Ys X: Nordics (Demo)

Ys X is of course the latest entry in the Ys franchise, and its demo was released on October 14, 2024 in an effort to drum up interest in its full release on the 25th.  Fitting in with modern trends it's a pretty substantial demo - you get to play the first three chapters of the story, and any saves and even achievements you earn carry over to the full version.

The developers apparently drew some inspiration from games in the Souls series for its combat, and that is pretty evident after playing a bit of it - there's a lot more focus on dodging and countering enemy attacks and healing is more restricted, giving you a limited number of potion bottles that must be refilled after use, and dying sends you back to the last checkpoint stone you activated.  Thankfully don't go ridiculously overboard with the influence - there's no dud equipment, tedious rare drop farming nor any need to build your character in one extremely specific way to stand any chance, and leveling is still a largely automated process that bolsters all of your stats.  The fundamentals of party based Ys are still here too, with one character under your active control and the others controlled by the computer, though you control only two characters this time - Adol and Karja.  A strange new mechanic is that you can hold R2 to effectively control both characters at once, massively boosting your DPS beyond what each character can achieve individually, even with skills. Since R2 is also your block and parry button (the former active any time you're not attacking, the other requiring a more carefully-timed press), it seems there's little benefit to fighting individually in most circumstances.  Another new addition is that you can press L2 to launch out a "mana rope" to both traverse obstacles in the environment and pull yourself closer to enemies for attacks, a bit similar to the new traversal mechanics seen in Ys IX.  There are some segments where you're traveling over the open ocean, complete with a fairly simplistic naval combat minigame to deal with attacking enemies.  This is also easily the most talky Ys game yet, with a lot of front-loaded dialog scenes and even more in between each story beat, with many elementa that don't get their due explanation until later in the story; it's almost on par with the Yakuza games.  Honestly I think I spent about 2/3 of my time with the demo watching cutscenes and the rest were action beats, which is not really what I think of when I picture the fast-paced actiony franchise that is Ys.

All told, it seems like another solid entry in the Ys series, but for personal preference, I like when Ys is just trying to be itself and not cashing in on something that's currently popular.  Felghana was a fantastic remake that perfectly captured the fast-paced style of the series roots, Ys VIII took the party-oriented format up to 11 with its great combat, fast pacing and well-realized characters and worldbuilding, while Monstrum Nox and Nordics just feel a bit bandwagony, trying to cash in on games like Kingdom Hearts 3's open-world design and Dark Souls' brand of combat; neither feels overly derivative of the games they're aping from, but at the same time they also lose part of their core identity.  I'll probably grab the full game of Ys X eventually, but not right away; especially with the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest III out next month and Fantasian: Neo Dimension coming not long after that.

Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: NIS America, Nihon Falcom
Released: 2024
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

The first in the Zelda franchise's nearly 40-year history to put the title character in the leading role, Echoes of Wisdom is also seemingly an attempt to reconcile the newer, more immersive style of Zelda with the classic dungeon crawling format that made it a hit to begin with.  But does it strike a solid balance between old and new, or is this a surprisingly unwise outing?

Breath of the Wild (and its followup, Tears of the Kingdom) were of course highly successful and well-reviewed games, but to many long-time Zelda fans they felt like a departure, stepping away from the tightly designed puzzles, gadgets and dungeon-oriented design in favor of something open world and based more on emergent design.  I can certainly understand that - I found Breath of the Wild a bit underwhelming myself - but Nintendo proved they weren't abandoning the old format entirely with a remaster of Skyward Sword and a full-3D remake of Link's Awakening.

Echoes of Wisdom is a game that utilizes a very similar visual style to the Link's Awakening remake, though it's made clear pretty quickly that it's not a full return to form - while you do play the intro as Link, utilizing a very familiar arsenal of weapons and moves, the game quickly shifts to you controlling Zelda and the gameplay changes up dramatically.  The main gimmick this time is utilizing the Tri Rod to create "echoes" - by scanning objects or the icons left behind by defeated enemies, you earn the ability to make duplicates of them.  Each object has slightly differing properties to utilize, while enemies behave much like their normal counterparts; just that they target and harm other enemies instead of you.  As you move through the game and complete dungeons, you also unlock new abilities.  One is that Tri allows you to pick up and move objects as though they were weightless (much like the Ultrahand ability in TotK), while completing dungeons earns you upgrades, like being able to have more active Echoes at the same time or create them at further distances, opening up new avenues to explore and overcome obstacles.

The central gimmick is certainly a clever one, and being able to improvise with the tools you're given to solve various problems makes the gameplay quite fun and rewarding.  That said, I think they made a mistake by making one of the first powers you get a limited time transformation to essentially just become Link again.  You even start out with his sword and unlock his bow, hookshot and bombs as the game progresses, like they were afraid to stray too far from the old staples despite the game ostsensibly starring a new character with a very different gameplay centerpiece.  Granted it doesn't completely upend Zelda's gameplay - it runs off a fairly short timer and you still need to use Zelda's toolset to expose boss weak points - but it feels like a bit of a copout that Zelda's first adventure still basically has you play as Link.  I found the game most enjoyable when I used the Link morph only when it was absolutely necessary to and just stuck to improvising clever solutions with echoes whenever I could; it gives the game a charm similar to doing a swordless run of 1986 Legend of Zelda.

While the game does return to a linear style of storytelling and progression by requiring you to complete dungeons in order to progress to new areas, some trappings of the open world style Zeldas remain in Echoes.  One is that there are many optional areas to explore and side-missions given to you by NPCs, which often have useful rewards.  BotW's cooking system returns in a more limited format - rather than being able to cobble together almost anything into a potion or a meal, you now combine two ingredients to create "smoothies" with various effects like elemental resistance, temporary damage reduction or restoring some of your energy.  Outfits also return in a more limited format, divided into Clothing and Accessories that grant various beneficial effects or are just cosmetic.

As in the Link's Awakening remake, performance does gets a little choppy in places (particularly when there's a lot of water effects) but I never found it severe enough to hamper the experience; a constant framerate is certainly necessary for games like fighters or racing games that require frame-perfect inputs, but in a leisurely, slower paced adventure like Zelda it's not a serious hindrance.  Something the game could have used is a Favorites list for your Echoes; having to scroll through a single-file list that runs dozens deep gets pretty tedious, and the various sorting options you're given only alleviate it to a point.  Being able to set a few Favorites in designated slots at the top of the list (or a separate list entirely) would have helped quite a bit.

So, is Echoes of Wisdom a return to the classic style of Zelda?  Yes and no.  It certainly returns to the more linear, puzzle-oriented format of the classics, but the core gameplay is more of a hybrid, taking the emergent approach to puzzle design from BotW/TotK and downplaying direct combat in favor of finding creative ways to outwit and defeat foes.  So if you like to make your own fun but want a more straightforward approach to dungeon puzzles and storytelling while you do it, Echoes of Wisdom is one you'll probably want to pick up.

 

Developer: Nintendo EPD, Grezzo

Publisher: Nintendo

Released: 2024

Platforms: Switch

Recommended Version: N/A

Bioshock Infinite

Infinite is more of the same braindead pew-pew crap gameplay as the original Bioshock, but instead of objectivism and libertarianism it's got Ken Levine's strawmannified takes on American jingoism and race relations and time travel and parallel universes and dehumanization that never actually takes a firm position on anything; after all, every true artist (and their publisher) will tell you that diluting any hint of a message until it's unrecognizable is a small price to pay for just a few more sales.  And it's all brought to you at the cost of his company and hundreds of his coworkers' jobs and well-being because the gaming press has hyped him up as some infallible heaven-sent visionary for so long that he's started believing it himself.  (Ironic, then, that he sees absolutely no parallels to himself and his story's villain, a normal guy who becomes a self-proclaimed prophet so he can exploit people for personal gain.)  But I will admit, seeing a popup about how "not all confrontations need to be solved with violence" after an unavoidable shootout in broad daylight that left about 56 of my assailants dead was pretty goddamn funny; at least until I learned that it wasn't meant to be and it was an earnest attempt at incorporating "player choice" and "morality" into the proceedings, which - surprise - makes literally no difference to how the story plays out anyway.  I also guessed the big plot twist about 20 hours before it came (seriously, we've all seen Fight Club by now, quit ripping it off) so the whole thing is just an overstuffed, completely boring waste of time.  Too overblown, obnoxious and in love with itself to realize it's not saying anything novel or even intelligent, Bioshock Infinite is the gaming equivalent of Ricky Gervais.

 

 

Seriously Ken, you worked on Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2, two of the greatest games ever made; eat a slice of humble pie and start working on quality projects again, not self-indulgent prolefeed garbage...

Developer: Irrational Games
Publisher: 2K Games
Released: 2013
Platforms: XBox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Mac OS X, Linux