RPG

Trials of Mana Demo

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It is the beginning of my third day of remote work and I already have no clue what day of the week it is. In theory this should mean that it is Thursday, but I am also deeply skeptical that time still moves in the same fashion that it used to. The weirdest part about working from home is how phenomenally busy I seem to stay, because I am having to exert so much effort to keep tabs on everything that is going on as opposed to news just finding me randomly. I spent most of yesterday on conference calls for various reasons and I think for the most part things are working as intended. My crew, also working remotely appears to be successfully knocking out things so I think the experiment is more or less working.

My evenings on the gaming front have been completely all over the place. Yesterday during the day I saw that Trials of Mana released a demo, and more important than that one that allows you to continue your progress in the full game. I have been exceptionally excited for the release of the remake of this game, largely because I have been waiting to play this game for legitimately decades. Back during the Super Nintendo era there were two games that made me want to learn Japanese so that I could play them. The first of these was Final Fantasy V, which I have played through several times now as part of the four job fiesta and attempted to play an early fan sub during the late 90s on an emulator. The other of these was Seiken Densetsu 3 or as we eventually came to know it in the west Trials of Mana.

The fan subs for this game were always lagging behind because the game proceeds in a manner that isn’t exactly like its predecessors in the “mana” series. Instead of having a fixed party you choose three characters to focus on and then that dictates what sort of quests and content you experience along the way. I remember there being a “golden” path translation that allows you to play specific characters, but even then… the game required way too much horsepower to be able to run on a Super Nintendo emulator at the time I was messing around with such things circa 1997/98. After that it was filed away in my brain as a game I would love to play if I ever got the chance and was quickly forgotten about as I transitioned mostly into PC gaming.

In June of 2019 the game was re-released as part of the Collection of Mana, but at that same time was announced that a fully 3D remake was on its way. Instead of playing the original 2D sprite based game I decided to bide my time and wait for its eventual release on the Switch in all of its shiny new glory. As a result last night I legitimately played through the entire battery on my switch poking around the demo and I have to say I am fully on board with this game. I legitimately loved the “Mana” series back in the day and Secret of Mana is among my favorite Super Nintendo titles. I even enjoyed the quirky Secret of Evermore that I still think is a hidden gem among the Super Nintendo era titles.

So far I have to say that the transition from traditional 2D Seiken Densetsu gameplay works pretty freaking well. The combat feels good and fluid and the jumping mechanics are functional for both getting to aerial enemies and traversing the 3D set pieces. I am enjoying the scavenger hunt aspect of the world in finding all of the hidden treasure chests, glowing items on the ground and pots to smash. The world map is adequate and combined with the in screen messaging does a good job of directing you towards the objectives you need to be paying attention to. On some level this feels like maybe a throwback to the Playstation 2 era of Action RPGs like Dark Cloud, but with significantly better visuals.

The demo allows players to get to level 7 and I believe through the initial story of each of the characters you have chosen. I fully expect to play my way through all of that and then continue into the full release when it comes out on the Switch on April 24th. My hope is that I can get Animal Crossing out of my system enough to give it some free reign in a month when it officially is available. This game feels like I had been hoping the most recent Dragon Quest game would have felt like, which I realize doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than myself. Since I played the original game with the Sprite as my healer, the girl as a dragoon and the boy as a sword wielder… I figured going for Duran, Charlotte and Riesz was the closest I could get to that sort of a setup.

In other news that absolutely made the world feel better for a little while… we saw Tripod last night. For those who have not followed the blog for long we have a community of neighborhood cats that we feed. We have super original names for each of them, but the most important one to us is the three legged female calico cat that we refer to as “tripod”. We promise we would give her a proper name if we could ever befriend her and get her into the vet. She comes and goes irregularly and is also way the hell too stealthy to get caught on the front porch video camera. This is a horrible quality photo take from my wife’s phone, but after a few months of not seeing her and fearing the worst we saw her up on the porch going for the food dish. It does my heart good to know she is okay and has made it fine through the recent cold snaps. We have a feeling that both her and the cat we refer to as “three” are actually living in our backyard, but any attempts to locate where they are staying have been unsuccessful. I believe however that they might be living way down underneath our slightly elevated wooden deck.

Islands and Mars

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I figured this morning I would talk about a couple of things that I have been doing. I am not entirely certain how I stumbled across this game but I have been playing The Touryst on the Switch. Trying to solve a puzzle or two before bed time has sorta become my new going to sleep ritual. This is from Shin’en which are the folks behind games like the Iridium series on the GBA and Fast MX… so they are a studio that seems to be able to get lower end hardware to do absolutely phenomenal things. The Touryst is no difference in that the executable itself is insanely small and the load times are so snappy that you never feel like you are actually waiting on anything.

The gameplay concept is simple. You are a tourist on vacation on an archipelago of islands, each one containing a shrine that you have to figure out how to unlock. You earn coins by completing tasks and by finding them out in the world. These coins are then spent on upgrading your abilities, to give you access to new areas and perform new abilities like the ability to pull yourself up on a ledge or to dash. These simple abilities combine with visual puzzle solving and some minor platforming in order to craft a world of exploration and discovery that feels like you are always unlocking something interesting around the next turn. I am not terribly far into the game but I am definitely enjoying myself.

What I find the most interesting is that while each shrine ends in a “fight” with its Guardian… none of them actually involve combat. Instead you sorta have to figure out how to deactivate the Guardian through puzzle interactions and moving pieces around in the right way. For example moments after taking the above screenshot the cubes begin to link up and you have to figure out a way to break the lights in order to deactivate them. You can get crushed in the process… at which point the game starts over on the beginning of the screen that you failed on allowing you to rapidly iterate on ideas until you solve the puzzle. It is the perfect sort of bite sized interaction for me and my bedtime gaming, and if you are looking for a fun Switch game to tide you over until Animal Crossing, then I highly suggest checking it out.

The other thing that I partook of last night was finally buckling down and finishing Mars War Logs, another in the line of games by Spiders that I have been exploring. I’ve talked at length about the experience of playing a game by this studio but at this moment I have now played through Greedfall, Technomancer and Mars War Logs and they all have a lot of similarities. The biggest part is that they are a company with really interesting ideas that outstretch the technical and design abilities of the team involved. If you can handle an awful lot of quirk and oddity in your games, then the experience might be extremely enjoyable. I mean playing through Mars War Logs was no more kludgy than playing through Witcher 2 for example and suffered from a lot of the same design problems.

I was actually way closer to the end of the game than I realized in Mars War Logs, because in about an hour of game play I managed to get to the credit roll. I have no interest in playing down an alternate path, because I feel like I made the choices that make sense the most for me. Problems aside I found it an extremely enjoyable play through and the truth is I am going to play anything that Spiders releases in the future after having played through three of their games. They do something really compelling to me and I am not entirely certain I can put my finger on it. The best of these was absolutely Greedfall and there has been a clear improvement in quality between the games as they sorta try and tackle the problems they keep running into. They seem to release a game roughly every two years so since Greedfall was a 2019 release, maybe we will see something new in 2021.

Soviet Fallout

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The joys of being sick. I am sitting down to write this while taking a breathing treatment, though admittedly the sound of the nebulizer does sorta serve as a calming white noise. I am returning back to work today and while my asthma is still engaged, the actual influenza should be long gone apart from this damned cough given that it all started on leap day. During my periods of recuperation I have been trying to find various low key ways of enjoying myself while gaming, because my reflexes and ability to do anything that involves a lot of momentum went out the window. I wrote a lot last week about my adventures in the EZ Everquest Server, and I have not quite finished that but I did feel like I needed to venture out a bit more and do other things.

In my travels I stumbled across some patch notes for a game I had never heard of before. Atom RPG is an admittedly poorly named game, but it represents a nostalgic journey back into the era of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. I’m not sure if you have attempted to play those games recently, but they are a bit of a struggle to get into. They are way more sluggish than your memory of them would indicate, and I struggled quite a bit a few years back in attempting to get started once more in the first game. Atom on the other hand is the sweet spot for Nostalgia gaming… it plays like you remember Fallout playing with all of the modern trappings that make it tolerable for long play periods.

Fallout was a post nuclear war game focused on what happened to America after the bombs fell, and ATOM is very similar except it instead is placed in the civilization that came after Soviet era Russia. This serves to give a really interesting glimpse in how the other faction viewed the inevitability of nuclear conflict and what might occur to society after a great fall plunges us back into the dark ages. Interestingly enough the picture painted is one way less bleak than that of the Metro series. You play as a member of A.T.O.M. a pre-war military organization that more or less plays the same role as that of the Brotherhood of Steel does in the Fallout games. You are sent out into the wastes in search of what happened to a General of your order who was on a mission to recover some ancient tech.

During your journey you will cross a waste dotted with small settlements and all manner of curiosities presented very much in a similar fashion to which you might remember Fallout. There are random encounters as you cross the waste either on foot or later through driving one of a handful of automobiles that are available and that require a constant supply of fuel for which you need to scavenge. The game as a whole feels a little harder than I remember Fallout being, or at least the availability of weapons seems a little harder to come by for a long time. The first handful of weapons you come across break easily, but thankfully the game has a reasonable crafting system and I was able to keep making improvised shivs until I came across better options.

The part that I find most intriguing is all of the soviet era nostalgia that is included in the game given that it is built by a team of Russian developers. I love seeing this familiar genre through a different set of eyes, and a lot of the same tropes playing out in a completely different manner. As far as your party composition goes, you encounter a whole bunch of random characters in your journey. The first for me was a dog that you can in fact pet and befriend and later equip with some nifty armor. After that I encountered a writer that had been exiled to the Gulag before the war and was living a life of isolation walled up on a farm trapped in by giant spiders. After clearing out the spiders he announces that he is joining your party and provides a certain bit of comic relief.

Other companions you can pick up for an indefinite amount of time. One girl for example I saved from a bunch of slavers and she wanted to follow me for safety. You can continue adventuring with her for as long as you like, but I escorted her to the main city in the game and “released” her where she then becomes an NPC working in a bar run by another party member you meet along the way. You can keep checking back in on her to make sure things are going okay which feels nice. The writing is extremely good which is important given this is a game without voice narration and you have to be drawn into the text in order to stay engaged.

I am not sure how long this journey is going to last, but for now I am deeply engaged. It is a game with some rich factions that will be recognizable when viewed through the lens of Fallout, but with a decidedly soviet spin on them. The game also gives you some interesting examples of raiders that are not just madness induced murder machines, but are instead a sort of organized crime syndicate that you can opt to join. I am more or less playing the life of the wasteland hero, helping the downtrodden like I almost always do in a game like this. However there have been more than a few situations where things went south and I wound up having to fight an entire settlement. I am just going to hope those were bad guys, because they didn’t exactly give me much in the way of friendly options.

If you too are prone to fits of nostalgia, then I highly suggest checking out this game. Fair warning however, that if you do get stuck you are going to find yourself wading through a lot of Russian language pages trying to find some of your answers. Additionally the game supports mods but I am finding them prone to the same problem of needing copious amounts of google translate to understand, and as such I have not gone down that rabbit hole. The base game is less than $9 right now and the “supporter” edition with extra goodies is less than $13. Definitely worth checking out if you too have ever tried to go back and play the original Fallout games.

FF7 Remake Demo Thoughts

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Last night I finally made my way upstairs and played through the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo available on Playstation right now. I have a weird relationship with FF7, namely because I did not own a Playstation 1 at the time in which it was released. I desperately wanted to play it, but ultimately had to wait until the PC Port came out some time later. This means I played the game with the weird midi soundtrack… which was made better by the fact that I had a sound card with a Yamaha synthesizer in it but still not quite like the CD audio. I enjoyed the game quite a bit but it wasn’t the world changing experience for me that it seemed to be for everyone else. The game that really blew my mind was Final Fantasy VI because of the extreme depth it had.

Ultimately all I am saying is that I was not pining for a remake in quite the way the rest of the world seems to have been. That said I am excited to see the final product and get my hands on it, and quite honestly enjoyed it a whole lot more than I thought I would. The moment to moment game play is really enjoyable. The boss fights are less so because they seem to drag on forever. I am hoping that this game releases with a difficulty slider because I am absolutely cranking it down so that I can more or less just experience the story again in an ARPG shell without having to worry too much about doing the right thing at the right time. There were times when the slowing down time while taking actions worked… and then there were times when it felt like I didn’t have nearly enough time to react to incoming attacks that I was supposed to be dodging.

Combat feels similar to that of Final Fantasy XV and you have a basic attack, the ability to do some special attack or shift into another attack mode and then abilities and spells. The part of combat that felt really awkward was having to wait for your ATB Gauge to fill up enough to be able to input any action other than the basic attack. This meant I would have to wait around in order to be able to access the item menu and take a healing potion, which feels real bad when everything else in the game is happening in real time. Similarly it felt odd having to wait out before I could input a special attack or magic because I was not entirely certain what caused the ATB gauge to fill faster. Evasion and Blocking also didn’t seem to work like I would have expected them to work. When you block an attack it still deals a sizable amount of damage through the block, and evasion seems to be super hit and miss if you are going to actually successfully roll out of the way of an attack.

The other negative is that on a baseline PS4, the textures were fading in and out of focus causing some moments of the game-play to look pretty ugly. I am lamenting the fact that this is going to be one of those one year exclusives for PlayStation and that I won’t simply be able to play it on my preferred platform of choice… aka my PC on day one. This game would look amazing with glorious 4k 60 fps treatment, and I am somehow doubting that the PS4 Pro even is going to be able to run it at that. I’ve held off on getting a Pro because it never really seemed like that big of a leap in either performance or graphics. Now I am on the fence as to if I play the game this year or wait until next year and pick it up on the PC.

Like I said before I think this is the sort of game that I will want to be playing on Story Mode. I don’t care to learn the nuances of this action combat system, and fighting anything other than trash mobs seems to take forever. The game does support a classic mode which is turn based, which might feel better when it comes to those tankier fights. However I think I would rather just run through on a lower difficulty and have fun slashing things to pieces with my buster sword rather than fiddling with more detailed combat. I am absolutely not a gamer that cares about the difficulty of games, and I tend to play them for a fun escape from my hectic real life rather than something I am doing to prove some nonsense to myself. I am the polar opposite of a competitive gamer and I am fine with my scrub status. I did however beat the demo and now I am on the fence if I order for PS4 or wait it out.