Category: Combat Design

Final Fantasy XIV, Rules, and Playful Design

I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV! Yes, I’m one of those! Blame my friends, they got to me at last. I had an interesting thought, the other day. If you haven’t played Final Fantasy XIV, hereafter frequently referred to as FFXIV, then you might not understand that its combat feels very different from the likes of more “standard” MMOs of the years’ past like World of Warcraft. There’s a number of certain somethings in the nuances of its design that piqued my interest, made me question what makes them tick. What’s more, the more I thought about these little nuances the more I found surprising parallels in other games that you might not expect. So, if only to satisfy my own curiosity, I’d like to try and break down what about FFXIV’s combat sets it apart, in my estimation, and what can be learned from how XIV does things. 

Now, if I describe aspects of Final Fantasy XIV that come from different expansions that were released years apart, please do not be dissuaded. The entire development history of the game is characterized by slow and highly iterative adaptation to its changing goals and aspirations. Even the game’s own narrative reflects this, but all that’s a story for another day. Suffice to say, even though FFXIV took about a decade to come out, in a drip feed, it is presently very much a complete and cohesive product worth investigating on the whole of its merits, in addition to the individual merits of its expansions.

The Core Mechanics

First, to understand how Final Fantasy XIV becomes ‘playful’, as the title up there indicates, we need to understand, like all newbie players, the baseline that the game expects of you during combat. To start, each player has a combat job, who fills some sort of role. The primary roles are tank, who absorbs most of the damage and the enemies’ ire, the healers, who provide healing support, and the damage dealers, whose specialty is obvious, and are further divided into ranged, melee, and magic damage dealers. Each of these jobs need to maximize their effectiveness to get through the most difficult encounters. Managing their resources correctly, pressing the right buttons and casting the right spells in the right order, is all essential.

There is an optimal way to do this. There is not room for much personal expression through play in the combat of Final Fantasy XIV. I think that’s fine, as this MMO concentrates much of its avenues of personal expression elsewhere. The playfulness of its combat lies elsewhere than in the individual players, as well. But back to the subject, if a player is experienced, their performance will more and more approach this optimal sequence of player actions, that deal the maximum damage, absorb damage most efficiently, or heal most efficiently. This is their ‘rotation’. Players are expected to constantly be tending their rotations in combat for maximum efficiency.

However, the enemies in this game have special attacks that can hit multiple players, and not just the tanks. These are called Area of Effect attacks, or AoEs. These are (almost) always indicated by bright orange volumes on the flat 2D surface of the ground. Some players might humorously say “there are lines on the floor” when ribbing each other’s performance. And indeed, to dodge an AoE, one must step out of the bright orange shape, before it resolves. The orange AoEs are a rather ingenious way of injecting some more engaging movement to the otherwise rather static tradition of “tanking and spanking” enemies as was often said in World of Warcraft. The AoE markers are calculated server-side, meaning their mechanics must be communicated to the greater online sphere before they resolve on an individual player’s client, as AoEs are by definition meant to affect multiple players. If an enemy were to just swing his arm without such a warning in real-time, the differential between client and server could make for a rather inaccurately timed and unpleasant experience. So instead, the developers opted to essentially slow down the process of dodging attacks a lot.

A muscular lizard man with brass knuckles strikes an intimidating pose. A bright orange rectangle appears on the ground in front of him. After a moment, he strikes at the air, sending a shockwave over the highlighted area.

These bright orange “danger” volumes become go-to shorthand in combat.

This, obviously, makes FFXIV a whole lot easier than, say, a real-time game like monster hunter (at least at first, but we’ll get there), and itself not quite an action game. The developers were aware of this too, of course, so instead of relying on players’ reactive abilities, they test players’ predictive abilities. AoE attacks come out slowly. Usually. And they have very clear indicated boundaries. They always resolve a static amount of time after appearing. So what happens if there’s a large AoE, leaving only a small safe zone… but then, another AoE appears, a couple seconds later but before the first resolves, and covers that safe zone? Now you are tracking two timers, splitting your attention.

Remember this is all happening while players continue to triage their rotations. FFXIV is a game that demands multitasking as a core skill. You might have heard this, but the human brain is actually exceptionally bad at engaging in several activities at once. When you ‘multitask’, what you’re really doing is rapidly shifting attention from one activity to the next, and back, ensuring no one activity becomes too neglected, like spinning plates. In the example I provided, you must manage your rotation, but also be aware of the first AoE’s timer, and not be distracted by the fact that a second AoE is overlapping your safe zone. Because as soon as that timer goes off, you must concern yourself with the second, delayed AoE’s timer, and vacate from the initial safe zone. Oh, and don’t forget to keep up with that rotation. Don’t want to fall behind on damage.

So from what at first seems like a rather basic combat design basis, we get some versatility with basically… messing with player cognition to a great degree. Imagine barrages of AoEs, all different sizes and shapes, all slightly offset from each other in space and time. Maybe some AoEs that respond to player movement, and some that depend on player facing direction. Pretty quickly the demands of multitasking become quite frantic. I don’t have to imagine it, I’ve lived it. It doesn’t end there, though. With these basic rules in place, Final Fantasy XIV, instead of only intensifying the existing mechanics, constantly introduces entirely new ones, with their own demands of the player’s time and attention. So how can they keep the constant barrage of new information from overwhelming the player? If the rules are constantly changing, how does the encounter design stay intuitive?

“Intuitive”

To figure that out, we need to decide what’s “intuitive.” using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive. Thanks Oxford, but, hm. Okay, that doesn’t help us much. How do we know what our players will feel to be true “even without conscious reasoning”? Let’s hone in on that last word – instinctive. We can start by using signifiers that relate to general knowledge the average player in our demographic would bring with them into the game. This often translates to relying on real world “common knowledge” as a basis for gameplay mechanics. If there are two towers, one taller than the other, and lightning is about to strike, which tower should you stand under?

An army of adventurers pelt a giant flying centaur with weapon strikes and bolts of magic. The centaur throws two spears into the air, which land on either side of a large platform. One spear is much taller than the other, and this one is struck by lightning.

As you can see, in the chaos, following simple instructions can be challenging.

FFXIV is, once you’ve acclimated to the basis of its combat system, rather consistently good at this. Most of the time, it is possible, perhaps even feasible, to discern most of what an enemy might be capable of based on this sort of “common knowledge” intuition. When an enemy raises their right hand, it is likely unwise to stand on their right flank. A dragon will probably breathe fire in a cone in front of itself. If a boss is charging a massive attack, with tons of energized particle effects to accentuate, and a rock that is roughly the size of play character falls onto the ground, then it is probably advisable to put the rock between yourself and the enemy boss. 

That last one is intuitive on a “common knowledge” basis, but it also overlaps with another kind of gameplay intuition, which is pattern recognition. Generally, human brains are very very good at recognizing patterns. When FFXIV introduces a new mechanic, it can be considered to be establishing a paradigm. As that mechanic may appear again, sometimes very frequently! In addition to the “core” mechanics of FFXIV combat discussed earlier, the game deploys additional mechanics with a particular kind of consistency of logic. For example, eventually a player working their way through the main story of FFXIV will find themselves fighting an ancient dragon. This dragon will use an ability called ‘Akh Morn.’ Prior to its activation, this ability is foreshadowed by the standard ‘stack’ mechanic indicator, meaning players must huddle together to split the damage. Akh Morn, however, hits multiple times – so if players scatter after the first hit as they’re used to, they must react to reconvene, if they’re to survive. Later, they will fight a dragon again, and Akh Morn will once again occur, and work the very same way. At this point, it will become clear that Akh Morn is an ability specifically associated with dragons, and players will be prepared for it any time they see one, even before the ability is used. This is also a kind of intuition, based upon a sense for the shape of the gameplay’s design and intentions, in recognition of established patterns. One might even call it gamesense. 

FFXIV overlapping its mechanics makes players more predictive than reactive.

That’s all well and good, but this is all kind of fuzzy, isn’t it? Indefinite terms like “common knowledge”, and even pattern recognition will not be consistent across all players – each individual learns at a different pace. So how can you tell what is intuitive? There’s no real definite approach outside of using best judgment, and then playtesting. Playtesting playtesting playtesting. You’ll never really know how players will react to certain gameplay decisions until you see players react to those gameplay decisions. Seeing your players engage with your systems will inform your approach. This can be seen in how enemies and combat mechanics in FFXIV change gradually, but significantly over the course of its story quest – through many iterations across several expansions that came out over the course of a decade. 

Final Fantasy XIV and Undertale Are The Same Game

I am especially fond of how FFXIV uses that “common knowledge intuition” to introduce its new combat mechanics. I have a history of playing MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft. I was even a rather hardcore raider – or in other words, a participant in high-end end-game content, the most challenging stuff saved for the most dedicated players. The way WoW designed its encounters was interesting, chaotic, engaging, and often quite complicated. However, I rarely felt the sense of intuitive sensibility I feel playing Final Fantasy XIV. The narrative and aesthetic building blocks of combat in Final Fantasy are all abstractions of actions one can make some sense of in the context of the fiction. WoW, at least when I played it, had some of that, but its more difficult encounters leaned much further into abstraction, with status conditions upon gameplay modifiers upon unique interactions disconnecting, at least for me, the experience of engaging with those systems from the experience of being in the fantasy world. 

I have been playing quite a bit of Undertale and Undertale-adjacent content, lately. Such as Toby Fox’s other brilliant game Deltarune, and the charming fan-made Undertale prequel, Undertale Yellow. While dodging bullets shaped like flexing muscles, representing a monster’s outgoing personality, it occurred to me how starkly similar these two games – Final Fantasy XIV and Undertale actually are, at least in terms of their combat systems. 

Okay hear me out, I’m not insane, I swear. 

Both games are RPGs that represent enemy offensive actions with abstract shapes that denote areas on a 2D plane of danger, and safety. Entering a “danger zone” causes the player damage. The shapes these danger zones take abstractly denote the kind of action the enemy is taking. In Undertale, these danger zones are called bullets, and if they’re shaped like water droplets, they might denote the enemy crying, or causing it to rain. In FFXIV, these danger zones are called AoEs, and if it’s a cone extended from a monster’s front, it might denote the monster breathing fire. 

I can see you’re not sold. Alright, consider this; both games feature two prominent methods by which tension, challenge, and surprise is weaved into gameplay. In Undertale you might run into a monster who cries tears down on you from above that you have to avoid. Then, you might run into a monster who sends a fly to slowly follow you, which you must constantly move away from. Neither bullet pattern is especially difficult to dodge. But then, you may run into both monsters simultaneously! Suddenly, you must multitask and interweave devoting attention to both bullet patterns at once. In Final Fantasy XIV, boss mechanics are deployed in a very specific way. Every boss will start by using one of its signature abilities – perhaps a simple barrage of AoE attacks at random locations around the players. Then, they’ll introduce a new mechanic, maybe forcing the players to a certain quadrant of the arena while looking in a certain direction. Neither pattern is especially difficult to dodge. But then, the boss will begin using both moves simultaneously! Suddenly, you must multitask and interweave devoting attention to both patterns at once. 

The undertale character Asgore, a large horned furred monster in a warrior king's outfit shoots many bullets of flame out at areas indicated with a "!". He then swings a blue, then an orange trident.

Oh HMMM sure looks *exactly* like AoE markers and color-coded attacks with special rules, HMMM!

That is not where the similarities end, though. The other prominent method by which both games influence their interest curves is through the introduction of new rules, as previously mentioned. Think about it; The first time Undertale deploys the “blue heart” mechanic, the player is shocked, possibly confused, as their schmup-style 2D grid of bullet dodging suddenly becomes a 2D platformer complete with gravity and jumping controls. It completely upends the paradigm of how one must think of the spatial relationships of all entities in play. I really think the “blue heart” moment is undersold in how instantly it establishes Undertale’s playful nature, and the breadth of  unique variety it is willing to explore. Meanwhile, in FFXIV, the first I remember of an equivalent “blue heart” moment is when I was introduced to the “ice floor” mechanic in the story content leading up to FFXIV’s first expansion. The ice floor forces the player to move a set, (large) minimum distance, if moving at all, most often coinciding with other, damaging mechanics that need to be dodged. This, and other mechanics like, “forced march”, which, as the name implies, forces your character to march in a straight line, changes the paradigm of how you relate your character’s spatial relationship to all other entities in play. 

A decaying giant robot puppet spins like she is dancing, in an opera hall. A much smaller android in a black dress dexterously bounds over and around a stream of energy orbs unleashed from the puppet, then strikes her with a sword.

But perhaps I give Undertale too much credit. I am not, after all, extremely familiar with the shoot ’em ups and bullet hells which inspired it. In fact, it feels as though bullet hell-like mechanics have been infiltrating other genres for a while now, much like RPG mechanics started to do some years ago. I’m always in favor of that sort of diffusion, as it leads to a lot of cool new ideas that couldn’t exist otherwise. It reminds me of Returnal, or its inspirations like Nier and Nier: Automota. I do, however, think there is a certain something to how FFXIV and Undertale/Deltarune play with their rules, that *does* set them apart from other similar games. I just can’t shake the feeling that these two seemingly disparate experiences have a strong link between them.

Rules

A rather flamboyant character with shoulder-length hair and an official-looking uniform. He is "roulx kaard" from the game Deltarune. He is lying down, propped up on one elbow, rocking his foot and a finger-gun gesture back and forth in rhythm. His hair is sparkling.

Image unrelated.

These “paradigm shifting” moments are essentially the introduction of supplementary rules to the basis upon each respective game is built. Games are made of rules, so when you add rules, you change the game. Both Undertale and Final Fantasy XIV do this with some regularity, to the point that adapting to the addition of new rules is a prominent part of both games’ core skillset and identity. A combination of pattern recognition, rote memorization, and intuitive anticipation replaces the twitch-reactive mindset you might find in an action game. This settles both games into a certain mood, where anything can happen, because any new rule can simply be dropped in the player’s lap.

By utilizing intuitive design, presumably through extensive testing, FFXIV dodges the obvious pitfall of such an approach in most cases. That being, if a player settles into the loop of a comfortable and reliable ruleset, a sudden disruption can feel jarring and unfair – a new rule kind of implies that the player hasn’t been prepared for it, yeah? So that’s why it’s so essential to this sort of playful design that things always be intuitive. FFXIV has several vectors to achieve this – not just in its flashing indicators, AoE warning shapes, monster designs, and monster animations, but also through the text displayed on enemy UI when they use a special attack. “Forced March” sort of implies what it does, and those words are visible to you before you have to react. All these things form the language by which FFXIV communicates information and teaches you each new rule without teaching it to you. Undertale’s language for communicating new rules is through shapes. When the player’s heart turns green, the game becomes a bit of a rhythm-adjacent directional timing game. This is indicated by all the enemy bullets becoming arrows, and moving in regular intervals with the music. 

A floormap with large, complicated orange "AoE" markers layered overtop. The entire map rotates counterclockwise, and two quadrants of the map are highlighted in red.

As you can see, once this stuff starts to stack up, it can really get quite taxing. Gif from here.

In both cases, if players are ever confused, they are never confused for long, and even may discern the nuances of a new rule before it’s engaged! Understanding game rules becomes a skill in itself, and experienced players are encouraged to discern the shape of the design through intuition. I find something so fascinating and appealing about this because it goes in the opposite direction of the typical wisdom that the hand of the designer needs to be invisible. The players play along as the designer plays – it creates a sort of Calvinball mentality, where the game can be anything you imagine, and every encounter can feel fresh. So many other RPGs I’ve played get so wrapped up in what the design of their encounters must be that they feel stifling.

I think this is what makes me distinguish Undertale and Final Fantasy XIV so closely in my mind, even compared to similar games in the MMO or Shoot ‘Em Ups genres. It’s the playfulness, the bending and manipulating of the very fabric of the game by bending, reimagining, or supplementing the very building blocks, the rules. This allows the designers so much freedom in what they can convey simply through combat mechanics, and if you’ve read anything of mine or spoken to me for five minutes, you may know that I love when gameplay and narrative synergize or better yet supplement one another. Undertale uses shapes to communicate gameplay obstacles, but also the shape of the opposing monsters’ emotions. The blue heart mechanic only appears while fighting the skeleton brothers, two fights that happen worlds apart but are connected by this, emphasizing their relationship to each other. When a character repeats the use of a forbidden power in Final Fantasy you hadn’t seen for a very long time, you understand their desperation. And so on.

A closeup of an elderly elf man. He looks contentedly into a blazing light that grows to encompass him and then the entire image.

All that aside, you’ll still find me looking like this standing in a basic-ass AoE

What Was I Talking About?

Anyway, I think I’m finally satisfied with what was causing an itch at the back of my brain while playing Undertale Yellow. It’s that the exact same parts of that brain, the same reflexes, pattern recognition skills, and adaptability I had trained in Final Fantasy were carrying over. And I think I’ve been able to suss out what about the two games feels so familiar to me. Playfulness in design, the willinging to recontextualize and reorient the ruleset has been employed often in games, but rarely is it such a central pillar as it is in Undertale and FFXIV. Wario Ware and Mario Party are games about playing smaller, bite sized game experiences, and I’ve heard FFXIV players joke that they’re essentially the same as their favorite MMO. I can remember a number of arena battles in Ratchet and Clank that randomly swap out your weapon, or give the enemies some absurd advantage, rotating rules in and out over time. I think I’ve found a lot to take away from this exercise, and it’s given me a deeper appreciation for the very different approaches there are to making combat in games both fun and engaging. Not everything has to be about fast and snappy reactions. There are a myriad of reasons a person might enjoy a game and a thousand avenues to accentuate that. So experiment with your design and your rules, and see what speaks to you.

Ifrit the fiery god from final fantasy XIV is shown in closeup, a horned burning lizard-like beast with skeletal claws and stony scales.

So – let us be about it, hero.

Boss Breakdown: Dark Mantis from Mega Man X8

Boss breakdown again! It’s been a while. What’s a boss breakdown? It’s a design exercise. I try to break down, to the fundamental particles, what makes up a boss fight, how its design operates under the hood, and analyze the result. Design goals, what the design accomplished, the whys, the hows, and everything between.

For this boss breakdown I want to do something a little different. I’m going to compare two versions of the same boss fight. The boss I’m going to break down is Dark Mantis from Mega Man X8 for the Playstation 2. Interestingly, one of the versions is a fan-made recreation, meant to be evocative of the 16-bit classic Mega Man X games. This ‘demake’ in question is being developed by one AlyssonDaPaz. I played a lot of this game when I was a kid, and I have fond memories of it. On balance I’d say it’s a pretty good game, but it is far from the best of the Mega Man or even the X series. It was the first game in the series following the less-than-fondly-remembered Mega Man X6 and Mega Man X7, which are both… extraordinarily flawed, each in their own way. Maybe I’ll talk about those one day. My point is that X8 was a case of the franchise trying to re-find its footing after a rough patch, and as only the 2nd ever 3D game of the main series Mega Man games, it was still experimenting on how best to leverage these new capabilities with a classic formula. The ‘demake’ Dark Mantis has no such baggage nor extant goals. The fascinating thing about fan remakes and demakes like these, I think, is how they are inherently made with the benefit of hindsight, and the added context of being made by someone a fan – a distinct perspective that colors how the design is approached.

Dark Mantis, narratively, is an assassin-type robot modeled after a praying mantis with blades attached to his arms. He skulks about in the dark for a quick, clean kill. So, a lot of his design is going to reflect that. He has a lot of fast, sudden movements to reflect this. In the original, he has two basic behaviors – hopping back and forth a short distance on the ground, from which he will react with an attack based on player-proximity, and his second behavior; jumping back and forth across the top of the screen, from wall to wall. In the demake, his hopping behavior, which characterized Dark Mantis as very cautious and careful, looking for the opportune moment to strike, has been removed. In the practice the hopping behavior slowed the pace of the fight, leaving the player more room to breathe. This reflects the design philosophy of most of the bosses of Mega Man X8, none of which are extraordinarily fast pace. In the demake, Dark Mantis is basically always attacking, with very little downtime between each attack routine. This characterizes him more as a merciless, vicious killer that dispatches his opponents quickly and efficiently. If you want my opinion, the demake does, with the benefit of hindsight, characterized the mantis better through his design – more accurately matching his written dialogue and descriptions as presented.

He still bounces between the top corners of the screen by clinging to walls, but this has been altered in the demake. In the original, this behavior would keep the player away of their relative position on the ground and discourage abusing the walls to avoid attacks too easily, and Dark Mantis would otherwise have trouble hitting players hiding in those top corners. Forcing the player to the ground also encourages them into close proximity – appropriate for this more melee-oriented boss fight. The demake version fills this some purpose, but also includes the fan version’s first new attack not present in the original. Dark Mantis will, after one or several hops, drop straight vertically out of the air, bearing his blades down when he is exactly above the player. So the player must not only be aware of their relative position on the ground, but the number of hops Dark Mantis has done, and otherwise be prepared to react with a dash to dodge out of the way. This adds a sense of tension to the behavior that the original did not have. While in the original you did not know when Dark Mantis would drop from the wall, you could always preemptively move to the opposite wall. There is no such option with his plunging attack, so the player must always be prepared to react.

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. On the left, Dark Mantis hops from wall to wall, then plunges his blades into the ground. On the right, Dark Mantis hops back and forth on the floor, then throws a black energy projectile.

Left: Plunging Attack, Right: Shadow runner

Shadow runner is an attack that is in the original and not the remake. Which is ironic, seeing as how in the original, Shadow Runner is one of the attacks the titular X can copy from Dark Mantis after he is defeated. What it does, is produce a shadowy arrow projectile that travels horizontally, then spins outward when it reaches a close proximity to the player. This gave Dark Mantis an extra ranged option, to cover for his more melee-focus. It’s easily dodged though, by jumping over or dashing under it. It’s removal from the demake makes sense, as Dark Mantis is given an even more keen melee focus, and he much more aggressively forces the player into close proximity with him, making Shadow Runner kind of redundant. 

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. On both sides, Dark Mantis attempts to grab X, who moves out of the way at the last moment.

Aside: The animation and sprite work on this fan game is just gorgeous.

Next, we have Blood Scythe, which works a bit differently between versions. The original  has Dark Mantis travel a set distance forward in a fast dash when the player is close enough in front of him. He may hop into this range, or the player may enter it to trigger. To dodge the player simply has to dash or jump out of the way fast enough, or else be restrained by Dark Mantis. While restrained, the player will take a small amount of damage, but Dark Mantis will have his hp restored slowly in turn, making this a highly punishing attack. This serves the purpose of making the player always away of Dark Mantis’s proximity to them. He is meant to be deadly up-close with those plays, so this attack reinforces that idea. In the original the attack can be ended early by using the assist mechanic, in which one of the player’s two controlled heroes assists the other to escape, and takes his place in the action. The demake understandably removed this mechanic, and multiple playable characters in general, presumably for simplicity and scope reasons. There is another notable difference to the demake’s blood scythe and that is its movement. Its lateral movement is now slower, but will travel however far is necessary to reach the player, before initiating the grab.

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. Dark Mantis lifts his scythes up and dashes at X, grabbing him and sucking out his energy. On the right, another android appears to free X.

Ah yes, praying mantises, well known for… sucking blood? Robot blood?

This ties into another new attack added in the demake. When Dark Mantis is on the ground and detects the player is also on the ground, he may choose to initiate one of two attacks and move him across the entire arena from his current position until he reaches the player or a wall. In the first is bloodscythe, the second is close-ranged a slashing attack. Relatively, bloodscythe has a lot more startup time and moves slightly slower than the slash. He assumes two very different poses depending on which he will initiate – raising both blade arms for bloodscythe, and moving one blade to his hip in a low stance for the slashing attack. In many cases in Mega Man X game it is the player’s instinct to dash and jump to dodge attacks – as most attacks do not cover a wide area, this offers the most vectors of escape; up and away. It takes a good amount of discipline and conscientiousness to resist this impulse, which is what the slashing attack demands. Dark Mantis propels himself with the slash just high enough into the air that it can be dodged if the player is in a dash state, in which their hitbox is shorter. If they also jump, obviously they will be struck. Dashing and jumping is the optimal strategy to avoid bloodscythe, but not the slash. This new dynamic introduced to the fight ensures the player has to keep their eyes on Dark Mantis and watch for his tells.

A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room, all rendered in 16-bit pixel art. Dark Mantis readies an arm blade, and dashes across the enter length of the arena floor, then jumps and slashes X as he approaches. X ducks and dashes at the last second.

This animation on this attack is really well done – dynamic and threatening.

This forms a new core identity to the demake version of Dark Mantis. The slashing attack and bloodscythe become two of his most common attacks, and thus represent an ever present threat that demands skills of reflex, observation, and control. The slashing move is then followed by a short-ranged projectile that can be dodged easily enough, but adds to the complexity of the move as something you still need to be aware of.

Finally there’s the attack black arrow. It’s a spray of projectiles that launch up, and in an arc, spreading out as they go, then coming down on the position the player was in when they were launched. To dodge, anticipate where the arrows will fall, and stand in the safe gaps between them. The in demake, this further serves as a sort of misdirection. Because Dark Mantis has so little down time between attacks, his black arrow becomes a kind of provurbial smoke screen to draw player attention away while he prepares his next move. Black arrow is very similar between the versions, but demake Dark Mantis’s black arrow attack is a lot easier to see, in general. That makes it easier to dodge, but also less frustrating to deal with in general. 

Something black arrow draws into focus is the fight’s readability. Readability is essential for fast-paced action games like Mega Man. If the game is all about spatial relationships, reaction, and timing, the player’s got to see what they’re reacting to and time, and where it’s coming from, right? Now, the intentional obscuring of information like where a projectile is at any given time can be leveraged for an extra change of pace and challenge, which I presume is what the original X8 was intending, but this can very easily become frustrating. You see, each level in Mega Man X8 has some sort of unique level mechanic or gimmick, to distinctify the stage. This could have been done for any number of reasons. It’s possible it was just to give the game its own signature style compared to other Mega Man games, or it could’ve been done to broaden the game’s appeal to a more general audience, or for any other reason. In Dark Mantis’s stage, the gimmick is a generator that, when activated, turns on all the lights in the dark, shadowy level. This includes a light in Mantis’s own boss room. In light, he’s much easier to see. 

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. Dark Mantis throws several black arrows up. They then arc as they fall, leaving behind purple trails. X walks out of their trajectory.

Side by side like this, its easy to see which version is *much* more readable.

Even with the light though, demake Dark Mantis is just a lot easier to see. This is a side effect of him being a 2D sprite. 2D sprites are a lot easier to make readable than 3D. The artistic techniques necessary to make 2D art readable are less system-dependent as well. 2D sprites can have definite outlines without need of external program scripts, for instance.  For a further example of what I mean, consider that 2D Dark Mantis is not lit by any particular source of light in the room. He has shading, but it is general purpose – meant to look good from any position in the room in which he appears. His body catches light as illustrated, but not from any particular angle. With this in mind, 2D sprites do not have to have the same relationship of color and light to their background as 3D models do to look natural. Demake Dark Mantis is actually a lot brighter on the screen than his shadowy background may imply – he actually consists of mostly mid-tones – but it doesn’t look jarring. That contrast does make him highly readable at a glance, though. 

Original Dark Mantis, on the other hand, has to “blend” more with his environment, or his 3D model would stick out in a jarring way that would seem amateurish. A 3D model’s poses also have to be manually puppeteered, and a 3D model’s anatomy cannot easily be exaggerated the way a 2D sprite’s can to convey the artist’s intended look and feel. 2D drawings can be contorted in ways 3D models can’t to be more readable. 

At this point the difference in direction here is definitely starting to come into focus for me. One of the main things, I think, is difficulty. Mega Man x8, particularly in comparison to other Mega Man games, is not extremely difficult. It’s no pushover, on the harder difficulty settings, but the most critically beloved Mega Man games can be some real killers. The series kind of has a reputation for it, actually, and that sense of intense challenge is a big appeal for a lot of its core audience. 

I’m about to engage in some protracted speculation here.

Something to understand about Mega Man as a franchise: It’s never been a blockbuster seller. Mega Man the character is one of the most famous video game icons, period. Everybody knows Mega Man. The people love him. Thing is, that popularity never especially translated to sales. However, it’s a series with about 50 or so entries, even if you’re counting conservatively. My point is, these are highly technical games with a huge skill ceiling, and an often unyielding skill floor. Some niche, fairly hardcore games, for a niche hardcore audience. They inherently don’t have the same mass market appeal as a Mario, or even a Sonic. This was never a problem for a long time, because these games typically did not cost a great deal to make. Each sequel made extensive use of art assets recycled from the one previous, was made in a fairly short amount of time, and introduced only moderate iteration along the way. 

Mega Man games were fast turnaround, low risk, with a loyal and devoted audience of hardcores. That is, until 2D games started to temporarily lose popularity in the advent of 3D graphics. It didn’t seem temporary at the time, though. Here’s the speculation: 3D games are comparatively very expensive to make. If Mega Man were to survive, it’d need to establish a broader market appeal. And so, the two 3D games in the main Mega Man series of platformers, are also known for being quite a bit less refined in terms of skill investment, and a bit less difficult than the other games. All this to say, I speculate a reprioritization to make these games more generally appealing coincides with their transition to 3D, to make up for the cost of production.

That tangent out of the way, the demake version of Dark Mantis holds no such priorities. This version of the insectoid assassin was clearly made to be more evocative of the very difficult bosses of older Mega Man games, with their zippy movements, narrow dodge windows, and rapid fire attacks. And when I say ‘difficult’ I mean specifically designed to better reward full understanding and leverage of the player’s movement capabilities. This is what the demake version of Dark Mantis has two dash attacks, and a much faster desperation attack. These are meant to further push the player’s understanding of how much distance they can clear quickly, and in what directions that distance can be covered, along with a bit of reaction time testing. 

Finally, both versions of the boss share a mechanic whose archetype appears in several games. I tend to call this a ‘desperation attack’, although I believe the official Mega Man is ‘overdrive attack’. It’s a special, rare, extremely powerful and high-spectacle move that fully shows off the boss character’s power, and in theory fully puts the player’s skills and knowledge to the test, as one final high-tension show stopper. This is a new addition with Mega Man X8 and I have to say it’s a brilliant one. These sorts of things offer a lot of opportunity to characterize boss enemies, from their dialogue to their design, and make a fight a lot more memorable, by giving it a real signature and identity. I do have to say though, Dark Mantis has one of the easier overdrive attacks in the original game to deal with. He jumps to, and floats at the top of the screen and arena, then winds up a glowing scythe over one shoulder. A second later, he slashes one half of the arena entirely, dealing massive damage – always the side opposite the windup. He then repeats the attack on the opposite side. This is a really cool attack, conceptually, and from sheer spectacle I really think it does its job of characterizing Dark Mantis and making him very memorable.

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. Dark Mantis jumps up to and floats at the top-center of the room, before extending an arm blade to a great length behind his shoulder. He then slashes more than half of the room in one swipe, then alternates to the other side. On the left, he does this several times.

“I wanna see you CRY!”

The demake version once again ups the ante in terms of difficulty and challenge. The attack is basically the same, except the slash is now *even larger*, encompassing more than half of the arena, requiring a well-timed dash jump at a specific angle, and memorization of the attack pattern. That, and he will alternate slashing the left and right halves of the screen several times before his attack is done. This all makes the move much more menacing, and Dark Mantis as a result a lot more impressive, so I have to praise that. I would say it is perhaps a little less reasonable to be able to dodge this move the first go around, compared to the original, and while the enormity of the slashing effect reads perfectly well after the fact, it’s a little tough to predict that will happen if you haven’t seen it before. This is a little harder to work around, as part of the point of this assassination attack is that it has only a very subtle warning compared to its monstrous effect.

As a longtime and very hardcore action platformer(and Mega Man in particular) fan myself, I have to admit my bias for the more challenging, fast-paced Dark Mantis of the demake. I do have to reiterate that remakes and remasters, especially fan-made ones, have very different circumstances and context to the original design. I in no way mean to disparage the very talented folks behind Mega Man X8, they did not have the hindsight and their own game and future games to draw on. I do have to praise AlyssonDaPaz for his impressive work in re-adapting this boss fight for the kind of fan it’s clearly intended for – that is, longtime hardcore Mega Man fans. I think X8 was likely aiming for a broader audience and many of its design decisions reflect that. I hope you found this interesting. I know I always find boss analysis fascinating, and this sort of comparison is a rare and very educational opportunity. I feel like I was able to learn a lot from this.

Your actions are those of a Maverick!

Paper Mario and Elegant Design

You’ve heard it before. I’ve said it, she’s said it, we’ve all said it – those of us who’ve played it anyway. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is the best Paper Mario game. The best Mario RPG in general, in my humble opinion. That’s pretty astounding for a series that’s been going on for more than two decades. Sure, plenty of people still mark games like Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as the best of their respective series, but there have been many more contenders for both since then. Some from as recently as now, more or less (Time of writing: 2023). My point is, rare has a single entry in a series as The Thousand Year Door been so universally beloved, over and above its peers.

I think there’s a lot of reasons. The Thousand Year Door offers a rare interpretation of the bizarre Mario universe in a more grounded and holistic way, with a narrative bent. It introduces new, named characters and puts iconic Mario characters in novel and interesting situations. The world and narrative design went out of its way to be weird, surprising, and gripping in ways the more straightforward Mario games prefer to be safe, familiar, and general-purpose. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. Paper Mario: The Thousand Years Door is not only funnier, more dramatic, and more rich with character than every Paper Mario that came after it, it also plays better than every Paper Mario that came after it. The Thousand Year Door has some of the most elegant systems I’ve seen in a video game.

I could ramble for hours about how great Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, is but as you’ve no doubt seen many others do so elsewhere, so I will spare you. The focus here is going to be on the gameplay and systems that make the first two entries of Paper Mario so great, even isolated from all other elements. These systems which, in subsequent entries preceding The Thousand Year Door’s 2024 remake like Color Splash, and Origami King, were altered in specific and fascinating ways that had a profound effect on the gameplay of those games.

A ghost in a party hat sits on a recliner next to a fridge. He complains in text "What are you doing, interrupting my 'ME' time?"

Oh shoot, wrong image. This is a picture of me remembering I have to write this blog post. How’d that get in there?

Elegance In Design

So what do I mean by elegant? To me, elegance is all about approachability, and applicability. To create an elegant system, you need an interface that is welcoming, intuitive, and easy to understand, which interacts with each game system in ways such to produce an engaging experience. A sentence, to me, elegant design means systems which find depth in simplicity. Simplicity. This is, paradoxically, a rather difficult thing to achieve – systems that appear simplistic yet offer a lot of depth. 

The first Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 tackled this problem by stripping down the turn-based RPG genre to its barest essentials, which I think is often a good step to take when trying to really take stock of the high-level, fundamental building blocks of your game. What about turn-based, party-based RPGs is fun or engaging on a ludic level? The turn part of that formula allows for infinite time to consider decisions. So, high-level, low-stress decision making. Overcoming stronger opponents by utilizing party members’ unique abilities in combination, feeling clever. Customizing character loadout for unique abilities to reflect individual playstyles. Collecting rewards when defeating strong enemies, to become stronger. 

The game goes through each of these, one by one, and strips them down. Decision making is straightforward and boiled down to immediately obvious causes and effects. More on that later. What’s the minimum needed to accomplish skill combination with multiple player characters? Only two, so Paper Mario only has two active player characters at a time. Any more would add complexity. Character loadouts are represented by the badge system – a very simple point-buy system that allows unique abilities to be chosen, but these choices are non-binding and instantly reversible. The RPG convention of experience points is included, but XP totals never exceed 99, and each level up in Paper Mario reduces the traditionally dense cascade of numbers many other RPG level ups have to just one single bonus, chosen by the player from a suite of only three options.

Crucially, however, these simplifications take nothing away from the way their systems interact with one another. Leveling up still incentivizes battling. The limited choices in character progression still affect your strategy going forward. The wrinkle of the action command mechanic – real time inputs that enhance combat abilities – adds a natural point of divergence for different players. Those less skilled in the commands will find battles taking longer, and therefore will benefit more from having a greater health pool, etc. The mechanics which are simplified, still interact with each other in meaningful and impactful ways, experientially. 

A grid of orange, blue, and yellow badges are arrayed on a menu. There is a green caterpillar at the top left of the screen. At center-top, a description reads "Action Badge. Floating High Jump. Jump higher than usual and momentarily float." A red cursor highlights one of the badges.

The badge system was *so* successful, they basically copied the premise for the newest mainline Mario game!

I think it would be helpful to contrast this with a newer Paper Mario game like The Origami King. The boss battles in that game employ a special, proprietary set of game rules (presumably because it was realized that the depthless turn-based combat borrowed from its predecessor Sticker Star could not support an interesting boss fight on their own. cough). The rules are as follows. The boss enemy sits at the center of the play space, which is divided into three rings circling the boss. Each ring in turn is divided into a number of spaces. These spaces can be empty, have a movement arrow facing one of four directions, or have some other action-triggering item. On the player’s turn, they are given a limited amount of time to select the angle at which mario will approach this play space. They can also rotate each of the individual rings to line up the spaces as desired. He enters the outer ring, then travels until he hits a movement arrow, then changes direction. If he hits a contextual or action space, he executes the associated trigger. The goal is to reach the boss enemy at the correct angle to hit their weak spot. However, the boss can also affect the rings, “pushing” them outward, causing each inner ring to become the subsequent outer ring, and creating a new innermost ring. 

Now that sounds like a lot of information, and it is, not just intellectually but visually. The game boards for these Origami King boss battles are very noisy to look at. So the set up is like a turn-based RPG, but there are no interesting decisions to be made. The game has a very clear optimal solution which it is funneling you toward. To obfuscate this, Mario’s turn during this boss battles is on a timer, creating an artificial sense of tension, because the decision making of the gameplay has none. There is no substantive way to employ risk for greater reward, nor complex goal to accomplish. The systems at play appear very complex, but the goal is quite simple. The opposite of The Thousand Years Door, in which the player is presented with very simple tools to accomplish a relatively complex goal – defeating enemies with their own suite of tools that you must act and react upon accordingly. 

Mario stands on the center of a series of concentric circles, surrounded by origami crabs.

The Thousand Year Door makes something incredibly large from very few, very small parts. Origami King makes something incredibly small from many parts.

Decision Anti-Paralysis

This is a fairly well known phenomenon, so I’ll give the quick version. When presented with too many choices, even if all choices are compelling – perhaps especially so in that case – it actually becomes more difficult to make a choice. What constitutes “too many” choices is highly subject to the individual decision maker and the greater context in which the decision is made, but the phenomenon has an observable effect on how people engage with games. RPGs that drown the player in too many options for play or character customization can easily drive people away, or dissuade them from engaging with the nuances of the RPG systems entirely. 

But I think in a strange way, the opposite is also true. If given a selection of options, but a very limited selection of options, each possible choice can feel much more significant, and therefore confer a greater feeling of power and control to you, the player. There is a balance of course. If choices are too limited the player doesn’t feel the freedom of expression inherent to compelling decision making. They feel dragged along, dissatisfied. The three level up choices of Paper Mario represent a good, strong selection of paths to choose for the respective context. Health for durability, staying power, and a safety net. Flower power for those who wish to make liberal use of powerful special abilities. Badge power for those who desire a greater pool of more varied strategic options to choose from. 

In The Thousand Year Door Mario, at the outset, only has two attacks – hammer and jump. Even fewer in the first Paper Mario. The two attacks do two very significantly different things. The jump can damage any enemy Mario can touch from above. It can deal two instances of 1 damage. The hammer can damage any enemy on the ground that Mario can reach by walking, and deals a single instance of 2 damage. These very simple rules make every choice feel pivotal. It’s not a question of dealing fire damage vs. ice damage as in the case in many RPGs, it’s a question as to whether your attack will be effective at all, and as the player gains knowledge of how the game works, that knowledge becomes a skill in knowing when and how to deploy their limited choices.

The Value of Low Numbers

Paper Mario prioritizes being intuitive and readable for players of all ages. A lot of RPGs involve a lot of math. Paper Mario isn’t interested in that. Again, we ask the question – what is the bare minimum level of complexity necessary to make an RPG system functional? Do you need to be able to deal 9999 damage? Do we need four digits to account for meaningful measurements of battle power? Super Mario Bros. only had eight worlds, and 64 levels, to make a comparison. That is the number of significant demarcations of difficulty. So maybe an RPG only needs two digits to represent damage? For most of Paper Mario only one digit is needed! 

Does the difference between 4882 damage and 5121 damage really matter all that much? Think about it, I mean really think about it. If an enemy has 26000 health, how many times do you have to hit it with one of those four digit numbers to defeat it? The answer is six. Six for both, actually. The ~300 damage between the two is totally irrelevant. White noise. It is actually very unlikely that an enemy has *exactly* enough health to make such a small difference matter. And even then, the difference is only one turn. These number values might as well be 5 damage, and 26 health. Now those stats resemble a Paper Mario enemy, come to think of it. 

Several windows indicating character status are displayed, with a lot of 5 or 6 digit numbers. The closeup face of a knight cuts in center-screen, then the camera pulls back as this knight strikes some monsters several times with a sword. Each strike showers the screen in incomprehensibly large and frequent number values.

I could not possibly tell you what on earth is even happening here.

Following a pattern here, although there is a narrower scope to the information density, that can actually be an advantage. Low numbers accomplish two major things. One: the line of causation between player decisions and outcome are clear. When you succeed at an Action Command in Paper Mario, you deal two damage. When you do not, you only deal one damage. In games with higher numbers, the numbers will naturally change more gradually, and constantly, and thus players will not be able to immediately recall what is and is not ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’. This allows players, with minimal investment on their part, to make meaningful decisions that have an immediate, tangible, visible effect.

Of course, it’s not as if smaller numbers are universally better. Larger values offer more granularity, and specificity. There’s more resolution to store information in the integer 1000 than in the integer 10, but practicality isn’t the only consideration here. There’s also just an undeniable appeal to big numbers on their own. Something in our lizard brain loves to see those values biggify. Sometimes reigning in that instinct toward preposterous numeric exaggeration is worth considering, though.

Mario stands on the center of a series of concentric circles, with four origami shy guys standing before him. An origami fairy next to Mario says "And they're lined up perfectly, so your attack power went up by 1.5X! I'll, uh, let you do that math."

Ahh, yes, every young Mario fan’s favorite leisure time activity: math.

Depth And Intuition

Paper Mario in its original incarnations took a step back and looked at what made up a satisfying progression system in an RPG. What are the barest essentials? Experience points, earned when defeating enemies and stored up by the player, represent progress towards leveling up and getting stronger. In Paper Mario star points take this role. They are likewise earned after battle, but rather than the traditional system in which XP requirements for each level becomes greater and greater to accommodate the leveling curve, a level up in Paper Mario always requires only 100 star points, at acquisition thereof, the player is returned to a count of 0 star points, and works toward earning their next level. This does not negatively impact pacing or the level curve however, as star point yield from defeated enemies scales with the player’s level. The weaker an enemy is in comparison to Mario, the fewer star points he will get. By hiding the mechanism of the leveling curve like this, Paper Mario removes an inherent mental calculus, easing the player’s mental tax, so they can focus on more central aspects of the game. Hiding information like this can be just as impactful as taking it away. RPGs at the time soon started to realize this fact as more and more RPG level progress is being represent as visual indicators like bars that fill up, rather than just overlarge numbers. The immediacy of being able to see one’s progress simply has an undeniable benefit. 

And yet, leveling up in Paper Mario is no less satisfying nor compelling for this simplification. This is an example of simplifying without removing core appeal. 

Intuition is a key target for those wishing to make games that feel simple to play. Common sense is not common, and appealing to a general or even niche demographic’s natural tendencies is hard. I think it’s one of the most important duties of a designer though: anticipating what your players are thinking. But it is essential that you do – when a game is intuitive, the more naturally play comes. The less you have to explain in detail of your game systems through exposition to the target audience, the better off you are.

Mario stands on the center of a series of concentric circles, surrounded by origami goombas with wings. A text pop up at center-screen reads "Line them up!"

Uh… Yeah, kind of the opposite of this.

In Paper Mario, jump attacks are for the air, and hammer attacks are for the ground. However, jump attacks can be used on grounded enemies, many of which react to jumps specifically. Hammer attacks can only hit the nearest grounded enemy. But that also means… Mario can just run underneath flying enemies to reach grounded ones on the backline. Enemies attached to the ceiling aren’t grounded… so a hammer won’t reach them, but there’s no space above, so you can’t jump onto them. However, several of Mario’s partners have projectiles or other attacks that approach from the side. Mario himself can learn a quake move that shakes even the ceiling! All this is obvious to anyone observing, these rules do not assert themselves in big text-heavy tutorials. Combat in Paper Mario is complicated… but it isn’t. It’s all intuitive. Many of its rules speak for themselves. Don’t jump on spiked enemies. Don’t hit exploding enemies with a hammer. Do jump on koopas to flip them over. Use the hammer on more defensive foes. Use the jump to bypass enemies to those on the backline. You can tell just by looking.

The Complexities of Simplicity

On a stage with an audience, Mario runs up to a fuzzy creature with crazy eyes, and slams it with a wooden mallet.

Now, a game that is elegant is deep yet simple on the player’s end. It doesn’t mean making such systems work harmoniously is a simple task. An enormous amount of thought was clearly put into Paper Mario. The key is the way in which different systems interact with one another, which takes a great amount of planning. Badge points drive the player’s acquisition of unique abilities, which drives their expenditure of flower points, which drives their ability to get through battles without taking damage, which drives their desire to increase their health points, which drives their desire to obtain star points to level up, which drives their desire to battle enemies, for example. In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, a caustic pattern is established wherein rewards for battle are simply not worth the time and effort (because the combat in that game is boring, you see.) Instantly any inter-system cooperation is cut off, and does not matter to the player. They are no longer compelled to do battle and engage with your combat system, so they simply won’t. 

Speaking of making combat engaging and intuitive, I want to comment on the extensive care put into the action commands of Paper Mario. Almost without exception, each of the Action Commands in The Thousand Year door are meant to be abstractions of the actual diagetic action the commanded character is executing. For example, Mario is easy to break down: When Mario uses his basic jump attack, he kicks off of his target with a single, precision strike at just the right moment to get a second jump up successful Action Command. Appropriately, this jump Action Command is a single, precision, well-timed press of the ‘A’ button, or the button already associated with jumping. When using a hammer attack in The Thousand Year Door, the command is a little different. The player must pull the control stick away from the target while Mario is building power, then let it go. This mirrors the motion of applying pressure to pull back a heavy hammer, and then letting its weight carry you into a full overhead swing. Every action command in the game follows a sort of logic like this, but I want to mention one more. One of Mario’s allies is a koopa who attacks by withdrawing into his shell, and spinning up to launch himself at opponents. The action command is to press A, not just as he hits an enemy, but as a constantly scrolling marker overlaps a target point on a bar. Why does it take this form? It represents the spinning! Your PoV is the koopa spinning in his shell, trying to align his target. So clever. 

Princess Peach stands in a computer room full of terminals, screens, and readouts. She says in text "Uh... OK then. Good night." with a nonplussed expression, the leaves.

Yes, The Thousand Year Door Is Actually That Good-

-and you should play it when the remake comes out. Seriously though, the purpose of this post is not to convinced anyone of how great The Thousand Year Door Is. I actually approached this from the assumption that the game is indeed effective at fulfilling its design goals, and I wanted to make the case for my observation of how that was accomplished. The genius of the first two Paper Mario games was in how they opened up an extremely storied and nuanced genre for young people. I basically learned to read by playing Paper Mario. It was formative for me, and it practically built the foundation of my understanding of how elegance and intuition in gameplay mechanics worked. I’ve revisited it many, many times and learned a little something about design every time I go back to it. I hope I’ve been able to impart some of that to you. 

Mario, flanked by a goomba with glasses and a goomba with a ponytail and pit helmet stand before an ornate, ancient door. Mario holds a map aloft, which glows with magic.

It HURTS to be this good!

Inter-System Parity and Persona: A Resource Management Game

Persona 3 is being remade and they’re changing some things about how dungeon exploration works. I presume it’s going to look a lot more similar to how Persona 5 and Persona 4 does things. In my last playthrough of Persona 5: Royal I was struck by a thought regarding how its various systems fit together. I wanted to get it down in writing.

It has been oft refrained that modern Persona combines the appeals of two very different modes of play. This is true to an extent, but a zoomed-out bird’s eye view of the actual decision-making structures of play in the modern Persona series reveals that the differences aren’t as pronounced as you might think on a high level. Ultimately, the entirety of Persona‘s interactive gameplay is a series of resource management decisions.

Three Japanese students in uniform run down a dreary hallway lit with a sickly aqua green light. The surrounding decor is twisted and abstract. There are blood stains on the floor. A staircase is ahead.

Man, this is going to look so much better in HD.

There’s this concept I like to come back to when thinking about games designed with distinct modes of play such as this. I think it is generally a good idea to look to forming come kind of parity between different modes in a game, even if they’re technically different. For example, the mid-2000s were in love with turret sections. If you know, you know. I always felt like these fit most elegantly in with games that are already about shooting. Firing a stationary gun from a first person perspective *is* a different mode of play than running and gunning in a game like Ratchet and Clank. However, the game is about aiming and shooting big guns to begin with. So even though the rules are little different, the player can more intuitively slide into this different mode of play without it feeling jarring. On the other hand, players may find the addition of the all-too-common fictional card game within the game off-putting because of how different a card-game mindset is to, like, a platformer. Intelligently, most games with card-game minigames keep them as optional side-content.

The main item that unifies all of the game’s various systems is time. When interactive mechanics form a cohesive system, gameplay decisions exist in a hierarchy. Where and how you use your in-game time sits at the top. Persona models the daily life of a sociable high schooler and how the player chooses to use each day is a decision that cascades down across all other systems. Persona breaks down into two primary gameplay modes: the social simulator, and the strategic turn-based combat dungeon crawler. Ultimately though, whether you choose to spend time getting ramen with classmates, working out at the gym, studying for class, or fighting horrific hell-beasts in humanity’s collective unconscious, you’ll be spending a day of in-game time for each instance of each task. Days are a finite resource, and how you choose to spend them is the primary mode of interaction in Persona at a high level.

A stylized manga-like birdseye view of Tokyo. A row of numbers representing dates appear, and they move to the left, centering first "9 Saturday" and landing on "10 Sunday", the latter of which is pierced with a knife.

Time ticks down on your game, just as it does on the summer of your youth.

Persona’s dungeons are bursting with tough encounters with monster designed to whittle away your resources; health, and spirit power, or SP. These are long gauntlets meant to stretch your abilities to endure numerous combats to the breaking point. There is no reliable method to restore SP within these dungeons themselves. The only way to restore your combat resources fully is by ending a given dungeon session, and allowing time to pass to the following day. That means, of course, that you must spend at minimum one additional day of in-game time to complete the dungeon. This limitation of SP restoration is crucial, as it forms a limiting reagent to dungeon activity. It is possible to complete any dungeon in a single day, but only with extremely deft management of SP. This one resource’s scarcity creates a space where skilled play can lead to greater reward, without the implied penalty of inefficient play being too punishing. Losing one day is not a big deal. Wasting a lot of days though, adds up. Failing to manage your combat resources efficiently leads to an inefficient use of your social resources.

It’s this inter-relation that forms the bedrock of the gameplay loop in Persona. You have a limited number of days to complete a dungeon. And beyond that, you have a larger, but still limited number of days before the entire game concludes. Therefor, it is implicitly more desirable to complete dungeons in a timely manner, leaving more in-game days free for the player’s other social projects – fostering relationships, improving one’s social skills, earning money in a part-time job, etc. The latter of which can be intrinsically motivating through appealing character writing that makes the player want to engage in this social simulation. The social sim half of the game forms an extremely important part of this gameplay loop bedrock, but it’s important to note it would be not so nearly engaging without strong narrative context Persona puts forth for the social aspects of its gameplay.

A young silver-haired man in a Japanese school uniform is frames beside a list of character names, each with a rank and meter representing their respective closeness to the young man.

Many choices, but which- it’s Chie. You should pick Chie. Hang out with Chie.

You need to complete each dungeon in a timely manner, so you need to get stronger. Normally, in an RPG, you mostly do this by just fighting. Defeating more monsters means leveling up, means increasing your player characters’ power. This is also the case in Persona, although it is intentionally a lot more limited. When your protagonist levels up, his maximum HP increases, and his maximum SP increases, but that’s about it. His damage doesn’t go up, his defenses don’t go up, etc. It’s a good thing, then, that leveling him up does offer one other benefit – it increases the level of the titular personas that you can create, which, if you didn’t know, are reflections of the inner self that can be summoned to do battle. For our purposes and for the purposes of strictly talking about gameplay mechanics, they are basically pokemon. These personas determine the protagonist’s stats.

The developers do a couple of very clever things in how they handle power progression for personas. Personas themselves can level up, and their stats will increase accordingly, however, there is an effective soft cap to their usefulness. After a few level ups, you’ll notice your persona’s power growth start to kind of bottom out, as they become increasingly more difficult to level up, the acquisition of new abilities becomes scarce, and their old abilities just don’t quite measure up to the stronger monsters you’re fighting. This is the game’s way of always encouraging the player to make new personas as they level up. Each persona is not a lifelong companion, but rather, basically, a stepping stone to ever greater things. This behavior is further encouraged by an experience bonus a persona received upon being fused. This bonus can be massive and is a much more efficient use of your time than leveling up a persona in battle. How do you get this bonus? That’s right, the social sim gameplay mode.

A part of demons are covered in tarp and shoved into magic, glowing guillotines by childlike wardens. When they are chopped, their energy turns into a blue mist that reforms into a red-armored knight astride a horse.

The persona fusion animations can get rather fanciful. I went bowling with my cousin and I am now more proficient at decapitation.

Each persona has a type associated with an arcana of the tarot deck, and each of those arcana is associated with one NPC the player is encouraged through narrative context to form a relationship with. The rub is, once again, you have limited days with which to foster such relationships. So what type of personas you empower, and how efficiently you do so, is entirely up to you. Because there’s a lot of strategic skill involved in the social aspect of these games. Provided you are not simply following an online instruction guide, the social game of Persona involves a lot of forethought, planning, understanding the schedules and exceptions to the schedules of NPCs, how long certain long-term projects like improving your academic stats will take, how all this intersects, and how to balance it all.

The art of a tart deck is displayed, in order of arcana numbered 0 to 20. The art is dark and somber, with extensive use of silhouettes and blue-leaning color palettes.

Here you see persona 3’s lovely arcana artwork, I guess in case you’ve never seen a tarot deck before.

This is, of course, a sort of tongue-in-cheek rumination on the nature of social interaction in real life – how easy it is to foster so many entanglements and commitments that it becomes a game in and of itself to manage them all, but also very compelling gameplay, that some players may not even notice they’re partaking in. The metaphor here is clear in narrative as well; friendships make the heart grow stronger, and your weapons are personas – the power of the heart. You delve into the game’s respective dungeons, and engage in strategically engaging combat one day, then decide whether your time is better spent hanging out with that girl you like, or patching things up with your friend whom you had a spat with the other day. Because even for how difficult it can be, it’s all worth it – just like forming bonds in real life – through the intrinsic narrative reward of getting to know these characters to the extrinsic gameplay reward of increased power in the dungeon, meaning you can complete the dungeon faster, meaning you have more time to play the social game, meaning you grow even stronger. And thus, the gameplay loop.

A group of four phantom thieves square off against two horned horse demons and a fairy. One of the thieves summons a monster in a jar with a swirl of blue energy, and the jar-monster strikes a horse demon with lightning.

There are a lot of numbers and words to look at here, but it’s all in service of maintaining that loop.

Persona‘s combat, similar to its sister series Shin Megami Tensei, is itself primarily a resource management game. As a turn-based RPG units of action are divided into discreet units. The player takes action, then the enemy monster does, etc. Your SP or HP can be spent on more powerful attacks, but can also be costly. However, if you don’t defeat enemies quickly, you may take damage which will require the expenditure of SP or healing items to recover. There are mechanics in place to extend the player’s turn to avoid this. However, utilizing this “Once More” mechanic most often involves the expenditure of SP. And even then, there are more and less efficient ways to spend SP, such as using a screen-wide attack to hit a group many enemies at the cost of significant SP, can be more efficient than using a single-target attack to hit each enemy in sequence. Understanding the balance can be key. Because both action and inaction can lead to loss of HP and SP, when fighting enemies in Persona, you’re really searching for the most efficient path to navigating each battle in terms of resources – weighing the potential losses versus gains in each given scenario, all in service of that ultimate higher level goal – clear the dungeon efficiently. This is the heart of Persona‘s combat system.

What appears to be a giant lizard with camo-print skin is electrified by lightning shot from the ghostly visage of a samurai, commanded by a teenager schoolboy. The text "Weak 19" appears, indicating damage dealt to the monster's weakness.

Exploiting weaknesses is one of the main ways to stay efficient in battle.

Each day, if you choose not to go dungeoneering, you must choose how the protagonist will spend their day. These units of action are divided into discreet days. The player takes action, then a day is expended, etc. Your time can be spent developing a bond with an NPC for those more powerful personas, but maxing out an NPC bond can be a costly long-term use of time. However, if you don’t get stronger personas, that can cost you in the form of excessive SP expenditure in the dungeons later. There are mechanics in play to make the development of bonds more efficient, such as seeing a movie with several friends – which buffs some social stat like charm, while also developing two bonds at once. Timing is crucial, however, because if one or both of the NPCs you bring to the movies is not ready to improve develop their bond, the act may do nothing for you. Understanding the balance can be key. You may also choose not to develop any bond, and simply spend the day working for pay to buy precious healing items, or weapons. Because both action and inaction can lead to loss of time, when developing bonds in Persona, you’re really searching for the most efficient path to navigating each day in terms of resources – weighing the potential losses versus gains in each given scenario, all in service of that ultimate higher level goal – clear the dungeon efficiently, so you can spend more time with your friends.

What we conclude from this, is that the social aspect of this game, when you really look objectively at just what mechanics are in play, is a turn-based resource-management game. Ah-HAH! I fooled you earlier, it turns out Persona‘s seemingly extremely different gameplay modes have almost exacting parity with each other! How about that. That’s right, I am making the case here that both of Persona‘s primary gameplay modes are essentially the same, when you get right down to it. It is the nuances of their execution and, crucially, their narrative context that is their distinguishing factor. The social mode is much more relaxed, with smooth music, good laughs, and little sense of tension or danger, outside the mundane stakes of going out on a date, or whatever. The dungeons and battles have very tense and exciting music, the narrative stakes are that if you lose you die, and you’re surrounded by nightmarish imagery. These contexts, along with the more immediate feedback of failure in battle vs. social situations, whose failure states are more nuanced, make dungeons a state of high excitement on an interest curve, vs. the social situations’ more mellow levels of excitement. With the two modes existing in a mutual loop, Persona quite naturally creates a very compelling interest curve.

Persona‘s themes, every Persona‘s themes have, at their core, the universal truth that true bonds with true friends make a person stronger. This is repeated a number of times in a number of ways in dialogue, but its also rather skillfully crafted into the very fabric of how the game systems inter-relate. The strong your bonds the strong you literally are in the game’s more dangerous situations. What really elevates it though I think, is how that desire to save the world with your buds further motivates engaging with them socially. There are a lot of games which began to ape Persona‘s ‘half combat, half social sim’ conceit following the breakout success of Persona 5. Some of them, though, I think miss the point here. Persona is not two separate systems that somehow fit together like magic, no. They are two very similar systems subtly distinguished in mechanics and narrative context to fit together seamlessly.

A blonde girl with short hair stands on a beach overlooking glistening blue water. She wears what appears to be a metal headband or headphones which cover her ears. Her face is framed by a white metal material that covers her entire neck and the outline of her jaw. She slowly turns to the camera.

The ability to summon a Persona is the power to control one’s heart, and your heart is strengthened through bonds…

Playing Final Fantasy I, II, and III For The First Time

I try to play a lot of games. I find exposing oneself to a wide variety of ideas and precedent helps one form a better understanding of the craft. I especially am fond of tracing the development of certain ideas and precedents over long stretches of time. In a moment of hubris that could be perhaps, generously, described as “insane”, some friends and I decided to undergo the herculean task of playing through the entirety of the Final Fantasy canon. The Roman numeral numbered ones, anyway. There are scant few games with such a distinct and traceable lineage. This is but the first leg of a long journey. Perhaps by the end you dear reader, and I, will have learned… something.

A man in red and black armor wielding a black sword with a red crack in it in one hand. His other hand is spiky and demonic with an orange glow over black armor. He stands before an ashy gray castle in the background. A fiery phoenix and wolflike beast growl at each other from the corners of the screen. Promotional image of the game Final Fantasy XVI

…We’ll get there.

As this is a retrospective, expect at least some spoilers for these games.

Final Fantasy I – Setting a Precedent

This is not going to be a narrative retrospective, at least not primarily, but story is an important part of this franchise’s identity, so I will touch on it briefly where I have something to comment about. Final Fantasy I‘s initial setup is about as simple as it gets. Four Warriors of Light set out on a quest to save a princess from an evil knight, then quickly discover they are heroes foretold in legend, destined to defeat Four Fiends, collect four magic crystals, and restore the balance of light and dark in the world. Still, even from humble beginnings, someone somewhere wanted to make this tale stand out a bit, with inspirations likely from Japanese mythology, manga, and anime, all of which tend to deal with rather esoteric concepts. The evil knight from the beginning of the game, Garland, reveals that he has enacted a complex time loop by sending the Four Fiends back in time. The result of this is that Garland becomes the immortal demon Chaos. Once defeated, all of our heroes’ adventures are undone, along with the evil of Chaos, though the memory of those adventures remains etched in the Warrior’s hearts. There are elements of Final Fantasy‘s heart here already. The esoterica, the high-minded fantasy concepts, the slight twinge of melancholy at the end of a long journey, all feelings that pervade the Final Fantasy games and their derivatives that I have played.

A man in full platemail, helmet decorated with bull-like horns and glowing yellow eyes. He wields a giant greatsword, and has a woman in a dress slung over his shoulder. A castle looms very small in the background. An image of the evil knight Garland.

Yeah man, this guy…

At the outset, the player chooses a lineup of four heroes from a roster of possible character classes with different abilities. Notably, you can loadout your team any way you like. Use four white mages, aka healers if you so like. Use four glass cannon black mages. This level of customization sets a nice precedent going forward for what the gameplay of Final Fantasy is, I think. The game followed the release of Dragon Quest about a year earlier, and follows similar conventions of its contemporaries. Turn-based combat with simple rules, spells, attacks, and the ability to run from battle.

Often I judge my enjoyment of turn-based gameplay by how much leeway I am given for strategic thinking. There’s… not a whole lot of that in Final Fantasy I. Boss and enemy designs tend to be straightforward. One throws fire at you. One throws ice at you. Sometimes enemies are stronger than you, though, and figuring out how to maximize your heroes’ damage while keeping them alive can be a bit of an entertaining problem.

A skeletal mage labeled 'Lich' fights against a mage in a blue robe with a face shrouded in shadow, all on a plain black background. The menus surrounding the fight are labeled 'Lich' 'Fight' 'Magic' 'Drink' 'Item' 'Run' 'BkM 'Fhtr' 'Thef' 'RedM'

The game’s visuals are simplistic, but refreshingly uncluttered.

My friends and I did arrive at a rather interesting strategy. It’s pretty apparent that it wasn’t the primary method of play, that it was a strategy unique to us, so that’s pretty cool. We had a part of one strong physical attacker, the warrior, one potent offensive mage, the black mage, one healing support, the white mage, and one jack-of-all-trades red mage. Our go-to method is thus: The white mage casts a strength-enhancing spell on our warrior, and the red mage casts a speed-enhancing speed spell on our warrior. Our black mage continues to blast offensive spells away, not needed enhancements to do decent damage, especially against several enemies at once. Meanwhile, our warriors becomes a lawnmower, shredding through bosses and other monsters like dry grass.

So while our decision making process never really changed, we did make some interesting decisions that allowed us to clear the game, so that’s good. On the other hand, the presence of a certain mechanic I dread really accentuates the repetitiveness – that being random encounter system. In the overworld, the player character moves across terrain divided into tiles on a grid. Each time they pass a tile, there is a chance they will be forced into a monster encounter. I think I’ve decided by now I pretty much detest random encounters, for a number of reasons. They introduce a level of abstraction that is irritating to me, bringing me out of the fantasy of the world. Where are all these monsters coming from? Where are they hiding? Why are they not dangerous until they are on top of me? Worse than that it bring an unjustified level of agency away from the player. The use of random encounters in early RPGs almost certainly was partially a tech consideration. The NES can only render so many items on screen, and a consistent supply of enemies to fight was needed. Still, from a purely ludic standpoint it’s annoying as hell. Crossing a continent in this game could take two minutes, or two hours, depending on your real-world luck stat. Mine is very very low.

I always find myself comparing old RPGs with random encounters to one of my favorite RPG – Chrono Trigger which, contrary to many of its contemporaries, had no random encounters. Enemies were consistently visible in the overworld. Sure, there were surprise encounters, and required encounters. Enemies often leap out of bushes to ambush the heroes. The added context and predictability of these encounters make them far more tolerable, especially when backtracking through areas, as is often required in RPGs. When one can mentally prepare for exactly how long a task it’s going to take, it’s a lot more pleasant than getting surprised with a lot of meaningless activity that does little but waste time. Any advantages you could gain by having random encounters can be achieved with more bespoke, designed encounters, with none of the frustration. But, this is Final Fantasy I of 16, so I’d better get used to them. Just wanted to throw out the random encounters rant early on here.

There’s one more thing I’ve got to say about this first game. Final Fantasy I sprang forth about a year after the release of watershed title Dragon Quest, itself inspired by similar role-playing-type games like Ultima. Ultima, in turn was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, itself inspired by other tabletop war games and major fantasy works like The Lord of The Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium, which includes The Lord of The Rings, represents a sort of fictive mythologized history of the real world – a legend for the modern age. My point is, Final Fantasy represents a lineage of people exploring the nature of the world as they understand it through imagination. There’s something poetic, I think, about how the heroes of the story embark on a journey that brings them across the world, and to the edge of history, only to rid the world of evil, at the cost of forever leaving those fantastical events behind, as nothing more than a fantasy. They don’t get to stay in that world, but the memory of it stays forever with them. Final Fantasy I is a humble game, with systems, gameplay, and storytelling that are primitive by today’s standards, but it’s also impossible to divorce it from all this context of its creation. There’s a lot of beauty, in this humble little adventure.

A message saying; 'The Warrior who broke the 2000 year Time-Loop is truly a LIGHT WARRIOR.... That warrior was YOU!' is imposed over a backdrop of peaceful waters and forests of pine trees under a blue sky.

Final Fantasy II – Experiments Are Educational, But Not Always Fun

The early Final Fantasy series was notoriously mislabeled in the west under its English releases, with Final Fantasy IV being erroneously christened Final Fantasy II to English speakers because the actual second and third entries to the franchise were simply not released outside of Japan. You know, I believe in the dissemination and availability of media across cultural boundaries. Translations and localization with easy availability are not only good, but necessary for a thriving and robust culture. That said… I think I could see how The Powers That Be found that, in the project of bringing Final Fantasy to the western market… I understand why they decided, “eh, think we can skip this one” (this is a joke). I mean… It’s bad, guys. I did not thoroughly enjoy my time playing Final Fantasy II.

The story of this game is alarmingly Star Wars. I know that’s an easy criticism to levy at a lot of fantasy media, but it’s really true in this case, I think. Everything from a rebellion lead by a princess fighting an evil empire, to a secretive emperor with a flying super weapon that razes civilizations, accompanied by a right-hand man dressed in black who is a secret lost family member that eventually turns good again at the last minute. The biggest major departure is the journey’s terminus taking place in a bright technicolor version of hell, which was a pretty delightful surprise, though somewhat harsh on my eyeballs.

A portrait of a man in an armored hat next to a text box reading "Guy: Guy speak beaver." Below the text, four people stand near a beaver in the snow.

Okay, never mind this story is Kino.

Once upon a time, the coolest, hypest, most exciting RPG on the horizon was the as yet unreleased Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We were dazzled with its cutting edge graphics in one-thousand-and-eighty-whole-p, 1080p! We were told about many of its new, innovative, never-before-seen gameplay systems that would upend what we thought an RPG could be! For example, the traditional RPG character level system? Out the window! Replaced, with this shiny novel skill system where your hero would improve specifically at the tasks they performed the most. How fresh! How new! Except, of course, this system predates Skyrim by more than two decades. It exists, in near identical fashion, in Final Fantasy II, which also forgoes its predecessor’s level system in favor of an adaptive skill system. Suffice to say, it leads to many of the same problems that plagued Skyrim in its day, though in some cases to a far greater degree.

Against a black background, four cerulean blue knights on horseback fight against a four heroic warriors. The menu at the bottom of the screen reads hp and mp, as well as the heroes' names in Japanese.

Oh featureless black void in which all fights take place, we’re really in it now…

Your heroes’ efficacy with a sword, with a shield, even with their ability to sustain damage is all determined by individual numeric values that only increase when engaged in their associated property. For your Warriors of Light to have a decent health pool, they have to be smacked in the face, repeatedly, and at length. Because you are able to target allies with offensive commands in battle, the best way to train hp is to have your heroes smack each other. The adaptive skill system introduces all kinds of bizarre and irritating behaviors like this. Whenever you get a new spell, you are not enthralled by the exciting new possibilities, but debilitated by the crushing knowledge that you’ll have to spend hours mindlessly blasting weaker monsters to get this new spell to even reach the point of being partially usable.

You will consistently feel pigeon-holed by the choices in character building presented in this game. Make no mistake, Final Fantasy II offers a bevy of options when building your heroes for battle. There are lots of different swords with different properties, from swords, to axes, to polearms. You can even dual wield! You can carry a shield. You can practice black magic and white magic as you please! You can customize your spell loadout. And yet. It takes so much time, and so much effort, to get any of those aforementioned options up to a level of usefulness with the adaptive skill system, that if you don’t choose your course for each hero early on, and stick with it, you’ll find your jacks-of-all-trades to be rather useless in combat by the end. In this way, Final Fantasy II rather lacks the adaptability in hero roster customization that even Final Fantasy I had.

This is not to say that such a level of adaptability is necessary to even complete this slog of a game. And I don’t use that word lightly. A lot of RPGs are very long, and very repetitive, but engaging with II‘s content is so consistently irritating, with more random encounters than ever before, that I eventually found myself engaging in… the Teleport spam. You see, Teleport is one of those spells – the kind that remove enemies entirely from battle. Usually, the tradeoff for that in most RPGs is that enemies will not drop loot, or provide experience points to level up. However, my hero’s skill at successfully casting Teleport did improve every time they used it, making this spell an infinite feedback loop of instantly killing everything, and becoming more likely to instantly kill everything. Including bosses! Including the last boss, save for his… very very super last, final form. Even then, we moved on to employing some other similarly cheesy strategy to dispatch him. ‘Cheesy’ in the case meaning, that it does not feel as though the strategy meaningfully engages with the mechanics of the game. The win against the boss at the end rang kind of hollow for me.

So Final Fantasy II was extremely experimental. It tried a totally new way to conceptualize character building. Even its Star Wars-ass story feels like a test bed for what these games could be capable of narratively. I mean certainly a lot of things happen in this game. It’s turn of event after turn of event, even if they all feel very familiar. Gameplay seems to have become even more simplified since the first game, but that may also be a byproduct of experimentation, with new spells and skills and whatnot. Experimentation isn’t a bad thing though, even if it seems to have thoroughly ruined this particular outing. Based on what I know of Final Fantasy now, it’s almost certain that the developers learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t while making this game, and that’ll serve them well in future titles.

Final Fantasy III – Why This Game And Not Any Other?

Final Fantasy III starts introducing more of those bizarre, esoteric concepts that require some serious thinking to really keep straight it your head. There’s no time travel, as far as I can tell, but there are larger than life mythological wizards, with special gifts of immortality, or dream walking, etc. There is global time stoppage, though. There’s a giant floating continent that the heroes were born on, not knowing it was a small part of the larger world. To the game’s credit, I also experienced that same emotional journey – and I’m sure that was the intent, a surprise reveal for players of the smaller Final Fantasy games that came before. Surprise! The game’s world is actually way larger than you thought. Pretty cool. The Warriors of (The) Light are still mostly hollow player-inserts, the quest is still to collect a bunch of magic rocks, and most characters present are not terribly deep or engrossing. The villain is once again preoccupied with immortality, and entangles themselves with dark forces beyond them for their hubris. The series is establishing its pattern of repeating narrative motifs – which is not necessarily a bad thing!

Final Fantasy III introduces the Jobs system. The seeds of this system will germ and survive long into Final Fantasy‘s future, up to present day. It is, in essence, the ability to swap your Warrior of Light’s class and associated abilities or on the fly, or under certain circumstances. In III, this circumstance is any time outside of battle. Your choice of jobs to pick from expands as you progress through the game, with more powerful ones coming later. This is pretty exciting, and does enhance the possibilities of team building from the first game. You don’t have to commit to a team right away. There are a couple problems with this first run at the system, though. For some reason, swapping jobs makes the swapped hero weakened for several battles. I say ‘for some reason’, but it’s likely to make committing to specific jobs per hero attractive, so heroes build more of a gameplay identity, rather than faceless fighters who can do all things at all times. I suspect this, because future such jobs systems will be designed toward that end, but usually in a more clever and less frictional way.

A grid view of the same drawing of a girl five times, with the girl in a different outfit for each drawing, and then again in those respective outfits seen from behind.

All that said though, yeah, the jobs system is cool.

Boss and enemy design of Final Fantasy III is once again fairly simplistic, but there was a moment that came late in the game. I think what I saw in Final Fantasy III was a spark, a flicker, a momentary glimmer in the night that reminds me of the reason that I actively seek out games with turn-based combat. I’m not talking about why I play JRPGS, a vague collection of aesthetic and ludic conventions that form a genre. I’m talking about why I enjoy the play of commanding a team and managing resources in a turn-oriented fashion the way Final Fantasy does it, divorced from all aesthetic and narrative trappings. Within the optional dungeon of Eureka, I saw the essence of what makes turn-based RPGs worth the effort.

The bosses of Eureka are tough. They threaten the Warriors of The Light with devastating attacks and powerful spells. Instant death for individual heroes is a very real possibility. To defeat these bosses, my own team of heroes – us nerds playing the game, had to put our heads together and reason out a strategy. A lot of games require this kind of creative thinking – where your initial approach is brick-walled by an impassible obstacle, and a different approach is required to progress. However, given the strictly governed rules of a turn-based game, the player’s ability to think laterally and solve abstract problems is something unique to this kind of play. It’s the same sort of thing that’s made activities like Chess and Go among the most enduring of all designed games. In hundreds of hours across three games of mowing down group of monsters, after group of monsters, boss after boss, villain after villain, mostly just by spamming our most powerful moves over and over again or… gods save me… spamming the Teleport spell, Final Fantasy III, in it’s final hours, at last forced us to think. It wasn’t just that we could think creatively to solve a problem, but that the game responded to this, and rewarded this. When creative application of game mechanics leads to interesting and rewarding, designed scenarios, that, to me, is strategic liberty, the very reason turn-based games are compelling to me.

Four purple wasps on a black background fight against four heroic warriors. The warriors names, as well as the options for combat are listed in Japanese on blue menus.

You kill an awful lot of wildlife in RPGs, I’m realizing…

It’s so important for a game to recognize its own worth. Why play this game, and not any other? I play action games to feel a sense of dexterity in my hands and tension in my heart that isn’t possible or quite the same in other formats. I play rhythm games because my sense of music aligns with my sense of play, and the two complement each other. I play platform games because the ease of traversal they entail appeals to a sense of exploration and adventure. I think often games will replicate certain mechanics or conventions based on precedent, without stopping to recognize why those things are precedent in the first place. This is the kind of thing I was hoping to see, playing Final Fantasy as a retrospective – these important core principles to the turn-based RPG and JRPG traditions develop before my eyes in real-time.

It occurred to me that the strategic liberty I so value in turn-based RPGs is much like the solving of a very elaborate and very particular kind of puzzle. It isn’t just that we had to think creatively with the tools we were given, but that the tools we were given operated in tandem to produce new possibilities. For example, the Warrior of Light Refia was our dragoon hero, or spearman. She was also our greatest damage dealer. We were fighting a boss whose physical attacks devastated the heroes. We could counter this with the Protect spell, but that Protect spell could only target one hero per turn, and only two of our heroes were capable of casting it. Moreover, each of our four heroes served an essential role in the party. Refia brought the damage, the dark knight Ingus was the only one who could take a hit, the red mage Luneth was our go-to spell caster, including caster of Protect, and the white mage Arc was needed for healing duty. Losing even one would debilitate us for the rest of the fight.

While our mages were busy casting Protect on people and not healing, one or more of our heroes might straight up die, so raising a full defense was just too slow a prospect. It occurred to us, after some experimentation, that Refia’s Jump ability – in which she jumps off screen and becomes immune to damage for one turn, then crashes back down to deal bonus damage – was maxing out the damage count at ‘9999’. Five of those jumps alone would bring the enemy down. So instead of insuring every hero could survive incoming damage, one of my friend’s suggested, let’s ensure Refia can, so she can constantly jump to safety, while busting the enemy down over the course of ten turns. Instead of Protecting the party, our mages would Protect themselves, while Refia used the guard action to survive. Then, we would buff her with Haste to ensure she’d always Jump before the enemy could act. If ever she was caught with some damage as she landed, we would repeat the process of setup, then sent her on her way to continue the attack. After a couple of tries, it worked! The enemy was defeated, and all of us players cheered.

The sense of satisfaction that washed over us was fantastic. Our friend expressed that they felt like a genius – a familiar sensation for anyone who’s played a particularly challenging RPG. It’s just a shame that this sort of thing had to take several dozens of hours of gameplay to get to. That’s a bit unfair, though, there was some strategizing that took place in the earlier levels of Final Fantasy III. However, it never reached near this level of depth. Knowledge of the game’s rules or how its various mechanics interacted was never really necessary. It was more a continuous process of experimentation – seeing what the various hero jobs did, though a feeling of utilizing them to some greater end was disappointingly infrequent.

That said, the presence of this strategic liberty, even at the eleventh hour, kind of redeemed Final Fantasy III a bit in my eyes. Like Final Fantasy I, I think it’s very commendable for its time, and it’s scratching at the surface of some of the things that I think makes this kind of game great, which is a good sign! I’m optimistic going into Final Fantasy IV, another game I’ve never played! Final Fantasy will be entering a transitional period, I predict, as it undergoes a transformation from its simple NES days to the robust cutting edge graphical and storytelling experiences of the SNES and PS1 eras, and beyond, that the series is famous for.

A man in blue dragon-like armor with glowing yellow eyes repeatedly pumps his fist in the air on a grassy background.

With the memory of their struggle buried deep in their hearts…

A Heartfelt Review of Sonic Frontiers

So this is not a review blog. Reviewing things is not my usual thing. I’m making an exception for this, a very particular game. My relationship to the Sonic franchise is difficult for me to put words to. It is a property I am so profoundly invested in, I will watch all marketing and critical material for each new entry in this monolithic franchise like a hawk, and yet I can’t always bring myself to participate in new Sonic content. Lots of breath has been spent on the bizarre nature of Sonic as a media franchise, but for my part, the simple version is as follows. Sonic The Hedgehog is a franchise with identities as numerous as the stars. It is many things to many people, as it’s consistently accrued new young fans over the years with movies, comics, TV shows, and even games that are each often wildly different in tone, texture, and creative vision. Sonic seems to constantly be in a state of wanting to reinvent itself, and I’ve long been wary of this leading to games that are sometimes of questionable quality, and thus an a deep interest in critical and fan reception, despite my own desperate love of the franchise. I’ve just been disappointed by Sonic a number of times, but I desperately want to love each new game.

I’m pleased to say, Sonic Frontiers was not a disappointment to me. I love much about it, but I can’t say it’s exactly exemplary. Well, that’s for the conclusion. Like I said I don’t normally write reviews, but I don’t really care for letter or number grades on media. Art is just so much more than that could ever convey. So, I’m going to do my best, to give voice to my thoughts on the latest Sonic game.

Sonic Frontiers is the first ‘Open Zone’ Sonic game. What they mean by this is simply that the game is divided into several open-world style maps, with objectives, collectibles, points of interest, and characters to meet in each. These maps are not connected to one another as they might be in a full open world game, thus the distinction. This isn’t really an issue to me – I find I have a fondness for the unique strengths of linear game design anyway, so this is a bit of the best of both worlds for me. You can explore the zones as you wish up to a point, when the story kicks in, unlocking the next area.

You’ll find you need to collect a bevy of different objects to progress the story and proceed to the next map, by ultimately assembling the seven chaos emeralds to fight a big climactic area boss. In the mean time, these objects can be collected by exploring the many, many, small platforming challenges scattered about each island, by playing through the more robust ‘Cyberspace Stage’ platforming/speed challenges, by talking to NPCs in narrative sequences, or by simply interacting with various objects to find collectibles.

The Movement

The beating heart of any Sonic game, where speed is king, how does the movement system feel? This is something I always get caught up on. It’s also something that nobody can really seem to agree on, including the developers at Sonic Team! Sonic’s movement and gamefeel has changed so many times fans categorize the different systems like its a wildlife taxonomy, and there are categories within categories! To give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I think the best character controller in Sonic is Sonic Adventure 2, and I don’t think the games have felt quite as good since! Either too slippery, or too stiff, or some other oddity always throws me off. And of course the boost games which followed some years after the Adventure games had completely different design goals, and as such the character controllers departed drastically from what I had been attached to.

Before I get into, there is one strange thing. There are movement sliders. They feature the ability to adjust and customize things like turn rate, initial speed, boost acceleration, and even top speed! That’s a little wild to me. This may sound appealing to some, but me, I’m not fond. In a game about movement, like a platformer, the character controls and capabilities need to be fine-tuned to the environment to really excel at showcasing what a movement system is capable of. Design is decision-making, and a truly great movement system has to be deliberated on to a certain level of specificity such that it is as suitable to its place in the game as possible – you know, you need to design it. To me this is not of the same substance as, say, camera control options. It’s not even really a set of control options. It’s doesn’t affect the interface, it affects what Sonic is literally capable of as a game-entity. It’s strange. It strikes me as a lack of confidence, to have left your game’s de-bugging variable sliders in the options menu. Thankfully, there was at least some confidence here – the default ‘high speed’ style gives you, in my opinion, the optimal experience by default.

Sonic the blue hedgehog runs around a grassy plateau at twilight, sprinting in circles at high speeds with great grace and agility.
A slider labeled "top speed" is brought to its lowest setting, then the blue hedgehog Sonic runs across a grassy filed in midday at a very moderate speed.
Left: The most responsive Sonic ever, Right: The same but… slower?

The game opens with a prompt to choose your preferred control style – ‘High Speed’ style or ‘Action’ style, with the game noting that ‘Action’ is good for beginners. As far as I can tell, all this does is change where the default of the ‘top speed’ slider rests. All the other sliders remain the same! Action, uh, sets your top speed to the minimum setting. That’s all! High speed does the opposite, starting it at the max setting. I highly highly recommend choosing high speed, even for beginners. Maybe I’m off base here and as a long-time pro gamer sonic master, but I feel as though even someone relatively new to games is going to pick up a Sonic game… expecting to go fast? It’s kind of the main pitch of the character. I don’t really understand the inclination to undermine that for the sake of making the game allegedly easier. Although one would think nerfing the movement speed could also make the game harder. I just feel as though there were better ways to construct a ‘beginner-friendly’ mode.

Okay on to the actual movement. Sonic controls excellently, smoothly, without hitch. Sonic responsively turns nearly one-to-one with control stick input. He can very quickly achieve impressive speeds, while ducking and weaving around obstacles with an engrossing gracefulness. Sonic never slips and slides around, stopping pretty promptly when bid to stop. Sonic is very adaptable, capable of transferring from one activity to the next in short order, like hopping on a grind rail, hopping off midway to bounce off a balloon, then boost toward a cliff side in the distance. The fantasy of seeing a large landscape ahead of sonic and just dashing off into the distance is realized here, with a responsive and blazingly fast hedgehog.

He feels like Adventure Sonic to me. Which is to say I feel in direct control of Sonic. I don’t feel like I’m guiding him with a carrot on a stick, or wrestling against strict movement constraints. When I want Sonic to get to a particular spot, I can get him there, when I want to running around enemies with flourish and style, I can do that. This movement system really accels to me in its ability to directly translate the player’s self-expression through play onto the canvas of the game. The friction between player and Sonic is very low.

From a birdseye view, SOnic the blue hedgehog runs leaving light blue energy trail behind him, in a field of red flowers. Sonic writes the name "Ian" in cursive, using this trail.

Sonic grips the ground satisfyingly as you run. The homing attack is long-ranged and fast, although I feel it has a bit too much hit-pause, making it more disruptive to flow than it should be. Sonic has more options than ever, being able to slide, bounce, dash to the ground from the air, boost, and double jump! The latter really helps with making precision platform jumps, even at high speed.

To get into the specifics, Sonic’s boost ability has been given an overhaul. It is now a regenerating resource, rather that a purely expendable one, more in line with the stamina meter in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. I’m in favor of this change, as it makes the boost more of a strategic tool, a decision to make, rather than just a binary state of ‘holding boost down indefinitely’ and ‘not having enough boost power and walking awkwardly slow’. The boost can also be used as an air-dash to reach distant areas, which is great, because the game does not carry Sonic’s momentum much at all in midair.

It’s something you get used to, but it feels awkwardly wrong to jump out of a full sprint only to watch all of your speed evaporate. Obviously, the maps and levels are not built to accommodate a movement system that heavily transfers speed from one state to another. Every time you light-dash, homing-attack, or bounce, Sonic’s speed is totally reset, and you have to rely on the boost to pick it up again. Luckily, the boost is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution to every obstacle. It doesn’t damage enemies, for one thing, so it is possible to send oneself careening into danger at high speeds. This is the fun part though! Sonic has always been all about know when and how to leverage your speed, and Frontiers captures this through the versatility, though not omnipotence, of the boost function.

The new boost, like the old, effectively replaces Sonic’s spindash move, something I still sorely miss. I really feel as though it would fit quite well in Frontiers especially, given how much its movement seems to be inspired by the Adventure games which featured the spindash prominently. Its advantage over the boost is fine aiming, although there’s no reason the two mechanics could not coexist. Indeed, this is proven by the baffling inclusion of the dropdash, inspired by Sonic Mania. Sonic can spin up, but only in midair, and otherwise it functions exactly like a spindash, perhaps a bit more unwieldy than the one in Adventure and Adventure 2. You can’t use it for fine aiming since you need to jump into it, but the dropdash feels great to use once you get the hang of it, and although it’s by no means necessary to use in the game, it’s cool to have- and I feel the same about Sonic’s most iconic move! Please bring back the spindash. Anyway. The spindash feels like a glaring omission, if only for the sake of completeness, but most of its functionality has been distributed to other moves.

Sonic jumps into a blue spinning ball, and lands on the grassy hill as such, rolling down across the landscape at high speed, before unrolling into a jog.

Sonic plays mostly the same in the Cyberspace Stages, except his turn rate is more strictly throttled, as the stages are more racetrack-like. Interestingly, it seems as though the movement sliders don’t affect Sonic in these stages, at all. It seems there was confidence in how he moved in this context. And well-earned too! I honestly think Sonic handles better in Cyberspace than in any other ‘boost’ game that came before. Sonic still feels like a person, rather than a runaway car. Stopping, turning, readjusting for fine precision, is all intuitive and not a roadblock to some of the more platform-heavy stages. I do have one quibble, which is that Sonic has far less air control than in the Frontiers overworld, even while stationary. This is not ultimately very important to the core gameplay of Cyberspace, which wants you to go fast. The lack of air control while jumping at high speed is meant to be evocative of momentum, ironically, since the game doesn’t really express momentum in many other ways, and that makes sense. At low speed it doesn’t really make sense and feels awkward. It wasn’t a common issue for me, but occasionally, whether I wanted to look in every nook and cranny of a level, or was backtracking to grab a missed collectible, sometimes I’d miss a platform entirely because Sonic can barely move in the air in these stages.

Although this game lacks momentum, the way one can string Sonic’s various moves together to achieve a similar effect can be very satisfying. You might backflip off of a grindrail to air-boost right across an enemy that would’ve slowed you down, and you get through the level a couple seconds faster. It’s amazing how well the systems can interact like this in subtle ways, and leaves a lot of essential room for mastery. Though I wish there was some measure of greater momentum, which would go a long way had the levels also been designed to accommodate it, I still think this is going to be a very repayable game. It’s one of the most immediate, smooth, and frankly playable Sonic movement systems we’ve had in a long time. I’d love to replay all of the old Sonic boost stages with this new movement system.

The Combat

It’s fluff. It’s style over substance that involves a lot of stopping and starting that feels quite at odds with the otherwise very free-flowing and fluid movement gameplay. Eh. I’m not happy to say that. I didn’t want the combat to bounce off of me. I don’t think an added focus on combat is totally incompatible to a Sonic game. I just think to make it work, the systems would’ve had to better play to its strengths. What we got, feels oddly disconnected from the movement systems whereas I had hoped for a pair of systems that interlinked in some way. What we got is rife with simplistic dominant strategies, and an apparent lack of depth. Suffice to say, for a Sonic combat system, I’d hope for an intricate dance of momentum, all about constant movement, situational awareness, and yeah, speed. This is not that.

I want to be clear; the combat is not a chore. It’s not egregious, or irritating, or even too frequent. It mostly just confuses me as to why it had to be there. It’s never challenging nor interesting to me in the way that combat depth usually is. Its best qualities are the spectacle, which seems to be the primary motivator behind the design of this combat. It is indeed very,, cool,, when Sonic kicks the air so hard it shoots laser crescents at his enemies. It is very,, neat,, when Sonic zigs and zags around in a finishing flourish to dispatch an enemy. It’s pleasant enough to watch enemy robots explode, and the combat never lingers long enough to feel like too much of a disruption.

Sonic’s combat options essentially include your standard series of punches chained together, and, in the style of other genres like fighting games and beat-em-ups, the option to string in alternate button inputs in the middle or end of a combo to extend the assault an deal more damage. The wrinkle is that Sonic can chain his homing attack into the beginning of one of these combos. The homing attack is ubiquitous in 3D Sonic and allows the hedgehog to zoom to a nearby enemy’s location whilst damaging it. It’s snappy, smart, and fits in perfectly with a game all about moving. Now though, with enemies gaining larger health pools to accommodate a larger-scoped combat system, Sonic can’t just zip by his defeated foes anymore. There’s a lot of stopping, wailing on a guy with lots of health, rinse and repeat. I found myself just bypassing a lot of enemies actually, because I always felt like that’s what I wanted to be doing as Sonic. The prospect of taking two minutes to button mash some randos to death never appealed to me here. Credit where it’s due though, the decision to change the homing attack from an air-only maneuver to one Sonic can perform from any state, including running on the ground, assigned to the same button as his punchy combo attack, was pretty clever. It essentially means Sonic will always zoom to an appropriate target when starting a combo. I just wish the act of building those combos was more fun.

Sonic repeatedly punches, kicks, and spins at a red light affixed to the back of a giant robot beetle.

Enemies caught in one of your combos will be mostly stunned until you finish. Other enemies can intervene, but all the AI in the game seems placid enough that I never really found it too much of a problem. Really I found Sonic’s defensive options- a dodge and a parry – nearly unnecessary. I say parry, but it’s more like a block with a reprisal attack. There’s no timing window. By holding the block input, Sonic stops in place (ugh), and prepares for an enemy’s blow. Once he takes the hit, the offender is stunned, and Sonic can follow up with his own attack. To block another hit, you must re-input the block, but after that it can be once again held indefinitely. It’s a little wild to me, that this system gives me no sense of speed, seeing as I’m playing as Sonic The Hedgehog. The parry and it’s stationary, time-agnostic nature is a prime example.

Not that you’ll need to be very defensive to begin with. As is expected by this point, Sonic’s life meter is his ring count. Rings being the common collectible in this game, the equivalent of coins. When you get hit, you drop some. If you’re hit with zero rings, you die. Same problems as always apply. There’s not much tension if I know I can always just pick up the rings I dropped, except in very specific situations. This knowledge makes a savvy player basically invincible, and draws into question the necessity of Sonic’s upgradeable defense level, which only reduces how many rings vanish from Sonic’s inventory when hit, as opposed to how many hit the ground. No matter your defense level some always do drop, and you can just pick them up.

Sonic is cut by a robot with blade-arms, and knocked onto the grassy ground at night. He drops some rings behind him as he falls on the ground, but quickly picks them up and beats up the robot.

Sonic has a good amount of brilliant blue eye-popping moves to use, and it’s all very impressive looking, but for me, to feel invested in a game’s combat I have to feel present in the shoes of the player character. I have to feel like I’m making decisions as though there are enemies attacking me. I think the primary problem here is that I don’t feel any of that. I feel like watching some pretty nice, but altogether non-interactive animations. Even then, some of the camera choices are pretty questionable. One camera animation in particular, during one of Sonic’s moves, I could easily see giving someone motion sickness. The whole framing feels off, too. Often you’ll see a reverse shot of Sonic, as if your perspective is meant to be from the target of the attack. But that is so incongruent. I’m meant to be playing Sonic, shouldn’t the camera frame me as Sonic, not a third-party observer?

The combo system seems to be catered specifically to stringing together Sonic’s various new tricks to maximize damage in one combo, with very little emphasis on ducking and dodging enemies, which are, in the majority, woefully unequipped to pose a threat to Sonic. Though I always enjoyed the nice crunchy audio-visual feedback of smashing robots, that was all underlined by my misgivings. I rarely found myself making interesting decisions when dispatching enemies. With the exception of one new mechanic.

I did mention that the combat mechanics and movement mechanics do not interlink in a way I find satisfactory. Well, that’s mostly true. Besides Sonic’s punches and kicks and dodges, there’s also the new cyloop. The cyloop is allows Sonic to leave behind a trail of energy as the player holds the cyloop button. If the player navigates Sonic into drawing a closed shape with this energy trail, he whips up a damaging whirlwind to lift and harm foes. This is fantastic. This is a combat mechanic, which is also a movement mechanic. This synergizes with what Sonic is about, and this tiny little thing has such great room for mastery and interactivity. You can run Sonic as fast or as erratically as you please while doing it – you can even combine the cyloop with Sonic’s new boost, for some insanely agile and stylish loops.

Sonic runs a ring around a group of robots so quickly, he whips up a whirlwind that knocks them into the air. He then dashes from one robot to the next in a series of homing attacks, bashing them to pieces.

One maneuver, that never got old for me was rounding up groups of enemies as they spawned. The most basic enemies usually teleport in, in groups of three or four. If you’re quick, Sonic can boost into a full sprint, cyloop around them, launching the enemies into the air, where they are helpless to stop Sonic from using his homing attacking to blast through each of them in turn. It’s great, and feels like a real execution of skill and strategy – it requires an understanding of how two disparate mechanics (cyloop and homing attack) interact, as well as the execution of a cyloop at a high, unwieldy speed. As enemies got stronger, it became apparent that I could no longer defeat them with just a cyloop and a single homing attack. It was kind of disappointment, to be honest, to use the rest of Sonic’s sluggish arsenal. Having to repeatedly wail on a robot to defeat it feels so much less smooth and flowing than a one-two punch of cyloop to homing attack. The enemies still rarely put up any opposition to me doing this, which I would’ve liked to see, but I enjoyed the cyloop so much more than every one of Sonic’s other offensive options that I’d use it whenever I could. This is a mechanic I hope to see return in the future, and expanded on.

Honestly, even the bosses I feel could’ve been designed largely the same way just without the combo system at all. All of them boil down to -do some Sonic related activity like run fast or jump over something, until my weakpoint is exposed, then wail on it-. Why the wailing though? Why not just expose the weakpoint and hit it, then we get on with doing Sonic related things. The following would work basically the same without a combos system. Run up his arm, sure, avoid the red rings, got it, then just homing attack the weakpoint. Why stop in place for all the extra punching?

A giant three-armed robot slams the ground in front of Sonic with its hand. Sonic boosts and dashes up the arm, before slimming into the hinge that connects the arm to the top of the robot, and punching it until it explodes.

For all of my complaining I want to reemphasize that the combat is a minor enough part of regular gameplay, or otherwise inoffensive enough, that I never felt like it was really disrupting my good time. It helps that so many of the encounters are so easy. I obviously care a lot about combat design, and I tend to have a lot more to say about a subject when I do really like it, the subject being Frontiers in this case, but it has just a few niggling problems that I can’t quite ignore. So if you’re wondering how I went on at such length about a supposedly ‘not that bad’ subject, that’s how.

The Levels and Spaces

One of the collectibles Sonic needs to complete the game are obtained by doing Cyberspace levels, which are bite-sized chunks of intense gameplay reminiscent of “boost” games like Sonic Generations and Sonic Forces. In these stages, Sonic’s movement is more restricted, and there’s a focus on completing them fast. In fact, there are several objectives in each, and you receive more of the required collectible the more challenges you complete. One such challenge is to beat the level in a minimum required time.

Most of these times are pretty generous, but some of them really push the movement system to its limit, demanding the player squeeze every last second they can out of Sonic’s ability to cut corners, boost over obstacles, and bounce off baddies. It’s really quite exciting, and the smaller levels had me a lot more invested in trying to get good times than more open-concept levels in past Sonic games might have. I still miss Sonic Adventure style stages, but the refocus on speed running is a good fit for these narrower experiences.

The Cyberspace levels lack the spectacle and narrative context of boost games from previous games, using only a short list of visual elements, recycled across many stages likely for the sake of development scope. That aside, this may be the most I’ve enjoyed boost-style long-corridor Sonic levels in a long time. With the updates to Sonic’s movement, I find them a lot more approachable, and my playstyle a lot more freeform.

The reduction of level themes to a rather sparse and measly handful certainly there’s a lot less visual variety than I might be used to in a Sonic game. For what it’s worth, I can’t honestly say that I got tired of the repeated patterns by the end of the game, as the levels themselves are engrossing enough as bits of challenge and play. They’re pretty sizeable, too. They’re not primarily what you’ll be doing in the game, but nor are they purely optional side-content. You do indeed have to play at least some of them, but they are fun, and I found it pretty breezy to complete every single one. The levels are fun to play, but that’s all. I will never have the same sort of visceral, emotional connection, or immersive sense of place to these nearly context-free spaces as I do to some of Sonic‘s classic locations. Speak of which…

For many of these cyberspace levels, the physical platform layout, obstacle placements, and overall design is borrowed largely or in-part from existing Sonic levels from previous games in the franchise. While this may seem off-putting to some, it’s actually kind of refreshing, to retread familiar ground with Sonic Frontiers‘ new and frankly quite competently put together movement system. Some of these stages haven’t been in the spotlight for literal decades. While you do need to do at least some minimum number of cyberspace stages, you do not need to do even nearly all of them, so the presence of reused content doesn’t feel like much of an imposition to me. Their presence is largely explained away by cyberspace being ‘constructed of Sonic’s memories’ or somesuch, even though certain stages that are present such as Radical Highway are not levels that Sonic himself ever ran through. It’s neither here nor there.

Ultimately, a curated list of tried and proven stage designs alongside a handful of originals and remixes makes the Cyberspace level design quality feel quite consistent overall. The stages also being bite-sized allows the designers to explore gimmicks for the levels that might be tiresome otherwise, like a series of suspended boost rings you have to jump between, for example.

When it comes to the overworld, we have a repeating pattern of context-free grind rails, bounce pads, and booster pads littering a mostly naturalistic environment dotted with high-tech ruins. The ‘context’ to these is that they are bits and pieces of these ruins, but they don’t really read as that. Their presence faded into the background for me as I simply began seeing them as gameplay items, though I wish they could be that and a more natural part of the world. The open zones themselves to me feel pretty uninspired. Grass place, volcano place, desert place, etc. I’ll remember the Starfall Islands well for a number of reasons- the events that took place here, the fun I had running around with Sonic, the conversations I had with his friends – but I won’t remember them because of my sense of place while visiting them. They feel honestly, kind of generic.

The Music

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but Sonic Frontiers‘ soundtrack is out of control. It’s bursting with levels of palpable passion and energy such to be bordering on unreasonable. The way I feel when listening to some of these songs is how I should be expecting to feel listening to a sold-out rock concert in a stadium. To experience the same sitting in my living room playing a video game for children about a cartoon hedgehog feels almost surreal, but this has always been the case. The consummate strangeness of this franchise is a feature, not a bug. You can’t quite replicate this exact experience elsewhere. This is the kind of energy that got me invested in the hedgehog in the first place.

The high-energy stuff is kept close to the chest, for a bit though. The overworld is rather ambient, chill music just capturing the vibes of nature. It seemed in marketing to me like it would be an ill-fit for sonic, but the overworld really is more about vibes than action and adventure. The heart-pumping electronic stuff starts to kick in with the Cyberspace levels, which utilizes some short-looping but very catchy and cool tracks.

It’s pretty much tradition at this point, Sonic’s got good music. No matter what you think of any given Sonic game, there is a weird, infectious bug at Sega that convinces each and every person on their audio staff that they need to compose and perform music like they’re going to die tomorrow. The energy flows, and every Sonic soundtrack inexplicably has a song powerful enough to crack a mountain in half. Lesser game soundtracks would settle for a profoundly powerful endgame boss theme that rolls with a thunderous buildup of swelling instrumentals before awashing you in a tidal wave of heartfelt lyrics which tie together the themes and the game and steps along the way the characters had to complete this journey together with you. Sonic Frontiers has at least four. Four lavishly produced lyrical tracks that put most of what I hear in other games to shame. The Metal Gear Rising: Reveangence comparison early was foreshadowing. There was clearly some inspiration here, these songs kick ass, and in similar fashion, blast you in the face with some of the most earnest lyricism you’ve heard since you first discovered what music was when you turned fourteen, just as each boss enters their climactic final stage. Blaring guitars accompany dual vocalists utterly convinced they’re creating the coolest thing of all time – and they’re right. I feel like I could crack a mountain in half with my fist listening to these.

Weird side-note: The main credits theme for this song, Vandalize, which is also very good, has an original edit not featured in the game. This original edit pretty heavily features the F**K word, in the context of its traditionally 1st definition. Kind of funny, having that officially closely associated with a Sonic The Hedgehog game. Y’know I’m not a prude for that sort of stuff, not at all. Just crossed my mind that actual children will probably be googling this song once they finish the game. It’s nothing that’s gonna ruin anybody’s life or anything, just. Funny? Strange? I dunno. Side-noteworthy, I guess.

Sonic is sliding across a grindrail, offset from a cliff overlooking the sea. He jumps off the rail to reach the cliff, but in midair, the camera shifts perspective to focus on a distant menacing robot labeled "Tower". This shift in perspective has killed Sonic's momentum, and he falls into the ocean like a sack of bricks.

The Narrative

Sonic fans made a big deal about the new head writer for this game, Ian Flynn. He’s been heading up the new run of Sonic comics lately, and apparently is much beloved for that. I don’t read the comics, and video games are a very different medium, even aside from the fact that game development is often messy and solid writing can get mangled for any number of unforeseen reasons. I was cautious going into the story of Frontiers.

Narrative for Sonic has been as divisive and chaotic as his gameplay, for much the same reasons. Seems like no one can decide what Sonic really should be, or if he should even be anything. Maybe Sonic can occupy any tone or style at any time. Who’s to say? Before Frontiers Sonic’s games have given up on much of the melodrama and outlandish plotlines that defined him for some years, focusing more on child-skewing comedy and such silliness.

Frontiers sticks more to the old dramatic model. Sonic’s friends are in real trouble, trapped in Cyberspace, and he’s got to rescue them. A new antagonistic force in the form of the mysterious AI-hologram girl Sage has appeared. I have to say, the plot of this one is rather thin. It feels as though Flynn was brought on quite a ways into development, to post-hoc fill out the narrative beats to fit in with Sonic’s adventure across a series of islands. Not much happens other than Sonic getting beat up by big monsters repeatedly as he slowly gets closer to his friends’ release. Then you fight a bigger monster at the end.

That said… though the plot didn’t do much for me, there’s a lot more dialogue and character writing going on here than Sonic has had in a long time. You know, there’s like, some real growth and personal introspection on the part of these cartoons between some of their conversations. It seems Ian Flynn has a real talent for character voice, as Sonic, Knuckles, Tails, and Amy haven’t felt so much like fully fleshed out characters for a long, long time. They have opinions of each other, senses of humor, dreams, and desires. They aren’t caricatures. Where the plot feels thin, the story is consistently carried by these character interactions, and I constantly felt compelled to find the next story cutscene, because I just wanted to see these bozos interact with each other more. There’s a lot of one-on-one dialogues between Sonic and one other character, and I would’ve liked to see more group interactions, or interactions sans Sonic, and perhaps a more robust plot would have been able to accomodate that.

Another highlight is the subplot of series archenemy Dr. Eggman, which happens mostly off-screen, but is recorded in a series of obtainable voice recordings from him. Eggman as an example here, we really see some new takes on these characters, sides that logically work, but have never really been explored before. How does Eggman feel about the, like, by all accounts, actually alive machines that he’s created with his own hands? Maybe Tails, though he values Sonic as a best friend, has feelings a bit more complicated than that. What does Amy think of Sonic, having chased his affections for so long, but been rebuffed at every turn? There’s a lot here.

That’s to say nothing of the new character, Sage. She’s adorable, entertaining, and even packs a bit of a pathos punch. I wouldn’t say she’s terribly deep, or anything, but she’s obviously got some emotional complexity to her, and her relationships to the other characters are super interesting. Her visual design is really cool too. I really, really, hope we get to see more of her in the future.

Another fun quirk of the writing is that is seems almost religiously committed to reaffirming the canon of Sonic The Hedgehog as a series. Nearly every game is referenced in some way, its story being incorporated into Sonic’s personal history, no matter how absurd or bizarre the events would seem to be in retrospect. I honestly have to respect the hustle. For a long-time fan like me, I found it amusing, and even somewhat compelling, the persistent callbacks and connections.

The storytelling technique and presentation, as far as games go, is nothing you haven’t seen, for the most part. You go from game objective to game objective and occasionally trigger a cutscene conversation between Sonic and an NPC. As I’ve mentioned, it did keep me continuously motivated to find the next one though, it’s certainly not bad! In terms of presentation, when the game wants to build excitement, it delivers, with that insane music and some absolutely gorgeously boarded animated action scenes.

The plot, like it begins, ends somewhat underwritten, with a dearth of real context or answers for what’s happening. There are bits and pieces that suggest a grander narrative that may follow, but I could see this leaving people cold in some respects. And yes, I got the real ending. Still, the character writing remains strong-throughout and I’d be excited to see what this new writing team can do with perhaps more leeway.

Conclusion

Sonic The Hedgehog once felt like every creative involved through they were creating the coolest thing in the goddamn world. For a long time I didn’t quite feel that anymore. Maybe it was a sign of growing up, or maybe something was lost. It’s hard to say. From the music, to the visuals, the ambition and scope of the story, the style you’re capable of in gameplay. It was all just so cool. And you know what? Sonic Frontiers is far from a perfect game, it’s full of baffling decisions and strange inconsistencies that feel as though someone should’ve been on top of, stuff that feels obvious to me in hindsight. And yet, I feel shades of that same feeling again for the first time in maybe a decade. Sonic is cool. Sonic has always been cool but this is different. This is like, advanced cool. This feels like every creative involved is convinced that they are creating the coolest thing in the goddamn world. The passion is palpable. And it’s fun! I breezed through the game 100% with basically no desire to stop. The gameplay may not have as much ‘momentum’ as I hoped, but there’s momentum in the energy of this game. Like it’s the first step of a mountainous surge of creativity. Sonic Frontiers is good. Go play it.

The blue hedgehog Sonic runs at high speed through a field of red and white flowers, wind whipping past him as he goes. He hops over a rail, and ducks to slide beneath another one.

They’ll Know Your Name, Burned Into Their Memory…

Bayonetta’s Witch Time is Better Than Most of Its Derivatives

Man it’s been an absolute hurricane of a month for me, and I am freaking exhausted. It’s Halloween night, so I’m going to indulge myself and ramble about what else? A parry mechanic. Ramble about a parry mechanic whilst complaining and making perhaps uncharitable comparisons between vastly different games. Like I said, I’ve chosen to indulge myself. Nothing scarier than unfiltered opinions. It’ll be a good time. Let’s go.

Bayonetta is an action game from 2009 that grew to a franchise that is apparently worth $450 million. No, do I not have a source for that number. In seriousness, while the niche-ness of Bayonetta may have placed her more in the financial category of a God of War (2005) as opposed to a God of War (2018), she seems to have made a much heavier mark upon combat design, particularly in regards to action games heavy on the spectacle. ‘Spectacle Fighter’ or ‘Character Action’ were a couple of vague and unhelpful terms spun up around the time of Bayonetta‘s release to try and encompass the really different way that certain games started doing things following Bayonetta. Of course there were plenty of games that slotted into the category of ‘spectacle fighter’ before, Bayonetta herself owing much of her DNA to games like Devil May Cry which came long before. And as I said, Bayo was plenty niche, but among the melee-action hardcores, both players and designers, it seems as though she’s had a very last impact.

One of the most noteworthy features of Bayonetta, which set it apart, was the ‘witch time’ mechanic, essentially the game’s parry mechanic. In Bayonetta, if you dodge at the last possible moment, the entire game’s time scale will slow to crawl, except for the titular player character Bayonetta herself, who can the walk about as she pleases, and unleash a flurry of attacks against her hapless foes. Games like Max Payne and even some of Bayonetta‘s own predecessors like Viewtiful Joe made use of a slow-motion effect to allow players to more tactically navigate chaotic and fast-paced situations. Bayonetta‘s wrinkle of hyper-specificity, in that witch time can only be brought forth in response to player performance and situational awareness is what really made this particular mechanic special, I think.

The black catsuit-wearing witch Bayonetta fights two angelic lizard monsters in a quaint yet abandoned European town. She dodges nimbly out of the way of an axe strike, as time slows around her in a purple haze. She leaps into the air and beats one of the lizards to death while he can hardly move.

Bayonetta, primarily inspired by Devil May Cry, features a robust combo and score system by which the player is expected to not just mow down hordes of monsters, but to do it in style. While other games were killing framerates, making characters run like tanks, and restricting camera controls to make games feel more cinematic, Bayonetta opted to pull its camera back and give the player the tools of an editor; the ability to slow time and navigate a mid-massacre diorama like it were an art exhibit, for snippets at a time. If spectacle was the goal, if spectacle is a design pillar of this series, then witch time gives the player the space to think through their masterwork, their fireworks show. Action games like these have big and complicated combo systems for juggling enemies in the air and performing outrageous feats of acrobatics. They can be hard enough to master on their own, let alone while bloodthirsty monsters are swarming about. Bayonetta really seems interested in on-boarding newbies despite its niche appeal, and witch time reinforces this by giving the player a pause with which to set up or practice their big combos stress-free, like a batter swinging at a teed up ball. The Bayonetta loading screens, which opt for a playable void in which you’re free to practice combos at your leisure, makes me quite confident this was one of the goals. With very little practice, witch time allows players to come to grips with the combo system in a more controlled environment, as well as looking cool as heck.

What’s more is what it does for the interest curve of a given battle. Parries in action games typically embody a kind of crescendo, where the intensity of the battle reaches its peak because the player is at the greatest risk – they’ve put themselves in harm’s way to deflect an oncoming attack. Bayonetta takes this further with an invigorating lull in the action to follow, a denouement so to speak. This creates a great rhythm of rising and falling action that allows one to navigate the battlefield in a way that’s a bit more planned and elegant, less improvisational and chaotic than in many other games, which certainly fits the bill of Bayonetta‘s atmosphere. It’s a game about an incredibly stylish witch who always seems to be one step ahead, and just a tad more confident than is warranted by any given situation.

The black catsuit-wearing witch Bayonetta fights an angelic lizard creature with a horn instrument in a gothic temple courtyard. She dodges a strike from it, causing time to slow around her in a purple haze. She then strikes the enemy so hard he is catapulted into the air, where Bayonetta juggles him about with a series of gunshots and rapid melee strikes.

I say that Bayonetta seems to have had a big impact despite it’s somewhat limited first splash because it really seems like tons of games took after it. Bayonetta‘s developer Platinum Games ran with the ‘character action’ style of game, with a slew of them to follow, including Bayonetta‘s own sequels, as well as collaborations like Nier:Automata, a game which shares a huge amount of DNA with Bayonetta including witch time as an option mechanic. As a brief aside, what I’m going to complain about with Automata is that the witch time equivalent in that game is so instantly satisfying to use, that it makes me wish it was a baseline feature of the game as with Bayonetta! Ah well.

Interestingly, I see Bayonetta inspirations in even heavier hitters like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. I think one of the magical parts of game design is that like, even more so than in many other art forms, the practices and learned lessons of design can be studied and adopted in direct ways freely. It’s magical to see wildly different games borrowing great ideas from one another, putting their own spin on it, and creating some truly great experiences. Breath of The Wild did not do that with witch time. Oh yeah, complaining about botw let’s DO THIS. So, in BotW you can induce a slow-motion of sorts by dodging out of the way of enemy’s attack at the last moment, just like in Bayonetta. After this, you are.. permitted to spawn the attack button and unleash a pre-baked, non-interactive series of attacks. Or, you can do nothing, and the slow-mo promptly just ends. It’s, um, well it’s got the spirit anyway.

The key problem with implementations of parries like this lies in the lack of interactivity, I think. The problem starts with the dodge that initiates it. Dodging in Botw is so digital and rigid, as opposed to games like Bayonetta which have more of an analogue omni-directional approach. Then, the result of the dodge is non-interactive. The only player input is continue, or don’t. Not really much of a choice, meaningful for otherwise. Witch time allows the player to do anything they’d otherwise be able to do, but against an army of nearly paralyzed vulnerable opponents, and has so many options to bear against them at that. Imagine if Link from Breath of The Wild was able to, say, use one of his Shieka Slate gadgets during the slow-mo time, planting a bomb, bashing a foe with a big piece of metal, or even just shooting a bunch of them with arrows. To be clear, BotW does have a lot of weird glitches involving its slow-mo effect that make some strange interactions possible, but these are clearly not intended as every perfect does is accompanies with a big flashing “PRESS BUTTON NOW TO FLURRY RUSH DO IT NOW”, and these glitches are not likely to be noticed by casual players.

A blonde young man with a sword and shield side-step dodges a jumping attack from a pig-demon as time slows to a crawl atop a brick stone pathway overgrown with grass. The young man veeeery sloowlly does a combination attack on the pig demon.

Parries are fun, but mostly as tools of personal expression through play, and signs of mastery to enhance performance during play. In the former case, BotW is functional as a basic parry mechanic – you can choose, meaningfully whether to go for flurries or not depending on the combat situation, but it lacks the follow-through of witch time’s setting up for complex combos in a way that feels satisfying. The pre-baked combo of the flurry rush is also really long and time consuming. I said earlier that a parry should mark a big crescendo, a spark of heightened action, but the flurry rush just takes so damn long to resolve, and since enemies in BotW can often be damage sponges, it doesn’t really have the oomph I’d want. The thing could resolve in a fifth of the time and be much more effective in terms of feel, I think. Kirby and The Forgotten land does just this with its own witch time mechanic, and I feel it works much better there. Feels looser and more free-form, too.

The round pink creature Kirby dodges a charging fox in an open grassy field, as time slows to a crawl. Time resumes as kirby goes in to inhale and swallow the fox whole.

In the latter case, where parries accentuate mastery, this only really matters, in my opinion, if it can be significantly felt, most often by making fights shorter. If you can parry a lot, then you can counter a lot, then you can dispatch enemies quickly, in most games that have that feature. Flurry rushes take so long that even if they technically shave time off of beating baddies, it rarely feels like it. I often feel, in BotW that I’d save more time by just wailing on dudes. The game lacks the same goals of defeating enemies stylishly, in an explicit capacity anyway, so I personally feel more compelled to dispatch efficiently, and flurry rush has friction with that.

The round pink creature Kirby dodges a charging fox in an open grassy field, as time slows to a crawl. Time resumes as kirby goes in for a switch strike with his sword.

So what’d we learn from all this? Witch Time is great. It synthetically manipulates the interest curve to have natural highs and lows, but explains it away with a clever and intuitive mechanic that ties in with the style of Bayonetta the game and Bayonetta the character. Witch Time eases players in to high-intensity action games and sets up those really cool combos that everyone wants to pull off. Parry mechanics should have a material impact on gameplay so that their role as a barometer of mastery can be felt. Parry mechanics ideally can also serve as a vector of player creativity and agency during combat. I got to complain about Breath of The Wild. It’s all good here.

I hope you enjoyed this slightly indulgent Halloween special. Stay spooky and be good to each other.

A demonic dragon head made of black hair appears from a purple portal in quaint yet abandoned European town, and violently bites into a strange reptilian creature, spraying blood every as the dragon jostles the limp creature about, before biting down hard, reducing it to spatters.

You’ve been naughty…

Splatoon’s Salmon Run: Fine-Tuned Machine of Industry

Got Splatoon on the brain, so that’s what I’m gonna talk about today. The game’s preeminent horde mode, added in Splatoon 2, and expanded in Splatoon 3, to be specific, Salmon Run. So essentially I adore Salmon Run, it’s some of the most fun I’ve had with a horde mode in a game, that is, a mode in which waves of enemies hound a team of players in hordes, as the players are tasked with holding them off. In Salmon Run, four plucky young squidkids and octoteens are on the clock to collect golden salmon eggs for their employer. Each run is divided into three waves of increasing difficulty, which can take a number of different forms at random. During each wave, hordes of minor salmonids of a small, medium, and large variety will hound the players, and occasionally larger ‘boss salmonids’ will appear. They are more dangerous and harder to take down, but each drop a number of golden salmon eggs, which then must be carried, one at a time per player, back to a centrally located basket to meet each wave’s quota of golden eggs. Fulfill that goal, and you progress to the next wave. I’m going to go over my perspective on the various elements that make Salmon Run work so damn well. It starts with the maps the game mode takes place on.

A Space Where Moments Happen

Salmon Run maps seem pretty simple on the surface. Smaller than Splatoon‘s versus maps, and usually approximately circle or square shaped. They all hold a few interesting features in common, though. For one, they all feature a large amount of elevation variation. This is important, as most salmonid cannot directly climb walls like players can, and thus will have to path around and through the level’s various ground passages. That’s important too, those passages. The heavily varied elevations create a lot of corridors and enclosed spaces. These enclosed spaces can lead to players getting trapped with enemies, in dangerous situations. That’s the point, Salmon Run maps tend to be less open to facilitate this up-close encounters, to really engage the players with how their enemies move and operate. Strategy becomes essential to keep yourself from being cornered. All this creates exciting ‘Moments’ of high action, that keep Salmon Run interesting.

Speaking of being cornered. Ever notice how all the Salmon Run maps are similarly shaped? Specifically I mean, if we are to assume they are basically the shape of a square, then three of their ‘sides’ are always exposed to the water, where salmonid always spawn from. The fourth side, is not.

This will cause salmonid, again always approaching from the beachheads, to surround players as they navigate, but never directly from behind, as that would feel unfair. So the minor salmonids; tiny small fry, player-sized chums, and larger imposing cohawks, all walk toward players at a moderate speed, usually in lines and clumps, then try to melee attack. The damage dealt by each, and the damage each can incur before being dispatched is proportional to their size. It might be one’s inclination to largely ignore the unruly masses and focus solely on bosses, but this would be a mistake, especially as that aforementioned difficulty scale begins to skyrocket. There is one wall for players to back up against in the face of the coming forces, but they also must keep an eye out for flankers, constantly. peripheral attention becomes essential. Reacting for flanks is another of these exciting ‘Moments’. Waves of high danger follow waves of control, forming Salmon Run’s interest curve.

Game is Hard

So one thing that a cooperative experience like Salmon Run needs is longevity – something for players to latch onto so they keep coming back. One way Salmon Run achieves this is through an adaptive difficulty system. Based on how frequently a player is winning at Salmon Run, an invisible difficulty scale will begin to go up for them. Higher difficulty scales mean more frequent salmon spawns, and higher egg quotas. The higher scales demand more and more efficiency of the players.

So, cleverly, Salmon Run starts out very forgiving, allowing players of any skill level to begin to succeed and claim their rewards for the game mode. What I find commendable is how unrestrained the upper echelons of this scale is. A lot of the fun of horde mode comes from the horde- tons and tons of enemies coming at you all at once. Through grit and determination, you can overcome.

An octopus girl is surrounded by fireflies as she picks up a golden egg with a net. She swims through blue ink to escape a frenzied mosh pit of enraged salmon, who flail at her with frying pans. She swims frantically away.
More like Salmon RUUUUUUUUUUN

Salmon Run also includes a lot of wrinkles and surprises, such as the special event waves, where the rules of the game are tweaked slightly. For example, high tide might shrink the play area, making the next round very claustrophobic. What is all this for, then? Well, like the level design which emphasizes situation awareness, every aspect of Salmon Run from its maps, to its enemies and bosses reinforces specific fundamental skills in the Splatoon player’s toolkit. Players are randomly assigned weapons they are forced to use, reinforcing general adaptability and understanding of the game’s mechanics. The maps are laid out to reinforce situational awareness and navigation skills. Specific bosses reinforce specific weapon-handing skills. As the game’s difficulty ramps up, so does the speed of the game, and the skills needed for mastery are further and more rapidly drilled into the player.

Entity Cramming

“Entity Cramming” is a term originating from Minecraft, a game which allows a very large number of entities like players, enemies, and animals to coexist in a very small space. Salmon Runs can get very cramped, very fast. Especially at higher difficulties with very high spawn rates, or during high tide, at which the viable play space shrinks. There is a need to combat the problem of overpopulation in a small space, to keep the game running smoothly and feeling fair. A lot of salmonid bosses possess some way to impede player movements or player attacks, or both. Even beyond that, with too many enemies present, it would become unfeasible for four meager squids to fight back, which would create an overwhelming and unfair disadvantage for the minor mistake of acting just a little too slow or inefficiently. There’s also the random chance that bosses might occupy the same relative space.

To combat this, salmonid bosses represent an inherent risk-reward factor. With many of them bunched up, there is great risk to approach them, but many slamonid bosses represent an opportunity to clear wide swathes of salmon all at once. There are bomb salmonid, for example, which explode and deal damage to their allies when defeated. When enemies are bunched up, players with wide-reaching area-affecting weapons can take out multiple of them at once. All bosses explode into friendly ink, which is toxic to some salmonid. The new Slammin’ Lid boss, added in Splatoon 3, will utterly crush any salmonid beneath it, bosses included, if it is goaded to use its slam attack.

An octopus-girl in a slopsuit approaches a green UFO piloted by a fish. The UFO hangs over two giant fish with bombs strapped to their heads. The UFO flashes, them falls directly onto the giant fish like a rapid hydraulic press, crushing them utterly into an explosion of orange ink.
Good Cod that is satisfying

So with this built-in risk-reward for salmonid bosses, it’s never too daunting when they team up. With a clever and careful approach, bosses can be used as weapons to take out other bosses! So while difficulty scaling leads to huge hordes of enemies, it also creates this rubber-banding effect where huge hordes of enemies can actual mean an increase in overall efficiency, where you’re dispatching two or three bosses at once, along with their smaller minions, rather than just one. At high levels of play, golden egg collection can skyrocket to huge profits.

Teamwork Teamwork Teamwork!

The real key to excelling at Salmon Run is efficiency, and efficiency is teamwork. It is virtually impossible to accomplish some of this game mode’s higher-end challenges without utter mastery and knowledge of your role on the team. The randomly assigned weapons ensure each player accels and struggles with some specific task. Long ranged precision weapons can take out unshield bosses from a distance with ease. Heavier wide-area weapons can dispatch crowds of small salmonid *much* faster that snipers can. Some weapons can defeat salmon from safety whereas others have to get up close and personal.

Later on efficiency becomes to important, that if you are ever swimming around with a full tank of ink ammunition, you are kind of a liability. My advice to ace Salmon Run? Always be doing something, whether its clearing small enemies or ferrying eggs. Rescue teammates as quickly as possible – four sets of hands outperform two or three. Everyone has a role to fill, even if that role is just moving eggs around, because you’re weapon is ill-suited to the current event wave. In Splatoon 3, a new event wave called the Tornado was implemented to highlight this. Large quantities of eggs spawn far away from the basket, so the four players must form an assembly line of sorts to taxi them across enemy territory. Kind of reflects the rough work environments that the game uses as its horde mode backdrop, huh? In fact, there’s a lot of parallels to game development in general..

An octopus girl in a slopsuit swims back and forth across blue ink, each time grabbing a golden salmon egg in a net, and hurling it up a ledge to a friendly squid kid, to whom it is handed off.
Pictured: The Production Pipeline

The Main Event: The Bosses

The bosses in Salmon Run are fun, inventive, visually creative, goofy, funny, and irresistibly compelling. They all fill specialized niches in the gameplay, and each reinforce a skill for the player. They all have specific rules for how best to deal with them. There’s a lot, so I’m going to rapid-fire-style review them in a series of mini boss breakdowns and see how they fit into this scheme, with a little more detail given on the new bosses added to Splatoon 3‘s Salmon Run.

Steelheads are giant salmon with bombs in their heads. They arm the bombs for a moment, then throw them as a player approaches. They teach precision aiming, as their weak point bobs about while it’s vulnerable. They also reinforce reactiveness to bombs and ground hazards – a common danger in Splatoon.

Steel Eels demand the skill of tracking moving targets, their weak point constantly on the move, and occasionally blocked by their own shield-like bodies. Terrain navigation is crucial here too, as getting sandwiched by one against another enemy or wall means death.

Scrappers, or Jalopies, as I like to call them, teach the skill of flanking. They always turn to face attacking players, and they are shielded from the front. Using teamwork, one player can distract or stun from the front as they other takes them out. This is one of the ‘kiteable’ bosses, which can be lured by the player to be very close to the basket when they die, leaving eggs right there. Retrieving golden eggs past salmonid enemy lines

Stingers are of a class of salmonid bosses I call ‘globals’, as they can damage players from anywhere on the map. Stingers use a long-range beam unimpeded by terrain. Stingers teach players a hierarchy of needs for the game. It’s near-impossible to kill every enemy as they spawn. Just reaching your egg quota and surviving is paramount. You have to triage your attention to what’s most important. Stingers are important. You’re excelling when you put out fires before they happen, and addressing Stingers quickly is a good example.

Maws can also be kited to the basket for easy eggs. They teach how to swim away while placing a bomb, which generally kills them. A surprisingly practical skill, as bombs cost a lot of ink, but swimming replenishes it. Efficient!

Drizzlers are a global salmon which create damaging rain that also ruins friendly turf. They teach lining up shots, and maintaining relative positions between player and enemy, as they are most easily dispatched by deflecting their projectile back at them. Lining this up is strict, to aim well!

Flyfish. Ooooh Flyfish. Perhaps most infamous of all salmonid. They are hovering mobile missile vehicles which periodically fire squid-seeking missiles at players who must be moving to avoid them. This is global. They are easily one of the most dangerous bosses to keep alive, so a great marker of Salmon Run mastery has become one’s ability to safely and efficiently take them out. Taking them out quick is a true marker of friendship between allies. They teach precision use of the grenade sub-weapon, as you must land a grenade in its open missile launchers after it fires. Twice. Once for each launcher. It also teaches patience, and the truth of your own mortality.

An octopus girl in a slopsuit swims through green ink to throw a grenade into the open missile launcher of a hovercraft being piloted by a salmon, just as its second missile launcher as been destroyed in a similar way by a friendly squid kid nearby.
Any man who can one-cycle a flyfish with me, I would trust with the life of my child.

The Slammin’ Lids (god I love that name) are one of two new Salmonid that seem to be purposed to teach one of the two new movement options in Splatoon 3. The lids are easiest to kill by baiting out their slam attack, then mounting them while they’re on the ground, to kill the pilot. The easiest way to do that, is by using the new Squid Roll, which allows rapid turning while swimming through ink. They are also one of the best example of the entity cramming solutions in Salmon Run, as I’d shown earlier. Their main threat is the impenetrable shield they produce beneath themselves, which can obscure lines of fire while they pump out small salmonid to shore up the enemy forces. They aren’t high-priority targets, but can become dangerous if they take up advantageous positions.

The Fish Stick is a toward carries by a rotating contingent of salmon. The stick is easily dispatched using the new Squid Surge, which allows one to rapidly ascend a vertical surface. The Fish Stick fills a new niche in the game mode, which is the use of the player’s wall-scaling abilities, and introduces an enemy that is itself terrain that can be inked. What’s really interesting is that the Fish Stick’s terrain remains in play even after it’s defeated and its eggs are retrieved, opening new strategic options for players. This can be a double edges stick though, as while the extreme vantage is usually safe, some salmon like the maws or dreaded fly fish can use its small surface area to trap players.

The Flip Flapper is a salmon dressed like a dolphin which drops rings of enemy ink where it is about to dive. Filling in this ink with friendly colors before it lands, stuns it and renders it vulnerable. I love this thing because it teaches the teamwork of efficient ink coverage. Nothing worse than teammates who waste time inking something you’ve already inked. Working together, these dolphin wannabes are no challenge, but they also serve Entity Cramming well, as they are very weak to the splatter from other enemies nearby being killed.

Big Shots are tough guys with lots of health that stay on the sidelines. I think what these guys are meant to teach is how the AI operates and reacts to player movement. You see, the Big Shot is a global who uses a machine at the beach to launch wave-generating projectiles toward the basket. Very inconvenient. What is, convenient, though is that the player can use the same device to launch golden eggs toward the basket. Toward, not in, mind you. Another player still has to be there to cash the eggs. If they don’t, salmonid will come in and snatch them up, making the players’ efforts a waste of time. What’s more, is that spending too much time on the beach, which I might remind you is where salmonid come from, can mean quickly becoming overrun by enemies, and trapping you in a place which is very dangerous and inconvenient to reach. Teaches teamwork and restraint.

And octopus girl holding a bathtub uses it to throw green bubbles at a giant salmon on the beach below who is fiddling with a wood-chipper like machine, and is then exploded into green ink. An allied squidkid below loads a golden egg into the machine, which is then launched across the field of view.
Couldn’t have gotten better footage of that egg being thrown by the Big Shot if I’d planned it

There are a few more event-specific bosses, but that was a lot, I think, so we’ll leave it at that.

EMERGENCY!

Octo-girls and squidkids are celebrating, only.. "EMERGENCY!" appears in orange text. Suddenly, a GIANT, like 30-60 foot tall salmon appears, and roars like godzilla. "King Salmond Cohozuna" appears in white text.

JUST KIDDING! They couldn’t have a sequel without upping the ante a little, right. At (slight) random, after winning a few Salmon Runs, the new King Salmonid Cohozuna will appear. You have a mere 100 seconds to send him back to the briny deep in order to secure the special fish scale rewards he provides. Really, there isn’t much to him or his AI beyond standing as a suitable final challenge to really test the player’s mastery over all these bosses and systems. His implementation is pretty clever, though.

He has a LOT of health, so normal weapons will simply not do enough damage to vanquish him on their own, not in the time allotted. To beat him, you’ll have to leverage golden eggs, which can, in this bonus boss round, be thrown with zero ammunition cost. They deal massive damage to him, and the only way to get them remains the same: defeat the boss salmonid that accompany him. You’ve only got 100 seconds, your team, one special weapon, and the ink your back, so I hope you’ve been practicing your aim and reaction time.

He seems to prefer to follow the last player who damaged him, so he can be tanked somewhat. He’s not that dangerous on his own. He’s slow, and only has two real attacks. One where he belly flops right in front of him – so keep somewhat at a distance. His other is a jump, which does heavy damage where he lands. Be ready to move. Other than that, it’s his health and his bulk that is the challenge. The team needs to work together to get enough eggs to bring him down, while positioning him such that he is not a threat to the team, and such that he is not covering vital resources with his body. It’s a stiff challenge, but if you really push your self and put a full understanding of all the little things Salmon Run has been teaching you, it’s very doable. A suitable finale to any work day.

A giant 30-foot-tall salmon flops toward an octopus girl wielding a an automatic ink-gun. He is being pelted from the sides by golden projectiles. He turns around, then bursts into green ink in a fantastic explosion. A squidkid declares "Booyah!" as the four cephalopod teammates, now friends, celebrate.
That’s teamwork!

The Cohonclusion

Where. That felt like a gauntlet. We all get through okay? Yeah so I love Salmon Run, to reiterate. It’s got so many little clever design considerations to acutely tune the experience and promote active thinking while playing. Sure, it’s great fun to goof around in with friends, but even at a casual level, enough exposure to the game mode will gradually train certain behaviors that make you better at it. I think that’s a sign of some absolutely excellent game design, that deep consideration of incentives and how minor tweaks to Splatoon‘s gameplay setup will reinforce certain behaviors. Salmon Run is also just where some of Splatoon‘s considerable creativity comes to the fore. I mean “Slammin’ Lid”? An eel made of shower heads that forms an impenetrable wall of showering ink? A mothership that is a warehouse container full of smaller crates that deploy salmon? Come on. This stuff is gold.

An octopus girl swims across orange and green into into a torrent of orange produced by allied weapons. She is showered with golden eggs as salmon burst around her. She grabs one and throws it into a large basket.

DO YOUR JOB!

The Ink Must Flow: How Splatoon Gets You In a Rhythm

Splatoon is my favorite multiplayer shooter series right now. There’s a lot of reasons for that, from the inimitable youthful aesthetic, to the novelty of its premise, to the breadth of self-expression available to players. I think what most draws me back to this game again and again is just how effortlessly it induces the Flow State. The Flow State is a psychological concept that you may have come across by many names in different fields. It is being fully immersed and cognitively absorbed with a task. It is being ‘in the zone’, so to speak. It is associated with a certain energy, a joy, in the act of doing. As applied to games, it’s what happens when you become so involved in with the game, so in sync with its rules and systems that you feel time slip away, when effort becomes so natural it feels like no effort at all. It’s the kind of thing I make games for, as opposed to any other medium, and Splatoon pulls it off beautifully in the way its most basic gameplay is structured.

In a peaceful urban sidewalk patio, a purple octopus repeatedly bounces around in a circle on the pavement, before transforming into the purple silhouette of a young girl.
This is how I express myself

You’re a Kid Now You’re a Squid Now

Like many great games Splatoon is a system built on mobility and positioning. However, its breakout idea is that the players have agency not only in how they move, but in what areas of the game space are available to them to move. Most shooters’ main actions are move and shoot. Splatoon adds move, shoot, and claim turf. Your team claims turf on any playable surface they shoot with their ink-based weaponry. At any time, players may shift from their ‘kid’ form, in which they can shoot to claim turf or defeat opponents (‘splat’ them) to their ‘squid’ or ‘swim’ form. In the swim form, shooting is not available as an action, but mobility options are greatly expanded. While swimming, a player is significantly faster on the ground, while also gaining the ability to scale sheer walls that have been claimed by allied ink.

Splatoon has a created an inherent meaningful decisions layered on top of the typical scenario in a competitive shooter. Like in other games, players have the option to take cover, spray suppressive fire, focus down single targets, and the rest, but they also have the omnipresent option to forego offense entirely for the swim form, making them more mobile, and harder to see. The last essential wrinkle is that ammo (ink) is limited, the player can only load so much at one time. To reload, the player needs to swim through allied ink that has already been laid down. This also quickly heals any damage you’ve taken, acting as a catch-all resource renewal action.

Your two modes now create a feedback loop. Shooting can accomplish two things. One: splatting players which gives you and your teammates safe space to advance the game’s main objective, which is usually to claim turf. And two: claiming turf, which is the metric by which the winning team is judged, but also provides a tactical advantage in allied ink’s utility to evasive maneuvers, ambushes, and advantageous positioning. The more angles you have on your opponent, the more limited their options as opposed to yours. Swimming accomplishes two things as well. One: The increased swim speed, decreased visibility, and healing of the swim form makes a swimming player a much less vulnerable target than a shooting one. Two: A swimming player is restoring ammunition, which must be done to continue shooting.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt runs across a shipping dock, drenching the ground with purple ink from a giant paintbrush she carries as she goes. Every few seconds, an ink tank on her back becomes visibly emptied, and she turns into a small octopus that sinks beneath the ink on the ground. When she emerges, the ink tank is full. She continues this pattern rhythmically.
It’s rhythmic, comfortable, almost, therapeutic. Yeah! Ink that turf!

Here Splatoon has through incentives solidified its gameplay loop to where shooting gives you more space for swimming, and swimming enables you to continue shooting. After getting used to the unconventional systems, it quickly becomes intuitive how they relate to each other, and thus players will naturally begin to fall into a pattern, which typically looks like this:

Lay down plentiful amounts of ink to claim turf, including a path to your next desired, probably tactically chosen, location. Then, swim to that location to reload your ink. Engage the enemy team either though frontal assault or ambush tactics, utilizing your own turf for advantage. Whether the enemy is splatted, or you or pushed back, you’ll relocated using your own turf, renewing your resources at the same time, and repeat. Ink and swim, ink and swim.

The Simple Pleasure of Splatter

Splatoon is a crunchy, colorful, game with lush audio-visual feedback. A lot of care was clearly taken to making the act of laying down ink very satisfying. There’s a simple joy in seeing color overtake the environment, permanent marks of your activity. The wild shapes and pathways carved across the terrain, as seen from above in the final score tally screen of each match, leaves evidence of every assault, flank, retreat, and regroup each team took part in.

A bird's eye view of a symmetrical office complex. The upper left section and most of the center is covered in bright purple ink. The lower right is covered in neon green. The two ink colors meet at an uneven border, indicative of splashes, splats, and drips, the purple intruding on the green and vice versa. Two cats appear on either side of a meter indicating the ratio of purple to green. The cats dance and determine that the purple is more abundant than green, as the meter reflects this. The word "Victory" appears.
Sometimes these end screens can look pretty wild, a cathartic sendoff to an intense match.

It is intrinsically motivating to want to just cover stuff in pretty colors. With that desire in place, and the necessity of the swim form for continuing to do that, players are naturally encouraged to tactically engage with the game, and consider their surroundings. No matter what, when you run out of ink, you have to swim for a bit to restore it, so players are given a mandatory bit of space and pause in the action to acknowledge their context. Splatoon trains players to always be considering their next move. You know you have to restore ink, so you know you have to relocate eventually as some ground is ceded to your opponents.

This space to consider is a permanent and mandatory part of the game loop, but is also fun in and of itself. Movement in Splatoon while in kid form isn’t horribly slow, not nearly slow enough to be frustrating, but it is pointedly slower than swimming. The contrast makes swimming through ink exhilarating and liberating. It also makes one feel powerful compared to those not swimming at that exact moment, as a swimming squid has the advantage of wall-scaling and stealth through their reduced visibility. At any moment you can jump out to ambushed an unsuspecting opponent. So while Splatoon is essentially forcing an idealized interested curve through the interplay of its mechanics (moments of high intensity shooting to moments of less intense swimming, reloading, and repositioning), it remains intrinsically motivating throughout.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt summons a fountain of ink beside a bridge soaked in pink and yellow ink. A yellow squidkid, threatened by the pink geyser, retreats beneath the bridge, and uses an inflatable wall there as cover. The octo-girl runs back and forth a bit behind the wall to mix him up, but as she goes in for the kill, the yellow squidkid backs off of a safety girder and falls to his doom.
Tricking this squidkid off a cliff is tangentially related… but mostly I though it was funny

Through this enforced rhythm and tactical engagement, the endless looping of shoot, swim, ink, shoot, swim becomes natural. Before long, it will feel second-nature to veteran players, like skiing veterans effortlessly gliding back and forth across a slope. Ink, shoot, swim, reposition, shoot, ink, swim, retreat, ink, swim, etc.

I really think its the rhythmic nature of this extreme tight gameplay loop that makes Splatoon so engrossing. In some ways it feels almost like a ritual, meant to teach you the inherent interrelations of Splatoon‘s various modes of interaction. For example, knowing that swimming is the best, fastest way to move, and that it restores your ammo, one might realize that swimming with a full tank of ink is a bit of a waste. That’s ink which could be better spent elsewhere. If you know you’re going to be swimming for a bit to get to your next location, it would be ideal if you could spend a great deal of your ink all at once at something productive. And… wouldn’t you know it, there is such a tool, a secondary weapon all players have access to that consume a large amount of ink, but can claim turf at a great distance, create threatened space to keep enemies away, or even outright splat enemies instantly. Indeed, throwing a splat-bomb secondary weapon into the distance before swimming a ways to restore the sunk cost is a powerful strategy.

Push Buttons and You’re Contributing

One thing I want to briefly touch on is how Splatoon goes out of its way to maintain this rhythm no matter what. After all, the point of Flow is its uninterrupted and focused nature. You know, a flow. Splatoon clearly values this flow state greatly, with all of the contingencies it deploys for possible interruptions. There’s a couple of techniques it uses to do this.

First, death and death timers. Sorry, splatting and respawn timers. When getting splatted, you’re put out of commission for some time. There has to be some reward for getting a splat where shooting the other guy is a primary goal, so some space and time is awarded to the successful splatter-er. However, this game wants as little (boring) downtime as possible, and will thrust a defeated player back into the action as soon as possible. Respawn timers never last more than 10 seconds. Lots of shooters have similar respawn timers, but Splatoon‘s super jump mechanic, which lets players immediately jump to an ally’s location makes getting back into the action incredibly quick and breezy. To counteract this, so that every match doesn’t devolve into an immovable, non-dynamic stalemate, the average TTK or time to kill in Splatoon is very low, meaning just a little bit of forethought or even luck can unseat a skilled opponent who’s caught unawares. If ambushed, a squid kid can be taken down in a fraction of a second.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt jumps across a shipping dock drenched in yellow and purple ink. Yellow cephalopod-kids spray yellow ink at her, partially covering her. She sprays purple ink at her feet and turns into an octopus to submerge in it, before retreating. As she does, she spies a yellow opponent spraying ink on her purple turf, sneaks up behind them, and splats them into a burst of purple ink in less than a second.
Here demonstrates the utility of Splatoon’s ink-swim-ink rhythm. I only lived here because I repeatedly swam in my own ink to restore heatlh. It also shows how attainable a good ambush is.

The inherent risk in attacking in Splatoon is reduced in this way. If you can outmaneuver an opponent you might be able to defeat them before they have a chance to hit you with any reprisal. There’s a synthesis of strategy and instinct here that’s very friendly to newer players. If beating someone in a competition is so demanding that a new player can never get one over on their opponent, the game runs a high risk of bouncing off of them. We want those new players to experience that engrossing flow state uninterrupted, so beating even veteran players in shootouts is made a very attainable goal.

Of course, even if you’re not extremely predisposed to shooting opponents in general, Splatoon‘s got your flow state covered. Simply shooting the unmoving ground beneath your feet creates a tactical advantage for your team. Inking turf is how you build up your special weapon, which itself is quite powerful for creating space, inking turf, and splatting opponents. A note on those special weapons, by the by. If a player is splatted, they lose progress towards charging their special weapon, even if it’s already fully charged! I love this design decision, as it encourages liberal use of the special weapons, which is exciting for both sides of the match. Use them with some strategy, sure, but if you don’t use it for too long, you will most certainly lose it. Why is this good? Well it prevents that boring downtime, where players might be encouraged to play passively, waiting for the perfect moment to throw out a bunch of specials rather than just using them so they can charge up the next one.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt sprays purple ink on a moving bit of drawbridge as it goes vertical. She turns into an octopus and swims up the surface, then leaps down to ambush a fleeing yellow opponent. Finally, she doubles back, and inks some more wall to create an escape route.
Play long enough, and everything from using your specials, to nabbing kills, to laying out turf becomes second nature, a continuous stream of consciousness

Anyway, inking turf is the main goal of most gameplay modes, and it contributes directly to your team’s likelihood of success. It also increases your more violently-minded teammate’s options for splatting opponents. If the enemy team’s hard-hitters are simply hitting too hard for your comfort zone, any player can contribute with minimal risk of interruption if they avoid the front lines, and just focus on getting into that flow of laying ink, swimming, laying ink.

Masahiro Sakurai, creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series, recently shared his theory that there is a relationship between the level of a game’s ‘Game Essence’ or ‘Risk and Reward’ and the broadness of its appeal to a wider audience. I think there’s some merit to this line of thinking, and the runaway success of Splatoon, which has implemented so many clever ways to diminish inherent risk so as to maintain the integrity of its gameplay loop for all players, winning or losing, while also allowing greater levels of risk for high-skill strategy and gameplay execution, supports it. One of the many reasons for Smash Bros. success, I think, is a philosophy of risk vs. reward similar to Splatoon‘s. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the former were an inspiration to the latter.

Swimming In Splatoon’s Energy

If there’s three words I’d use to describe Splatoon‘s vibe they’d be ‘youthful’, ‘vibrant’ and ‘expressive’. It’s a game that gives so many unique avenues to accomplish it’s primary goals, but all through a highly tuned gameplay loop that encourages situational awareness and engagement to create an engine for inducing the flow state. Splatoon‘s greater context of youth-dominated urban spaces playing host to the world’s coolest city-wide paintball matches encourages an inviting environment of constant partying, and playing the game feels like that too; a nonstop party, three minutes at a time. It’s a lot of little hidden motivators working in tandem behind the scenes that create this overall vibe. It’s amazing the sense of freedom I get from such a precisely controlled set of parameters. When I really get into a match of Splatoon, I hardly feel as though the space between myself and the world of the game exists at all. It’s like swimming in that exciting space. If I could master one aspect of Splatoon‘s design it would be that.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt runs through an office complex with floors and walls drenched with green and purple ink. With a giant paintbrush she leaves behind purple ink as she goes. Several ink-bombs go off around her before a countdown timer reaches zero, as a barrier of caution tape with the word "Game!" written on each piece covers the screen.

Stay Fresh…

Thoughts on Multiversus: Sticking Out In Well-Explored Territory

I’ve spent a few hours playing Warner Brothers’ answer to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. this week. Yeah, Warner Brothers. Seemingly also an answer to, uh, I guess Viacom’s Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. (MultiVersus developed by Player First Games and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl developed by Fair Play Labs and Ludosity). It’s funny video games’ premiere crossover game has met its competition lately from the television and film industry. Or maybe not quite competition. I’ve had a lot of fun playing MultiVersus, and it definitely gives me some of the same chaotic, good vibes of a good Smash Bros. session, but it also feels distinct in some key ways. MultiVersus has been pulling some impressive concurrent player numbers and seems to have drawn a great deal of positive attention. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, so these are more or less my first impressions and initial thoughts on the matter.

Finn and Superman team up to fight Batman and Harley Quinn on a concert stage from the show Rick and Morty
Ah yes, the classic matchup. Superman, Batman… Harley Quinn… and Finn The Human from Adventure Time

Drawing People In

I think of lot of MultiVersus‘s initial success can be attributed to some very savvy distribution and marketing decisions on their part. The game dropped with an absolutely delightful fully animated short featuring some of the more surprising inclusions to the game. Fighting games are complicated beasts, and as crucial as their nuances may seem to the enthusiast and designer, it’s often the case that an audience is found by virtue of aesthetics or indeed, character roster. Smash Bros. has earned its reputation as mechanically deep and irrepressibly fun to play, but lots of games are like that – Smash is so huge because it has a singularly unmatched roster of characters. The absurdity of Arya Stark defending Bugs Bunny from a batarang may be matched only by the absurdity of the Iron Giant rolling up alongside actual Superman. MultiVersus starts strong with a trailer that features a great deal of the character roster, including surprising editions with devoted pre-baked fanbases, in out-there abnormal team-ups and head-to-heads.

The aesthetic of this game is just appealing too. Not too fancy on graphical fidelity, but the game has a soft, round, inviting look to it and all of its characters. The models are animated well and look quite appealing from the middle-distance a player is going to seem them in the heat of battle. The inclusion of not just voice acting, but the legitimate, genuine article original voices for much of the cast is a huge appeal for me personally. As much passion as Nickelodeon All Star Brawl clearly had, I struggled to maintain an interest in the game when it was eerily silent, without the iconic voices that helped make its cartoon fighting cast stars in the first place. Their post-launched inclusion in an update was much appreciated, but the production values of that game, likely on the basis of budget, simply don’t compare to the push Warner Bros. has clearly given to the development of MultiVersus, financially speaking.

Maybe it’s not that surprising that TV and film companies see opportunity in the crossover fighter space. Original characters, regrettably, just don’t have the kind of draw that legacy characters do for a genre like platform fighter, that has traditionally only maintained a few active games. Even then, Smash is arguably the only one that’s achieved mainstream appeal. When Sony last challenged the throne with PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale in 2012, they struggled to populate the game’s roster with characters that are as instantly marketable as Superman, Batman, Bugs, Adventure Time‘s Jake The Dog, Tom and Jerry, and, uh, Lebron James. Warner Bros., obviously, owns a lot of properties, so they’ve got an inherent edge in that marketability by way of character roster. Selling on the merits of your character roster is essentially selling on the merits of your game’s possibility for play. When someone sees the Iron Giant – it primes their imagination for what is possible in your game, because even if you don’t know the Iron Giant, he’s a big terrifying metal man with jet boosters. It gets a potential audience excited in a way the presence of something more abstract like a “wave dash” never could. Not that mechanics are unimportant to retaining your audience, but more on that later.

The Iron Giant, a massive robot, picks up and throws Shaggy from Scoobie Doo, before jumping on him in a grid-lined empty arena.
I always knew shaggy could totally take The Iron Giant in a fight. Now I can prove it.

Next to consider, the game is free. Now I have a lot of personal issues with some of the particulars of the game’s monetization strategy, but it cannot be denied that playing the game, at bare minimum, costs not a penny. That’s something MultiVersus has over its contemporaries and seems a natural fit for fighting games. Free-to-play gained a lot of notoriety among business types for its wild success on behalf of games like League of Legends, games about battling between champions chosen from a huge roster of distinct characters sporting unique abilities. A high-skill-ceiling game that rewards intimate knowledge of the game’s intricacies, experimentation with multiple characters, and an understanding of how all the different characters interact. Yeah, a fighting game also seems a good fit.

Finally, with modern netcode and full cross-platform play support, MultiVersus has a refreshingly smooth online experience. For all of its popularity and quality in other areas, Smash Bros. has never been able to say that for itself. I cannot understate how delightful it is to be able to install a game on multiple platforms, pick it up where and when I choose, carrying all of my game progress between machines, and play with any of my friends who are all using their preferred devices. It really makes online games without this feature feel… a little archaic. Honestly, this is the form online gaming always should’ve taken since its inception.

“Platform Fighting Games”

With all that tertiary stuff going for it, it’s no wonder MutiVersus has retained such a player base and media presence in the last few days. People are loving it. A game can’t be carried by media presence alone though and I can confirm that the game is, indeed, fun to play. MultiVersus is a “platform fighting game” like Smash Bros. before it. Smash is certainly the most famous and successful of these, but there have been more platform fighting games than you might think. In addition to the recent Nickelodeon, there’s been a number of indie games following the formula like Brawlhala and Rivals of Aether, and also weird stuff you might’ve never heard of like DreamMix TV World Fighters, developed by Bitstep and published by Hudson, a crossover fighting game featuring the likes of Bomberman and Optimus Prime. Really.

I think one reason platform fighting games haven’t had the same presence as traditional fighters like Street Fighter or Dragon Ball FighterZ, despite one of the genre’s advantages being its beginner-friendly nature, is the ever-present shadow of Super Smash Bros. No other platform fighter has been near as successful as of now, to the point that “platform fighters” were once “smash clones” much as first-person shooters started their history as “doom clones”. But, as with Doom I think there’s been a period of experimentation with with these Smash Bros. off-shoots that have tested the water of what can be done to distinguish oneself from Smash while remaining familiar enough to draw in the players looking for platform fighting games. How much do you change? How much do you keep? Player First Games’ answer? Not too much, but just enough.

Platform fighting games are by nature more beginner friendly than the traditional variety of fighting game, with a greater degree of freedom of movement baked-in, and less reliance on complex minimally-visible mechanics. Multiversus well leans into this strength, even in some ways better than Smash. For example there are much more robust control customization features, allowing you to do things like separating combo moves and charged moves to two different buttons, or swapping what moves are mapped to neutral button presses and directional button presses, among others. Movesets are somewhat limited, even, which could potentially be a mark against it for some, but really does make the game simple to pickup and play. I’d go as far to call it somewhat button-mashy. You may find success just throwing attacks out there. I think there’s some depth to be found here though, the game seems much more naturally suited combo strings that Smash, allowing plays to intuitively juggle their opponents and give chase. And although things can get a little chaotic and hard to read, the action does remain readable if you concentrate, I’ve found, and just a little getting used to if you’re coming from Smash.

There’s a lot familiar here to platform fighter veterans. Characters have their standard attacks, which change depending on directional input, as well as four special attacks likewise influenced by direction. Taking damage makes you more vulnerable to being launched by enemy attacks, and getting launched past the game’s boundaries results in a KO. The ringout KO with ramping knockback from damage is one of Smash’s most elegant inventions, I think. It’s such a natural fit for a fighting game with platforming because it makes one thinking about their standing position within space. Most fighting games exist on an abstract flat plane, with implied impenetrable barriers on either side. The terrain is not a concern there. In platform fighters, where the player’s relationship to the terrain is as important as their relationship to their opponent, a win condition involving the ejection of your opponent from the terrain is brilliant. Some other platform fighters like PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale have had win conditions that just did not work for me, because they de-emphasized this player relationship to the battle arena in a way that made the platforming capabilities of the characters feel somewhat redundant. MultiVersus knows what to crib from its contemporaries.

Finn the human teams up with Superman to fight Batman and Harley Quinn on a floating concert stage from the show Rick and Morty. Finn digs BMO the living calculator from his backpack, then holds BMO up as he karate chops Batman and Harley Quinn into the distance.
Finn’s down-special operates like a simpler version of Hero’s from Smash

It’s also a little different though. Weird and unique decisions like giving Finn the Human from Adventure Time the ability to charge his attacks while moving keep the game fresh. Most characters have such small interesting unique mechanics, in addition to bigger and noticeable ones. On a broader scale, this game has some intense aerial mobility. Every character practically plays like Sora from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, flowing nimbly through the air at high speeds. In Smash, players are allowed two jumps and a recovery attack to stop themselves from falling off the arena. In MutliVersus, you can use a recovery twice, air-dodge twice, then climb up an vertical surface. They really didn’t want people falling off the stage by accident. In free-for-all mode, the edges of the play area draw in, making the safe ground smaller when the round’s timer nears its end. It’s a pretty elegant way to prevent camping, an often reviled somewhat bad-faith way of playing, which I think is quite clever, especially in a ‘just for fun’ party mode like free-for-all. I always appreciate fighting games that encourage engaging the enemy and utilizing the fighting mechanics, rather than just turtling up or running away.

Another unique and rather clever angle the game has is that it’s 2v2 focused. Now this is a mechanic that I think does come across somewhat in building your initial audience, because it has such an overriding effect on the game’s design and, like the character roster, is something that can spark a general audience’s imagination. Some people play games for the experience of being a support role for their friends. These people, I’d say, are less likely to play traditional fighting games, but the presence of characters with a support-specific focus like Wonder Woman or Reindog might be appealing to them. You can really feel the way the game wants to encourage team-play too. The presence of cooldowns, a rarity in Smash Bros., encourages teams coordinating their available resources and the timing of their most valuable moves. Having support roles in a fighting games allows MultiVersus to do things that Smash simply doesn’t, carving its own niche.

Superman and Finn The Human from Adventure Time team up to fight with Wonder Woman and Steven Universe. Superman's ice breath slows so Finn can followup, and Stephen creates a barrier with his shield for Wonder Woman.
Superman’s ice breath slows so Finn can followup, and Stephen creates a barrier with his shield for Wonder Woman

The game also just makes some design decisions for their fighters that just seems very… not Smash, not necessarily in a bad way. Smash is far from creatively stifled but it does have a little bit of a brand, and that’s fine. It’s nice to see its contemporaries establish their own brand though! Some of the wacky stuff characters can do feel like things Smash didn’t really start doing until the later downloadable characters of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. When I see the Iron Giant enormously stomping around the battlefield in MultiVersus I can’t help but think of the years hand-wringing online discourse had about the inclusion of “too big” space dragon Ridley from the Metroid series as a fighter in Smash. He got in anyway (and I will go to my grave being smug about that), but at quite a modest relative size. I love the depiction of Ridley in Smash, he’s practically perfect. Iron Giant though, I think is going to be a very memorable fighter in his own right, because the developers of MultiVersus feel so unrestrained by tradition, while respecting the foundations that were the inception of the genre they’re iterating on.

There’s a lot more to see and learn about MultiVersus. I’m sure there’s an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge yet to be discovered about combo strings, frame data, tier lists, and other such silliness, but on first blush the game is a blast and is doing a commendable job of setting itself apart from obvious comparisons. It’s production values are exceptional, its roster is absolutely wild and it’s free… more or less. My issues with monetization are the biggest sticking point for me. I don’t know if I want to talk about that here, though. At any rate, I’ve had platform fighters on the brain and wanted to get my thoughts out there.

Two Finn(s) The Human, Batman, and Wonder Woman duke it out in a 2D bat-cave themed arena. The Finns slash their swords, Batman throws punches, and Wonder Woman bashes with her shield as gouts of steam erupt from the ground.

Mathematical!