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majormitch

Playing FF7 Rebirth is giving me the Bad Thought of replaying other FF games.

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Monthly Roundup, December 2013

I’m going to issue an apology and/or a warning up front: this month’s entry might be a little too ranty with regards to Super Mario 3D World. I apparently had a lot more to say about it and stronger feelings on it than I originally thought, and the words just kind of came out in a single uninterrupted stream. I thought about trying to edit it down after the fact, but if that’s how I feel about the game then I’ll let those words stand. Maybe it’s for the best.

In addition to Super Mario 3D World, I played a fair amount of Need for Speed Rivals in December, which is my latest failed attempt to find a driving game I like in a post Burnout Paradise world. I don’t have much to say about it other than “I hate evading cops in driving games with a burning passion.” I also played through Electronic Super Joy, which is an awesome platformer similar to something like Super Meat Boy, and played about half of Crush, which is a super rad PSP puzzle game. Both of those are great and totally worth checking out, but I won’t expound upon them here. Past that I finally gave Rogue Legacy a shot, and also played through EarthBound. You can find thoughts on those two games behind the Mario wall.

Super Mario 3D World

Super Mario 3D World, ironically, feels more 2D than 3D.
Super Mario 3D World, ironically, feels more 2D than 3D.

In the grand scheme of things, Mario is awesome. I rank a handful of Mario games among my all-time favorites, and I want to stress up front that I like Super Mario 3D World just fine in a general sense. The core of the game is pretty good; it controls well enough, the levels can be creative, and the game looks and sounds great while sporting that Mario charm. That clarification out of the way, I find myself personally disappointed with Super Mario 3D World in some ways that I will probably have a difficult time expressing. In fact, a lot of my feelings on it are rooted firmly in my history with the series, so maybe a brief recap is in order. I’ve played virtually every Mario platformer since the original Super Mario Bros., and have always felt that the series was striving to push the boundaries of what a platformer could do (even if there were a few speed bumps along the way). From Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario Bros. 3 to Super Mario World to Super Mario 64 to Super Mario Galaxy I felt like the core Mario games were continuously getting better, while simultaneously raising the bar for the genre. Towards the end of that stretch the New Super Mario Bros. games came into play, and I felt like those were deliberate throwbacks that tried to cash in on many people’s nostalgia for the NES games, primarily Super Mario Bros. 3. These games proved incredibly popular, and Nintendo ran with them.

I have never cared for the New Super Mario Bros. games, as I feel like Mario moved past those 2D roots a long time ago for the better. It was fine as a one-off nostalgia trip or marginal sub-series, but as its own franchise it seems really limiting, and the idea of favoring that style in the face of something like Super Mario Galaxy is crazy to me. Yet, after Super Mario Galaxy 2 came out, that team famously transitioned to Super Mario 3D Land, which is, despite the term “3D” in the title, much closer to the 2D Mario games than it is to something like Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Galaxy. Levels are more straightforward and less open, sporting layouts and obstacles that share a lot of design sensibilities with the 2D games. You also have a timer, you find suits that you carry between levels, and you jump on a flagpole at the end. There’s a weird 8-way run to the movement too, along with a dedicated run button, and the game replicates the “three gold coins per level” thing that the New Super Mario Bros. games introduced. It was, in Shigeru Miyamoto’s own words, a "3D Mario that plays as a 2D Mario game." Being the direct follow-up to Super Mario 3D Land, Super Mario 3D World implements this same design philosophy. And while I felt this method was, again, a fine one-off experiment or handheld sub-series, I find the idea that this is now the flagship console Mario experience to be kind of a bummer.

3D Mario games controlled better over 15 years ago, on a shitty controller no less.
3D Mario games controlled better over 15 years ago, on a shitty controller no less.

It’s not that any of those little details are game-breakers on their own, but when you add them up I find them bothersome. Why am I stuck with 8-way run in a fully 3D environment? Likewise, why do I need to hold down a run button when analog control over your movement speed worked so much better as far back as Super Mario 64? Why is there a timer, a frustratingly short one I might add, in a game that seemingly wants you to explore to find three hidden stars and a stamp in each level? That timer is the worst by far, as I frequently ran out of time as I scampered up walls in search of those silly collectibles that I never liked to begin with. It all makes for a less consistent Mario experience that simultaneously doesn’t even control as well as the series has before. Nor are the levels as big or as ambitious, or reward exploration nearly as much, instead sticking closer to the blander designs of the 2D games. All of this leads to my real problem with the whole situation, which is that it feels like the innovations of the real 3D Mario games of the past 15+ years are being ignored in favor of regressive 2D design. In other words, while Super Mario 3D World is a good 2D style Mario game, and would make a more than worthy replacement for the New Super Mario Bros. games, I think it’s a poor substitute for the previously excellent and ground-breaking 3D titles in the series. It’s not the direction I prefer to see the series go, and yet the release pattern of Mario games over the past three years suggests it is very much the direction the series is going. Maybe I’m wrong and a proper 3D Mario game is actually on its way, or maybe I’m just being unfairly critical of a game that’s not even that bad. Either way, Super Mario 3D World is not what I want from the Wii U’s premiere Mario game, and has left me feeling down on the current status of a franchise I’ve loved for a long time.

Rogue Legacy

Despite rarely actually liking games with many “roguelike” elements, I continue to give them a shot. I appreciated Spelunky and FTL for their interesting ideas, but found the act of playing them past the learning phase not to my liking. Rogue Legacy joins that group, and having done this rodeo enough times now I think I’ve developed a better understanding of what exactly it is that I do and don’t like about these kinds of games. The good, and what continues drawing me back in, is that (in these three examples at least) they can have gameplay mechanics that I find genuinely interesting. Rogue Legacy is no different; I think playing with a different character with different attributes each life is a cool idea, and I think the game has a neat upgrade system that carries over between lives, applying an intriguing sense of progression to death. One thing all of these games share is that they treat death as something you have to deal with and manage, an integral part of the experience rather than an annoying stumbling block that merely leads to reloading a checkpoint. In that sense, Rogue Legacy’s character progression might lend it the most interesting deaths among the bunch, and is perhaps my favorite thing about the game.

Rogue Legacy's high amounts of pure randomness eventually turned me off.
Rogue Legacy's high amounts of pure randomness eventually turned me off.

As for the “bad,” I’ve come to realize that I simply don’t like the high amount of pure randomness that is fundamental to their core design. With Spelunky it’s the level layouts and item drops, with FTL it’s the sequence of encounters and shops. While skill can certainly increase your chance of success, my progress in both games still depends highly on these random factors; it’s very possible to play well and still not have much of a chance. This always leads to a fair amount of beating your head against the wall until everything falls into place. You need a certain combination of skill and luck to succeed, and the particular mix of those aspects in these games takes too much of my fate out of my own hands, which ultimately serves to artificially lengthen the process. Rogue Legacy is similar, with its random level layouts, boss locations, and most importantly, the character classes you can choose from. There are many times where I simply want a specific class, but that class is not an option, which leads to many wasted runs where I know it’s virtually impossible to accomplish what I want. Not to mention that the dungeon layouts can be of varyingly difficult compositions. All of that randomness makes the game much more grindy than I’d like (on top of traditional grinding, which is also present in abundance), and I’ve come to understand that I tend to prefer more structure in these games (think Dark Souls). Rogue Legacy, like Spelunky and FTL before it, has an interesting set of systems and mechanics that I find fun to engage with up to the point where the game demands I grind and cross my fingers. I think I’ve reached that point with Rogue Legacy (I’ve beaten two bosses), and while I could continue bashing my head against that wall until it breaks, I’m not sure it’s the best use of my time.

EarthBound

Ignoring all the words I’ve already written above, the game I actually spent the most time playing in December was EarthBound, which I literally beat in the final three hours of 2013. I played at least a third of EarthBound about ten years ago, but never finished it for whatever reason. With its official release on the Wii U Virtual Console earlier this year, combined with my dedication to tackling my backlog in earnest in 2013 (now carrying into 2014), I figured this was as good a time as any to finally finish what I’ve always heard described as a classic.

EarthBound's a crazy game.
EarthBound's a crazy game.

That said, upon beating it I don’t know that I have a whole lot to say about EarthBound that hasn’t been said many, many times before. From a pure gameplay/combat standpoint it’s mostly classic 8 or 16-bit era JRPG stuff, which works well enough to get the job done, but also doesn’t do much for me on its own these days. I do think that the game’s pacing holds up surprisingly well, however. It keeps you moving from one place to the next before anything gets too old, which also services what I feel are the best parts of EarthBound: the world it creates, the characters and the writing. You’re constantly moving to wild new locations full of ridiculous characters who all say the darnedest things. It’s just a wacky and fun (and funny) world, and when I hear people say that EarthBound is their favorite game of all time, I’d imagine it’s for these reasons rather than for the serviceable but generic combat. Hell, I still find the game incredibly charming and endearing as a grown man playing it nearly 20 years after it was released. It’s not a stretch to envision someone playing this game during their nostalgia years and going on to think it’s the best thing ever made. Truth be told, that’s almost how I feel about Super Mario RPG. Deep down I know that Super Mario RPG is pretty standard JRPG combat wrapped in a weirdly charming and endearing world, but I played it at just the right age to enshrine it in an impervious shell of nostalgia as one the most incredible things ever. I can absolutely understand how someone could feel the same way about EarthBound, and if I had played it when I was a kid I might be such a person. Even as an adult I still had a lot of fun with it, and highly respect what it does. I get you EarthBound, and I salute you.

Looking Ahead to January

How better to kick off the new year than with more games!? As always I have plenty on my plate, starting with Path of Exile. Some friends and I played a few hours of that before Christmas, but lots of holiday travel derailed us over the past few weeks. Now that the holidays are over we should be getting back to it in earnest. Past that I already managed to start both Tearaway and Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen in the first few days of 2014, both of which I’ll continue to play. Risk of Rain (for better or worse) is the next game at the top of my list, and if I have time after that I’ll delve even further into the backlog. As for actual new January releases, The Banner Saga is the only one I’m really keeping an eye on. I think that could potentially be neat, but I also don’t know quite enough about it yet. Either way, I have more than enough games to play at the start of 2014, and play them I shall.

8 Comments

8 Comments

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Hailinel

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I can't say I agree with your assessment of the timer in Super Mario 3D World at all. I've played up through the end of the main game and into the star world, and only once did I die because I ran out of time. Though there were several occasions where it did come close, not counting the special 100 second stages. Also, while the stages are meant to be explored for the stars and stamps, it's easy enough to go into them on repeat trips, so I never felt pressured to get everything at once. The time limit just adds that extra level of challenge to the game.

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Mento

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Edited By Mento  Moderator

I think some criticism of Super Mario 3D World is warranted (as long as you don't try to unfavorably compare it to New Super Mario Bros. U at least), but I can also understand how difficult it is to put into words a mild dissatisfaction might be without any glaring problems to turn the spotlight on. Collectibles weren't one of my personal bugbears with the game, though, but I suppose that timer does make it rough (especially when it drops to 30 or 100 seconds in some specific stages). I do kind of wonder about the mentality of going through Mario games avoiding them, given they're the impetus behind most of the exploration and taking on some of the tougher challenges each stage presents. Running through each level to get to the end as soon as possible just seems absurd to me, unless you were trying to avoid as much content as possible (or are speedrunning it, which is another matter entirely).

As for Rogue Legacy, a friend of mine was decrying her luck in Spelunky and how its randomness screws her over more often than not, which is very off-putting when you consider yourself a dab hand at that sort of reflexes-based action platformer. When an arrow trap is pointing directly at the entrance, or there's simply no good items to find, or something decides to piss off the local shopkeeper, it's exasperating. In perhaps a serendipitous twist due a design decision possibly done to cut corners, Rogue Legacy doesn't have too similar a problem because its "procedural generation" aspect is simply a list of pre-generated room instances which are then placed randomly around the map each visit. Each individual room has been well-considered and balanced by the developers, so there's far less bullshit to run into. The only real obstacle that can be blamed on arbitrariness is the selection of offspring you can choose from, and given you have a choice of three (which then, eventually, becomes a choice of six) it's harder to hold in contempt. If you roll nothing but miners, you can always just run around the easier areas collecting money, and any other class can be worthwhile if you play them right.

I've been meaning to play EarthBound again, thanks for reminding me. The Wii U eShop has a better sense of sales and item value than previous Nintendo digital distribution services, but £5.50 for each SNES game still seems like a lot. I'll stop being a cheapskate and bite the bullet one of these days.

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majormitch

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Edited By majormitch

@hailinel: That's a fair assessment, and I think the timer's intrusiveness depends a lot on how you prefer to play the stages. If you're not concerned with getting everything at once, as you weren't, then the timer would rarely be an issue, since just beating stages doesn't take much time at all. Since I knew I wanted to get everything (which I did to unlock all the worlds) it made sense to try and get everything my first time playing a level. And once I committed to that, I had to search every corner and crawl up every wall, as the game made it clear pretty early on that it would place those stars anywhere. Playing that way caused the timer to be an issue more often than I would have liked (probably a couple of times each world), and I feel like it's an artificial way to force multiple playthroughs of levels without providing much benefit. I don't know that I agree that it adds to the challenge (on the normal stages), because if you ignore collectibles then beating the levels in the time given is almost never a challenge, and if you know where the collectibles are then getting them all and beating the level is still rarely a time crunch. The timer is mostly a non-factor in those scenarios. The problem only arises if you don't know where the collectibles are. Then it takes time to find them, and I don't think of putting a timer on a scavenger hunt as making it more challenging. It simply takes time to look everywhere in these levels, no way around it, and it's not always possible to explore every inch of a level with the time given in a single run.

That said, I did really like the time focused levels, like the 100 second stages. In those stages the timer was designed to be part of the challenge, which I thought worked super well and was a lot of fun. Those were probably my favorite levels in the game actually...

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majormitch

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Edited By majormitch

@mento: Don't worry, I still like 3D World better than any of the NSMB games :P

Finding the right words for Mario really was difficult- I think it's a strange game to judge. The collectibles with a timer is just a weird dynamic to me though. Like you say, it seems a little pointless to ignore the collectibles, because that avoids a lot of the content, the exploration and the challenge. But to get the collectibles you do have to explore, and the timer explicitly dissuades exploration. It feels dissonant to me.

I do think you're right that Rogue Legacy has less issues with randomness than something like Spelunky (and much less bullshit), but it still frustrates me, which is probably more a realization of my tastes than a pure criticism of the game itself. I think you have to be okay with and accept that every run won't be equally easy or difficult, and that some runs may be close to impossible for all but the most adept video game ninjas. I tend to feel like I'm playing until I get a favorable arrangement of variables that lets me progress rather than actually getting better at the game, which eventually wears on me. Maybe not the game's fault, but also something I've not been enjoying very much.

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danielkempster

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Edited By danielkempster

Great blog. I wish I had two cents to throw into the pot regarding Super Mario 3D World, but I haven't played the game. In fact, if there's one thing that shames me as a player of video games more than any other, it's that I've spent practically no time at all with Mario platformers. I played a couple of the old Game Boy ones (pretty sure I had one subtitled '6 Golden Coins' as a kid), but being as I predominantly grew up on Sega and Sony machines I missed out on all the 'main' games like Super Mario Bros., Mario 64 and Sunshine. I may well end up backtracking through the series at some point, as I've done with the Zelda franchise over the last five years or so, if only to see what I've missed out on.

While I've not played Rogue Legacy, I can empathise with your thoughts on Rogue-likes in general. A couple of years back I tried to play through The Binding of Isaac, which is another game whose innate procedural generation of its rooms and items can either make or break your run. Its frustrating to know that a large part of how your game progresses lies in the hands of fate rather than your own abilities, which is probably why I stopped playing the game and haven't been back since.

Earthbound is one of those historical gaming relics, accompanied by the likes of Chrono Trigger (which I really need to pick up another copy of), that I would love to play if I ever have the means to do so. The game never actually saw a UK release until its worldwide unveiling on the Virtual Console last year, so I don't think I'm alone in the category of 'curious Brit' when it comes to Earthbound. The biggest problem there is that I don't own a Wii U, and don't currently have any plans to pick one up. I'll never say never, but for now it's off my agenda.

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Slag

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for me Rogue Legacy gave me just enough progress to keep me going. Normally Rogue-likes burn me out pretty quick. But the Loot aspect and level progression has got their hooks pretty deep in me. And that's how I view the runs, I'm going for treasure first and if I stumble across a boss in a favorable health state then I'll go do that. So I don't view the runs as "impossible" since I don't necessarily view boss clearing as the goal of them, and I don't mind getting an archmage etc since I figure at least I'll knock out some equipment and fairy chests.

I am at the Final Boss now, although I haven't passed him yet I think I'll probably eventually get him at least once.

I will say the Final Boss is the first Boss I've found to be interesting. The Stage bosses are basically disappointingly glorified Mini-bosses.

Hope you enjoy DD: DA. I'm guessing you might be one of the many PS+ beneficiaries eh? I irrationally love that game. :)

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majormitch

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@dankempster: Thanks Dan. It's kind of interesting that, given how prominent Mario has been for so long, that you could have even avoided playing more of his games :P That makes me wonder how someone would take to playing a Mario game in 2014 without that history, which I had never really thought about before.

@slag: I do appreciate that Rogue Legacy has some amount of progression, and I actually played it a little today and made some progress. I still get tired of running through that damn castle over and over again, which has gotten pretty dull at this point, and you have to do it a whole lot for very marginal gains if you want to be powerful enough for the bosses. And even those runs you can't always count on getting you the kind of benefits you want and/or need. Still, progress is progress, even in small unreliable doses, and that in itself makes Rogue Legacy stick with me more than other, similar games. I might keep poking at it here and there, I seem to be doing OK with it in small bursts.

I had heard DD is one of your favs :P And I certainly am a PS+ beneficiary on this one; that was the final incentive to get me to try it out. I've played a few hours of it at this point and haven't quite gotten my mind around it, and/or I'm missing something. It's definitely a weird game. I feel like I've spent most of my time in menus fussing with inventory and/or skills. Either that or running errands back and forth for side quests. Part of me is considering just abandoning side quests altogether in hopes that the main path would get me to those large, exciting enemies I've heard oh so much about but haven't really encountered yet. I'm not sure if that would be wise or not.

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Slag

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@majormitch:

It might because I started in a gaming era than you did, but none of that bothered me although I can easily see why it would bother you. I'm accustomed to playing the same levels over and over, growing up on the ole NES side scrollers like Mega Man and Contra. Some stat progression and super responsive controls is enough to hook me. That may not be a point in my favor.

fwiw I managed to knock out the boss about an hour after I wrote my comment and hoo boy is New Game + pretty rough!

as far as DD goes. I have a recommendation re: sidequests if you want it (behind spoiler block, pretty light spoilers no plot details)

I'd do the sidequests as they come up at least at first if you ever want to. The difficulty in the game is roughest at the beginning and without the XP it can get very rough fast. Furthermore some of the sidequests are missable if you push the plot to far. The real generic ones (kill X, escort X person) are persistent, but anything that seems character related can be missed if you advance the plot too far from when it's offered.

It's definitely old school in that it never really explains the game mechanics or leveling system, which is a love it or hate it kinda thing. I'm totally fine with that, not everybody is understandably.