and obtuse unlock requirements for Switch Skills which hinders experimentation, but on the whole it's probably the best in the series.
What's crazy is that copy-pasting the GU Hunter Arts system would have been significantly better than the existing silkbind system, in the sense that the separate meters at least prevents one imbalanced move from sucking the air away from all the others, as well as encouraging aggression through meter buildup by attacking.
Moreover, GU's quantity over quality approach in styles and arts arguably worked better in producing actually fun playstyles, just by trying so many things that some ended up turning out well. Nothing in Rise is as blatantly busted as Absolute Readiness in GU, but on the other hand none of the parry moves in Rise are nearly as well-balanced as Critical Juncture from GU.
The increase in parry moves in Rise (and 5th gen more broadly) also goes against a huge strength of the series's combat: dynamic defensive play. As I examine in this post, one of the remarkable things about MonHun is how the roll iframes are balanced against the size and speed of the hitboxes such that the timing and direction needed is situation-dependent. Parries and lengthy iframe moves such as LS's foresight slash subvert this by covering a variety of situations with the same input, which in turn lessens the need for good positioning in advance. (Small note of praise: it seems like the base iframes on the roll have been reduced in Rise, which actually makes sense as correcting for the trend of smaller and faster hitboxes.)
Adding wirebug movement is cool in theory, but in practice, it's really difficult to imagine how they could have gotten this right. A huge tenet of Monhun combat is how your offense and defense are heavily intertwined through positioning, and it's easy to see how powerful fast movement is if you play Insect Glaive or Hunting Horn. Changing movement presents a huge risk of either breaking the dynamic or not really doing anything. Rise wirebug movement ended up being the latter, where it's mostly limited to catching up to a monster, occasionally dodging a few attacks like Mizutsune beam, or moving around the map (which is actually super fun!).
The difficulty of the game has been discussed many times, but even putting aside systemic concerns such as restock and damage values, what's baffling to me is how so many returning monsters (ex. Rajang, Nargacuga, Tigrex) are effectively slowed down versions of their GU counterparts, in a game which has the least player commitment and highest average weapon mobility. It's even more blatantly obvious in retrospect, after most of these monsters got extensive AI reworks in Sunbreak.
Brief dishonorable mention to the Hunting Horn: for a weapon which has always had great gameplay but lackluster damage output, Capcom decided that the appropriate course of action was to totally redo the moveset from a long range poking weapon with weird attack angles and buffs to a spammy close range washing machine that my friend described as "something out of God Eater."
This is something that I mentioned already in the Sunbreak review, but funnily enough has become one of my top sticking points with 5th gen MonHun: the gamefeel. I'm no animation expert, so I can't give a detailed dissection, but the less snappy animations somehow give the game this strange syrupy quality. I genuinely don't understand how something like Surge Slash GS in Sunbreak, which is the best weapon idea MonHun has had in years, feels so awkward to use despite really not being that different from an old MonHun weapon mechanically.
For what it's worth, I find it difficult to imagine them iterating on this set of mechanics in the future. But I'm sure MH6 will have many, many problems of its own making...
Last year I discussed many of my problems in the context of Sunbreak, and those all still apply to base Rise, but with even greater severity in some cases. Some additional points:
The nicest thing I have to say is probably the structure, which streamlines by picking some low-hanging fruit (minimal gathering quests, skip some overlapping village/hub progression). Of course this is also undermined by annoying aspects like Rampage (a worthless dev timesink similar to Zorah Magdaros in World) and obtuse unlock requirements for Switch Skills which hinders experimentation, but on the whole it's probably the best in the series.
What's crazy is that copy-pasting the GU Hunter Arts system would have been significantly better than the existing silkbind system, in the sense that the separate meters at least prevents one imbalanced move from sucking the air away from all the others, as well as encouraging aggression through meter buildup by attacking.
Moreover, GU's quantity over quality approach in styles and arts arguably worked better in producing actually fun playstyles, just by trying so many things that some ended up turning out well. Nothing in Rise is as blatantly busted as Absolute Readiness in GU, but on the other hand none of the parry moves in Rise are nearly as well-balanced as Critical Juncture from GU.
The increase in parry moves in Rise (and 5th gen more broadly) also goes against a huge strength of the series's combat: dynamic defensive play. As I examine in this post, one of the remarkable things about MonHun is how the roll iframes are balanced against the size and speed of the hitboxes such that the timing and direction needed is situation-dependent. Parries and lengthy iframe moves such as LS's foresight slash subvert this by covering a variety of situations with the same input, which in turn lessens the need for good positioning in advance. (Small note of praise: it seems like the base iframes on the roll have been reduced in Rise, which actually makes sense as correcting for the trend of smaller and faster hitboxes.)
Adding wirebug movement is cool in theory, but in practice, it's really difficult to imagine how they could have gotten this right. A huge tenet of Monhun combat is how your offense and defense are heavily intertwined through positioning, and it's easy to see how powerful fast movement is if you play Insect Glaive or Hunting Horn. Changing movement presents a huge risk of either breaking the dynamic or not really doing anything. Rise wirebug movement ended up being the latter, where it's mostly limited to catching up to a monster, occasionally dodging a few attacks like Mizutsune beam, or moving around the map (which is actually super fun!).
The difficulty of the game has been discussed many times, but even putting aside systemic concerns such as restock and damage values, what's baffling to me is how so many returning monsters (ex. Rajang, Nargacuga, Tigrex) are effectively slowed down versions of their GU counterparts, in a game which has the least player commitment and highest average weapon mobility. It's even more blatantly obvious in retrospect, after most of these monsters got extensive AI reworks in Sunbreak.
Brief dishonorable mention to the Hunting Horn: for a weapon which has always had great gameplay but lackluster damage output, Capcom decided that the appropriate course of action was to totally redo the moveset from a long range poking weapon with weird attack angles and buffs to a spammy close range washing machine that my friend described as "something out of God Eater."
This is something that I mentioned already in the Sunbreak review, but funnily enough has become one of my top sticking points with 5th gen MonHun: the gamefeel. I'm no animation expert, so I can't give a detailed dissection, but the less snappy animations somehow give the game this strange syrupy quality. I genuinely don't understand how something like Surge Slash GS in Sunbreak, which is the best weapon idea MonHun has had in years, feels so awkward to use despite really not being that different from an old MonHun weapon mechanically.
For what it's worth, I find it difficult to imagine them iterating on this set of mechanics in the future. But I'm sure MH6 will have many, many problems of its own making...
2004
(Completed debt, game dropped afterwards)
Frustrating. Despite this being my least favorite Pikmin by far, I actually do see the gameplay vision, and the aesthetic is very charming! But this is simply not a game playing to its strengths, and filled with too many frustrations to list.
The most obvious change is that this game has no time limit. Pikmin 1's time limit was a non-issue if you were decently good, but its removal signals a shift away from time efficiency being the major driver. Okay, so what is the driver then? Well, the combat... kinda.
On paper, and to some degree in practice, this is actually a fine idea. Swarming controls strike a balance between immediacy and indirectness that makes positioning engaging, especially amidst the chaos that erupts while trying to aim thrown Pikmin, call stray ones back, and dodge attacks. Some improvements to the controls from Pikmin 1, especially around selecting thrown Pikmin, support this without hampering tactility too much, and the Pikmin 2 enemy roster is far more creative, challenging, and dynamic than 1's.
The problem is that the level design is consistently terrible at actually inducing these types of scenarios. Overworld stages are downgraded remixes of Pikmin 1 levels, especially embarrassing compared to Pikmin 3's Mission Mode. But the real meat of the game, the caves, is somehow even worse. This is some of the most dry, sterile procgen I've ever seen, almost deliberately placing obstacles to encourage slow, grindy, safe clears. Everything is mostly cordoned off into their own "handmade" rooms, so that you tackle enemies and hazards sequentially instead of simultaneously. Many "lock-and-key" effects like fire traps, poison traps, electric beetles, etc. are actually more flexible than they seem, but the player is given no impetus to ever use a non-matching Pikmin type save for rare, forced scenarios like Submerged Castle.
Speaking of Submerged Castle, shoutouts to the Water Wraith for being a fantastic (albeit very undercooked) addition, by reintroducing efficiency concerns in a natural and dynamic way that fits the style of the game and leaves lots of room for counterplay. Of course, this is Pikmin 2, so it's limited to this cave and never used again.
I have many more complaints, so I will phrase things a different way. The great version of this game as I envision it would do the following:
- Either revamp the overworld to justify its existence, or further minimize/remove it
- Generate caves that place varying threats in close proximity to each other, and everything in generally more dense and interconnected layouts
- Rebalance the game to avoid reloading floors and instead emphasize continuous resource management
- Allow most enemies to wander much further from their initial location
- Introduce a mechanic that incentivizes some efficiency, which will complicate treasure gathering and grindy playstyles
- Instead of creating sudden difficulty spikes through random events like bomb rock drops, use procgen, such as grouped difficult enemies, constricting terrain, high hazard density, etc.
- Vastly speed up the pacing of the game. Given the current quality level, half of the caves can be cut
If you put all this together, it almost sounds like a traditional roguelike or dungeon crawler! But this style of dense, systemically driven design is not something that Nintendo seems willing or able to make; BOTW/TOTK is the closest, and those games exist in spite of balance and structural issues.
What's shocking though, is how much the Colossal Caverns romhack resembles this, simply by squishing everything in the game into one giant, dense cave. Combat is more chaotic! Routing is more freeform! Resource management is more natural! It still falls short structurally due to its romhack status, but it's a testament to how much of the raw material is already present.
Ultimately, a disappointment. This could have served as a great example of seizing on the latent potential in a set of mechanics, almost like how classic Doom's combat was explored and developed, but Pikmin 2 is just too unfocused and inconsistent to make it there. Check out Colossal Caverns with a self-imposed time limit, it's fun!
Frustrating. Despite this being my least favorite Pikmin by far, I actually do see the gameplay vision, and the aesthetic is very charming! But this is simply not a game playing to its strengths, and filled with too many frustrations to list.
The most obvious change is that this game has no time limit. Pikmin 1's time limit was a non-issue if you were decently good, but its removal signals a shift away from time efficiency being the major driver. Okay, so what is the driver then? Well, the combat... kinda.
On paper, and to some degree in practice, this is actually a fine idea. Swarming controls strike a balance between immediacy and indirectness that makes positioning engaging, especially amidst the chaos that erupts while trying to aim thrown Pikmin, call stray ones back, and dodge attacks. Some improvements to the controls from Pikmin 1, especially around selecting thrown Pikmin, support this without hampering tactility too much, and the Pikmin 2 enemy roster is far more creative, challenging, and dynamic than 1's.
The problem is that the level design is consistently terrible at actually inducing these types of scenarios. Overworld stages are downgraded remixes of Pikmin 1 levels, especially embarrassing compared to Pikmin 3's Mission Mode. But the real meat of the game, the caves, is somehow even worse. This is some of the most dry, sterile procgen I've ever seen, almost deliberately placing obstacles to encourage slow, grindy, safe clears. Everything is mostly cordoned off into their own "handmade" rooms, so that you tackle enemies and hazards sequentially instead of simultaneously. Many "lock-and-key" effects like fire traps, poison traps, electric beetles, etc. are actually more flexible than they seem, but the player is given no impetus to ever use a non-matching Pikmin type save for rare, forced scenarios like Submerged Castle.
Speaking of Submerged Castle, shoutouts to the Water Wraith for being a fantastic (albeit very undercooked) addition, by reintroducing efficiency concerns in a natural and dynamic way that fits the style of the game and leaves lots of room for counterplay. Of course, this is Pikmin 2, so it's limited to this cave and never used again.
I have many more complaints, so I will phrase things a different way. The great version of this game as I envision it would do the following:
- Either revamp the overworld to justify its existence, or further minimize/remove it
- Generate caves that place varying threats in close proximity to each other, and everything in generally more dense and interconnected layouts
- Rebalance the game to avoid reloading floors and instead emphasize continuous resource management
- Allow most enemies to wander much further from their initial location
- Introduce a mechanic that incentivizes some efficiency, which will complicate treasure gathering and grindy playstyles
- Instead of creating sudden difficulty spikes through random events like bomb rock drops, use procgen, such as grouped difficult enemies, constricting terrain, high hazard density, etc.
- Vastly speed up the pacing of the game. Given the current quality level, half of the caves can be cut
If you put all this together, it almost sounds like a traditional roguelike or dungeon crawler! But this style of dense, systemically driven design is not something that Nintendo seems willing or able to make; BOTW/TOTK is the closest, and those games exist in spite of balance and structural issues.
What's shocking though, is how much the Colossal Caverns romhack resembles this, simply by squishing everything in the game into one giant, dense cave. Combat is more chaotic! Routing is more freeform! Resource management is more natural! It still falls short structurally due to its romhack status, but it's a testament to how much of the raw material is already present.
Ultimately, a disappointment. This could have served as a great example of seizing on the latent potential in a set of mechanics, almost like how classic Doom's combat was explored and developed, but Pikmin 2 is just too unfocused and inconsistent to make it there. Check out Colossal Caverns with a self-imposed time limit, it's fun!
2021
Edit: The developer ProjectMoon has been involved in an unfortunate controversy, which you can find details of elsewhere. Use your own judgement, but at the very least don't play a fucking gacha game.
---
This is a direct sequel to Lobotomy Corporation, before playing Library of Ruina you must finish that first or watch a story summary video! Also consider installing this collection of mods that fix bugs. (Mass Attack targeting change is balance-affecting and probably not needed)
---
Strangely enough, the video game that came to mind most when playing Library of Ruina was Persona 3. It's been many years since I played it, and I would almost certainly have massive problems with it now, but in theory there are aspects that I admire. The game takes multiple gameplay modes that are seemingly separate, and tries to frame them all around the core themes of malaise, time, and death to create a cohesive whole.
I recall Persona 3's final boss being a major high point of the game, but after going back and watching a video of the fight, it's clear just how much the combat system is holding it back (and a credit to the other elements which can pick up some of the slack). When you are limited to simple loops of attacking and healing, there's not enough space to evoke the kinds of different experiences that the mood and themes are calling for, and the monotony is even sabotaging the intended effect!
Library of Ruina is by no means perfect, and in a certain sense is less ambitious than Persona 3. But it executes that vision with far more craftsmanship, in a way that allows it to both function on a moment-to-moment level and integrate its elements together. Once again, as I mentioned here and here, mechanical and experiential appeal isn't a real tradeoff: on the contrary, they complement each other!
The most obvious improvement, and my usual area of "expertise", is the combat, and though my experience is limited, it's probably the best turn-based RPG without positioning I've ever played? (Someone I know with more RPG experience corroborates this) I suspect the reason is actually simple: instead of looking to other RPGs, they took inspiration from tabletop games (Source - Lobotomy Corp spoilers) while ditching a lot of superfluous structural elements like throwaway encounters and exploration that aren't central to the goal of the game.
Very quick mechanics rundown to give context, don't worry about understanding it all (also I'm leaving a lot of stuff out). You have 5 characters, each with HP, stagger meter, speed dice, light, emotion level, and their own hand and deck of cards. HP is self-explanatory. Empty stagger meter = staggered for the rest of the turn and the next one, which prevents taking any actions and doubles damage received. Speed dice are a character's "turns" to play cards and have a random number assigned each turn, higher goes first. Light is basically mana and is consumed to play cards, regain 1 per turn. Emotion level determines max light, mainly raised by clashing (more in a second). Hand and deck self-explanatory, 9 cards in deck, start with 4 in hand, draw 1 per turn.
Each card has a light cost and some amount of dice (example). Cards are played by assigning them to a speed die and targeting an enemy speed die. Enemy cards and targets are shown at the start of the turn, and higher speed dice can forcibly redirect the targets of lower speed dice to themselves. If two cards target each other's speed dice, then their dice clash, which means the higher roll uses its effect and the lower roll doesn't (in ties, neither use their effect). Example: if the above card clashed with this card, the above card would likely win and deal blunt-type damage equal to the dice roll, but there is a chance they tie or the other card wins and deals pierce damage. Clashing dice builds progress to the next emotion level for both participants. Cards can have multiple dice (example) which are rolled in order, and uncontested dice simply have their effects occur.
Apologies for vomiting the manual at you. There are obvious similarities here to tabletop games, of course (cards and dice). But more fundamentally, the game is about resource tradeoffs and options, in the sense of something like Magic the Gathering. Unlike Slay the Spire derived card roguelites, in Ruina, light/mana and cards in hand persist across turns, putting more emphasis on complex short vs. long term value. Trade cards for life and damage (use powerful cards to clash with enemy attacks), trade life for cards (take a hit and don't play anything), trade life for emotion level (take many clashes, some of which will probably be unfavorable), trade cards for light (play weak cards that restore light), and so on. The many timing-sensitive variables like speed dice values mean you'll be constantly having to evaluate the relationships and efficiencies of each opportunity within a turn.
How does this relate to all that stuff I wrote at the top though? Well, it's precisely because the mechanics are deep and solid that the game can actually make use of them in an experiential way. Abnormalities, the SCP-likes returning from the previous game Lobotomy Corporation, are a shining example of this. Fighting them is more puzzle-like than most encounters, and there is enough room in the possibility space for them to bend the normal game rules in idiosyncratic ways that evokes their characters and moods while still keeping you engaged with the fight itself. Pinocchio copies your cards while trying to sneak incorrect versions past you, the cannibalistic Fairy Queen tries to eat its own kind for health unless you distract it, and Little Red Riding Hood flies into a frenzied rage if you kill the Wolf before she can. Each fight emphasizes a different aspect of the mechanics, which feels viscerally different and allows you to actually connect that with the context! When this dovetails with story events, the result can be surprisingly immersive and moving.
This type of characterization should be somewhat familiar to anyone who has played around with a custom card generator, and reminds me of one of Magic's own famous city settings: Ravnica, the City of Guilds. Consult the Necrosages gives a window into the Dimir, focused on gaining and denying others knowledge in equal measure. Judge's Familiar shows how the Azorius's meticulous devotion to laws are used to obstruct others, for both justice and simple power-seeking.
Ruina often uses similar techniques to evoke its characters and setting through its cards. One of my favorite cards, Will of the Prescript, illustrates how the Index's acolytes strangely benefit (drawing cards) by subjugating themselves to its seemingly arbitrary dictums (only works if the deck has no duplicate cards).
Of course, much of this is resting on the story and writing itself pulling its weight. I feel very inadequate to discuss the story proper, but considering it's such a driving force in the game, I will try (in a spoiler-free way). Ruina is a game about the terror of humanity's reach finally meeting its grasp. Humanity as a collective could accomplish anything, but that collective is mediated by structures, and the structure of this world, The City, is both prosperous evolutionarily and nightmarish humanistically. Almost no one wants this, but fixing things would require awareness and sacrifice that is tantamount to reopening scars with a knife, and so the City grows. And if humans can simply modify themselves so their desires more deeply align with the vile rhythms of the City, then what purpose can such an anguished struggle really have? The question is psychological: what does one truly desire, what should one truly desire, and how can one bring themselves to seek it?
"The moment man devoured the fruit of knowledge, he sealed his fate... Entrusting his future to the cards, man clings to a dim hope." - Persona 3
"Use your own eyes to watch things as they are. Then you may see it. However, you will inevitably forget why you wished to see it once you reach that point. That oblivion is what creates anguish; that is why it is a tragedy." - Library of Ruina
"On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god... How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? ...In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years." - Borges, The Library of Babel
Though my experience is limited, I would consider this to easily be the best RPG in this style ever made. Hopefully that's enough of a recommendation for you!
---
This is a direct sequel to Lobotomy Corporation, before playing Library of Ruina you must finish that first or watch a story summary video! Also consider installing this collection of mods that fix bugs. (Mass Attack targeting change is balance-affecting and probably not needed)
---
Strangely enough, the video game that came to mind most when playing Library of Ruina was Persona 3. It's been many years since I played it, and I would almost certainly have massive problems with it now, but in theory there are aspects that I admire. The game takes multiple gameplay modes that are seemingly separate, and tries to frame them all around the core themes of malaise, time, and death to create a cohesive whole.
I recall Persona 3's final boss being a major high point of the game, but after going back and watching a video of the fight, it's clear just how much the combat system is holding it back (and a credit to the other elements which can pick up some of the slack). When you are limited to simple loops of attacking and healing, there's not enough space to evoke the kinds of different experiences that the mood and themes are calling for, and the monotony is even sabotaging the intended effect!
Library of Ruina is by no means perfect, and in a certain sense is less ambitious than Persona 3. But it executes that vision with far more craftsmanship, in a way that allows it to both function on a moment-to-moment level and integrate its elements together. Once again, as I mentioned here and here, mechanical and experiential appeal isn't a real tradeoff: on the contrary, they complement each other!
The most obvious improvement, and my usual area of "expertise", is the combat, and though my experience is limited, it's probably the best turn-based RPG without positioning I've ever played? (Someone I know with more RPG experience corroborates this) I suspect the reason is actually simple: instead of looking to other RPGs, they took inspiration from tabletop games (Source - Lobotomy Corp spoilers) while ditching a lot of superfluous structural elements like throwaway encounters and exploration that aren't central to the goal of the game.
Very quick mechanics rundown to give context, don't worry about understanding it all (also I'm leaving a lot of stuff out). You have 5 characters, each with HP, stagger meter, speed dice, light, emotion level, and their own hand and deck of cards. HP is self-explanatory. Empty stagger meter = staggered for the rest of the turn and the next one, which prevents taking any actions and doubles damage received. Speed dice are a character's "turns" to play cards and have a random number assigned each turn, higher goes first. Light is basically mana and is consumed to play cards, regain 1 per turn. Emotion level determines max light, mainly raised by clashing (more in a second). Hand and deck self-explanatory, 9 cards in deck, start with 4 in hand, draw 1 per turn.
Each card has a light cost and some amount of dice (example). Cards are played by assigning them to a speed die and targeting an enemy speed die. Enemy cards and targets are shown at the start of the turn, and higher speed dice can forcibly redirect the targets of lower speed dice to themselves. If two cards target each other's speed dice, then their dice clash, which means the higher roll uses its effect and the lower roll doesn't (in ties, neither use their effect). Example: if the above card clashed with this card, the above card would likely win and deal blunt-type damage equal to the dice roll, but there is a chance they tie or the other card wins and deals pierce damage. Clashing dice builds progress to the next emotion level for both participants. Cards can have multiple dice (example) which are rolled in order, and uncontested dice simply have their effects occur.
Apologies for vomiting the manual at you. There are obvious similarities here to tabletop games, of course (cards and dice). But more fundamentally, the game is about resource tradeoffs and options, in the sense of something like Magic the Gathering. Unlike Slay the Spire derived card roguelites, in Ruina, light/mana and cards in hand persist across turns, putting more emphasis on complex short vs. long term value. Trade cards for life and damage (use powerful cards to clash with enemy attacks), trade life for cards (take a hit and don't play anything), trade life for emotion level (take many clashes, some of which will probably be unfavorable), trade cards for light (play weak cards that restore light), and so on. The many timing-sensitive variables like speed dice values mean you'll be constantly having to evaluate the relationships and efficiencies of each opportunity within a turn.
How does this relate to all that stuff I wrote at the top though? Well, it's precisely because the mechanics are deep and solid that the game can actually make use of them in an experiential way. Abnormalities, the SCP-likes returning from the previous game Lobotomy Corporation, are a shining example of this. Fighting them is more puzzle-like than most encounters, and there is enough room in the possibility space for them to bend the normal game rules in idiosyncratic ways that evokes their characters and moods while still keeping you engaged with the fight itself. Pinocchio copies your cards while trying to sneak incorrect versions past you, the cannibalistic Fairy Queen tries to eat its own kind for health unless you distract it, and Little Red Riding Hood flies into a frenzied rage if you kill the Wolf before she can. Each fight emphasizes a different aspect of the mechanics, which feels viscerally different and allows you to actually connect that with the context! When this dovetails with story events, the result can be surprisingly immersive and moving.
This type of characterization should be somewhat familiar to anyone who has played around with a custom card generator, and reminds me of one of Magic's own famous city settings: Ravnica, the City of Guilds. Consult the Necrosages gives a window into the Dimir, focused on gaining and denying others knowledge in equal measure. Judge's Familiar shows how the Azorius's meticulous devotion to laws are used to obstruct others, for both justice and simple power-seeking.
Ruina often uses similar techniques to evoke its characters and setting through its cards. One of my favorite cards, Will of the Prescript, illustrates how the Index's acolytes strangely benefit (drawing cards) by subjugating themselves to its seemingly arbitrary dictums (only works if the deck has no duplicate cards).
Of course, much of this is resting on the story and writing itself pulling its weight. I feel very inadequate to discuss the story proper, but considering it's such a driving force in the game, I will try (in a spoiler-free way). Ruina is a game about the terror of humanity's reach finally meeting its grasp. Humanity as a collective could accomplish anything, but that collective is mediated by structures, and the structure of this world, The City, is both prosperous evolutionarily and nightmarish humanistically. Almost no one wants this, but fixing things would require awareness and sacrifice that is tantamount to reopening scars with a knife, and so the City grows. And if humans can simply modify themselves so their desires more deeply align with the vile rhythms of the City, then what purpose can such an anguished struggle really have? The question is psychological: what does one truly desire, what should one truly desire, and how can one bring themselves to seek it?
"The moment man devoured the fruit of knowledge, he sealed his fate... Entrusting his future to the cards, man clings to a dim hope." - Persona 3
"Use your own eyes to watch things as they are. Then you may see it. However, you will inevitably forget why you wished to see it once you reach that point. That oblivion is what creates anguish; that is why it is a tragedy." - Library of Ruina
"On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god... How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? ...In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years." - Borges, The Library of Babel
Though my experience is limited, I would consider this to easily be the best RPG in this style ever made. Hopefully that's enough of a recommendation for you!
Tears of the Kingdom is radically and unintentionally about intrinsic motivation. All the building blocks are placed right in front of you, but you'll have to assemble them yourself. This is nothing new for pure sandbox games, but TOTK isn't supposed to be a pure sandbox game! In its best moments, it harnesses this: even mundane challenges are an opportunity to spark creativity. In its worst, it resents this, and will fight your agency tooth-and-nail.
Most of the time, the game lands in an awkward middle: not outright controlling you per se, but holding the guiding reins with shocking determination. Say you're on a floating island with a crystal you need to deliver to a nearby shrine. Almost certainly the game will place a wing and fan nearby, reducing the whole situation to a classic Zelda "nuzzle" where the solution is just handed to you directly. I understand tutorialization, but the game refuses to trust the player even after hours and hours and hours of this.
This also undermines any sort of efficiency-driven play, since the optimal solutions (that aren't obtuse speedrun-style tech) are simple and/or universal cheesy tactics (e.g. object + ascend + recall). There also seems to be some sort of aggressive speed cap that gives strong diminishing returns to multiple fans/rockets/etc. which hurts the parts management aspect.
But, with all this said, there's nothing stopping me from simply ignoring the game and coming up with my own wacky idea that's fun and interesting! What if I tried to launch the crystal directly with rockets? What if I dropped something to the surface from the shrine, brought the crystal, and recalled it back up? What if I put it on a really, really, really long stick?
Once I accidentally lifted up a large floating platform too high to grab with my Ultrahand. So I took out all my weapons, glued them in a straight line, and managed to reach up high enough to fuse it to the platform and yank the whole thing back down!
These are some of the most joyous experiences I've had in a game. I can't praise the building system enough (despite some minor control issues) in how deep, intuitive, and polished it is. Much of my time was spent messing around in some random location, seeing what I could build that used the items and landscape around me. It's the only true sequel to Super Metroid that Nintendo has ever made: the world is a kaleidoscope of problems to be both invented and solved.
But what's bizarre to me is how so much of the game either refuses to acknowledge this or even actively resists it! One of the greatest experiences I had with this game was making the climb up to the Water Temple on my own, without any prompting. Finding strange and inventive ways to hop between islands as I climb higher and higher in solitude, listening to the quiet ambience and seeing the imposing structure above creep closer and closer, then finally breaking in to hear the Water Temple's song play. This was by far the most powerful experiential moment I had in both open-world Zeldas, and in retrospect mirrors much of the strengths of Fumito Ueda's work.
And then, I was greeted with a loud "DA-DING" error message from the central console of the temple. So I dropped down, completed a menial fetch quest so Sidon would come up to the island chain, then returned to the console. "DA-DING." I went back, talked to him on a different island so the game would flip the proper flag, then returned again and was finally allowed to progress. It's baffling how the same game can have mechanics that encourage such freedom and a structure that so constricts it.
Mostly though, as with my first example, the game settles for mere apathy. Shrines vary from stiflingly simple lock-and-key tests of specific parts to open-ended challenges that you could feasibly solve without knowing the intended solution. (Sadly, the former are far more common than the latter.) The Fire Temple's skatepark design was my overwhelming favorite, and the Lightning Temple shows glimmers of greatness, but the Water and Wind Temple feel like Divine Beasts, and on the whole it's hard to not be disappointed in the missed potential here.
The Depths has parts lying around everywhere and treacherous terrain to use them on, but is homogenous and bloated. Sky Islands offer small shrine-esque challenges that can be fun, but fall far short of the potential illustrated by the tutorial area. Most of the side quests I tried were fetch quest adjacent, but there might be some really good ones out there! Which speaks to a larger point: there's too much content that's too much like BOTW that's spread across too large an area.
Combat mirrors the rest of the game, and its problems go back to BOTW. The sheer amount of options offered by fusing is breathtaking, and the breadth of interactions in BOTW's chemistry system has been made far more accessible. But the balance is all wrong! You can feel the potential during the combat shrines, where stripping your items away forces a more improvisational style. But the games it's (unconsciously) looking towards have key differences. Halo's two weapon limit prevents you from hoarding ammo in advance, whereas in TOTK (and BOTW for that matter) you will collect random resources without thinking. Traditional roguelikes are stingy with items to incentivize crafty use of each one, but BOTW and TOTK shower you with powerful consumables and fusion materials. Arkane's immersive sims also suffer from these problems to some degree, but in those games the level design is as much your foe as the enemies themselves, while level design is perhaps the single greatest failing of TOTK. All of the above games aspire to differentiate their tools, and TOTK has a lot of ways to produce interesting and unique effects, but the most common and powerful fusion materials are simple damage increases, which scale into the late game far better than the creative ones!
Despite all I've said above, I wouldn't quite call the combat "bad" per se. The swordplay is somewhat entertaining, throwing weapons is a great risk-reward mechanic, and having to scavenge around mid-fight adds a lot. But the most fun thing to do is to play with your food: try weird effects and interactions (of which the Bokoblins are fantastically suited for!) instead of playing efficiently all the time. Freeze things and blow them off cliffs! Bounce enemies around with a mushroom spear! Start Bokoblin-Zonai infighting!
For being so brilliantly realized yet simultaneously sloppily crafted, TOTK earns the title of most bizarre game I've ever played. It almost has a romhack quality to it: making visionary changes in some areas while uncritically accepting so much of its ill-fitting foundation. I had many moments of joy while playing it, but all throughout, the game looked on with a disinterested gaze. No score.
Most of the time, the game lands in an awkward middle: not outright controlling you per se, but holding the guiding reins with shocking determination. Say you're on a floating island with a crystal you need to deliver to a nearby shrine. Almost certainly the game will place a wing and fan nearby, reducing the whole situation to a classic Zelda "nuzzle" where the solution is just handed to you directly. I understand tutorialization, but the game refuses to trust the player even after hours and hours and hours of this.
This also undermines any sort of efficiency-driven play, since the optimal solutions (that aren't obtuse speedrun-style tech) are simple and/or universal cheesy tactics (e.g. object + ascend + recall). There also seems to be some sort of aggressive speed cap that gives strong diminishing returns to multiple fans/rockets/etc. which hurts the parts management aspect.
But, with all this said, there's nothing stopping me from simply ignoring the game and coming up with my own wacky idea that's fun and interesting! What if I tried to launch the crystal directly with rockets? What if I dropped something to the surface from the shrine, brought the crystal, and recalled it back up? What if I put it on a really, really, really long stick?
Once I accidentally lifted up a large floating platform too high to grab with my Ultrahand. So I took out all my weapons, glued them in a straight line, and managed to reach up high enough to fuse it to the platform and yank the whole thing back down!
These are some of the most joyous experiences I've had in a game. I can't praise the building system enough (despite some minor control issues) in how deep, intuitive, and polished it is. Much of my time was spent messing around in some random location, seeing what I could build that used the items and landscape around me. It's the only true sequel to Super Metroid that Nintendo has ever made: the world is a kaleidoscope of problems to be both invented and solved.
But what's bizarre to me is how so much of the game either refuses to acknowledge this or even actively resists it! One of the greatest experiences I had with this game was making the climb up to the Water Temple on my own, without any prompting. Finding strange and inventive ways to hop between islands as I climb higher and higher in solitude, listening to the quiet ambience and seeing the imposing structure above creep closer and closer, then finally breaking in to hear the Water Temple's song play. This was by far the most powerful experiential moment I had in both open-world Zeldas, and in retrospect mirrors much of the strengths of Fumito Ueda's work.
And then, I was greeted with a loud "DA-DING" error message from the central console of the temple. So I dropped down, completed a menial fetch quest so Sidon would come up to the island chain, then returned to the console. "DA-DING." I went back, talked to him on a different island so the game would flip the proper flag, then returned again and was finally allowed to progress. It's baffling how the same game can have mechanics that encourage such freedom and a structure that so constricts it.
Mostly though, as with my first example, the game settles for mere apathy. Shrines vary from stiflingly simple lock-and-key tests of specific parts to open-ended challenges that you could feasibly solve without knowing the intended solution. (Sadly, the former are far more common than the latter.) The Fire Temple's skatepark design was my overwhelming favorite, and the Lightning Temple shows glimmers of greatness, but the Water and Wind Temple feel like Divine Beasts, and on the whole it's hard to not be disappointed in the missed potential here.
The Depths has parts lying around everywhere and treacherous terrain to use them on, but is homogenous and bloated. Sky Islands offer small shrine-esque challenges that can be fun, but fall far short of the potential illustrated by the tutorial area. Most of the side quests I tried were fetch quest adjacent, but there might be some really good ones out there! Which speaks to a larger point: there's too much content that's too much like BOTW that's spread across too large an area.
Combat mirrors the rest of the game, and its problems go back to BOTW. The sheer amount of options offered by fusing is breathtaking, and the breadth of interactions in BOTW's chemistry system has been made far more accessible. But the balance is all wrong! You can feel the potential during the combat shrines, where stripping your items away forces a more improvisational style. But the games it's (unconsciously) looking towards have key differences. Halo's two weapon limit prevents you from hoarding ammo in advance, whereas in TOTK (and BOTW for that matter) you will collect random resources without thinking. Traditional roguelikes are stingy with items to incentivize crafty use of each one, but BOTW and TOTK shower you with powerful consumables and fusion materials. Arkane's immersive sims also suffer from these problems to some degree, but in those games the level design is as much your foe as the enemies themselves, while level design is perhaps the single greatest failing of TOTK. All of the above games aspire to differentiate their tools, and TOTK has a lot of ways to produce interesting and unique effects, but the most common and powerful fusion materials are simple damage increases, which scale into the late game far better than the creative ones!
Despite all I've said above, I wouldn't quite call the combat "bad" per se. The swordplay is somewhat entertaining, throwing weapons is a great risk-reward mechanic, and having to scavenge around mid-fight adds a lot. But the most fun thing to do is to play with your food: try weird effects and interactions (of which the Bokoblins are fantastically suited for!) instead of playing efficiently all the time. Freeze things and blow them off cliffs! Bounce enemies around with a mushroom spear! Start Bokoblin-Zonai infighting!
For being so brilliantly realized yet simultaneously sloppily crafted, TOTK earns the title of most bizarre game I've ever played. It almost has a romhack quality to it: making visionary changes in some areas while uncritically accepting so much of its ill-fitting foundation. I had many moments of joy while playing it, but all throughout, the game looked on with a disinterested gaze. No score.
2023
I highly recommend reading House of Leaves. It's a very unique novel that's surprisingly quite funny at times. You will love it, or at least hate it in an interesting way. This WAD is fine, but it pales in comparison to the work it's imitating.
Edit 10/26/23: Changed to unscored. Feel uncomfortable with the work itself as unfiction, and its impact on the Doom community it draws on (from?) seems negative to me. Very unsure of my thoughts though.
Edit 10/26/23: Changed to unscored. Feel uncomfortable with the work itself as unfiction, and its impact on the Doom community it draws on (from?) seems negative to me. Very unsure of my thoughts though.
2017
I would recommend playing this game blind if possible, so before reading, know that I give it my highest recommendation, though I have tried to keep this light on spoilers.
---
Experiential games seem to have a troubled relationship with their mechanics. Most games I've played that aspire to convey deep emotions or truths primarily rely on techniques established in other mediums such as cinema and literature. While these are obviously powerful and effective, it bothers me that they aren't really leveraging their key distinguishing feature: their interactivity. Either the mechanics are clumsily grafted on to a tangentially related narrative experience, they only resonate along some dimensions, or they simply aren't engaging enough to hold attention. Even when a game does mostly succeed, it's hard not to see it as an incomplete realization of its own potential.
Rain World does not struggle with this.
Slugcat is simple to control on a basic level: movement stick, jump button, grab. But the influence of momentum, some intricate Mario 64 esque techniques, and a pinch of QWOP style soft body physics makes quickly maneuvering around uneven terrain tricky, especially with the heavy gravity. There's a real physicality here: you'll feel it when you scramble to clamber Slugcat's body over a ledge, or when your frantic hopping gets stopped stone-cold by a crack in the ground. Holding objects will weigh Slugcat down, which subtly changes the arc and height of jumps, and landing a spear throw on moving targets is easier said than done.
This is paired with a dynamic creature simulation that you'll need to constantly adapt to. A Lizard's bite is deadly, but their bulky bodies have even more trouble maneuvering than you do, and they'll switch focus if threatened by something else. Creatures eat and hunt and flee based on their needs and what information is available to them, something you can work around and exploit by pitting them against each other, or taking advantage of distractions. Death is common and can be punishing, but the yellow flower, which negates this penalty if you can return to where you died with it, rewards those who show caution and savvy.
This is simply to say that the mechanics in and of themselves are intrinsically engaging; there's a good reason this game has extensive modding and speedrunning scenes. But what makes Rain World truly special is its unflinching, all-encompassing commitment to its most central idea: inducing the experience of an animal within a natural world. Developer Joar Jakobsson repeatedly mentions in this interview that the game was conceived as a simulation foremost, with no special privileging of the player character within the game's systems. Every single mechanic exists precisely to push you to behave as an animal would: eating, fleeing, seeking shelter.
Bats flitter, lizards prowl, vultures swoop. Everything needs to eat, not be eaten, and hide from the inevitable rain; they roam within and between screens to these ends. Where a Slugcat fits in is simply a function of opportunity and happenstance. Almost all other games would make some sort of concession to "fairness", but not this one. Sometimes you'll wake up and find a lizard staking out your way forward; other times a usual hunting ground will be empty and silent. That's just how this world is: that's life.
Seeing animals wrap and squish around the terrain, pushed and pulled by their own muscles or outside forces through procedural animation, conveys a certain life-like feeling. There are fundamental physics in this world, even if they are different from our own, and everything must obey them. Struggling with the controls is reflective too: we are born unfamiliar with our own body, and grow into its capabilities with time and knowledge.
It's the game's tremendous success in immersion, only possible through holistic devotion to its goal, that allows it to meaningfully ask you questions about nature, and for you to feel those questions. Why is nature so beautiful? Why is nature so cruel? How much are we animal? What does it mean to be animal? What does it mean to be part of nature, and know that you are part of it? These are thoughts etched deep into our psyche across millennia, which have only recently been allowed to slip from our minds.
In some regions of this world there are colonies of tentacles that coat surfaces and feed by pulling in anything that comes near. Touch only a few, and you can easily rip free; touch too many, and you'll be swiftly sucked in. But touch a handful, and you'll be locked in a futile struggle: you're strong enough to resist their pull, but not strong enough to escape. For the game to immerse me so much that it's able to convey even an inkling of that real situation, of a doomed animal desperately trying not to die, is a monumental achievement.
The clarity of artistic vision in Rain World makes its predecessors look almost primitive by comparison. If there is any justice, this will be looked upon in time with the analysis and praise it deserves, among the highest echelons of the canon. For my own thoughts, it's simple: there is before Rain World, and there is after.
---
Experiential games seem to have a troubled relationship with their mechanics. Most games I've played that aspire to convey deep emotions or truths primarily rely on techniques established in other mediums such as cinema and literature. While these are obviously powerful and effective, it bothers me that they aren't really leveraging their key distinguishing feature: their interactivity. Either the mechanics are clumsily grafted on to a tangentially related narrative experience, they only resonate along some dimensions, or they simply aren't engaging enough to hold attention. Even when a game does mostly succeed, it's hard not to see it as an incomplete realization of its own potential.
Rain World does not struggle with this.
Slugcat is simple to control on a basic level: movement stick, jump button, grab. But the influence of momentum, some intricate Mario 64 esque techniques, and a pinch of QWOP style soft body physics makes quickly maneuvering around uneven terrain tricky, especially with the heavy gravity. There's a real physicality here: you'll feel it when you scramble to clamber Slugcat's body over a ledge, or when your frantic hopping gets stopped stone-cold by a crack in the ground. Holding objects will weigh Slugcat down, which subtly changes the arc and height of jumps, and landing a spear throw on moving targets is easier said than done.
This is paired with a dynamic creature simulation that you'll need to constantly adapt to. A Lizard's bite is deadly, but their bulky bodies have even more trouble maneuvering than you do, and they'll switch focus if threatened by something else. Creatures eat and hunt and flee based on their needs and what information is available to them, something you can work around and exploit by pitting them against each other, or taking advantage of distractions. Death is common and can be punishing, but the yellow flower, which negates this penalty if you can return to where you died with it, rewards those who show caution and savvy.
This is simply to say that the mechanics in and of themselves are intrinsically engaging; there's a good reason this game has extensive modding and speedrunning scenes. But what makes Rain World truly special is its unflinching, all-encompassing commitment to its most central idea: inducing the experience of an animal within a natural world. Developer Joar Jakobsson repeatedly mentions in this interview that the game was conceived as a simulation foremost, with no special privileging of the player character within the game's systems. Every single mechanic exists precisely to push you to behave as an animal would: eating, fleeing, seeking shelter.
Bats flitter, lizards prowl, vultures swoop. Everything needs to eat, not be eaten, and hide from the inevitable rain; they roam within and between screens to these ends. Where a Slugcat fits in is simply a function of opportunity and happenstance. Almost all other games would make some sort of concession to "fairness", but not this one. Sometimes you'll wake up and find a lizard staking out your way forward; other times a usual hunting ground will be empty and silent. That's just how this world is: that's life.
Seeing animals wrap and squish around the terrain, pushed and pulled by their own muscles or outside forces through procedural animation, conveys a certain life-like feeling. There are fundamental physics in this world, even if they are different from our own, and everything must obey them. Struggling with the controls is reflective too: we are born unfamiliar with our own body, and grow into its capabilities with time and knowledge.
It's the game's tremendous success in immersion, only possible through holistic devotion to its goal, that allows it to meaningfully ask you questions about nature, and for you to feel those questions. Why is nature so beautiful? Why is nature so cruel? How much are we animal? What does it mean to be animal? What does it mean to be part of nature, and know that you are part of it? These are thoughts etched deep into our psyche across millennia, which have only recently been allowed to slip from our minds.
In some regions of this world there are colonies of tentacles that coat surfaces and feed by pulling in anything that comes near. Touch only a few, and you can easily rip free; touch too many, and you'll be swiftly sucked in. But touch a handful, and you'll be locked in a futile struggle: you're strong enough to resist their pull, but not strong enough to escape. For the game to immerse me so much that it's able to convey even an inkling of that real situation, of a doomed animal desperately trying not to die, is a monumental achievement.
The clarity of artistic vision in Rain World makes its predecessors look almost primitive by comparison. If there is any justice, this will be looked upon in time with the analysis and praise it deserves, among the highest echelons of the canon. For my own thoughts, it's simple: there is before Rain World, and there is after.
Edit 12/27/23: Still stand by the analysis here but used a weird tone, sorry if you are a Sekiro fan :(
---
Also read Maddison Baek's thorough mechanical analysis. Huge thanks to those who helped with editing and feedback.
---
Just as Nioh was based on Dark Souls, Team Ninja's latest game draws from Sekiro’s shallow, reactive combat.
Souls combat, while often devolving into iframe roll timing checks, has some good fundamentals underneath that reward spacing, smart attack timing, and stamina management. Nioh's great triumph is adding systems (stances, ki pulse, enemy ki, breakable yokai parts, soul cores, burst counter, yokai shift) that accentuate these while opening up opportunities for dynamic decision-making and player expression.
In comparison, Sekiro's fundamentals are: deflect, deflect, deflect. It is a game where the answer to every threat is a single, optimal response (the parry/mikiri/jump), ultimately pushing it closer to a semi-random rhythm game than an action game. While that has a certain appeal in creating a simulacrum of a sword clash as a part of an experientially driven whole (it cannot be overstated how critically important FromSoft's art direction is to their games), these days for me the illusion breaks fast. It feels like everything revolves around those parry visuals and sounds; without the satisfaction of dynamic decision-making, there’s little else to latch onto in the moment besides the clang of a successfully timed button press.
In a way it's the shadow twin of one of FromSoft's other series, classic Armored Core. Those games lean almost entirely on selling you the sensation of piloting a giant mech, and like Sekiro, a critical component of this is the game feel created by real-time audiovisual feedback. However, in AC's case this is paired with nuanced fundamentals of movement, energy management, aiming, and staying out of enemy lock-ons. Not only does this avoid sacrificing player engagement, but the decisions themselves further reinforce that sensation. Hoarding ammo to help pay your mech’s repair bills and struggling to get to grips with a new mech’s handling idiosyncrasies are situations that both arise during gameplay and would intuitively occur as a mercenary in this hypothetical world. In this way, even through an experiential lens, decision-making is an asset to be harnessed, not a weight to carry around.
So how does Wo Long, a near-exclusively mechanically-driven game, salvage Sekiro’s combat? In a word: clumsily. Like Sekiro, parries are still overwhelmingly the driving force behind defense, considering blocking and rolling both have heavy spirit drain penalties preventing you from using them for long, and parrying gains you spirit while draining the enemy’s. Huge tracking on many moves, combined with rapid-fire strings that quickly break blocks and catch rolls, means that learning the (reasonably generous) parry timings is ultimately the simplest and most efficient option at the end of the day.
The major saving grace here is the offensive side: Wizardry Spells, Martial Arts, and aerial attacks allow you to proactively pressure enemies, and there is some level of interesting resource management reminiscent of Nioh 2's Burst Counter with how executions, weapon swap parries, and parrying red attacks clears your red Spirit. But the damage values are simply too low, and risk of being interrupted too high, to warrant using anything but fast/hyper armored moves (random MAs per weapon exacerbates this by hindering experimentation). Without the importance of spacing and risk/reward dynamics of ki underpinning everything, it's hard for me to shake the feeling that it's all done better in Nioh.
It's in group fights that I see flashes of not Sekiro, but Ninja Gaiden, and what this game could have been. The assassin enemies' aggression, mobility, and tendency to attack in groups is a reminder that yes, this is the same studio that created the greatest action game enemy of all time, the black spider ninja. Wind Path/Enemy Step isn't quite up to its old enemy-homing, crowd-controlling glory, but it's still a fun movement option with a useful stun effect. In the face of numerous overlapping enemy threat angles, the parry’s movement component takes on new significance by allowing you to simultaneously defend from one attack and position around others. Having to multitask like this also gives the parry more opportunity cost and risk, as well as a "mental stack" type difficulty that doesn't devolve into trained muscle memory. The Zhang Rang fight leans into this and was far and away the most fun of the lineup for me.
Ultimately though, Ninja Gaiden this is not, and the FromSoft influences still weigh it down. Maddison does a great job analyzing the weaknesses here (few structured group fights, lack of support role enemies, NPC helpers deemphasizing crowd control, no soft-lock for blocking or executions), but even if they somehow fix all of that, the Souls camera will still be a huge issue. Locking-on to a new enemy or even quickly changing attack angles frequently causes the camera to sweep wildly, playing unlocked is unreliable for aim (especially with no soft-lock for performing executions), and the close-up, behind-the-back lock-on angle means much of your field of view will be wasted while you struggle to keep tabs on multiple dangerous enemies behind you. Ninja Gaiden’s fixed camera and soft-lock system never had any of these problems, which allowed you to focus on fighting the actual enemies.
One-on-one boss fights are the game at its most Sekiro-like, and worst. There are occasional fun positioning and offensive tricks to use, but knowing that the main path to improving at these bosses is essentially memorizing arbitrary timings is deeply frustrating to me. It reminds me of memorizing flashcards for an exam in school, and is just about as joyless, even with all of their (admittedly entertaining) bombast.
Nioh 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, so it's disappointing to watch Team Ninja awkwardly stumble around trying to elevate the broken combat base of Sekiro that they started with. Ultimately, it’s on them: Sekiro was a poor choice to build off of from the start, and I get the sense that the devs were hoping for more time in the oven on this one. But it’s hard not to imagine a world where Sekiro wasn’t hailed as one-on-one combat perfected, and instead recognized as a respectable, beautiful game about visceral-feeling sword clashes made shallow, but accessible. I find it hard to see Wo Long being made in such a world.
---
Also read Maddison Baek's thorough mechanical analysis. Huge thanks to those who helped with editing and feedback.
---
Just as Nioh was based on Dark Souls, Team Ninja's latest game draws from Sekiro’s shallow, reactive combat.
Souls combat, while often devolving into iframe roll timing checks, has some good fundamentals underneath that reward spacing, smart attack timing, and stamina management. Nioh's great triumph is adding systems (stances, ki pulse, enemy ki, breakable yokai parts, soul cores, burst counter, yokai shift) that accentuate these while opening up opportunities for dynamic decision-making and player expression.
In comparison, Sekiro's fundamentals are: deflect, deflect, deflect. It is a game where the answer to every threat is a single, optimal response (the parry/mikiri/jump), ultimately pushing it closer to a semi-random rhythm game than an action game. While that has a certain appeal in creating a simulacrum of a sword clash as a part of an experientially driven whole (it cannot be overstated how critically important FromSoft's art direction is to their games), these days for me the illusion breaks fast. It feels like everything revolves around those parry visuals and sounds; without the satisfaction of dynamic decision-making, there’s little else to latch onto in the moment besides the clang of a successfully timed button press.
In a way it's the shadow twin of one of FromSoft's other series, classic Armored Core. Those games lean almost entirely on selling you the sensation of piloting a giant mech, and like Sekiro, a critical component of this is the game feel created by real-time audiovisual feedback. However, in AC's case this is paired with nuanced fundamentals of movement, energy management, aiming, and staying out of enemy lock-ons. Not only does this avoid sacrificing player engagement, but the decisions themselves further reinforce that sensation. Hoarding ammo to help pay your mech’s repair bills and struggling to get to grips with a new mech’s handling idiosyncrasies are situations that both arise during gameplay and would intuitively occur as a mercenary in this hypothetical world. In this way, even through an experiential lens, decision-making is an asset to be harnessed, not a weight to carry around.
So how does Wo Long, a near-exclusively mechanically-driven game, salvage Sekiro’s combat? In a word: clumsily. Like Sekiro, parries are still overwhelmingly the driving force behind defense, considering blocking and rolling both have heavy spirit drain penalties preventing you from using them for long, and parrying gains you spirit while draining the enemy’s. Huge tracking on many moves, combined with rapid-fire strings that quickly break blocks and catch rolls, means that learning the (reasonably generous) parry timings is ultimately the simplest and most efficient option at the end of the day.
The major saving grace here is the offensive side: Wizardry Spells, Martial Arts, and aerial attacks allow you to proactively pressure enemies, and there is some level of interesting resource management reminiscent of Nioh 2's Burst Counter with how executions, weapon swap parries, and parrying red attacks clears your red Spirit. But the damage values are simply too low, and risk of being interrupted too high, to warrant using anything but fast/hyper armored moves (random MAs per weapon exacerbates this by hindering experimentation). Without the importance of spacing and risk/reward dynamics of ki underpinning everything, it's hard for me to shake the feeling that it's all done better in Nioh.
It's in group fights that I see flashes of not Sekiro, but Ninja Gaiden, and what this game could have been. The assassin enemies' aggression, mobility, and tendency to attack in groups is a reminder that yes, this is the same studio that created the greatest action game enemy of all time, the black spider ninja. Wind Path/Enemy Step isn't quite up to its old enemy-homing, crowd-controlling glory, but it's still a fun movement option with a useful stun effect. In the face of numerous overlapping enemy threat angles, the parry’s movement component takes on new significance by allowing you to simultaneously defend from one attack and position around others. Having to multitask like this also gives the parry more opportunity cost and risk, as well as a "mental stack" type difficulty that doesn't devolve into trained muscle memory. The Zhang Rang fight leans into this and was far and away the most fun of the lineup for me.
Ultimately though, Ninja Gaiden this is not, and the FromSoft influences still weigh it down. Maddison does a great job analyzing the weaknesses here (few structured group fights, lack of support role enemies, NPC helpers deemphasizing crowd control, no soft-lock for blocking or executions), but even if they somehow fix all of that, the Souls camera will still be a huge issue. Locking-on to a new enemy or even quickly changing attack angles frequently causes the camera to sweep wildly, playing unlocked is unreliable for aim (especially with no soft-lock for performing executions), and the close-up, behind-the-back lock-on angle means much of your field of view will be wasted while you struggle to keep tabs on multiple dangerous enemies behind you. Ninja Gaiden’s fixed camera and soft-lock system never had any of these problems, which allowed you to focus on fighting the actual enemies.
One-on-one boss fights are the game at its most Sekiro-like, and worst. There are occasional fun positioning and offensive tricks to use, but knowing that the main path to improving at these bosses is essentially memorizing arbitrary timings is deeply frustrating to me. It reminds me of memorizing flashcards for an exam in school, and is just about as joyless, even with all of their (admittedly entertaining) bombast.
Nioh 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, so it's disappointing to watch Team Ninja awkwardly stumble around trying to elevate the broken combat base of Sekiro that they started with. Ultimately, it’s on them: Sekiro was a poor choice to build off of from the start, and I get the sense that the devs were hoping for more time in the oven on this one. But it’s hard not to imagine a world where Sekiro wasn’t hailed as one-on-one combat perfected, and instead recognized as a respectable, beautiful game about visceral-feeling sword clashes made shallow, but accessible. I find it hard to see Wo Long being made in such a world.
1997
Reminds me of Monster Hunter 1: lots of messiness and annoyances, but nails a shocking amount of fundamentals from the get-go.
The heart and soul of this game, and probably its strongest aspect, are the controls. This might be the best game I've ever played in capturing the electric dynamic of graceful movement flowing through rigid restrictions. Boosting fast, but turning slow: that's fucking tank controls right there. Dodging another AC's missiles while struggling to keep them within your lock-on field? Boosting yourself through the air and letting momentum carry you while your energy recharges? Dancing in and out of melee range without losing control? Good shit.
This is also a game that actually justifies having stats and builds, because everything has some impact on how your AC handles. There's walk speed, turn speed, flight speed, durability, energy capacity and recharge speed, lock-on distance and shape, mobility with heavy weaponry, and probably more. Also an area map, please buy a part with an area map and don't make the same mistake I did. The balance isn't exactly pristine, especially if you find the secret weapons, but it didn't get in the way too much for me.
This being a corporate dystopia hellhole and you being a mercenary, the main thing you'll be worrying about for a while, especially as a new player, is money. Buying new parts takes cash (though you can sell them back for the same price!), but so do ammo and repairs, and if you lose the mission then enjoy the pure minus on your balance sheet. And by the way, don't break stuff the client wants to keep unexploded: you'll be footing the bill there too. If you decide not to save-scum and roll with the punches, there's a great survival-horror-ish dynamic to trying to stay above water while the stakes keep getting raised.
The main pitfall is the mission design. I actually think the dungeon-crawler style they went with could have worked; "Kill Struggle Leader" is laced with traps and gave me that pleasant singed old-school taste. But sadly, most of the mazes just amount to a long series of hallways with a few weak enemies placed like breadcrumbs, which makes even zipping your tin can around feel tiring before long. Basic AI adds to the monotony since almost all these fights will be 1v1 or close to it.
A few solid missions in the mix though too, especially when the game has you fight other ACs or painfully shares its love of unexpected halfway twists. And the ending has some excellent "game design as humor" that gave me a smile.
Solid first attempt with obvious room for improvement. Man, it would be cool if this studio still made games...
Murakumo or Chrome? Who cares? I'm a Raven, fuck you, pay me.
The heart and soul of this game, and probably its strongest aspect, are the controls. This might be the best game I've ever played in capturing the electric dynamic of graceful movement flowing through rigid restrictions. Boosting fast, but turning slow: that's fucking tank controls right there. Dodging another AC's missiles while struggling to keep them within your lock-on field? Boosting yourself through the air and letting momentum carry you while your energy recharges? Dancing in and out of melee range without losing control? Good shit.
This is also a game that actually justifies having stats and builds, because everything has some impact on how your AC handles. There's walk speed, turn speed, flight speed, durability, energy capacity and recharge speed, lock-on distance and shape, mobility with heavy weaponry, and probably more. Also an area map, please buy a part with an area map and don't make the same mistake I did. The balance isn't exactly pristine, especially if you find the secret weapons, but it didn't get in the way too much for me.
This being a corporate dystopia hellhole and you being a mercenary, the main thing you'll be worrying about for a while, especially as a new player, is money. Buying new parts takes cash (though you can sell them back for the same price!), but so do ammo and repairs, and if you lose the mission then enjoy the pure minus on your balance sheet. And by the way, don't break stuff the client wants to keep unexploded: you'll be footing the bill there too. If you decide not to save-scum and roll with the punches, there's a great survival-horror-ish dynamic to trying to stay above water while the stakes keep getting raised.
The main pitfall is the mission design. I actually think the dungeon-crawler style they went with could have worked; "Kill Struggle Leader" is laced with traps and gave me that pleasant singed old-school taste. But sadly, most of the mazes just amount to a long series of hallways with a few weak enemies placed like breadcrumbs, which makes even zipping your tin can around feel tiring before long. Basic AI adds to the monotony since almost all these fights will be 1v1 or close to it.
A few solid missions in the mix though too, especially when the game has you fight other ACs or painfully shares its love of unexpected halfway twists. And the ending has some excellent "game design as humor" that gave me a smile.
Solid first attempt with obvious room for improvement. Man, it would be cool if this studio still made games...
Murakumo or Chrome? Who cares? I'm a Raven, fuck you, pay me.
2022
danbo's review is excellent, check it out too.
Partners-in-crime Ribbiks and Grain of Salt take a break from their usual challenge mapping antics to put out a platforming-only WAD that's, shockingly, one of the best platformers I've ever played.
I think the problem with most platformers that I've tried (though I don't play many) is that the movement has to be pretty damn engaging to warrant focusing the whole game around it. I found Celeste just okay (high heresy, I know) but I can attempt stupid pointless jumps in Super Metroid for hours because the movement feels so alien and interesting.
It turns out Doom's bizarro physics (Absolutely no air control + lots of momentum + straferunning) work pretty well for this too! On top of this, Ribbiks and GoS hack together a weird Archvile-jump-on-command whose explosive flinging properties heavily depend on your speed and direction. It's all very analog, and the whole thing takes a while to get used to, but that's the point: it's about the tactile feel of play, almost like Katamari Damacy.
Levels are very lenient with the difficulty and only require a fraction of the gems in each level to be collected before you can move on to the next one, so you can try different challenges if you get stuck, though I would have liked to see a few more freeform areas where you can just jump around. I would be remiss not to mention these two's fearsomely honed ability to create atmosphere in the Doom engine, especially the last 3 maps. It's clear that after a decade in the scene, they know how to use color, lighting, architecture, and MIDIs (Ribbiks composes here too!) in ways that work with the engine's strengths.
While I was writing this I loaded the WAD up to check some things, but got sucked in again without thinking. Honestly feels like SM64 more than any other platformer I've played. Recommended to basically everyone. An absolute joy!
Partners-in-crime Ribbiks and Grain of Salt take a break from their usual challenge mapping antics to put out a platforming-only WAD that's, shockingly, one of the best platformers I've ever played.
I think the problem with most platformers that I've tried (though I don't play many) is that the movement has to be pretty damn engaging to warrant focusing the whole game around it. I found Celeste just okay (high heresy, I know) but I can attempt stupid pointless jumps in Super Metroid for hours because the movement feels so alien and interesting.
It turns out Doom's bizarro physics (Absolutely no air control + lots of momentum + straferunning) work pretty well for this too! On top of this, Ribbiks and GoS hack together a weird Archvile-jump-on-command whose explosive flinging properties heavily depend on your speed and direction. It's all very analog, and the whole thing takes a while to get used to, but that's the point: it's about the tactile feel of play, almost like Katamari Damacy.
Levels are very lenient with the difficulty and only require a fraction of the gems in each level to be collected before you can move on to the next one, so you can try different challenges if you get stuck, though I would have liked to see a few more freeform areas where you can just jump around. I would be remiss not to mention these two's fearsomely honed ability to create atmosphere in the Doom engine, especially the last 3 maps. It's clear that after a decade in the scene, they know how to use color, lighting, architecture, and MIDIs (Ribbiks composes here too!) in ways that work with the engine's strengths.
While I was writing this I loaded the WAD up to check some things, but got sucked in again without thinking. Honestly feels like SM64 more than any other platformer I've played. Recommended to basically everyone. An absolute joy!