Star Ocean: Second Evolution – I Choose You, Rena!

April 13th, 2013

Although Star Ocean: Second Evolution‘s narrative is pretty run-of-the-mill, one minor narrative arc did catch me off guard. Early on in the game, Claude (blonde-haired hero archetype) and Rena (blue-haired introvert archetype) run into the seductive Celine (purple-haired extrovert archetype), who shows the duo a treasure map and sends them off to Krosse Cave to track down the reward. After claiming the “ancient text” and defeating a pair of gargoyles, Claude and Rena find Celine waiting for them at the cave’s exit. She asks Claude if she can join the party. Rena expresses her discomfort for the unreserved Celine to Claude, and the player’s left to make a judgement call. Having grown sick of Rena’s pathetic “I’m a shy country girl” act hours ago, I leapt at the opportunity of adding a little verve to the narrative. Rena expressed her discontent, but I wasn’t all that fazed

Later, the crew arrive in Marze and quickly discover that all the children in the town were stolen by a gang of thieves. Our buddying heroes decide to go after the crooks, but Rena, possibly as a result of my earlier decision, split from the group and joined her big-brother friend, Dias. Claude was a bit upset over the matter, given his not-so-secret crush on Rena, but, again, I wasn’t fazed, after all, Celine seemed like a more than adequate replacement for Rena.

She wasn’t.

The difficulty spikes a little in the forrest on the way to the thieves’ hideout, but unlike before, Rena wasn’t there to heal the party out of every bad situation, and Celine could only cast attack magic. I ended up exhausting my stash of healing items and barely making it out the forrest alive, all the while feeling guilty that I’d, quite maliciously, given Rena the cold shoulder. The forrest and its onslaught of thief soldiers did something which up to that point the game’s copious amount of text dialogue failed to do: it gave me a reason to care about Rena. There’s a moral to this story and I’m sure that you’ve figured it out already: the only way to affect the player is through play itself.

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Wario Land: Shake Dimension – Enemies, Rewards, Level Design, and Progression

April 7th, 2013

My discussion on Wario Land: Shake Dimension‘s mechanics can be found here. You should read that first.

Enemies

Shake Dimension has a scarce selection of enemies, most of which do a pretty feeble job at engaging the player. The ubiquitous pawn enemies, Bandineros, have less interplay than a Marumen and basically act as walking health refills. The rest are mostly simple variations on the same walk-left-to-right formula. None of the enemies drop spoils, so their interplay is one cycle shallower than Wario Land 4‘s foes and there’s no undercurrent of psychological stringing-along. If Wario grabs an enemy and shakes them, they may drop a clove of garlic or some coins. I guess the developers wanted to find a way to encourage the player to use the accelerometer-controlled mechanic, even though it interrupts the game’s flow (Wario can’t move and shake) and isn’t very interesting. The enemies all make the same strange monkey noise when you defeat them. Not only does the sound effect not suit their visual form, it doesn’t make sense that the individual enemies all make the same noise.

Rewards

Most of the game’s rewards come in the form of money bags. Wario can shake these sacks to clear out the coins inside, causing a flurry of them to fill the surrounding area. The coins disappear shortly after they leave the bag, so the process of spreading them around only leads to frustration as there’s usually a few coins that fall either out of reach or too far from Wario to retrieve them in time. Holding the sack while claiming the coins is a bit cumbersome, so it’s preferable to find a quiet corner and let loose. If I were to repair Shake Dimension, I would drastically overhaul the money sacks, if not remove them completely.

Level Design and Game Progression

Where Shake Dimension goes from being good and reasonable to bad and frustrating is in its level design. Having spent 2 years analysing Wario Land 4 and its levels, the issues with Shake Dimension‘s set of stages became apparent almost immediately. They are:

The difficulty level in each world slowly rises before it’s reset at the start of the next world. Wario Land 4 does this too (as with Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins), but avoids the issue of the difficulty falling off a cliff every few stages by 1) making that cliff relatively short and 2) specialising each of the four passages around a different part of the game system. In Shake Dimension, the cliff is not only relatively high, but the worlds are relatively unspecialised.

Because of the dash attack’s new-found flexibility and how it’s deeply embedded into the post-fold by way of level design and side objectives, all of the post-folds, regardless of the type of folding, are about speed running. In Wario Land 4, the post-fold is—aside from a few levels—used as a time-pressured way of continuing the exploration of the game idea. Because Shake Dimension‘s game ideas are restricted to half a level, they tend to be shallower than they could be. To combat this, certain concepts are started in some levels and picked up in others, usually not sequentially. It’s this mixing and matching of odds and ends, combined with occasional Subwarine diversions, that makes the game’s narrative so incoherent.

The restricted-to-freer practice that defines Wario Land 4‘s education and variation isn’t as tight in Shake Dimension, so the game has a harder time of leading the player through the rigours of the level arrangements.

The level design and optional objectives work in tandem to offer the player a multitude of ways to scale the difficulty. There are two problems, though. Firstly, the player is usually only given one shot at accessing each of the secret areas and routes needed to fulfil the objectives. Given that, on their first go, the player doesn’t know what to expect from a level, it’s easy for them to overlook the indicators that lead to said secret routes and areas. Not being able to immediately retry therefore encourages them to manually restart the level every time they miss one of the many secret hidey holes. (Incidentally, the designers included such an option in the pause menu). Furthermore, Wario Land 4‘s “try again at the expense of more time” dynamic (that makes deciding what to do after failing an optional arrangement post-fold engaging) is lost. In Shake Dimension, when the player fails, they only have one option: press on. Secondly, most of the side objectives are set high enough that the only way to beat them is to access ALL the secret areas. Yet, since the player only gets one chance at reaching each individual area, reaching them all more often than not requires the player replay a completed level multiple times. This process of making the perfect run is heavily steeped in memorisation and trial and error

Conclusion

Since I started the first post summarising everything I’ve subsequently said, I guess I should end this final post with an introduction (there’s an allusion here to folded level design, I’m sure of it), or maybe just a mini-announcement. I’m nearing the end of my stockpile of notes, so that means I can start work on book #2. It’s a bit of a relief, actually. Although I think I’ve made a few good points over the past 2 months, writing short-form comments based on notes of games I finished months, even years ago is a real drag. I can’t wait to move onto something newer and more meaty, where I can really flex my skills. Of course, I’m always playing new games, so I’ll still be updating the blog with short-form observations. I’m aiming for a frequency of one or two articles a week, so actually not much will change, will it? Besides some “fresher” writing, I hope.

Additional Readings

Wario Land: Shake It! Review – Critical Gaming Network

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Wario Land: Shake Dimension – Mechanics

April 2nd, 2013

To wit, Wario Land: Shake Dimension takes Wario Land 4, pairs back or removes the mechanics, transformations, and game elements to a sort of proto-Wario Land 1 state and then replaces all the nuance and dynamics that made Wario Land 4 engaging with gestures that don’t evolve beyond their base level application. That’s not to jump on the “motion controls ruin everything, boo, hoo, hoo” bandwagon. In this case, the gameplay concepts themselves aren’t expanded beyond the player shaking the remote to make Wario do a particular action. The folded level design also isn’t so crash hot either, and the game has a nasty habit of making it easy for the player to fail optional challenges (often listed as side objectives, for the compulsive) and then denying them a retry, something which encourages manual restarts. Shake Dimension is a bare bones Wario game to say the least. Let’s extend on this a little though:

Mechanics

Wario’s core ability set is identical to Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land, except that the player can turn the Wii-mote to angle throws and shake the Wii-mote to shake a held object or activate an Earthshake Punch. Shaking a held object can cause coins or other treats to come bouncing out of them. The Earthshake Punch has Wario punch the ground, stunning enemies and altering certain level elements. The mechanic’s similar to Wario Land 4‘s heightened smash attack (level 2 quake), but can be activated instantly and runs on a cool down meter.

The Earthshake Punch and shaking held objects aren’t very engaging mechanics: the player waggles the controller and Wario does the action, that’s it. Although the mechanics are intuitive, as the input matches the output (shaking), there’s no variability to the motion. So, Wario can’t not do an Earthshake Punch because the player didn’t shake the controller hard enough, for example. Furthermore, the player can’t charge the mechanics like Wario Land 4‘s smash attack (ground pound), frame cut like Wario Land 4‘s attack jump, or activate frame-specific moves like Wario Land 4‘s dash attack.

 

Many of Wario’s mechanics are allocated to specific game elements. It’s these game elements that make up the majority of gameplay concepts—as opposed to the transformations in Wario Land 4, which are extremely paired back in Shake Dimension. These devices make clever use of the Wii-mote’s accelerometer and are much more engaging than the two permanent, motion-controlled mechanics. The unibuckets, for example, accelerate sharply when the Wii-mote is tilted, so the player must work against this nuance so as not to oversteer (more examples in the image above). I’m not so convinced of the Subwarine, though, which is fiddly and unnatural. Best to leave the submarining to Mario.

When Wario enters a red, right-angled pipe, officially called a Max Fastosity Dasherator, he can dash attack. Shake Dimension‘s dash attack is modelled after Wario Land 4‘s, but there are two significant differences:

These changes put a stress on the player keeping the dash attack active over an extended distance, where they can make the most of its fast speed. The folded level design and reward-based sub-objectives play into this, hiding the best rewards where only a dash attacking Wario can reach, at the end of the post-fold. This is also true of the time-based sub-objectives, which can only be met by completing most of the post-fold with the dash attack. The ability to change direction allows for more latitude in the level arrangements and plays into the mechanic’s skid nuance.

As for the other differences between Shake Dimension and its predecessor:

This is a two-parter, so stick around for part #2 where I discuss Shake Dimension‘s enemies, rewards, level design, and progression structure.

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