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binarystargames · 9 months

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Valiant Horizon post-itchfund-launch devlog #1: Diceless, Roll for Magnitude, and Roll for Success

This post is about the various mechanical choices made in Valiant Horizon at a very high level. I group these into three categories: Diceless mechanics (stuff that works), Roll for Magnitude mechanics (stuff that works but you roll to see how much), and Roll for Success mechanics (stuff that works if a roll goes your way).

Diceless

The simplest kind of mechanic. This is what Assets, Exhausting Assets, and Burdens are:

You take an action and it works.

If you didn't expend a resource, you add or amplify a complication on that action.

The complications here are Burdens.

The resources here are Assets or Determination (which can either restore the use of an Asset or negate a Burden).

You can also reduce your access to a resource to achieve a larger effect.

This is Exhausting Assets.

The vibe I wanted to achieve wasn't "do you solve problems, overcome obstacles, etc." so much as "how do you do it". We are going to assume, generally, that the protagonists will get to the other side of whatever problem they encounter. The question then becomes: how do they win? What do they prioritize with asset use? What are they willing to let fall by the wayside or go imperfectly to get there? What resources are they willing to pull from the combat side to make it work? Are they willing to overextend themselves to achieve a victory? It becomes a question of resource management and long-term risk rather than short-term probability-based risk.

It's also a matter of spotlight management and diversity of outcomes. If your Windmagus knows they only get one use of wind magic per session, they know they can't solve every problem with that. But maybe they have something in their background that will suffice, or there's a good chance someone else will have something else too that might work. Or if they think whipping up a tornado will solve the problem better, they won't have easy access to their wind magic in the future, but it might be worth it. (Given that the penalty for Exhausting Assets is reset when you gain a level, this also encourages players to go a little more nuts with it near the end of a level - which should probably be something somewhat climactic anyway, so good!)

This is not how it's going to work in every Total//Effect game. Liminal Void, for instance, has more traditional "skill" rolls with Assets being granted by skills or by tools, granting things like advantage or stepping up numerical outputs. Get you a system that does both!

Roll for Magnitude

Now, this isn't to say it's a diceless game! Far from it. You roll a lot in Valiant Horizon. But usually you're rolling for magnitude and not success.

Generally I like the idea of failure-less combat. I'm sure plenty of people love the tension of whiffing attack after attack but it's not my bag in almost any circumstance. I'm fully on board with removing roll-to-hit. One criticism I have of purely diceless systems, though, is that they can lead to very predictable situations, especially when diceless abilities are tied to set effects/powers. (It's what spawned my quarterbacking posts.) Now, of course a GM/Narrator/facilitator/etc can always introduce new things to the scene to spice things up - that's why there's a "the GM does something cool" thing in LUMEN, for example, and why I kept that rule in APOCALYPSE FRAME. But that's already an intensive role, and requiring them to keep things interesting is sometimes a big ask.

As a middle ground, combat in Total//Effect still involves rolls for variable effect for set powers. They all get better at higher Totals (3 dice added), and most of them key something off of Effects (individual die values). This means that something always happens, no matter the roll value - depending on the ability, it may be extremely small, but it's something. Correspondingly, even pretty middling abilities (like basic enemy abilities) can sometimes spike up hard on triple 6's! (This happened literally the first Total//Effect session I ever ran. Incredible moment.)

If you're wondering what probabilities look like for it, I wrote a big piece on it here. Back in October, so parts of it are outdated! I can hardly believe it's been going this long. The math's still good though.

This is also used for Fame rolls for Reputation: Fame decays by a die roll at semi-regular intervals. (This is actually an off-shoot of two separate Total//Effect systems that are in play in Liminal Void, Rolls for Progress and Threats, which are Good Clock and Bad Clock respectively. Having something that conditionally ticks up but at a non-constant rate adds another level of tension to an already tense thing!)

Roll for Success

There is exactly one thing that can still fail on account of a roll: Calling for Aid from Relationships. The tension I want in Valiant Horizon shouldn't come from "does my cool combat stuff work" or "does the cool thing that my hero gave me". It comes from "can I rely on my friends". This is partially because it's a huge benefit! It's a 1/session/relationship thing where you can tag someone in out of turn and outside the action economy (if it goes well). But it's partially because I want that tension: do you, does your character, think they can reliably call on their friends for help?

At low levels of relationship, the answer is...sometimes, but not really. At higher levels, you've gotten a better understanding of how to ask: you can reliably ask for lesser things, but grander things are still dodgy. And at the highest level, you can always rely on them: it'll never fail as such. (Sometimes you'll get a mixed result still.)

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Dice, rolling, and such are tools in the toolbox. Knowing when you want to use them, how you want to use them, and why goes a long way.

Next devlog, I’ll get into the various classes and start showing off more of the incredible art Charlotte made!

#ttrpg #ttrpg design #indie ttrpg #total//effect #valiant horizon #game design #ttrpg dev

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shyguycity · 6 years

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GOTY 2017

Hey y’all, it’s time for my third annual game of the year list. I hope it’s not too boring or longwinded. I also hope you don’t go into this expecting reviews of each game; with very few exceptions this list isn’t going to go into deep dives about individual game mechanics or plot beats, and I also don’t bother explaining highly specific video game terms and genres that the lay person isn’t going to be aware of, which is more down to this seeming too long already rather than apathy on my part. Discussion or questions are very welcome! Anyway, before we get into the actual top 11, here’s a couple games that didn’t quite make the cut that deserve to be talked about, as well as some housekeeping as to why some pretty big games aren’t included elsewhere on the list.

Some friends and I are also looking into doing a podcast later on to talk more in-depth about our lists, as well as maybe some other year end awards-y type things for other categories in games. Anyway, here we go.

Games I haven’t gotten to yet: Ruiner, Pyre, Prey, Yakuza 0, Hollow Knight, Hellblade

Don’t @ me I’m sleeping: Resident Evil 7, Persona 5, Mario + Rabbids, PUBG

Special shout outs that didn’t make it to the actual list but are still good, quite good!:

Snipperclips: Cut It Out Together (Switch) - Absolutely everyone that owns a Switch and has someone to play co-op games with should buy Snipperclips, be it significant other, child, sibling or roommate. It’s a game where you each play as two pieces of paper that have to cut each other into different shapes to solve various puzzles, and it’s even way more fun and goofy than that description makes it sound. If I had been able to put more time into this game it probably would’ve made the actual numbered list.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus (PS4/Xbox One/PC) - Wolfenstein’s story about an alternate 1960s where Germany won World War 2 and occupy America was so absolutely fucking bonkers and fun while at the same time bleakly sad and interesting. It’s a shame the actual game isn’t very fun to play, but this absolutely deserves mentioning somewhere. Get fucked Nazis.

Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4) - Horizon has maybe the most interesting and well told story in any big budget, non-indie game I’ve ever played. It’s also maybe the best looking game I’ve ever seen, especially running in 4k. It’s a shame it released so close to Zelda and Nier, since I feel it’s going to be overlooked in a lot of other GOTY lists, but it’s absolutely worth playing. Also the main character, Alloy, is really fun and tells weird kings to fuck off when they try and hit on her.

Aaaaaaaand here’s the actual list this year:

11. Night in the Woods (PS4/PC) - More games should address mental health. I think the medium is especially suited for not only discussion of the matter, but potentially as a teaching tool as well. It’s especially neat in Night in the Woods because of its slice of life, shitty rustbelt town in fall atmosphere. The main character, Mae, is an unexplained college dropout that returns to her hometown to hang out with friends, and discovers that they’ve all started making progress towards various goals in life while she has largely languished. It’s a very personal and sweet story about reconnecting with your roots and rebuilding connections with loved ones, all while surreal shit is going on in the background and it’s always kind of unclear what Mae is actually suffering from.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that, much like Life is Strange (PS4/Xbox One/PC) before it, what starts off as a very simple and charming slice of life game eventually strays into much bigger, cosmic scale ideas, and it kind of feels out of place. Still, I was never bored or driven to the point of rolling my eyes, and I’ve never played a game with more realistic dialogue between goofy and awkward punk rocker friends. The fact that everyone is an anthropomorphic animal for no reason other than to make it look cuter is a huge boon as well.

10. Shovel Knight: Spectre of Torment (Switch/PS4/Xbox One/Vita/PC/Wii U/3DS/PS3/Xbox 360) - The original Shovel Knight was a very cute, very charming, very ok game. It never blew me away the way it did for other people, despite the fact that it seemed tailor made for me, but it was still pretty dang good. The two expansions, however, have been far more interesting games, and Spectre of Torment in particular is a love letter to the original Mega Man X (SNES), a game which has weirdly never had its formula and feel replicated or expanded upon. Having full freedom to select which order to complete stages, as well as finding hidden doodads within that let you purchase new weapons, really maximizes the replay value. Add to that a completely remixed soundtrack that’s way more fun and melody driven than the original, and you have maybe the best action platformer since Mega Man 9 (Wii/PS3/360).

9. Destiny 2 (PS4/Xbox One/PC) - I think Destiny 2 represents pretty much everything I hate about modern game design - approximately 8,000 unique currencies all with their own uses; different classes and subclasses that in broad strokes don’t feel any different from each other; no real sense of progression aside from seeing a set of numbers arbitrarily rise; needlessly large worlds that aren’t fun to explore; a heavy emphasis on story when the story is complete fucking trash; etc. And yet I still put dozens of hours into the game.

It’s a dumb game and I am a very dumb person. That said, despite the constantly online, shooter focused nature of the video game industry, there really aren’t any other shooters so devoted to cooperative play on a scale larger than team versus modes. I can’t think of a game that’s had more fun co-op in recent memory, and that’s enough to make up for the mediocre pomp and frills surrounding the actual game. Who cares that Destiny is borderline predatory when my friends and I are throwing lightning grenades at shadow emperor space worms?

8. Metroid: Samus Returns (3DS) - At one point in time I’d have considered metroid my favorite game series period, so watching its decline over the past decade has been particularly painful. I wouldn’t say this half remake, half new game is an unmitigated success. But for an outsourced, low budget, sidescrolling entry in 2017, a time in which the indie scene has completely taken over the space metroid used to occupy, Samus Returns is an admirable experiment.

Unlike most, I think making the game more combat focused than any previous metroid is actually a wise move, especially considering the developer pedigree; Mercurysteam, despite any other faults, has proven that they can handle designing engaging combat mechanics. And weirdly, even though the main heroine is a 6 foot tall amazonian space goddess with bird alien power armor and a cannon arm, the series has never had engaging combat encounters before this. The game definitely lacks some of the atmosphere that the series is renowned for, but it’s hard for me to fault the game too much for what it isn’t when what we have is an interesting interpretation of a classic game and a new entry in an amazing series that has been dormant for too long.

7. Sonic Mania (Switch/PS4/Xbox One/PC) - Sonic was never really that good, even the Genesis era games that people hold in such high esteem. I’m actually of the opinion that, prior to Mania, Sonic Colors (Wii) was the best game in the series - the gameplay possibilities added by the wisps felt right at home in a Sonic game, while not feeling like a cheap gimmick. Generally speaking, the original Sonic games feel far too simplistic in terms of the verbs available to you to compete with anything like Mario. And while Mania doesn’t give Sonic any new verbs besides a variation on spin dashing, the level design is so creatively above and beyond anything previously seen in the series that it feels like an entirely different beast. Honestly, chemical plant zone alone has more creativity in its two acts than the entirety of any previous 2D Sonic game, and that’s before it culminates in a freaking Mean Bean Machine battle against Robotnik. I liken Mania the most to Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) in its ability to capture everything that the previous entries in the series were known for while still being able to modernize its design.

Despite all of that, the best part of Mania is its unflinching devotion to its aesthetic. It truly looks like a long lost Sega Saturn game. And while the soundtrack isn’t quite as slavish to what came before, I don’t think I’ve had a more dumb grin on my face this year than when I heard the calypso style Green Hill zone remix for the first time. Mania is a celebration of all things Sonic the Hedgehog, which means different things to different people. To me, what the game most loudly celebrates is the untapped potential of a tragically mishandled series. Consider this game the fulfilment of a promise the series originally made nearly 30 years ago.

6. Splatoon 2 (Switch) - If I’m being completely honest, Splatoon 2 is making it this high on the list almost solely for how fun the new four player cooperative mode, Salmon Run, is. You get stranded in various locations to take on hundreds of slimy zombie-esque salmon while terrifying horror movie music plays and you send out unheard pleas to the universe that you were paired up with players that actually know how to use the charger weapon (Splatoon’s equivalent to a sniper rifle that apparently takes more skill to wield than an actual real world sniper rifle based on my dozens of hours playing).

Salmon Run is fucking incredible. The rest of Splatoon 2 is also really quite fun to play. However: Nintendo is still so stubborn or incompetent or both when it comes to online play that any amount of fun you have with friends outside of Salmon Run is usually punctuated with spikes of rage the likes of which I’ve never experienced.

You can join your friends and play turf war (the standard Splatoon battle mode) pretty effortlessly at any point.

That’s good!

Every single match you play assigns you both to random teams, meaning you’re not always actually playing on the same team as the friend you’re attempting to play with. In fact, I swear there’s some kind of algorithm going in that actually assigns you and your friend to opposing teams more often than not.

That’s bad!

There is a mode where you can play with a dedicated team of two or four people, paired up against other groups of two or four.

That’s good!

It’s actually a ranked mode which is where all the professional Splatoon teams that stream on Twitch for hours everyday hang out, so you’re more than likely going to be facing off against a team of people who are so good at the game they make money off of splatting.

That’s bad!

Every few weeks there are big game-wide events called Splat Fests where each person chooses between two options, and then represents their selection and are paired up against players from the opposing team. These can range from pretty basic, such as cats vs dogs or ketchup vs mayonnaise, to the extremely goofy like Spongebob vs Patrick. Also, the music and backdrops of levels completely change during Splat Fests; all the levels are changed to take place at night, and you’re treated to ‘live performances’ of squid pop music. You even get exclusive in-game t-shirts based on the team you picked.

That’s good!

But your ability to play with friends during Splat Fests is even further restricted, limiting you solely to the aforementioned ranked mode. It’s to the point where it almost feels like Nintendo would just prefer you to play by yourself against strangers in some weird joyless, lonely world, which feels entirely counter to the kinds of games the company makes.

………..can I go play Salmon Run now?

I hope that this entry doesn’t come across as too negative, because despite all my personal frustrations with how Nintendo completely mangles their own online modes, the game is an absolute blast to play. And Salmon Run really is good enough to make up for a lot of these shortcomings! I just hope a Splatoon 3 really changes pretty much everything about the interface surrounding the game; we could really have something absolutely amazing if that were to happen, instead of a really fun game that has to be talked about with asterisks.

5. Steamworld Dig 2 (Switch/PS4/Vita/PC) - In a year that brought us the first new Metroid game in the better part of a decade, I never would have expected the best metroidvania style of game in 2017 to be a sequel to a pretty lowkey indie game that seemingly flew under the radar of the vast majority of both the industry and fans. I played the original and enjoyed it for what it was, but I never would have imagined that a sequel would be hanging so high up a game of the year list. And yet, it’s the best one of these in quite a few years, handily beating out recent darlings of the genre Axiom Verge (which was pretty ok) and Ori and the Blind Forest (which was really great). This mostly comes down to the new abilities you get in Steamworld; they’re not trying to subvert your expectations and knowledge of metroidvanias like a lot of recent games. Nope, you’re getting a damn grappling hook and jetpack. But these are the most satisfying and friendly grappling hook and jetpack mechanics in video games in a very long time. The game just has a very friendly vibe in general, from it’s warm, beautiful visuals to its amazing soundtrack. Even its upgrade system is extremely pleasant and forgiving, allowing you to swap out upgrade cogs with no fuss or punishment.

I’m also fully aware that Steamworld doesn’t quite fit into the metroidvania bubble; you’re constantly digging downward as opposed to exploring and re-exploring labyrinthine spaces looking for missile expansions, to the point where it’s almost a sidescrolling dungeon crawler. However, I think calling it a dungeon crawler is doing it a disservice due to certain connotations with that term. All you need to know is that if you’ve already finished Mario and Zelda on your Switch and are wondering what’s next, you can’t do any better than this.

4. Super Mario Odyssey (Switch) - It actually hurts my soul that a brand new 3D Mario game isn’t even in my top three games of the year. Especially since it’s a really good Mario game! Most of that is down to just how stacked 2017 has been, but it’s also down to some disappointments I have with Odyssey. Let’s just get it out of the way - there really isn’t a whole lot of high quality platforming in the game. I went in expecting this from the moment the game was announced as a return to the exploratory style of Super Mario 64 (N64), but even adjusted expectations couldn’t assuage my disappointment in those regards after playing the game for a few hours; Mario is so fun to control in Odyssey, and has such a wide array of moves at the player’s disposal, that my soul aches thinking about a hypothetical version of this game with devious platforming on the levels of Super Mario Sunshine (GameCube). Despite all of that, you can dress Mario up as Don Draper and ride a moped as a t-rex chases you down an alley.

So the level design never even begins approaching manic perfection of Super Mario 3D World (Wii U). It’s hard to be too upset about it when you start to realize just how dense with content every single area in Odyssey really is. When you first touch down in each kingdom, you can barely take 10 steps from your ship without stumbling onto a handful of moons. And what the game lacks in regards to its dedicated platforming challenges, it makes up for with the fever dream of creativity that is allowing the player to throw Mario’s cap at dozens of different creatures and possessing them, each with their own unique controls, movement and abilities.

And look. Even though I’m sorta full up on nostalgia for 8 and 16-bit games at this point, I absolutely am ready for nostalgia for Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64 games, which Odyssey is hopefully kicking off here. I was six-years-old when I played Mario 64 for the first time, and as hyperbolic (and maybe sad) as it sounds, I consider clumsily using an analog stick for the first time to try and make Mario climb trees outside of Peach’s castle to be one of the defining moments of my life. Without spoiling anything, there are a couple moments in Odyssey that brought me hurtling back to that time in my life that nothing has been able to previously. It’s absolutely worth buying a Switch for just to experience Odyssey, despite my opening volley of complaints. Just feel free to stop well before you find all 880(!) moons if you want to leave with the best possible impression.

3. Nier: Automata (PS4/PC) - Generally I don’t consider myself a particularly intelligent person, at least in the grand scheme of things. But by and large, talking about games, especially the kind I like, is a pretty straightforward affair (“Kirby pilots a mech in this one!” “This is a dual ghost fairy type that dresses itself up like Pikachu to trick humans into loving it. Oh wow.”). With Nier though, I find myself mostly feeling intellectually incapable of talking about its story and themes in any meaningful way beyond that a game has never made me feel the way this one did. And maybe not being tempted to make a fool out of myself by talking about things above my education level is for the best, because I would consider being spoiled on such an amazing game in some idiot’s end of year list to be a true shame.

Nier might look like typical anime goofiness on the surface, what with blindfolded french maid sexy butt android fighting wind up toys with a katana. But the game is fully self aware of every single trope it uses, including all of the questions it asks about existence and humanity. It goes some places and has some things to say, man. The one message I feel comfortable in talking about that the game espouses: being human essentially means being in a community and taking care of one another. This is exemplified in what was, for me, maybe the most stunning moment I’ve ever experienced in a game, and during the end credits no less.

This has been a very hard year to be a human living on planet earth. And though Nier is unflinchingly bleak, the overall message of hope and positivity beneath the surface was something that I personally needed. There has never been anything else like this game, and though there are certainly better playing games in 2017, I don’t know if anything will emotionally stick with me the way Nier has.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch/Wii U) - Not since I was a teenager with nigh unlimited free time have I been so enraptured with a video game like I was with Breath of the Wild. I put 60+ hours into the game in the first week it was released; it was like Zelda became my second job, only I was being paid in korok seeds and bloodshot eyes. And I say all of that as a person that considers the Zelda series pretty low on my personal Nintendo franchise totem pole!

What Nintendo was able to do with the open world genre, a type of game they’ve never touched before, is nothing short of remarkable. Most ‘open world’ games are open world only in the sense that there’s a lot of empty space to drive around in to get to an arbitrary objective marker, with no mechanics to give players a way to actually have fun in all of that space. Zelda lives and dies by how the world reacts to everything the player (and enemies) are doing. Sure, there’s simple examples like rolling a boulder down a hill to kill an unsuspecting group of enemies. But getting into a battle with enemies shooting fire arrows at you on a grassy plain, having the hill catch fire, and then escaping after realizing that the wildfire has created warm air that can push you on your paraglider up and out of harm’s way is one of the most amazing moments I’ve ever experienced in a game.

There are definitely issues with the game. For a game with so much time spent in menus, you’d think Nintendo could have come up with a far less cumbersome menu navigation method. And I do very much miss having full length Zelda-styled dungeons (though I do think breaking them up into 120 individual puzzles is a very interesting design decision that totally fulfils its intended goals). It’s easy for me to ignore a few rough edges in a game that made me totally forget what it meant to live life away from a TV screen for an entire week, though.

1. Cuphead: Don’t Deal with the Devil (Xbox One/PC) - I hesitate to call many things, in any medium, “perfect”. And when I do, it’s things like Shaun of the Dead. No, Shaun is not high art in the slightest, but I can’t think of any other movie that so deftly delivers on its intent while making it seem effortless. With the way modern video games are developed, my ideal of perfect (besides being as subjective as it can possibly be) seems nigh unattainable; how is a consumer product that’s touched the hands of hundreds, if not thousands, over the course of years of development supposed to sustain a singular, unified vision across the entire experience? Even the two best games of the past few years, Bloodborne (PS4) and Super Mario Maker (Wii U), really fall flat on their faces in certain regards, albeit in completely different ways. Make no mistake: Cuphead is the perfect video game, as well as the best game in maybe the best year for video games ever.

It’s not just the game’s tireless devotion to the “rubber hose” era of animation. Nor is it just how the game’s biggest video game inspirations, Gunstar Heroes (Sega Genesis) and Punch-Out!! (NES) are in and of themselves two perfect action games. The combining of a long dormant style of art with a (mostly) dormant style of games is genius in a way that makes everyone else seem dumb for not thinking of it first. Cuphead feels like something that came from an alternate timeline where polygonal games never became the norm, but art in games continued to grow and evolve, unlike other contemporary retro-styled affairs. Which isn’t meant to disparage games of that ilk, but rather emphasize how Cuphead somehow manages to succeed as a game that owes a lot to works that came before it, while also not relying on direct references to, and nostalgia for, those inspirations. The references and nostalgia are there of course, but aren’t needed for the game’s accomplishments to be appreciated by just about anyone.

Put all of that aside though, and what you have is a really fucking fun game where you get to shoot anthropomorphic waffles with magic finger guns. And it has cooperative play! In fact, the only bad thing that can be said about Cuphead is that the second playable character, Mugman, is relegated to player 2. Maybe ‘perfect’ was a tad hyperbolic.

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postgamecontent · 7 years

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Shining in the Darkness: SEGA Genesis RPG Spotlight #1

Original Release Date: March 29, 1991

Original Hardware: SEGA Mega Drive

Developer/Publisher: Climax Entertainment, Sonic! Software Planning/SEGA

SEGA's prolific and long-running Shining series is best-known for its entries in the tactical RPG genre, but that's not how it got started. The first game in the series is a first-person dungeon crawler, a format the brand would only return to once more in the late 1990s. Shining in the Darkness was the first development project for both Sonic! Software Planning and Climax Entertainment, but neither team was new to RPG development. In fact, the head of Sonic, Hiroyuki Takahashi, and the head of Climax, Kan Naito, had previously worked together on the Dragon Quest series for Enix. Although most Japanese RPGs released after Dragon Quest take after that important series in some ways, it's even easier to spot the links in Shining in the Darkness.

That link is also how the two teams came to work together on this and its follow-up, Shining Force. Having served in production roles on various Enix titles in the late 1980s, Takahashi was ready to move on, and in 1990 he did just that. He found a welcome partner in SEGA, who had just launched their new 16-bit hardware platform the year before and were looking for any talent they could pry away from Nintendo's powerful grip on third parties. Given Takahashi's resume, it's not surprising that his first project would be an RPG. SEGA invested in a new division called SEGA CD4, which was soon renamed Sonic! Software Planning in honor of the company's popular new mascot.

Naito had decided to depart from Dragon Quest developer Chunsoft around the same time. He formed Climax Entertainment and almost immediately started working with SEGA. Climax's first job was to help out Sonic! with their first game. The new team had just four members including Takahashi and needed some programming and art support. As Takahashi and Naito were friendly from their days working on the Dragon Quest games, the latter happily obliged with the request. Not long into the game's development, there was a shift in management at SEGA. Unfortunately, Takahashi didn't receive nearly as much support from the new management, planting the seeds for an eventual explosive exodus.

Given that Shining in the Darkness was the first project of two unproven teams, it's not that shocking that SEGA offered the absolute minimum budget they could for the game's development. Still, the developers made the most of it, re-using art as much as possible without compromising Takahashi's vision for as immersive an experience as was possible with the technology. The unfortunate outcome is that the game is rather more repetitive than it perhaps could have been. Visual and audio assets are stretched as far as possible, and the game has very few cut-scenes and themes relative to other contemporary RPGs. The game was completed and released in March of 1991 in Japan, with a speedy localization seeing it arrive in North America and Europe in August and September of 1991 respectively.

Expectations for the game weren't terribly high given the low budget and lack of experience of both teams. Somehow, Shining in the Darkness became a fairly big hit both in terms of critical reception and sales. Oh, it wasn't a huge seller in absolute terms, but for a SEGA home console release, it did very well. For his part, Takahashi didn't think the game was as strong as it could have been. He wanted to create better, more innovative battle systems than the average RPG had been including. For whatever merits Shining in the Darkness has, its battle system certainly can't claim to be innovative. Takahashi's inspirations and ideas would lead him down the road that resulted in Shining Force, one of the more successful international releases of a Japanese TRPG in its era.

It's worth noting that in the grand battle between loving RPGs for their mechanics and loving them for their stories, Takahashi was firmly in the mechanics camp. He didn't have a lot of use for stories, and that comes through pretty clearly in most of the Shining games from the pre-Saturn era. Indeed, the plot in Shining in the Darkness couldn't be more generic if it tried. You play as a young knight who is tasked by the king of the realm to recover his missing daughter. Your father, the greatest swordsman in the land, was already sent on a similar quest, but no one has heard from him since. You must enter the nearby labyrinth where they allegedly disappeared and find out what happened to both of them.

The game's world consists of just a single castle, a lone town, and the labyrinth. You can probably guess where you'll be spending most of your time. The castle mainly exists to move the plot forward from time to time. The town is your source of new gear, helpful items, a bed to rest on, a little helpful gossip, and the obligatory church that heals your ailments and saves your game. As for the labyrinth, it ultimately consists of five levels and four side caves, none of which are optional. The size is pretty substantial for the time, and the game doesn't have any sort of useful mapping feature, so you will definitely want to break out the graph paper in order to avoid getting lost. The best the game offers is a spell you learn later on that shows your immediate surroundings. It's not that helpful most of the time.

With its first-person dungeons, turn-based combat, and little more than a menu town to break things up, the obvious source of inspiration here is Wizardry. But Shining in the Darkness also takes a lot of lessons from Dragon Quest, resulting in a kinder, gentler experience. For example, a full party wipe only costs you half of your gold on hand, allowing you to keep any gained experience, items, and progress. Grinding is alleviated somewhat by having random hard-to-kill enemies appear that grant you buckets full of experience should you slay them. You have access to an item that instantly warps you back to town at a relatively low cost right from the start of the game. A big part of your quest involves gathering some legendary equipment, and you even save your game at churches complete with a jingle played on a virtual pipe organ.

While the game on the whole is quite easy for those willing to put in the time to grind, that doesn't mean it's totally bereft of Wizardry's tricks. Later areas of the game make use of trap-door pits, and you'll run into spinner tiles relatively early on. The encounter rate in the game is extremely high, and enemies love to call their friends into battle when they're losing. Even with all of that, however, the hardest part of the game is the beginning, when your hero is all on his own. He has a limited inventory, little money, and no magic. Wandering too far from the front door of the labyrinth is not advised. This portion of the game lasts until you run into the first mini-boss, a crab who scuttles out from behind a wall if you try to enter a certain section of the maze. Take him down and your days of solo battles will be behind you.

None too soon, either. Shining in the Darkness's combat never gets terribly complex, but when you've only got the hero in your party, your options are largely limited to a basic attack, using a healing item, or running away. You're either strong and lucky enough to outlast your opponent, or you're not. Gaining your additional permanent party members at least adds some strategy into the works, as you slowly learn an array of magic spells to use. There's nothing too fancy here, but you will have access to some buffs and debuffs, so that's at least something. You'll also occasionally be joined by a temporary party member who contributes an action every so often. You can't control them, but it's a nice bonus anyway.

There are no bones about it, though: Shining in the Darkness is one of those games where you will spend a disproportionate amount of time grinding. You need to grind up experience to get your stats high enough for bosses and the difficulty spikes that come with them. You need to scour for coins to make sure your gear is as up to date as possible. Some of the grind comes from having to retrace your steps to get back to where you were in the labyrinth. The back half of the game opens up a warp system, but until then you'll have to trudge all the way back through the dungeon every time you go back to town, smashing the weak and worthless enemies that crop up every few steps along the way. Much of this grind is mitigated if you're actually having to explore and map the dungeon, as that involves a fair bit of extra walking and fighting. If you know where to go or are using someone else's maps, you'll have to resign yourself to the idea of plopping down in each new section for a while and smacking around the newest beasts until you catch up.

True to Takahashi's preferences, Shining in the Darkness has a pretty threadbare story. There are a couple of twists that you'll see coming from a mile away if you're well-versed in the genre, but this is mostly a game about pure good versus pure evil. That said, the game has quite a bit of personality to it. The visuals are bright, the characters are well-designed, and what few bits of story that are present go a long way. Little touches like the music from the tavern getting quieter as you move your view to shops farther away in the town help make the world feel more alive. Having NPCs run into you in the dungeons and briefly join your side makes the labyrinth feel like an actual place where characters other than your party venture into. The music is excellent on its own, though it has to carry the heavy burden of being too few pieces stretched across far too much playtime.

With dungeon crawlers making a strong comeback in the last ten years, we've seen many new ideas and systems introduced to make the genre more palatable to the average player. Shining in the Darkness was a relatively player-friendly example of the genre in 1991, but it's a little harder to put up with in the here and now. Even its once-lauded icon-based interface feels cumbersome at times. Still, I think it can be put up with, which is more than you can say for many of its contemporaries. I suppose the real question is whether it's worth putting up with, and that's a more difficult one to answer. If you're the sort for whom the simple joy of mapping is sufficient entertainment, you'll likely enjoy at least one playthrough of the game. There's nothing particularly objectionable about it, after all.

On the other hand, the game's minimal story, grind-heavy progression, and generic approach to just about every aspect of its mechanics don't make for a compelling case for anyone else. Shining in the Darkness is the kind of game that is great when you have too much time and not enough to do, making it perfect for those long summer days in 1991 when the selection of console RPGs was rather thin. Today, its primary merits are that it served as the launching point for much better games to follow, and that it's not especially painful to play. Perhaps that's enough for a game of this vintage. I'm not sure I'd care to revisit it again outside of that context, mind you.

Next: Beyond Oasis

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#retro #gaming #sega #sonic software planning #camelot software planning #climax entertainment #genesis #mega drive #shining in the darkness #shining #rpg

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nazih-fares · 7 years

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In these modern days, 3D fighting games are a rare commodity. Born from 3D craze of the mid-1990s, with an urge for every single console in the market to enter this new dimension, the genre flourished… until it almost disappear entirely. Let’s face it, in the case of fighting games, a combat in a 3D environment can pose many gameplay worries and few titles have mastered this trend, like Soul Calibur and especially the Tekken series (both published by Bandai Namco). Known for these endless combos, the series had lost some of its punch after the release of Tekken 6, but Katsuhiro Harada wanted to bring back the saga with the might of an iron fist, worked for years with the perfectionist mind of a Japanese developer, and finally gave us Tekken 7 on consoles after a year in Arcades, and might be the series best entry so far.

Since its early days, the Tekken series suffers from many of the genre’s clichés which were too difficult to forget (I’ll refrain from mentioning the horrible Tekken 5 and Tekken 6 which did not help at all). With its lengthy combos, its endless aerial juggles and a certain amount of accessible playability, the franchise did not bother to reshape the gameplay. Now with Tekken 7, Harada’s team had the main goal to get away from the old trends, and get back to the days of being a fun but also very technical fighting game for the sake of the fighting game tournament scene. On that competitive front, Tekken always played a role in major international tournament series like EVO. For that, the franchise decided to expand that by adding native eSports features in the game, such as the possibly to organize your very own bracket online tournaments, participate and spectate matches being played, which help tremendously streamers.

To start with, when to comes to technical gameplay, Tekken 7 says goodbye to the infinite combos to return to something purer and raw, closer to the gameplay feel of my favorite entry in the series which is Tekken 3. In general fighters seem heavier on ground, but lighter in the shock of the punch and kicks, helping push back the opponent without the endless aerial juggle of the previous games. (the nuance is important) And return more quickly to the ground. In the air, the hitboxes seems more reduced than before, requiring players to time hits better to link these famous air combos. The result of all this is shorter but more violent combo threads, which above all will demand a greater mastery of the game, which is what we wanted.

The game is therefore more technical, but also more tensed, with a real work done on the defense and the possibilities to counter-attack. Tekken 7 introduces the Power Crush system, which allow the players to absorb damage from a mid to high attack and use it against your opponent (similar to Street Fighter IV Focus Attack). The Power Crush system doesn’t work on low sweeps or grabs, so don’t expect to abuse or spam these features. This is where the mindgame takes on its importance since you’ll have to be close to active that Power Crush, but at the same opens the door to get countered by a simple grab, and thus reminding you how important attack variation is in Tekken 7. Besides the Power Crush, Tekken 7 enriched the Rage system introduced in the previous opus. With RB (or R1 depending on your console), it is possible to launch a Rage Art attack, a kind of Super Attack (a bit like Mortal Kombat’s Xray Attacks), but also to use the Rage Drive, a unique attack that has the ability to break enemy guard, and initiate longer combos. Tekken 7 of course didn’t forget the cinematic angle of franchise, and added this Super Slow Motion that is activated when both of the players are at low health and are just about to hit each other.

When it comes to the story mode of Tekken 7, it tells the end to the conflict between Heihachi Mishima and his son Kazuya, known as the “Mishima Saga”. The mode will expand with a few different characters other than Heihachi and Kazuya, which could entertain fans of the series. I for one never bothered understand the storyline of the Tekken Series, and this episode is no different as it’s riddled with cliche dialogue lines and scenes. The game story takes a hell lot of time to tell the story, with too many cinematics, but also weird conversations where characters would be enacted by different lanaguage voiceovers, which is a bit weird and illogical. I mean, unless you are at an interpreter party, who would logically start a topic in English (Nina), for a Japanese (Heihachi) to answer back in his native tongue, only to be interrupted by a new Italian fighter (Claudio). Anyway, it might feel normal for people, it’s just weird to hear 3-4 different voiceover languages in the same scene.

At launch, Tekken 7 gives us a fine selection of 36 characters to play, including old ones like Nina, Kuma, Law, but also nine brand new fighters including Claudio, Luchy Chloe and our first Arabic one called Shaheen. The new fighters are necessarily more classical in terms of design styles, adding a great diversity in the roster of the game, without creating useless duplicates. Every fighter has his own personality and it will once again be difficult not to find one that clicks to your style, whether you prefer some like Lucky Chloe with very fast hits and extremely fluid movements, or go for – my favorite so far – Master Raven who’s more technical and relies on counter-attacking, as well as using teleportation and quick dodge paired with Ninjutsu style (Sort of robotic-enhanced ninja).

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As it is the case with many fighting games nowadays, including recently Injustice 2 (reviewed on our site last month) you will have the freedom to customize your favorite fighters through a dedicated editor. Clothing, hair, color schemes, and a bunch of – mostly goofy – accessories will create numerous combinations. I wish though that they focused a bit on creating real secondary identity like character specific or exclusive accessories, because most of the alternative set given are mostly just alternate color scheme sets based on the original. If you didn’t get what I mean, I’m referring to ideal secondary cosmetic skins that dramatically change the look of the fighter, maybe with a classical retro look, younger age, etc. As you would have guessed, most accessories aren’t unlocked and require you to either spend money (in-game currency) or do specific game actions and achievements. You can earn money through various existing game modes (online, singleplayer, etc) or spend time in the Treasure Fight mode. The latter, is a like a min-arcade mode, forcing you to beat a succession of enemies and will win a chest after each win that contains a customization item, and the more you chain victories, the more rare the loot.

On the side of the online mode, I’m happy to say that it’s probably the best around from this new generation of fighting games (In comparison to Injustice 2 and Street Fighter V). While it was still difficult to judge the effectiveness of matchmaking since few people had the game when I received my review code, but after the launch week, I faced no problems, with no latency issues, dropping server connection and no frame drops whatsoever.

Sadly my small issue with the game is the general visual look of Tekken 7, which is closer to an older generation game. For a game launched in 2017 – even if it was in Arcade 2016 – it visually looks like a Tekken 6, lacking a sort of finesse. Even if the game is perfectly fluid, using a brand new Unreal Engine 4 custom graphic engine, the general feel is a bit sub-par on couple of points. Menus are slick, arenas are really colorful and special effects pop, but face animations feel crude, and some clothing and other cosmetic parts of the fighters look pixelated around the edges.

But at least, on another artistic point of view, the game has some of the best audio compositions, mixing fun guitar metal shreds and heavy riffs, traditional Japanese and far east instruments and even some Arabian and Spanish influenced tunes. To be honest, that surprised me a lot, as previous games were always playing the clichés of the genre, which you can actually listen to in the PlayStation 4 exclusive Jukebox mode, which acts as a historical music library of the Tekken franchise.

Tekken 7 was reviewed using an Xbox One digital copy of the game provided by Namco Bandai as well as a PC Steam copy of the game purchased by the reviewer. The main review was done by Nazih Fares and the technical PC review was written by Mazen Abdallah after a tested on a PC running Windows 10, with an 8GB NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070 fitted on a 4th Generation Intel i7 4790 3.6Ghz CPU and topped with 16GB of RAM. The game is also available on PlayStation 4 via retail and online stores. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published.

After waiting for more than 6 years for a sequel, you'd expect Tekken 7 to come back with the might of an iron fist, and Bandai Namco absolutely nailed that. In these modern days, 3D fighting games are a rare commodity. Born from 3D craze of the mid-1990s, with an urge for every single console in the market to enter this new dimension, the genre flourished...

#Bandai Namco #Editor&039;s Choice #Featured #Fighting Games #Multiplatform #Multiplayer #Namco Bandai #Singleplayer #Tekken

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