The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild & Climbing and Freedom

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

An open world game is at its best when it makes the player feel like they can go anywhere and do anything. They should feel completely open to the fun of the player. While open world games are not my favorite genre, I do enjoy them. I’ve especially liked the Fallout series, Witcher 3, Horizon: Zero Dawn to name a few, one thing all these games have in common is that I tend to get stuck on things. Whether it be on a piece of furniture in a building, a sign next to a wall outside, or simply a hole I could climb out of, I have gotten stuck on something or in some place where I had to fast travel out.

I was thinking about this issue many AAA open world games have as I recently replayed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and I realized this issue never occurred in that game. While it’s not my favorite game, I would be foolish to argue that it’s not a masterpiece. It’s a beautiful, pain-painstakingly crafted world that the player is set out into to explore. It manages to feel so much bigger than most other open world games. With much more freedom to the player and with more fun to be had in it, it feels more alive and moving than other games in the genre. This is due, in large part, to Nintendo deciding that the player should have the freedom to climb on particularly everything they see.

Breath of the Wild wasn’t the first Zelda game to introduce climbing, but it was the game to take it to its logical conclusion. In Breath of the Wild, Link can climb any surface, besides ceilings and the walls of shrines, as long as he has stamina left, which is indicated by a green wheel next to the character. This means the player can climb anything their heart desires: walls, mountains, trees, houses, flag poles, etc. This is the best part of the game for a multitude of reasons.

As the player plays through the game, completing shrines and collecting spirit orbs, they can increase their max stamina. This means that Nintendo had a way of subtly guiding the player through Hyrule at the start of their journey without any walls or locking areas off the map. Some mountains might be too high to climb with Link’s current stamina, encouraging the player to find a way around them, while things like towers, high hills, and flag poles are the best place for scoping out shrines and other points of interest. This guides the player with an invisible hand. It leads them away and around certain tall structure but towards others needed to get the lay of the land. The high mountains also hide some of the tougher mini bosses and harsher climates that require more preparation to deal with. It is smart to block new players from these challenges and let them discover them later in the game. It’s no wonder then that the fiery Death Mountain and frigid home of the Ritos are located in the north of Hyrule, the furthest areas away from where the player starts their journey.

When I said that some mountains are too high to climb in the early game, that’s not exactly true. There are a few small things the player can to ensure they can climb any height from the beginning of the game. First, and the more obvious one, is food. Some foods in Breath of the Wild can give Link extra buffs along with healing his damage. Some can provide extra stealth or defense while others can even increase the speed in which Link climbs and can replenish his stamina. A good combination of these food items will ensure Link can climb to the top of anything as long as the player has cooked enough food. The second thing a player can do to regain stamina while climbing is just stand. You can usually find little nooks in mountains cliffs that Link can stand on to regain stamina. This is trickier as a lot of time the places you can stand are extremely hard to find with only a slight difference in angle of the mountain side dictating where you can and can not stand. I’m not sure if this was an intentional decision on the developers part or not, but it reminds me of other small, secret techniques in Nintendo games they don’t show the player, but can help break the game. The most notable example of this is the bomb game in Super Metroid.

These ways to refill Link’s stamina to climb seemingly impossible mountains is important to Breath of the Wild because it adds the aspect that the game is best at: freedom. Simply put, Breath of the Wild is the most free and open open world games that’s ever been made. Being able to climb everything gives the world a true go anywhere, do anything feel. I was honestly surprised by how much the game still felt fresh during a replay. Climbing opens up an infinite number of subtly different paths the player can take that I traveled to Kakariko Village on my second playthrough taking a completely different route than my first.

Breath of the Wild’s is not the largest world in all of video games, but it damn well feels like it. That is do to the freedom climbing offers to the player. With games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, you know that some chunks of the map are inaccessible, be it behind an impenetrable mountains or buildings the layer can’t actually go into. There’s no areas like that in Breath of the Wild because, with the ability to climb everything, the player knows that every mountain is another vantage point, every ruin wall can be scurried over and hidden behind when a Guardian is aiming its beam at you, every flag pole or tall pillar could be hiding secrets at the top. There is nothing standing in the player’s way because they can just climb over it.

There is one area that the game takes away your ability to climb and that’s in the shrines. These shrines are scattered around Hyrule and act as tests to the players. Most are puzzle shrines which test the player’s ability to use the Seika Slate and other tools to solve problems. While these puzzles often don’t have just one way to solve them, they are more linear than the overworld, more focused and designed to test the player in a specific way. Naturally then, Link is unable to climb the walls in the shrines because most would be broken by that ability. I always find it telling what ability developers of games find important, or even overpowered, by what they will limit or take away to crank up the challenge. The reward for completing a shrine is a spirit orb, four of which can be exchanged for a heart or stamina piece, increasing health or stamina respectively. It’s no surprise that in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild increasing stamina is an equal reward to increasing health. 

Limbo – Critical Miss #6

/ atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

Independently developed games have been around nearly as long as video games have existed, but they really came into their own through the mid 2000’s to the early 2010’s. Games like Cave Story, Braid, and Super Meat Boy all helped establish indie games as a source of excellent titles. Even Minecraft, one of the most successful and popular games ever made, was an indie game developed by the tiny studio Mojang. Indie games have been a fascination of mine ever since my reintroduction to video games around 2014. In fact, Cave Story + was one of the first games I bought on my 3DS. One indie game I always heard a massive amount of praise for was Limbo, but I only recently sat down to play through it.

Limbo was the poster child of early 2010’s indie games. Developed by Playdead with a team of around 8 people, it emphasized a striking art style and atmospheric storytelling while cutting gameplay down to its core. I came out in 2010 to instant critical acclaim and was the indie darling of that year. Being a platformer, it was a very familiar style of game, but one that was done so differently and artistically that people took notice.

Limbo is focused to a laser point. It gets rid of everything unnecessary to the game, leaving only two actions for the player to do besides moving the character: jump and interact, which means either pushing/pulling an item or hitting a button. Everything single thing and mechanic in the game revolves around these two actions. The anti-gravity affects how and where the boy will jump, a bear trap might need to be pulled into the path of a murderous spider leg or a box pushed to climb pass a high ledge, the section were the level rotates around the boy moving the layout of the platforms constantly, making the timing for jumps constantly changing. 

This strong focus is Limbo’s greatest strength because it extends out of the gameplay and into the presentation. The art style is the first thing any new player will notice about the game. Limbo’s visuals use only light, shadows, and the shades of grey found between. This style shows the character and the world around them as silhouettes from distant light and helps builds the bleak atmosphere of the game. The world the boy must travel through is utterly indifferent except when it wants him dead. It forms an oppressive loneliness around the player that sticks with them well after the game is over. Personally, the loneliness of the atmosphere is what affected me most about Limbo and what I continued swirling around in my head when thinking about the game because the Limbo seems to actively work to make the player dislike it.

The puzzle solving loop of the game relies heavily on trial and error. Nearly all the puzzles and platforming challenges in the game are close to impossible to solve on the first try, either due to very strict platforming timing or some of the pieces of a puzzle being obtuse without the player dying first. Trial and error gameplay has always been a touchy subject for games as it often seems unfair to the player, who couldn’t predict an obstacle until it’s killed them. Limbo can be frustrating with its trail and error design, especially when the player is expected to interact with a new mechanic they have no idea how it will act, but it doesn’t hurt the overall experience too much. Death, for one, is always interesting since the boy’s body will rag-doll and react to the game’s physics engine and respawning is extremely quick, meaning the player doesn’t have to wait to play the game after an unfair death. Secondarily, the trial and error design feels intentionally hostile to the player themselves and this helps with the atmosphere of dread and oppression. Ultimately I believe gameplay should come absolute first for any game, but I begrudgingly respect Limbo for sacrificing smooth gameplay to heighten atmosphere.

The first half of Limbo is the stronger one. The moment the player is sunk into the game’s world and take in the bleak landscape around them is one of the most off putting in gaming, the blurry outlines of shapes in the background looking like they’re about to jump out at the player at any second. The game feels like a horror game at first, with a giant spider trying to hunt the boy throughout much of the first half and a strange group of people trying to impede your progress forward. 

By the second half of the game, though, much of the horror for the forest is gone and replaced with more physics-based puzzles of the industrial area. The player will have to explore run-down buildings with electric signs, buzzsaws, and machine gun turrets that never truly feel like they belong to the world in which the player explores. More frustrating, though, is that the puzzles become much more strict. It’s only natural for puzzles in a puzzle game to get more challenging as the game progresses, but they would be expected to add difficulty by making the puzzles trickier or require more thought and exploration of the surrounding area. In Limbo’s case, the difficulty is increased by narrowing the margin for error. Timing to move boxes or complete a task will rely on frames of timing and platforming challenges often come down to pixels between success and missing a swinging rope needed to pass. I was nestled in for a slow, puzzle solving game and was not prepared for platforming challenges later in the game.

Even with these issues in the game, however, Limbo is still good, but I have trouble deciding whether I think it’s great or not. My opinion of the game wavers between loving the game and thinking it is fine. Moments like the spider chase and the section where the player rotates the area around them are great, but the frustration felt with some of the later, stricter puzzles means I not itching to replay Limbo anytime soon. The thing I know for sure, though, is that I respect the hell out of Limbo for it’s tight focus on core elements and it’s willingness to emphasize atmosphere over everything else. These are choices not often seen in games by AAA studios and is the reason I can easily recommend Limbo, and independent gaming in general.

Mega Man X & Level Interconnectivity

/ atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

I first played Mega Man X about a year ago and I had fun with, but when I recently replayed, I had an absolute blast. It was thrilling to dash jump pass enemies and using boss weapons to dispatch of enemies enemies. It’s the type of game that warrants multiple playthroughs after the player get used to the stiff controls and learns the layout of the levels, which can be tricky the first time with obnoxious enemy placement and hazards. The game is very replayable since the levels can be competed in any order and the upgrades collected along the way will help makes certain parts easier. There is a great sense of interconnectivity between the levels, but there is one smart aspect of the design on Mega Man X that is criminally underutilized.

First, I want to discuss boss weapons. The most basic and obvious benefit of  boss weapons is that every boss is weak to a certain weapon. This has been a staple of the franchise since the very first Mega Man released on the NES in 1987. This directly guides the player, who will most likely want to go against the boss who’s weakest against the weapon they just acquired, but there are also more subtle ways these weapons incentivise players to complete levels. 

Some basic enemies throughout the levels are easier to beat with certain boss weapons. The turtles and sea dragon mini bosses in Launch Octopus’s level die in a snap with the Storm Tornado acquired from Storm Eagle and Boomer Kuwanger’s Boomerang Cutter is useful against the Hoganmer enemies whose shields will block every projectile coming from the front. This helps experienced players choose what level to play next if they have a good idea of what enemies to expect and nudges newer player to experiment with weapons to see what works best. It also works as a guide similar to how it was handled in the older NES Mega Man games where it was sometimes best move to a different level if an obstacle or enemy was too tough because there was probably a weapon or upgrade in another level that will make it much easier, like the Magnet Beam in the original Mega Man.

During my most recent playthrough, I wanted to get the Buster upgrade as early as possible. To do so, I got the helmet upgrade from Storm Eagle’s stage and then went to Flame Mammoth’s stage. It was interesting to see that the levels were set up in such a way that both the helmet upgrade to break the blocks to the Buster upgrade and the effective weapon against Flame Mammoth were found Storm Eagle’s stage. Since I started with Storm Eagle, instead of Chill Penguin as usual, I also remembered that Flame Mammoth’s level is supposed to have fire throughout the stage.

Chill Penguin’s stage is the easiest Mega Man X stage and it is also where you get the most important upgrade: the leg’s upgrade, which lets you perform a short, quick dash. This upgrade is so useful and important to the game, that the developer’s didn’t even hide it in the stage. It’s right in the open on the only route through the level. I believe that the creators of the game intended Chill Penguin to be the first stage of the ideal playthrough because it is relatively easy with one of the most simple bosses in the game to defeat, there’s an important upgrade that impossible to miss, and it even has a new feature to the series being the ride armor. Another interesting thing that happens after defeating Chill Penguin is that the rivers of fire in Flame Mammoth’s stage completely freeze over.

There are a number of ripple effects that defeating certain bosses will have on other stages in the game and they are the most interesting thing about Mega Man X. Most notably of these is when defeating Storm Eagle. The boss fight takes place on top of an airship and, after defeating the boss, the ship comes crashing down onto Spark Mandrill’s level. This cuts off the electrical currents running through the floor in the beginning of the level  but also causes blackouts later in the level that momentarily hide the bottomless pits. Another example of this would be defeating Launch Octopus and flooding a pit in Sting Cameleon’s stage, which is needed for a health upgrade. 

These changes based on boss defeats show a lot of interconnectivity between the level and not only helps to encourage replayability, but also makes the world of Mega Man X feel alive and functioning. It feels like the world exists without the player, like it’s a clock with its gears turning to keep it ticking, and that the player is actually disrupting the natural pace. It’s a very uncommon feeling for a SNES action, in my experience, and is more akin to an epic RPG like Chrono Trigger.

While these changes across levels are brilliant, they are sadly underutilized. There really aren’t that many examples of them in the game. In fact, I named the three biggest ones in this post. I would have loved to see more like if defeating Flame Mammoth caused the trees in Sting Chameleon’s level to be on fire, exposing new enemies and making the player dodge periodic stampedes of frighten robots. Or is beating Spark Mandrill electrified the ocean in Launch Octopus’s stage, making the water dangerous and creating a more standard platforming level above the surface of the sea.

Mega Man X is a game I love and is a perfect example of why sometimes leaving the player wanting more is the smart option. While the interactions between levels due the boss weapons and stage changes give the game great replayable and help it feel alive, it’s hard not to want every boss defeated to affect the overall game in some way. The effects of defeating bosses like Chill Penguin and Storm Eagle are great, but they are so few and underutilized, it leaves the player wanting more in the best way. If nothing else, this is an aspect of the first game for Capcom to expand on if they ever make Mega Man X 9. 

Resident Evil (Remake) – Critical Miss #5

Featured / atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

The Resident Evil remake for the Gamecube is an interesting case in video games. It’s one of the few game remakes that is widely considered to be just as good, if not better, than the original. The original game came out for the Playstation in 1996 and was a landmark title for the survival horror genre. The remake came out in 2002 and fined tuned the original game to near perfection while adding minor difference to surprise players of the original title. 

The Spencer mansion in which the majority of the game takes place is a giant puzzle box you solve from the inside out. The main gameplay loop of Resident Evil is exploring the mansion to find items or keys that open up new areas to explore. With this design, the mansion slowly blooms open. The game is very good at indirectly leading the player by limiting where they can go. In the opening, you only have a few rooms to explore before you find the sword key and then you have another limited amount of rooms to search until you find the next key or item for a puzzle that’ll unlock new areas. This heightens the sense that you are investigating the mansion and uncovering its terrible secrets as you play.

While some rooms in the mansion tend to blur together, like the multiple bathrooms or balconies, most are very distinct with different designs or set pieces. This is a smart way for the game to help the player remember where they might need to go in the late game when the entire mansion is open and sprawling. Another thing that helps lead the players in the late game is the map itself which always shows what rooms that all the items have been found in. If a room on the map is green, everything has been found. However, if a room is red that means something is still to be found and it’s worth a second look. This leads the player while backtracking throughout the game, which is something you’ll do a lot.

Two complaints I hear about the Resident Evil remake, after they made the original’s tank controls optional, are backtracking and the inventory management. With inventory management, I understand the complaints. Each character has limited item slots, six for Chris and eight for Jill, and that is the max number of items you can carry at a time. So If you find a room with an important item you need to progress but your inventory is full, you need to go back to a safe room with an item box to drop some stuff off before returning to the room to collect the item you need. While this can be very annoying, I personally liked the limited inventory. I’ve always had a soft spot for inventory management mechanics in game and I starting seeing it in Resident Evil as a puzzle in itself.

The backtracking never really bothered me either. The game is designed around by having the mansion interconnected with paths opening up that make traversing it rather easy. The games leaves it up to the player to learn these paths, which can be frustrating in the early game when the mansion isn’t completely etched into the player’s mind, but after a while they will be as familiar with the Spencer mansion as they are with their own home. The backtracking will ensure of this.

There are other areas of the game to explore besides the Spencer mansion. Throughout the game you will search through the courtyard and a guest house on the grounds, run through an aqueduct system with sharks and abandoned mines where the terrifying and tragic Lisa Trevor lives, and discover a secret Umbrella lab deep below the mansion. While none of these areas are bad, they never reach the heights of the mansion. They are much more linear in design and some, like the forested area or mines, tend to feel samey since they lack interesting set piece in rooms. 

Exploring and solving puzzles would be enough for other games, but Resident Evil is a survival horror game, which means there has to be something that threatens the player and forces them to be on edge throughout the game. Resident Evil does this by having the mansion and its surrounding areas be infested by zombies. The zombies themselves are not too scary, but it’s the mechanics around them that keep them threatening. 

There is limited ammo, healing items, and ink ribbons used for saving the game in Resident Evil. This leads to an internal struggle within the player every time they encounter a zombie: is it better to try and run past them, risking losing some health or leaving them in the same spot to have to be dealt with again, or is it better to use some ammo and kill them? There is never a right answer to this question.  Zombies that are killed will come back later in the game as more powerful Crimson Heads if their bodies are not burned, which is another thing to consider since the kerosene used to burn the bodies is limited. This keeps every encounter with an enemy interesting and tensions are kept high by introducing stronger enemies throughout the game, first with the Crimson Heads and then with the lizard-like Hunters.

But while each encounter with a zombie is interesting and it is consisting stressful to go up against a Hunter in the late game, that’s not the same as the game being scary. Tension was high in the early game when I tried to kill every zombie I came across, but after a while I learned to get around them by baiting their lunge animations. I killed any zombies in areas I knew I would be travelling through a lot, burning their bodies immediately after. By the end of the game, I had a surplus of ammo and heals so I started shooting everything I came across in the end game. 

I tend to see games in terms of mechanics which leads to horror games falling short for me. I often start to see games as their moving, mechanical parts instead of their wholes so the feeling of fear doesn’t stick with me that long. Resident Evil suffered from this. I wasn’t looking at it as a spooky survival horror game after a while but as a series of combat, inventory, and puzzle mechanics. But honestly, I loved my time with the game. The mechanics sewn into Resident Evil and the truly excellent level design still makes it a must play to this day.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice & Revisiting Levels

Featured / atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

The world of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is noticeably smaller than those seen in previous Fromsoftware’s Souls games. Dark Souls was a tower of levels stacked on top of each with paths and elevators and secret connecting them all. Dark Souls 2 started in Majula and branched out from there, with branches coming off those branches and so on. Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 are a combination of the previous games and are like webs with areas spreading out and folding on top of each other while being interconnected throughout. But while Sekiro’s world is not as large or as interconnected as those other games, it does something genius with its central point, Ashina Castle.

The first part of Sekiro is very linear. You have to make your way from the Dilapidated Temple through Ashina Outskirts and the valley until you reach Ashina Castle. Ashina Castle sits in the middle of the game’s world and works as the trunk of the tree that the rest of the game spreads out. From the castle, you can go to the Sunken Valley from the shrine, Senpou Temple from the dungeons, Ashina Depths from the bottomless pit, or stay and explore the interior of the castle. During my first playthrough, I completely missed the window to enter the castle. So I actually went and explored all the other areas until I hit dead ends before going back and fighting the boss in the castle to progress the story. The young lord tasks you with retrieving a few items from the other areas. But once the items are collected and you try to warp back to Ashina Castle, you’ll discover something surprising: you can’t.

This is because Ashine Castle is under attack. When you go back to Ashina (I used the Abandon Dungeon idol and climbed over the gate), you’ll find it under siege with bamboo ladders reaching to the rooftops and new enemies slaughtering the Ashina soldiers. You find yourself in the middle of a war. The soldiers of the opposing factions will attack other enemies and yourself upon sight. This helps give the ascension up Ashina Castle have a different feel than before. The battles with enemies are more chaotic and dangerous while sleath has a new option of luring different enemies into each other and slipping away in the confusion.

Sekiro does these moments of revisiting previous areas so well. A lot of games don’t change anything in levels you need to revisit, leading you to fight early game enemies with late game equipment, skills, and stats. This can help the player feel the growth the character has undergone throughout the game’s journey, but it also often leads to these sections to feel uninteresting or boring. Like in their other Souls games, Fromsoft never wants the player to feel overpowered in Sekiro.

I loved playing through Sekiro because I was still learning things about the game and the combat mechanics up until and during the final boss. It’s amazing having a game that feels like there is still so much more to master even after you’ve beat it, especially one where a large chunk of the game is revisiting the same areas multiple times. Sekrio keeps its difficulty cranked high when revisiting Ashina Castle by introducing new, tougher enemies or by having enemies that were mini bosses now being basic mobs. The interior ninjas and Ashina generals were early game mini bosses while the Red Guard are some of the toughest enemies in the game with tricky attack patterns and guns that shoot fireworks.

The game stays challenging when revisiting Ashina Castle, but it also manages to feel fresh when exploring. There are new routes through around the castle. First time revisiting it, there are bamboo ladders all over the castle, making for new grapple points and new ways to ascend. During the second revisit, you start from the top of the castle and have to fight your way down. It’s a small thing, but it goes miles to prevent revisits feeling samey. The castle itself will also look different, be it from the ladders scaling the rooftops or from everything being engulfed in flames when you have to make your way down during the games final section.

During the final third of the game, you also have the option of revisiting both Hirata Estate and Ashina Outskirts in new ways and both these areas are also burning, almost seemingly to the ground. Fire works as a wonderful theme in the last moments of the game representing the war and destruction the world is set in. Hirata Estate you revisit through Owl’s memory of that night instead of your own and it’s pretty much the same with tougher enemies and much harder mini boss encounters. Revisiting Ashina Outskirts, however, is what solidified my appreciation for the reuse of previous areas in Sekiro.

When you go back through Ashina Outskirts, you do it in reverse. You start from the castle and make you way over a bridge where you see Ashina’s defenses being slaughter by the Red Guards. After this point, is all Red Guards and fire. I went through Ashina Outskirts so many times on my way to the castle in the beginning of the game that I had a set route through it so I could stealth kill all the enemies in the way. Upon revisiting Ashina Outskirts, I didn’t have that route so I have to think quick about stealth, had to pay closer attention to my surroundings, and I had to fight hard or find an escape route when I fell into a nasty fight. Everything looks different when you go through the outskirts again in the same way that a road might look different if your driving through it in the opposite direction you usually do. At the end of the trek through Ashina Outskirts, after seeing all the fire and destruction suffered to the area, you find yourself up against the cause of all of the damage: the Demon of Hatred

This ferocious, tragic, pain in the ass boss is a strange creature in the world of Sekiro, belonging more in the worlds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne both in design and boss battle. It is huge and beastlike, with one arm composed entirely of flame. His fight relies more on attacking his vitality instead of his posture which runs counter intuitively to the rest of the boss fight in the game. But it is a good fight after you learn its patterns and it all takes place in the battle field before Ashina Castle gates. The world of Sekiro comes full circle as one of the final bosses in the game has the exact same arena as one of the very first bosses.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – Critical Miss #4

Featured / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night came out in 1997 and it was a huge departure for the Castlevania series. It was less linear like its predecessors and more explorative, with a huge open map more like a Metroid game. This lead to the series lending the second half of the genre name: Metroidvania. I was excited to play the game for the first time when a rerelease was announced for the PS4. I’ve always been interested in Metroidvania games. I have gotten through half of Super Metroid and enjoyed it before i got distracted with other games. After I completed Hollow Knight though, I was itching to get back into the genre and I thought I’d take a look at one of the major games that helped shape the genre outside and past the Metroid games.

Right off the bat, the presentation of Symphony of the Night is great. The music ranges from hype-inducing in the opening hallway to creepy ambience in the flooded caves and the sprite art for the enemies are all detailed and gorgeous. Even the few examples of using 3D models, like for the save point coffins and the clocktower that rotates as you ascend the stairs to face Dracula, mesh well with the 2D art and add a whole lot of charm to the game. Alucard himself is the only aspect of the presentation I don’t care for. While his sprite is fluid and well animated, the sprite also seems blurry when he’s constantly in motion and having after effects trailing behind him. It is neat to see the wings of Alucard’s bat form change color depending on what cloak he’s wearing, but his sprite came across messy and less detailed than the world around him.

Castlevania Requiem: Symphony Of The Night & Rondo Of Blood_20190519124932

The two best things about the game to me are the enemies and the map. Enemy variety in a game is huge to me and Symphony of the Night does not disappoint. There are so many different types of enemies from wolves and skeletons to invisible fencers and floating books the spit out a mass of conjoined skulls. Enemies all have unique sprites, with only a few pallet swaps, and there are many different attacks the player must learn to avoid. Like the enemy list, Dracula’s castle is similarly huge and varied. There are many interesting locations just filled with secrets to find and relics to collect, some of which will open up means of unlocking even more secrets to explore. I got so absorbed into exploring the castle, wanting  to find everything I could, that I ended up revealing 100% of the map before fighting Richter without much trouble. But after fighting Richter, another castle appears upside-down from a portal in the night and the last half of the game is accessible. Unfortunately, this is where the game lost me.

The combat in Symphony of the Night never really enthralled me. There’s not much to it besides attacking and jumping to dodge enemy attacks while using an occasional subweapon. The combat is very basic and when paired with the knockback Alucard suffers when hit it becomes more frustrating than fun. Alucard will go flying halfway across the screen every time he takes damage and it’s obnoxious. Multiple times I found myself entering a room, getting hit by an enemy standing just inside the entry, and having the knockback send me back out the door I just came through. This was just annoying.

Castlevania Requiem: Symphony Of The Night & Rondo Of Blood_20190515192926

Starting in the reverse castle, the enemy placement seems more haphazard and less considered. Some halls in the second half of the game are so full enemies that do so much damage and send you flying around with knockback that it is highly incentivized to travel through the rooms in Alucard’s mist form, which is horribly slow. Traversing the reverse castle altogether is tedious. Most the platforms to scale are just slightly beyond your jump height, even with the high jump and double jump, that you need to use the bat transformation to just proceed. The bat form, like the mist form, is just too slow so exploring the reverse castle isn’t exciting. It’s dull.

A lot of the issues with the reverse castle could be made easier with Symphony of the Night’s leveling system and RPG elements, a first for the Castlevania series, but they don’t add much to the game overall. In fact, they’re almost unnoticeable. Throughout the game, you will gain experience points and levels from killing enemies, giving you increased stats and health points. You can also find health upgrades and new weapons or armor hidden throughout the castle. Going through the game, leveling up at a steady pace and equipping the best weapons and armor I found, I didn’t notice a change in my character. All enemies in the first castle died in one or two hit and did less than ten damage to me. When I got to the reverse castle, however, enemies took longer to kill and would do upwards of thirty damage per hit. That, along with the room obstacles like sliding spikes on the floor doing nearly eighty damage, the options once you hit the difficulty spike in the reverse castle is to either die a lot or move through the entirety of the second half of the game in mist form.  

Castlevania Requiem: Symphony Of The Night & Rondo Of Blood_20190515184337

After a while in the reverse castle, my interest in Symphony of the Night just stopped. The pacing suffers too much from having to move in the bat or mist forms and the combat isn’t nuanced enough to keep me engaged. I was having fun through the first castle but I wasn’t enthralled by the game at any point. So when I hit the difficulty spike in the reverse castle, I didn’t have the motivation to continue.

Cuphead & Attack Patterns

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

So I finally got a chance to play Cuphead and I’m now here to lay any arguments about its quality to rest: Cuphead is dope. The game caught my eye, like it caught so many others’, first with its art style. Hand drawn in the style of a 30’s cartoon, it was immediately unique, gorgeous and fresh. When the game came out and I saw it was a challenging boss rush with Megaman type run and gun levels, I knew I had to play. I knew the game was going to be hard, but I wasn’t expecting how bad I would be at it Eventually I overcame the game and realized that this was something special I had to write about.

Cuphead is a game about dodging and shooting. You have to make sure to aim so you hit the enemies during a fight, but you have to do this while avoiding all the attacks the enemies throw at you. This is pretty basic stuff and a description that 90% of all video games can fall under. But it is the way that Cuphead challenges the player to memorize attack patterns and move during the fights that sets it apart.

All the bosses in the game only have a handful of attacks they utilize. The attacks are clearly telegraphed due to the obviously cartoony art style with shorter attacks having smaller telegraph windows and longer, harder to dodge attacks have longer telegraphing. It takes some time to learn all the patterns and tells for attacks in any given fight, but after a couple tries the patterns should be ingrained in your muscles. The fights always remain challenging though. Some attack patterns, like the dragon’s fireballs, can have different points of contact while some bosses, like the genie, can have a vast pool of different attacks to draw from. The player themself also has to be taken into account. While you may know the patterns and their tells like the back of your hand, effectively avoiding them and still managing to land your attacks is still a challenging task.

Every boss in the game has multiple phases where they change forms and attack patterns. You might start off fighting a blimp only for it to turn into a giant mechanical moon by the last phase. This helps Cuphead remain challenging as each phase has unique attacks to avoid, but it also helps to push the player to keep playing. You want to learn a phase’s patterns of attacks to see what sort of crazy form the boss will take next. Each time you die a line appears showing you just how close you were to a new phase or how close you were to defeating it, making you want to give it just one more try.

There are a variety of attack patterns on display in Cuphead. Some bosses will shoot projectiles and others will move around the screen trying to hit you. Bosses like the bee lady, Rumor Honeybottoms, will have mini bosses for phases and others like Beppi the Clown will summon basic enemies as part of the fight. There are attacks that chase you around, projectiles that spin in a loop de loop pattern or fall from the top of screens, and constant bullet spirals more commonly found in bullet hell games. Some bosses will even limit where you stand during the fight, be it from having moving platforms or by taking away the ground you stand on with thorns or spikes.

The best example of all these mechanics working together has to be the pirate boss, Captain Brineybeard. He is a pirate standing on top of his ship, meaning he has a smaller hitbox than most the other bosses because it is tucked away in the upper left corner. To hit him, you’ll either need to jump or stand still to aim diagonally, making it tougher to avoid any incoming attacks. Luckily, the first phase is pretty easy with only two attacks to worry about: a barrel that will move left or right across the screen and drop to the ground if you go under it and projectiles from an octopus that the Captain will shoot at you. If you stay on the move and hit the boss when you have a safe opening, this phase won’t take long.

Phase two, however, gets trickier by limiting the players ability to avoid attacks and giving them shorter safe windows to aim and shoot. Along with the attacks from phase one, Captain Brineybeard will now summon other enemies by whistling. There is a shark that will come from the left side of the screen and take up most of the space the player has to maneuver in, a squid that will pop out in the middle background and splash ink to darken the visibility of the screen unless the player kills it quick enough, and a dogfish that will jump out of the water on the right side and slide across the ground in a set number and distance. These force the player to play within momentary limitations; be it smaller space to stand in, harder to see attacks, or just by making them decide whether it is better to jump at possible inopportune times or focus on hitting the enemies instead of the boss.

Phase three is just phase one and two but with the Captain’s ship now joining the fight by spitting cannonballs across the ground, telegraphed by an obvious chewing animation. However, phase four changes everything by having the ship throw the Captain overboard. Now the ship’s mouth is the hitbox and all that remains of the familiar patterns of phases one through three is the barrel still moving and dropping when you are under it. The boss has two new attacks you must learn. The first being fireballs it’ll spit in a devilish loop de loop pattern that I never really got a perfect grasp on. And second is a giant pink laser that you’ll either need to duck under, which means you won’t be able to move safely if the barrel moves above you, or continuously parry the laser, a far more tricky task, but one that grants more movement options.

This boss is challenging, but when I finished the game, it was my clear favorite. It’s so finely crafted to keep the player constantly on the move while the attack patterns work so well at stacking on top of each other. This limits the player in interesting ways and gives them a lot to focus on and juggle during the fight. All the bosses in Cuphead are frantic and fast-paced, but Captain Brineybeard’s fight seems the most kinetic. I lost a lot during the fight but i was never frustrated at the game. I was only ever frustrated with myself. I knew all the patterns and how to avoid them, but executing that knowledge was the tricky part. This boss works well as an example of the entirely of Cuphead itself. It’s frantic and challenging, but completely fair. The attacks all have patterns and tells, but it’s up to the player to read and avoid them.

Shadow of the Colossus – Critical Miss #3

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

Shadow of the Colossus came out for the PS2 in 2005 and gained critical acclaim for being a completely unique game. It told its story like a myth with deep implications and a moral complexity seldom seen in video games of the era. It featured such large creatures as enemies that gave the game an unparalleled sense of scale. It was very impressive on the PS2 and, 15 years later, continues to impress through its remake on the PS4.

When the game starts, the player finds themselves controlling a boy named Wander. He is entering a forbidden land with a dead woman to cut a deal with an ancient god, Dormin. Dormin tells Wander that the woman’s life will be restored if he can defeat sixteen colossi scattered across the land. So Wander sets off without a second thought.

Wander rides his horse, Agro, across the barren, desolate forbidden land that obviously hasn’t been inhabited of hundreds of years. Agro’s controls take some getting use to and the camera struggles against the player. After climbing some cliffs, you’ll find your first target. The creature you come across is huge, towering over Wander, and is covered in hair and dirt and stone structures. It looks organic and constructed at the same time. The colossus is awe inspiring and intimidating, but isn’t too hard to defeat. Climbing up to the colossus’s head to its next weak point is thrilling. Climbing drains your stamina and watching Wander being flung around when the colossus tries to shake him off is extremely tense. When you reach the weak point on its head, you plunge your sword into it over and over again until it finally falls. Wander gets transported back to the temple to get his next target, but not before strange, black tendrils pour out of the fallen colossus into him.

This is how the entire game goes from the first colossus onward. You explore the world until you find the next colossus , find its weak point and take it down, and then go back to the temple to start over again. This structure works surprisingly well for the game and keeps the momentum going because you carry the excitement from defeating a colossus over to the next one. It is smart of Shadow of the Colossus to focus on the excitement of the gameplay because it seems Team Ico was more interestd in making a visually stunning over a fun game.

Shadow of the Colossus has a lot of frustrating things about it. One major thing being the controls. Wander’s movement controls are stiff and clunky and I never really got completely used to them. He stumbles on small rocks or ridges in the ground that other games would have you smoothly pass over. While it might seem more realistic, it makes the game feel clumsy and heavier than it should. Wander’s run speed is way too slow which incentivizes riding Agro, but Agro is also difficult to control. It gets easier when you learn that Agro will continuously run forward and try to avoid upcoming obstacles by changing directions. Agro’s controls are especially frustrating when approaching a gap or narrow path. Agro will often try to run to the side of narrow path or comes to a complete stop in front of a gap because it recognizes these area as obstacles. It makes the player feel that they are not in complete control.

Taking control away from the player is always a bad idea for video games. A game where you don’t feel completely in control of your character or your camera is a game that feels unfair. I mentioned before that the camera struggles against the player and that’s because the camera favors a cinematic view. It focuses on Wander running across a field and it might sweep around to the side for a nice profile shot. You can move the camera wherever you want it, but it will always moves back to the original position. This is why I said Team Ico seemed more interested in making a visually stunning game over a fun game. It seems they wanted some dramatic scenes when exploring, rather than letting the player look at the world freely themselves.

But when it comes down to it, the game is fun. Travelling to the colossi can be tedious, and even boring sometimes, but the world around you is beautiful and mysterious. Climbing puzzles are always satisfying because places you can grab are subtle enough that you have to look for them, but never hidden enough to take too long. The real stars of the game, however, are the colossi themselves. They are the real reason that the game still deserves to be played today.

Every colossus is simply thrilling to fight. From first seeing them and being shocked by their size to finally landing the final stab in their weak point, it is just exciting. Most the of the sixteen colossi are totally unique in design and the few that seem similar, or complete copies of each other, still have unique ways of taking them down. They all work as enemies, puzzles, and levels at the same time which is something still rarely seen in games. For the most part, they are all so alien, yet awesome looking, that I found myself with a new favorite colossus every time I found one.

You feel completely insignificant while climbing on the colossi because they are so huge. Wander almost disappears against some of the larger ones when the portion you’re climbing takes up the entire screen. Watching Wander hanging on for dear life and flopping around like a rag when a colossus tries to shake him off helps heighten the sense of scale. It is also one of the most tense things I’ve experienced in gaming, especially as you watch your stamina meter quick depleting, hoping that the colossus stops before it is completely gone and you’re flung off it.

I typically don’t do well with games that have bad controls. If a game is frustrating just to move in, I will drop it quick. Shadow of the Colossus could have been one of those games with its clunky movement and stiff camera that fights you whenever you want to move it. But with each colossus I found, I was invigorated and would forget about the frustrations getting there. I had to see the next one, and the one after that, all the way until the end of the game. These colossi, these sixteen massive beings of stone and flesh are still so utterly unique in the world of games that they alone make Shadow of the Colossus worth playing.

Bloodborne & Horror

/ atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

Bloodborne has been one of my favorite games (easily in my top five) ever since I played it in early 2016. I was just getting back into video games at the time and had bought a PS4, the first console I had owned since the Wii, a few months earlier. After getting burnt out on Fallout 4, I picked up a used copy of Bloodborne because I kept hearing it was one of the best games for the console.

Playing through the game was an eye-opening experience for me, a perfect example of not knowing I wanted something until I had it. I had never played a Souls game before so it probably took me 4-6 hours to get through Central Yharnam, the opening area of the game, when I beat Bloodborne for the first time. Despite struggling throughout the game, I fell in love with it: it’s combat and enemies, the bosses and the leveling system, it’s setting and atmosphere.

However, the aspect of Bloodborne that gripped me the most during my first playthrough were the horror elements of the game. I went into the game almost completely blind and it bred a special kind of terror in me.

There was an oppressive dread and uneasiness that plagued me during my first playthrough. The game takes inspiration from Victorian Gothic literature with the city of Yharnam being a fictionalized London of the 17th and 18th century with its cobblestone streets and abundance of cathedrals and churches. Just outside the city are foggy forests and dilapidated farmsteads. The enemies are also what you might expect to find in a Victorian era story. There’s crazed villagers, werewolves, andbloody crows. There are even gargoyles and ghosts later in the snow-covered Cainhurst Castle, castles being another classic Gothic troupe. Yharnam itself is in chaos. The streets are piled up with coffins and most of the living have barricaded themselves indoors. The only occupants on the streets are the beasts and those hunting them, but the line between the two groups is beginning to blur.

The world of Bloodborne feels utterly hostile to the character and the player themselves. In classic From Software fashion, most of the games mechanics are not clearly explained, relying on the player to learn them on their own, and pretty much any enemy can kill you in just two or three hits. The unforgiving nature of the difficulty keeps the tension high and makes the player never feel completely safe in the game. I always felt anxious when reaching a new area in the game. The idea of new enemies with new attack patterns I didn’t yet know typically meant I was mere moments from death.

Death itself is not the only stressful thing about dying in Bloodborne. Upon death, you drop all the Blood Echoes you have acquired and to get them back, you must return to where you fell to collect them. And you must do this without dying again. The Blood Echoes act as both experience points and currency in the game, so what you lose in losing all your Echoes is progress. This makes death punishing in Bloodborne, but not impossible to overcome. And it always reminded of the save station style of death in more traditional survival horror games. In games like Resident Evil and Alien Isolation, you can only save at certain spots on the map and when you die, you go back to the last save you made. This means that anything you’ve done between the save and death is lost and you have to do it over. The only difference is you lose game progress in Resident Evil, but in Bloodborne you lose character progress.

Death mechanics are not the only aspect that Bloodborne shares from more traditional survival horror games. During a recent playthrough, it struck me how many of the doors you have to open in Bloodborne, which isn’t a lot admittedly, always creak open almost painfully slow. This is reminiscent of the iconic room transitions in the Resident Evil series, where going between rooms would be shown as a door slowly opening or a slow climb up a ladder. Not only did this help hide long loading times on the original Playstation, but it also helped raised the tension during the game. While the door is opening, the player has a moment to anticipate what might be waiting for them in the next room, their imaginations can run wild and let the terror build before revealing what the game has in store for them. There is also the added tension of enemies approaching from behind as you take your opening a door.

One of the most important aspects in survival horror games is an emphasis on atmosphere. A strong atmosphere can do wonders for scaring a player. The atmosphere in Bloodborne is thick as flesh and blood. Everything is dark, dank, and desperate. The feeling of hopelessness presses on the player like a weight on their shoulders. Along with the difficulty discussed before, the bleak atmosphere helps to keep the tension high in Bloodborne. It makes the player feel small and insignificant in the world of Yharnam because, despite what you do, the city is always beyond saving. The player will quickly learn that they are not some grandiose, fantasy hero. Saving Yharnam and its inhabitants isn’t possible, so the only thing they can do is survive.

Like most truly great horror media, Bloodborne explores other dark emotions of the human condition along with trying to scare it’s players. The anxiety of unknown things ahead, the dread of death and losing progress, and the oppressive hopelessness of the setting and atmosphere all lead players to constantly feel uneasy in the world of Yharnam. And despite not being a full blown horror game, Bloodborne still continues to be the game that scared me the most through that very first playthrough.

Earthbound – Critical Miss #2

Featured / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

Smiles & Tears

We had a Sega Genesis in my household growing up which means I missed out on the entirety of the Super Nintendo’s lifespan. When I started getting more into video games years later, there was a game from the Super Nintendo that always came up as one of the best games on the system. That game was Earthbound and it always intrigued me.

The game stars Ness with his three friends, Paula, Jeff, and Poo, as they travel across Eagleland to stop an all powerful evil force named Giygas, who is making the world around them act strange and hostile. Along the way, the friends will help towns solve their problems, make new friends, and unlock their latent psychic abilities. It’s a standard RPG but with the traditional fantasy setting traded for a real world setting and the swords and bows switched for baseball bats and yo-yos for weapons.

The setting is what intrigued about Earthbound from the start. It seemed so quirky and unique. Before this review, I had tried to play it a couple times, but I never managed to beat it before. Now that I have completed the game, I see that there was a reason for that.

The presentation of Earthbound is instantly inviting. Cheery, colorful graphics with simplistic sprites meets the eye and the bouncy, bizarre music meets the ear. The music especially is great. It covers so many genres and moods while maintaining a strange, sci-fi feel. It compliments the otherworldly undertones of the game.

Earthbound has a goofy feel throughout and the enemies exemplify this. A highlight of the game is reaching new areas and seeing the sprites of all the new enemies. They range from crazed hippies and multiple types of robots to googly-eyed ducks and dinosaurs. The sprites of these enemies are always bright and colorful and cartoony. Underneath all the cartoony visuals and silly dialogue, there is an undercurrent of darkness running through Earthbound. Throughout the adventure, Ness and the gang will be attacked by police officers for causing trouble in a town, dismantle a group of cultists, save a town being plagued by zombies, and the final battle with Giygas takes place on what looks like the intestines of some giant creature.

Giygas itself is the payoff to all the darkness and tension building under the game as you play. It is a Lovecraftian nightmare, a being whose power and lust for evil is said to break its own mind at the end of the game when you face it. In true cosmic horror style, Ness and the player cannot comprehend the true form of Giygas or even its attack, which are portrayed only as swirling red shapes and flashes respectively. The battle with Giygas was a highlight for me in the game, but not for the fight itself but for the character and design of Giygas. The mechanics of the battle in the final phase when the player has to keep the party healed and have Paula pray for help I found to be tedious . With each turn of this, you watch a cutscene of the prayer reaching someone you meet along the journey and them offering you their help. While these scenes are charming, they are extremely slow and just bog down the pace of the fight for me.

The pacing of Earthbound is the biggest issue in the game. The walking speed of  the party seems fine at first, but without any consistent means of speeding them up like a run button it starts to grate. The menus are slow and clunky to navigate and the battles drag on because of these menus. These small things add up to make the moment to moment gameplay feel tedious, but there are also bigger issues with pacing that quickly fatigued me towards the end of the game.

The first of these was the grinding. In honesty, it’s not absolutely necessary to grind in Earthbound, but every time you get a new party member, whether Ness is level 10 or 40, that new character starts at level one. So if you don’t want them to be smeared by enemies or want them to be useful in combat, you have to stop and level them up. This kills the pace of the story, but not as much as the structure of the game itself. Earthbound has a overarching story, but it’s more of a loose guiding thread. The structure of the game feels more like a monster of the week cartoon series where the team comes to a new area dealing with some odd problem, they solve the problem, and move on. While this structure works to some extent because the sets are usually quirky and interesting, with only passing mentions of the looming evil of Giygas, I often felt discontinued from the main plot.

Earthbound is never great at guiding the player and nudging them in the right direction. It’s not terrible in the beginning of the game, gets at little more confusing around Twoson and Threed, and gets totally obtuse starting in Fourside. Admitting this could be a mistake in my playstyle, but even when speaking to NPCs and paying attentions of the hints they dropped, I still found myself completely lost at points. The worst examples of this were the few instances where I had to enter certain areas just to leave and trigger an event or when you have to backtrack to past areas to get information on a puzzle or key item to the current section.

All this adds up to Earthbound feeling like a slog. Towards the middle of the game, when the quirkiness was starting to feel less fresh and engaging, I started feeling very fatigued of the game. I didn’t particularly dislike the game, but I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I hoped I would.

Like most games, Earthbound is a mixture of good and bad. While I truly enjoyed the setting and enemies, it wasn’t enough to combat the slower pace of the game. If you’re a fan of older RPGs and can handle a slow moving one, I say give Earthbound a try if you haven’t already, but it’s definitely not the first Super Nintendo RPG I would ever suggest.