August 2021 – Parry Everything

Majora’s Mask Boss Fight Remakes: Boss Design Goals

This is part two of an analysis on the boss design of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and its remake. Part one can be found here.

Something I’d like to talk about while reviewing these last two bosses is the utility of bosses in general. Rather, what design goals are you fulfilling by including a boss? People love bosses, but why? They tend to be notable spikes in gameplay intensity marking the end of a chapter, level, or other extended segment. Bosses can serve a number of functions be it as a narrative component, accentuating a certain gameplay mechanic, simply being a restrictive challenge, among many others. Considering the design goals of a boss helps keep the experience focused and in-line with what you’re trying to design. I’m going to look at these next two bosses through this lens.

Gargantuan Masked Fish Gyorg is next on the chopping block. As his name implies, this beast will fight you primarily from his home in the water. The fight takes place in a large, deep pool with a single round platform in the center raised just above the water’s surface for the player to stand on. At this point in the game the player will also have access to the Zora form, a power which allows them to breathe and maneuver adaptably underwater by running along the pool’s bottom or swimming at high speeds like a dolphin. I’d definitely call Gyorg the weakest of the original N64 Majora’s Mask boss fights. With very little going on, and a rather disruptive camera, I never find myself looking forward to fighting him.

N64 Gyorg’s fight is kind of confusing, to be honest. While the fight is completely player-directed, it’s also not always clear exactly what you need to be doing in this fight. If you stand on the central platform, Gyorg flails about and tries to knock you off, indicating clearly that you’re meant to fight him in the much more spacious pool, although blind-firing arrows at him with your bow from dry land is also possible. The camera is not very kind when it comes to this method, however. You seem to be punished for not being in Zora form, and once in Zora form Gyorg still just seems to swim aimlessly, occasionally going for a bite at you. There’s so little structure to this fight that one can just sort of… try things out, most of which will only kind of work. What I think you’re supposed to do is use the Zora form’s boomerang ability to stun him.. Then use it again while he is stunned to damage him. He has a weak point you need to hit, but it is targeted automatically if you use the targeting mode. A little odd, a little unclear. If you get the timing right, you can stun lock Gyorg forever and there basically is no boss fight. Get it wrong, and you’ll be seeing a lot of the inside of Gyorg’s mouth in rather frustrating fashion. The problem is, while the targeting mode tries to frame the camera, Gyorg’s wildly moving body will swing it around in an abrupt fashion. Unfortunate, since using the targeting mode is the ideal way to attack him. After he takes some damage, he will release a swarm of small fish to attack you, though they can be largely ignored as one continues to stun-lock Gyorg.

The total lack of structure in this fight makes me wish it was more environment-directed, and makes me question what the design goals with this fight are. It does not utilize this dungeon’s item at all, nor is it very friendly to using most of the Zora’s powers. Swimming at Gyorg can potentially harm him, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s not very fun or effective to do. Since actually swimming is not much involved in this fight, it doesn’t really serve as a capstone to the mechanics of the dungeon its found in either. Gyorg is a bit of a low point for me in Majora’s Mask, not providing much by way of narrative, challenge, or mastery for the player. The most effective strategy “throw boomerangs at him repeatedly”, does not make much intuitive sense, and goes to show how some environmental-direction, either through the boss’s actions or the area they are fought in, can help make a fight’s design goals clearer and more effective.

3DS Gyorg sees a lot more structure and direction by the environment in his boss fight, to become a much more effective boss in my opinion.

Once again we have that obvious orange eyeball-weakspot, but also a notable change to Gyorg’s design. Before his body was a continuous color but now his face is a notable stony gray in contrast to a softer looking red-orange body. The structure of the fight is being communicated. On the 3DS it’s a lot more clear what you’re actually hitting; anything besides Gyorg’s mask. It’s the mask that’s armored, but not his body, indicating it is vulnerable. The camera has been improved immensely when it comes to shooting Gyorg with the bow and arrow. He now jumps into the air or swims along the surface of the water like a shark, framing his bright orange body nicely against the blue arena for some bow shots. It’s a lot more satisfying already. It works so well it seems as though fighting Gyorg from the land is the intended method, although the Zora also still works like in the old game.

This still looks so incredibly silly to me.

This time, once Gyorg has taken enough damage, the land disappears, forcing the player to engage as a Zora. The implementation of the Zora’s gameplay mechanics are still not stellar in this part of the fight, but it’s a marked improvement over the original game. Here, the Zora’s swimming ability is incentivized to quickly release sea mines, whose very presence is a good clue as to what the structure of this fight is. Gyorg will often open his gullet to try and suck you in, but will suck in any stray mines instead, stunning him and opening him for attack.

Hey-hey! Swimming to fight him actually.. kind of works now.

This phase is a little janky as the timing for getting Gyorg to start inhaling and releasing a mine is rather narrow and doesn’t feel as smooth as the mechanics of many other Zelda bosses. Still, overall the changes to Gyorg make him feel like a much more complete experience that actually utilizes mechanics from his dungeon such as the Zora swimming. There’s a lot more variety and feedback for what you should actually be doing. If the design goals here were to engage the player to think about how to adapt to an aquatic foe, it succeeds on that front. I’d give the 3DS version of Gyorg a solid thumbs up over his predecessor.

By janky I mean… well it’s a little disorienting to even figure out what’s going on here.

The final boss I’ll be talking about from Majora’s Mask is the Giant Masked Insect Twinmold. With a somewhat misleading yet somewhat appropriate title, Twinmold is actually two giant masked centipede… worm… things, plural.

The original Nintendo 64 version of this boss fight is extremely open ended, extremely player-directed. There is a special dungeon item you obtain in the hours leading up to Twinmold’s confrontation, but it, like many such items before it, in Majora’s Mask is entirely unnecessary to defeating its dungeon boss. Although you are clearly intended to use it. In fact, Twinmold’s boss room is the only location in the game in which that special item, the giant’s mask, can be used. It grants the player titanic proportions, using some visual trickery to transport the player to a scaled-down version of the boss arena inhabited by scaled down Twinmolds that can be much more easily reached with your now colossal sword.

Whether you decide to don the giant’s mask or not, the concept of this boss fight is extremely simple; Twinmold is invulnerable everywhere along its long body except at the head and tip of its tail. The player’s goal is to strike the head and/or tail of each Twinmold until they die, while avoiding their sharp, undulating bodies. If the player is using their limited magic to do so, such as in utilizing the giant’s mask, they must keep on eye on this magic resource and shrink back down to normal size in order to replenish, risking some greater threat to their health in the process. It’s a straightforward rule set borrowed from previous 2D Zelda games where fighting a giant worm meant aiming for its constantly-moving tail, but adapted to 3D space. It works really well! Rarely are you required to keep exact stock of the player’s sword in 3D space in this way, so it’s refreshing and interesting.

I quite like this iteration of the Twinmold fight. It’s simple, but after the difficult and daunting experience that is their home dungeon, it’s a bit refreshing to just stroll up with this huge amount of power in the giant’s mask and let loose. It seems that, along with spectacle, power fantasy was a major design goal of Twinmold, specifically the power fantasy of gaining the might to outmatch an overwhelming evil, as is often the case with Zelda. It’s a bit of relief from the high-intensity part of the interest curve that makes up much of Majora’s Mask’s later stages. Twinmold is not very difficult, but it is very satisfying and momentous. With the final of four major evils stricken from the world, it feels as though the player has truly accomplished something great. Giving them the freedom to completely direct the boss fight helps reinforce this, by making it a labor of their own agency.

3DS remake Twinmold works quite a bit differently. The fight is now a two-phase affair. In the first phase, the player will not have access to the giant’s mask. On the Nintendo 64 this mask was obtained within the dungeon itself. On the 3DS, the mask is obtained after defeating one of the two Twinmolds. This first Twinmold prefers to fly overhead, and has those large orange eyeball-weakspots on its underside. Shooting it with light arrows will take it down. While shooting, the player must be cognizant of the other Twinmold, which will shell the ground with fire balls.

Really, it kind of feels like he’s **asking** to get killed

Now, fighting Twinmold without the giant’s mask on the Nintendo 64 is very fun but very daunting. It’s difficult, requiring the player to be constantly aware of their surroundings to quickly position themselves such that they can reach Twinmold with their attacks. The concept of having to defeat one Twinmold against all odds as a tiny normal-sized person before getting the giant’s mask and unleashing overwhelming force against the second is an appealing one. It builds tension and anticipation of the fight to come, adds some nice challenge to this late-game boss, and makes that ultimate power fantasy all the sweeter. It’s a good change in isolation, though I do wish this first phase on the 3DS was more player-directed, with less reliance on those eyeball-weakpoints, which at this very late stage of the game feel somewhat passe. Having to defeat Twinmold in the same fashion as both a human and a giant would better highlight the contrast between the experiences.

3DS Twinmold’s biggest problems come in the form of the changes to the giant form. Giant form on the N64 controls exactly the same as normal form, you’re just now giant, with reach to match. On the 3DS, however, you become lumbering, slow, and very limited in your moveset. You no longer have access to your sword, instead punching the air in front of you with each press of the attack button. This form on the 3DS just does not feel good to play. It’s cumbersome, difficult to position correctly, and frustrating to hit your targets with. Twinmold is no longer vulnerable on the head and tail, and instead punching it anywhere along its body is viable, presumably because positioning the giant form is so difficult that were the old vulnerabilities in play it would be nigh-on impossible to connect any attacks with Twinmold.

No- yeah, okay. I’ll just… wait here on the ground. You can let me hit you when you’re ready.

Since the player can barely move as a giant, the fight is almost the antithesis of the open-ended fight of the N64, with the player constantly waiting for Twinmold to swing by in a fashion that will allow the player to hit them without accidentally meandering into Twinmold’s spiky body and getting knocked onto the ground. There are also some boulders the player can throw, but you will once again have to wait for Twinmold to hold still in order for them to do anything, and once those boulders are gone, they’re gone. The result is a fight whose exceedingly sluggish flow is determined by the environment, where the player is stuck in a frankly frustrating and unwieldy control scheme unlike anything else in the game.

Gonna go make a sandwich while this is happening.

The fight also lasts forever. This is just a tuning problem – Twinmold clearly has too much health – but I nonetheless became exceptionally bored by the time I had swung Twinmold around like one of those fuzzy worm toys for the fourth time. Where the previous Twinmold’s design goals were clear the 3DS version’s seem somewhat muddied and confused, with good ideas being overshadowed by frustrations and missteps. There’s no power fantasy here, and little sense of awe either. The first Twinmold’s weakness is too obvious, and the second Twinmold is too frustrating.

A mixed bag is how I would describe the remade Majora’s Mask bosses, ultimately. In my estimation, Odalwa is a bit of a step back, Goht has some improvements and some awkward changes, Gyorg is a clear improvement but by no means perfect, and Twinmold is an overall inferior experience despite some good ideas. Aside from my opinion of quality, however, I hope comparing and contrasting the surprisingly different ways all the versions of these bosses were designed helped highlight some of the things to be thinking about when designing bosses. How in control does the player feel? What design goals is your boss meant to fulfill and do they make good on that? Odolwa made me feel the rush of a life or death battle against a swordsman wielding inhuman powers, but some of that is lost if you make the methods by which you can fight him too restrictive. On the opposite end, Gyorg’s confused and meandering original boss fight was markedly improved by the introduction of some structure and environmental cues. Boss design is a deep and broad topic that I’ve only scratched the surface of, but looking at all these different boss designs have given me a lot to think about.

You’re the bad guy. And when you’re bad, you just run. That’s fine, right?

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask: Remaking Boss Fights

Alright, time to talk about one of my favorite games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. It’s an odd one in the Zelda canon, a direct sequel to the seminal Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time developed in only a year, known for its oppressively somber atmosphere and mature themes. It’s a game where an ominous title card greets you at the start of each day, counting down to the end of the world. It’s a weird one, which is probably why I love it so much. I was lucky enough to see one of my favorites receive a total remaster, featuring a big leap in hardware from the Nintendo 64 to the newer, portable, Nintendo 3DS. Remakes and remasters are always a fun topic. What actually gets changed in such revisions? What’s sacred and cannot be touched? I wanted to specifically take a look at the boss battle designs of these two versions of the game as Nintendo made some notably significant changes in this area in particular, while much, though not all, of the game’s other mechanics remain faithfully identical between the two versions. I’d like to breakdown a few of the boss designs to see where the design goals of the versions diverged, while thinking about a concept I’ll call player-directed vs environment-directed boss fights. There’s a lot to go over here, so I won’t be breaking down every single mechanic of every fight and what those elements accomplish (Although, that sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe for another time). Moreover, I want to see how the changes made affected my experience with the bosses. Let’s get started.

This is what I see every Thursday morning

The first major boss of Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64 is the Masked Jungle Warrior Odolwa, a demonic swordsman who commands swarms of carnivorous insects. So I mentioned that Majora’s Mask is a weird game, and even its debut boss is proving this true. Traditionally, Zelda boss fights work in a pretty standard fashion. You receive some new item or weapon, and you utilize it in a specific method to exploit a well-marked weakness the boss has. In this way you progress the encounter, like solving a puzzle. Zelda boss fights are usually not very open-ended. This is not universally the case, but it tends to be the norm. That would be an environmentally-directed boss, where it is aspects of the game’s behavior and scripting that dictate the pace of the fight. One can’t shoot the big-eye monster until it opens its big-eye. Boss encounters that can be progressed at the player’s agency, such as where the boss enemy is always vulnerable, are more player-directed. This is not a binary, and there’s a lot of fluctuation on a spectrum between these two styles of boss design. Zelda partakes in both from time to time, sometimes within the same encounter, though I’d say trending more toward environmental-direction.

This boss attack leaves an intentionally designed opening, where striking Odolwa is easy

Odolwa bucks this trend entirely. You can hit Odolwa at any time with a number of implements. In fact, the weapon you find in Odolwa’s dungeon, the Hero’s Bow, is entirely unnecessary for defeating him. It certainly is advantageous to use it, but entirely optional. Odolwa has no obvious weakness, he has no obvious repeating pattern. He has a collection of patterns and behaviors that respond to the player, of which some leave him open to attack, and others less so. Even still, it’s possible to damage him during times that don’t seem like obvious openings, so long as you can connect sword to swordsman. The sum of this is that ‘openings’ are not taken for granted, not guaranteed progress. There is an element of execution and performance required of the player, instead of just following a script.

This attack leaves an intentionally designed opening, where striking Odolwa is- “Insects? Oh god fire!? AHH!”

During the fight Odolwa will summon beetles to hound you from the ground, and butterflies to swarm you from the skies. The beetles can be easily dispatched with sword strikes, while the butterflies need to be more carefully maneuvered around. What I find so distinctive about the Odolwa fight for a Zelda First Boss is how firmly the player directs the pace of the fight. I’m never waiting for anything specific to happen, never just nodding along with Odolwa’s preplanned script. Much more than many other Zelda fights, Odolwa’s encounter on the N64 can go in a wide variety of directions very quickly. He’s basically always vulnerable to attack, and so fighting him becomes a skillful test of how the player can handle an increasingly complex bevy of spacial information. So long as I’m willing to risk it, and I have the finesse to get around Odolwa’s shield, I can deal as much damage as I want as quickly as I want, and even end the fight quite promptly.

In the 3DS version of the game, Odolwa’s been altered quite a lot. Immediately attention is drawn to his new, glaring orange eyeball weak spot. I must compliment the animators for how elegantly it’s conveyed in its intro, much more so than such eyeballs will be in later Majora’s Mask 3D bosses, as it does communicate the new direction the design this fight has taken rather well.

Hmmm… I wonder where his weak spot could be.

On the other hand, while his weakness is clear, a lot of the aspects that made Odolwa unique, if somewhat intimidating, have been dummied out. For one, it is now impossible to deal sword damage to Odolwa while he is brandishing his sword at you. A bit baffling, to be honest, seeing as how Odolwa is a swordsman. It seems rather obvious a player would want to go blade-to-blade with him, yeah? Whereas in the N64 version, Odolwa would use his shield to make hitting him with the player’s sword more troublesome, here it’s all for show. Odolwa is completely immune to sword strikes period.

Blue sparks = no damage. Why does he even need that thing?

Odolwa is once again vulnerable to a variety of attacks, but now they all seem very restrictive, and kind of arbitrary. It seems the goal here was to make the fight more environmentally-directed. One can only damage Odolwa when he presents his new eye, which demands use of the dungeon’s Hero’s Bow item, or the Deku Mask. Perhaps this was in an effort to make the boss more approachable – one advantage of environmentally-directed boss fights is that the player is given a more definitive answer to the problem of how to take down an obstacle, making it more of a puzzle than an actual fight, which is naturally somewhat less stressful. I think there is something to be said for establishing the monsters of Majora’s Mask as these intimidating, aggressive and stress-inducing beasts, however. Some of Odolwa 3D’s changes work against this.

For example, 3D Odolwa suddenly becomes very passive when the player is utilizing a flower with the Deku Mask power, as this is another ‘correct’ answer to the problem of hitting Odolwa’s glowing, orange, eyeball-weak spot. It makes Odolwa seem kind of… stupid, and less of a threat. He stands around patiently to be pelted in the face with an aerial bombardment. It highlights the artificiality of the encounter and could potentially draw a player out of the all-encompassing atmosphere Majora’s Mask is known for. Some of Odolwa’s tricks have also been removed, seemingly, such as his ability to summon a ring of fire to entrap the player. If it seems as though I am being overly harsh on poor Odolwa, it’s just that I really want to highlight the difference in design ethos here. I suspect the 3DS version of this game was meant to be more generally accessible, as Majora was always a niche as far as Zeldas go. These changes seem to be made toward making the experience more familiar to standard Zelda games.

You gonna… You not gonna try and stop me Odolwa?

There are games with much more environmentally-directed boss fights than Zelda, where the boss’ behavior is entirely divorced from anything the player does, where the player just has to wait and act as they are meant to, or fail to progress. As I said, there’s a lot of variation out there. Ultimately, a lot of the changes to Odolwa are an issue of presentation. The big eye, the initial immunity to sword strikes; it all builds up this sense that you have to be very specific about how you approach the encounter, where in reality a lot of the same strategies work between both versions of the game. The N64 version is just a lot more free-form, and open to more experimentation, while the 3DS version excels in clarity of its intentions.

From N64 Odolwa I felt the malice of a monster in fighting him. Things got chaotic toward the end as I was engulfed in a ring of fire, my enemy gleefully taunting me from just beyond sword’s reach. Then I realized; I could skewer the arrogant warrior with the bow I found in the dungeon! But I’d have to be careful, man-eating butterflies and beetles swarmed me. It really felt like a struggle for survival. 3DS Odolwa gave me the feeling of solving a puzzle. It’s more like dissecting a more strict set of rules, as Odolwa behaved much more predictably.

Masked Mechanical Monster Goht, our second major boss enemy, sees much less drastic changes than his little brother in the jump from Nintendo 64 to Nintendo 3DS, but there are still some noteworthy ones. Goht is a giant mechanical, erm, goat of sorts with the face of a man. His fight involves chasing him around a circuit in the form of a rolling goron wheel at high speeds. The player’s goron wheel takes some time to rev up, and requires a magic resource to maintain its speed, but once it does, it protrudes spikes that can be used to damage Goht by ramming into him. Hitting his legs deals damage, but hitting his back by going off of a ramp and landing on him knocks him down, allowing the player to strike him directly with powerful punching attacks.

This fight is almost entirely player-directed, entirely open-ended. Chasing Goht is the name of the game, but how you go about this is wholly up to you. Goht is vulnerable at any time, and the pace of the fight is determined by how well the player can execute on the chase. Knocking Goht down is advantageous, but by no means necessary, and the methods to do so are rather open ended, with the complex mechanics of the spinning goron wheel offering a number of options. If ever the player runs low on resources, it is up to them to decide when and how to replenish by hitting the magic jars speeding by on the circuit, and what risks they are willing to take to do so.

As I said, 3DS Goht is mostly the same, but the changes he does have are significant. For one, Goht can now be knocked down by repeatedly hitting his legs, or by landing on top of him. The ramps lining the circuit are now regularly shaped, and require much less speed to initiate a jump. Since Goht can be knocked down either by landing on his back or by clipping his heels now, and since landing on his back is now much easier in this version, the entire decision is less significant. Both options are still there, but neither provides any clear risks or advantages.

The reason for this is that knocking Goht down is now required to deal direct damage to him. When grounded, Goht reveals a huge eyeball weakspot, in a rather goofy and incongruous fashion. At this point, the player must remove their goron power and take out the dungeon’s item, the Fire Arrows, to deal damage to the eye. This makes the fight simultaneously more stiff, moving away from that more loose player-directed design ethos of the N64 boss fights, if only slightly in this case, while also adding an extra step. It’s a little strange, as though the eyeball only exists as an excuse to make the fire arrows relevant to this boss fight. It also disrupts the pacing of the fight, forcing the player to change from a goron to a human with a slow animation, and then shooting this fast-running monster while standing completely stationary. For N64 Goht, hitting him while knocked down blends seamlessly from chasing him, as one does not even need to change out from being a goron.

The original N64 Goht is such a strange fight for a Zelda game. A high-speed car chase, essentially, complete with bombs, electric gunfire, falling debris, the works. The ability to strike Goht from any angle with the goron wheel adds such an intense dynamism. Thankfully, that’s more or less maintained throughout all versions. The 3DS version of Goht managed to feel mostly reminiscent of the original, which for a remake I think is usually a good thing. Making the ramps for pulling off aerial jumps in the 3DS version more consistent and easier to use may lower the skill floor a bit, but it also lets you do cool fun things more often, so it’s a fair trade. I mean this is only the second boss, after all. The need to pull out the fire arrows occasionally felt like an unnecessary road-bump, and made me roll my eyes a bit (as well as Goht’s, hardy har), but it’s a very minor thing and ultimately the two fights are nearly equally fun.

So it seems the Majora’s Mask 3D remake is going for a lot more environment-direction for its boss fights as opposed to player-direction. In presentation, at least, it gives the impression that the fights are more rigidly defined, with less room for exploratory play. The advantages of such an approach can be a more quantifiable end experience that the developer has more control over, but there are also drawbacks such as the loss of that sense of exploration, experimentation, and realism in the experience. Drawbacks that I’d argue Majora’s Mask wasn’t entirely in need of. I don’t want to give the impression that Majora’s Mask 3D didn’t improve upon the old in some ways. Some accessibility considerations like making the jumps in Goht’s fight easier to pull off will probably make it more fun for most. The heavier involvement of dungeon items in the boss fights make them feel more congruent with the dungeons they’re in, if not necessarily the greater atmosphere of the world. And still, these are only two of Majora’s Masks‘s bosses, but this is running pretty long. I think next week we’ll take a look at the remaining two bosses of the Majora’s Mask superfecta (that’s a trifecta, but four, I just learned). There are definitely some positive changes there that I’m excited to talk about, including ones that exploit the advantages of environment-directed boss design. Hope to see you there.

Certainly, he had far too many weaknesses to use my power…

The Elites of Risk of Rain 2: Efficient Design and The Fundamentals of Real Time Combat

Risk of Rain 2 is a roguelike action game developed by Hopoo Games and published by Gearbox Publishing. It was released in early access for PC and consoles in 2019 before fully releasing on August 11, 2020. The gameplay premise of Risk of Rain 2 is as follows: You are a space-faring adventurer exploring a hostile alien world, overrun with monsters that will appear in order to kill you, in greater and greater numbers the more time you spend on the planet’s surface. You can collect various weapons and artifacts to empower yourself as you go to the face the ever greater challenges that intensify with time.

There’s a lot going on with Risk of Rain 2 design-wise that’s very interesting, but I’d like to focus on the game’s elites system, particularly how it was designed efficiently to accomplish a lot within a relatively manageable scope by utilizing the fundamentals of how an action combat system works, at the most basic level. I want to answer how those pieces fit together, how they create a compelling experience, and how they were utilized in this particular instance for Risk of Rain 2.

Man, there certainly is some… Game Design,, happening here. I mean just. Just look at it go.

The elite monsters in Risk of Rain 2 are randomly generated normal enemies, the likes of which you will see in droves, but with specific extra attributes along with slight changes in appearance to signify this. They are rarer than normal enemies, and thus their appearance is a bit of an event, something to take notice of. Their incidence becomes more frequent the longer a game session goes on. There are five main archetypes of elite monster. Blazing, Overloading, Glacial, Malachite, and Celestine. These archetypes can each be randomly applied to near any enemy that normally spawns. While an elite monster will have enhanced offensive and defensive capabilities, their unique traits also seem to be very deliberately chosen to complicate matters in a much more subtle way. Nearly all of them concern the player’s relative position to the elite enemy, the spatial relationship between them.

When you get down to it, there are some fundamental factors to be thinking about when developing a real-time combat system for a game. One of the ultimate goals in design should be encouraging the player to be making meaningful decisions, decisions that feel, to the player, as though their involvement is having an important and material impact on their experience in the game. Making complicated or fast-paced meaningful decisions is where challenge comes from. Having a variety of ways to answer such meaningful decisions is where player expression and play-styles come from. It keeps the player paying attention, keeps them engaged. One of the main avenues to accomplish this in a real-time combat system is to keep the player thinking about the main variables unique to real-time combat: space, time, and their relation thereof.

When fighting in real-time, the player’s position relative to any danger such as an enemy will be constantly shifting. Meanwhile the time investment of their own actions, compared to the time an enemy takes to execute an action, works in concert with these spacial relationships to determine essentially every outcome combat can have. No matter how complex the system, these two basic pillars of spacial relationship and timing are the building blocks of how it all works. A sword slash creates an area of threat for a set amount of time that damages an opponent if they intersect with it. If the opponent has a defensive action whose duration lines up with that sword slash they can protect themselves from harm. Attacks have limited reach, dodges have specific timing, and thus mastering the way these timings and positions relate to one another is how the player manages their own risk, and is essentially always the way to master this sort of combat system. For a designer, knowing your tools is how you can design for those meaningful decisions, to make the process of mastery a fun and engaging one. Space and Time are two of the most primary tools for designing real-time combat.

In the case of Risk of Rain 2‘s elites, nearly all of them create specific considerations of space for the player. The glacial elite is a good example. Upon death, they leave behind a conspicuous sphere of frosty air and ice particles that, after just a moment, burst with ice, freezing any players present within the sphere in place for a couple seconds, leaving them vulnerable. Perhaps you are already seeing how this situation works with the basic pillars of real-time combat to promote some active decision making on the part of the player. Normally enemies can be cut down with no heed in this game, but when a glacial appears, suddenly there are more decisions to be made. When should they be killed? How will I escape their ice bomb once they are? What are the consequences of how I approach this? Risk of Rain 2, as its name implies, is a high-stakes game where players can die easily, losing a lot of progress in the process. Something as simple as being frozen for a few seconds can mean death depending on the situation. Other times, it’s just an inconvenience. This variability keeps the player thinking and promotes that meaningful decision making. One player might play it safe and always destroy glacial elites from a distance. One player might consciously keep a movement option available to escape the ice bomb.

As the ice bomb forms, my priorities quickly change, I make the snap decision to get clear of it.

The blazing, malachite, and celestine elites work similarly, creating specific and dynamic areas of threat that players must play and plan around. They do different things – blazing monsters leave behind trails of fire as they move, malachite monsters can suppress the player’s healing, and celestine monsters hide the presence of other nearby monsters, making them totally invisible. However, the principle is the same. By creating these areas of threat at somewhat random intervals that all work in different ways, and can even overlap when several elites are on screen, the player has more to consider in their positioning and how they tackle the situation, upping the challenge, and promoting the player’s expression through gameplay. These periodic moments of higher-intensity decision making is one of Risk of Rain 2‘s most interesting aspects.

Blazing monsters and their trail of fire is of particular concern to melee-oriented player characters, as opposed to ranged-oriented ones. They help to differentiate and individualize the different roles and play styles the player can take up. It’s far more dangerous for a melee character to engage a group of blazing monsters, and this affects their decision making when they crop up.

Keeping my foe at sword’s length, hitting it only with the tip of the blade, is an effective strategy.

The overloading elites work with the other pillar of timing. Normally, any damage dealt to enemies is permanent and persistent, meaning the player can at any time retreat, recover their own health, and return to finish an enemy off. The top half of an overloading enemy’s health, however, will regenerate if left alone for too long, making finishing them off somewhat of a priority, another interesting decision to consider. Some of the other elites have elements of timing in their special qualities as well, such as the blazing elites dealing damage-over-time, and the malachites’ healing suppression.

Overloading enemies leave a lasting effect when they hit you, and will keep coming back if not dealt with fast.

Celestine monsters are rare but very disruptive. The principle of hidden vs nonhidden information in games is its own topic, but I hope it’s obvious how completely hiding all the visual behaviors of enemies shifts the dynamic of the player and enemies’ spacial relationship drastically. The player will definitely want to reconsider how they approach such a scenario. Each of these are just a wrinkle; a small, minor change to the dynamic between player and enemy that completely re-contextualizes how they approach the situation.

The result is a player who is constantly on the look out for these wrinkles, these unexpected developments. The surprise and the added danger is invigorating, exciting, and novel. In a word- engaging. A lot can be done with a little, and using the combinative potential of these elite archetypes, there are theoretically unlimited novel scenarios the player might find themselves in. Elites could come from any angle. Above? Below? They could take the form of any enemy. Enemies that shoot from a distance, enemies that rush you down. These elite archetypes can even be applied to bosses, creating a ridiculously hectic and dangerous challenge for hard core players to overcome later in the game.

So these elite monsters accomplish a lot. Periodic moments of high intensity created by manipulating the player’s relationship with space and time lead to a more engaging interest curve. This is all accomplished with some pretty simple mechanics that can be overlaid onto essentially any monster in the game. Risk of Rain 2‘s already impressive menagerie of monsters that all behave in unique and interesting ways is essentially multiplied in number by five. Instead of the art, tech, and design overhead needed to create dozens of more monsters, a huge variety of gameplay situations were achieved by mixing and matching these archetypes, of which only a handful needed to be designed. It seems to me this was achieved through a thorough understanding of positioning and timing in real-time combat and how to manipulate those pillars to organically produce interesting and compelling situations. Understanding the basic building blocks of your gameplay systems, and how they affect player behavior is a really good way to begin understanding how to design efficiently and effectively.

..and so she left, heart still racing…

Galaxy Brain: How NEO: The World Ends With You Recaptures the Experience of its Predecessor

The World Ends With You is a distinct and memorable little action RPG originally for the Nintendo DS. It is remembered and well-loved for an engaging story about coming out of your shell and expanding your horizons by connecting with people. The game also sported an incredibly unique action combat system utilizing the DS’s hardware features – one of the first touch screens used for video games, and two concurrent display screens. In The World Ends With You, combat is conducted through a loadout of unique psyches, the player’s attack moves, that each are used via a respective touch-based gesture to fight enemies. This all occurs on the DS’s bottom screen. At the same time, a second character is controlled with buttons to defend against additional enemies on the DS’s top screen. These features allowed for some standout gameplay mechanics that helped The World Ends With You achieve its cult status, but how has this gameplay evolved as its been ported to other, more traditional interfaces?

It’s a lot to keep track of, but MAN do I feel like a genius when it works!

The World Ends With You has been ported to a number of systems since its original release, including the Nintendo Switch and several mobile devices. Given how entwined the original game is with its hardware, particularly in utilizing the feature of action occurring simultaneously on two screens, it seemed a given that the game’s mechanics would have to be re-imagined for these other systems. The route these ports took accommodating the change in hardware was a simplification of focus. In lacking a second screen, the Nintendo Switch version of the game changed the player’s partner character, normally an independent actor on the DS’s top screen, into another psyche in the player’s arsenal, controlled similarly by touch gesture. Using this partner psyche in conjunction with the normal psyches would confer combat bonuses. This was a fairly elegant way to make the game functional on devices that lacked the DS’s unique features, and the game remains fun, if somewhat more cumbersome to control without a touch screen stylus. However, these ported versions of the game seem to lack something experiential and essential when compared to the original. In cutting the second screen’s mechanics entirely, something fundamental was lost.

In enters the bluntly titled NEO: The World Ends With You, a new direct sequel to the original game for the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4, arriving some fourteen years later. The PS4, notably, lacks a typical touch screen entirely. One may note further, that NEO lacks gesture control, entirely. The design focus of this game has, perhaps surprisingly, shifted entirely away from replicating the methods of the DS touch controls. Although The World Ends With You‘s gesture controls were incredibly intuitive and satisfying on the DS, they weren’t entirely one-of-a-kind. Other games like WarioWare: Touched! accomplished similar things with their controls, albeit in different genres. NEO shifts focus to what is more unique about its predecessor, and seeks to replicate not the control scheme, but the core experience, what is happening in the mind of the player, something more recent ports of The World Ends With You struggled to do.

One screen, one window of focus, but has something been lost?

The World Ends With You for the DS had some best-in-class gesture controls for an action game on that system, but this wasn’t the only gameplay mechanic that set it apart. During regular gameplay, the player’s main character, Neku, acted on the bottom screen, where he’d have to attack enemies while dodging around them according to the player’s touch gestures. Simultaneously, on the top screen, Neku’s partner would be stationary, and slowly assaulted by enemies. The player would have to control Neku with one hand, while commanding the partner character to defend themselves via button inputs with the other. Neku and his partner share a health bar, so if either screen was not given due attention, both would suffer. This created an absolutely mesmerizing experience of splitting attention between two active scenes, triaging and reacting to both. It was a different and challenging sort of mindset to get into, this constant multitasking, demanding players adjust to a new way of thinking. In fairness, it could even be restrictive to some players, a shortcoming that is assuaged somewhat by the versatile difficulty options present in the game. Once the player got use to this, however, it could create a state of flow and rhythm where successfully managing two characters was almost hypnotically engaging.

NEO once again features multiple simultaneously controlled player characters that share a health bar, this time up to four, all on one screen, in a 3D space. As stated, gesture control is done away with entirely in favor of assigning each psyche move to a button input. Each psyche is assigned to one of up to four characters in the player’s party. The twist is, each party member answers the player’s input independently of each other, but are each still vulnerable to counterattack at all times. As before, all psyches operate with different game mechanics at different time frames, but they can be layered together, offset from one another, done in sequence, executed in any way the player is able to push the associated buttons.

For example, one character might loose a volley of energy bullets when the player repeatedly taps a face button, while another character charges up a big rock to throw when the player holds down a shoulder button. In this scenario, the rock will do extra damage if timed to hit just as the first character’s bullet salvo is finished, using Neo‘s combo system, which encourages finishing multiple psyche moves on the same enemy in quick, timed succession. Bonus damage and and the potential to unleash a devastating ultimate move is rewarded for doing so consistently. In this way, the player is rewarded for roleplaying their party of characters as working together, and supporting one another, just like the original DS title, all while replicating that challenging and engaging split-attention experience through its design alone.

NEO even further addresses the barrier of entry for new players by condensing all the action to one screen. A single field of view is intuitive- it replicates how we view spaces in real life. Two screens, while novel, also create two separate cognitive spaces in our minds. No matter how close together they are, switching between two screens is harder than simply utilizing your peripheral vision on a single screen, due to that cognitive distance the break between screens creates. There is something to be said for that novelty of control across several distinct cognitive spaces, but it is a trade off that fits naturally for game consoles that simply don’t support multiple screens.

The player characters once again share a health bar, but unlike in the previous title, now all exist in the same game space. Each party member’s movement and dodge mechanics become directly controlled by the player when their psyche was the last one to be used. Each time a new psyche is used, control is shifted to a new character. The player must shift their control around like this. To keep things from getting disorienting, the 3D camera is directed by the game, rather than the player, and party members quickly run into the player’s field of view on their own as they are queued up to be controlled, creating a smooth transition.

Enemies will still react and attack in real-time, and all party members are vulnerable, thus the player has to be splitting their attention to multitask and triage the various goings on in the battlefield, all while keeping up their rhythmic combo of attacks. If one party member is pinned to the ground, the player might respond by sending another to help them out. All this together emulates the original game’s sense of almost melodic flow within gameplay, that makes the player feel smart and skillful to maintain. A complete re-imagining of gameplay mechanics was able to recapture The World Ends With You‘s most distinctive feature, by focusing on the core experience. Although the gameplay is structured very differently in many ways, the experience one feels while playing the new game is incredibly reminiscent of the original.

Here we see one character’s melee attack push an enemy out of the way of a rock throw – being aware of spacing and timing is essential

This also serves to reinforce some of the themes of both games – expanding your horizons by reaching out and connecting with other people. As Neku must learn in the original game to open himself to others, the player learns how to coordinate Neku and his partners’ distinct gameplay styles together, to create a greater whole. NEO‘s combo system accomplishes the same result, rewarding the player for being cognizant of the timing, effects, and spacing of each player character independently, and how they work together. They must consider a greater group, and not just an individualized self. The result on screen is an amazingly coordinated show of teamwork, reinforcing the player’s small band of party members as a real team working together toward the same goal. It’s a narrative in its own right, told entirely through the gameplay mechanics, reinforcing the explicitly written and acted narrative told between sections of gameplay.

A friend’s been pinned by wolves, indicated by those red “!!!” in the front. Let’s beat them back together!

NEO‘s renewed shift in focus re-frames what was once a hardware problem into a design problem, while playing to the strengths of the platforms the game was developed for. What’s more, the new angle by which this design problem is tackled plays to the original strengths of The World Ends With You, recreating the experience that makes it unique, not just the control scheme. It does this to draw the player in to this stylish and exciting world, while also creating a consistency of narrative between gameplay and non-gameplay sections. Re-framing issues like this in terms of design, playing to a game’s strengths and unique experiential identity is something that makes games truly memorable. NEO: The World Ends With You knows its strengths, knows the experience it’s aiming to create, and executes on that in a manner best suited to its platform, choosing not to adhere rigidly to old solutions and patterns. As it turns out, entirely changing its approach and expanding its horizons may have been the best way to become a true successor to The World Ends With You.

Expand your world…