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.

Baldur’s Gate 3 and Motivation: Why You Can’t Stop Playing Baldur’s Gate

You know it, I know it. I’ve spoken to strangers on the street in the past few weeks who know it. Baldur’s Gate 3 is on fire in the twilight of summer of 2023. The game has been extensively praised for its AAA quality that does not include any (as of this writing) in-game purchases or microtransactions, things which in their respective games, tend to replace motivating factors or worse, leverage motivating factors away from player enjoyment to encourage spending. I find it the height of irony, and extremely hilarious, that even given all of the breath, incalculable dollars’ worth of research, and man hours devoted to trying to make the perpetually playable game, to become the perpetually profitable game vis a vis microtransactions, Baldur’s Gate 3 has manage to break records of concurrent players and shatter sales expectations simply by being competently designed, with a respect for the established fundamentals of how game design manages player motivation. How about that.

A zoom in on the eyes on a monstrous, tentacled face, looking panicked. The next shot is from their perspective, seen through the windshield of a vehicle, falling through the air, about to crash into the side of a mountain.

Footage of me about to crash into yet another hundred-hour long RPG I don’t have time to play.

And speaking of motivation, it got me thinking about the game’s balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. If you’ve studied game design for any amount of time, you may have run into these terms ‘intrinsic and extrinsic motivation’. I was particularly interested in how Baldur’s Gate 3 leveraged the concepts in concert with one another, and what specific gameplay aspects map to which form of motivation. The game has made some headlines for its huge numbers of concurrent players on PC – breaking the all time top charts. Clearly something is motivating players to keep coming back, and often, to the point of being notable even in comparison to other games.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

So what are our vocab words for the day? Each are a form of motivations that encourages people to do stuff. Extrinsic means motivated by a consequence that exists outside of the action you are being motivated to do. In game design terms, this usually means rewards. Points, gold, gear, are all extrinsic motivators. They give a reason to adventure into the frontier and fight monsters, as opposed to intrinsic motivations – in which the promise of adventuring and fighting monsters is the only motivation you need. An intrinsic motivator is an action which is itself compelling. You might run on a treadmill just to work up a sweat, but you might play a sport just because you enjoy the sport. Both actions lead to a similar result, but in the former case you’re motivated by the result – the reward of the health benefits -, and in the latter case you’re motivated by the act itself.

This applied to Baldur’s Gate in a lot of pretty obvious ways. The game dolls out fairly regular rewards for exploration, dialogue choices, monster fighting, and general adventuring. You clear out a cave of gnolls, you get a cool magic pendant. This makes you stronger, which makes you better at fighting monsters, which you are now more motivated to fight because you can find more magic treasure. Do this enough, and you level up, earning more tools to play with, yet another reward. And so on, forming a feedback loop. But then, why is it that you consider those new tools a reward? The promise of enhanced power could mean faster extrinsic rewards, but it’s also likely you simply relish the idea of getting to use new spells are abilities. That’s intrinsic motivation at work. If you enjoy the strategy and planning involved in a combat encounter, you’re intrinsically motivated.

The Reward In The Labyrinth

A quintessential example of extrinsic motivation is the rat in a maze. If you put a rat in a maze where it can smell cheese hidden in the center, it will follow the scent to the treat, solving the maze. Why does it do this? What’s motivating it? Obviously, it is the promise of reward. It thinks of nothing but that reward in the labyrinth at the center. A game, especially a linear narratively driven one like Baldur’s Gate can be thought of as a labyrinth. It’s a designer’s job to lead player’s willingly through the labyrinth, and so extrinsic rewards are some of the most powerful tools in accomplishing this. What Baldur’s Gate 3 uses as its rewards system is not unique to it, but the results are leading to praise and critical reception the likes of which a western AAA RPG of this type hasn’t seen in a long time, so it’s worth examining. The player is given two major things regularly over the course of regular gameplay, which I would consider rewards – player power, in the form of gold, magic items, and experience points… as well as interactions with, and revelations about the player-controlled characters which make up their party of adventurers.

A rat, straddling a piece of hempen rope says "Follow me. But be ready for anything."

I am not ready for anything.

In other words, Baldur’s Gate uses its characters as a primary source of extrinsic motivation. You improve their attitude toward you enough, you find interesting encounters out in the world that the characters have things to say about, you progress the main narrative along its course, you are rewarded with more interactions with your party. This only works, of course, because the characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 are written so damn well, and are so compelling. A fair number of games have boring characters, to be frank. A fair number of games have boring characters that talk, a lot. Unless your player wants to get to know your characters, and hang out with them, the threat of more content involving interactions with them will not be very enticing.

Now, I’ve got a lot of opinions on the subject, but this isn’t a writing tips blog, so I’ll try to be pretty succinct, broad, and clinical about this. What makes the characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 work so well for people? Or at least, what do they have in common that’s making everyone want to smooch them, making fan art of them, and play hundreds of hours of a deeply involved role playing game to get to know them better. One obvious key, they all share, is an interesting hook. There’s a weird little fact about each of them that instantly draws you in. The hook is the promise of something interesting that could happen – the seeds of intrigue being planted in your audience’s head. It’s something that raises questions and teases answers. Literally every party member, and many NPCs, in Baldur’s Gate 3 share this quality.

Shadowheart’s hook is – well, it’s already there, isn’t it? Why is this young woman named Shadowheart. That’s a little strange, isn’t it? Does she come from some obscure culture that names people as such? Is it a religious thing? She is a cleric, after all. Maybe it’s just a title. These kinds of questions keep your player guessing, and motivate them extrinsically to want to progress their relationship with these characters until the interactions themselves become enjoyable, and the practice becomes intrinsically motivating. Then you’ve got them. We got all that from dear Shadowheart, and she hasn’t said a word of dialogue. All that before we even discover she worships a dark goddess of pain, in contrast to her very amicable and friendly demeanor. More questions. Another hook. Then we learn she had her memories willingly wiped. Then we discover she is afraid of wolves. Etc. All the Baldur’s Gate characters have a lot of these little secrets about them that get hinted at gradually as the game progresses, and many of which are inter-related. Before you learn about Astarion’s personal problems, he tries to make nice after holding you at knifepoint. Before you learn about Karlach’s heart condition, you learn she fought against her will in a blood war in hell.

A raven-haired woman with pointy ears in intricately decorated chainmail speaks casually to someone just off-screen. Onl the listener's shoulder can be a seen. There are cobblestone walls in the background.

I would die for you.

Again, without going too much into the nuances of to write compelling characters, a topic way beyond the scope of this blog post, I will say that this cast all have consistently engaging presence. This is something I notice in a lot of media that loses my interest. You can have the ‘deepest’ most ‘complex’ characters in the history of literature, but if A: Their depth is not conveyed (with those hooks, and subsequent payoffs) or if, more importantly in my opinion, B: They are not compelling to spend time with, your characters are not going to move people. Characters are more than just the hooks and the big reveals and the huge dramatic shifts and the larger-than-life inner turmoils. Think about your friends, your family. The people you love. Most of the time, assuming a healthy relationship, you’re not spending most of your time with people in high-intensity emotionally fraught confrontations. Most human interaction is just… shitting around.

An elf with red eyes and white hair speaks in a sultry manner into the camera. Beneath his lips, sharp fangs can be briefly seen.

You are a consummate loser, but you’re my consummate loser.

Baldur’s Gate 3 characters are excellent at shitting around. Astarion’s over-the-top, campy, cynical melodrama is fun, and funny. Shadowheart’s deadpan earnestness is charming and sweet. Karlach’s puppy-like sense of wonder with the world around her and irrepressible optimism is a delightful contrast to her menacing appearance and horrifyingly tragic backstory. Gale’s flighty, overly poetic, and know-it-all manner of speech makes him dorky and affable. All this, of course, bolstered by stellar acting performances. These people are just a good time to be around. It doesn’t feel like wasted time listening to them talk. This is all compelling, entirely aside from any deeper emotional complexity. Mere exposure to them is compelling. The fact that you might like these people, is what makes emotional complexity and the answers to those hooks from earlier mean something. It’s what makes them captivating and moving and effecting. People carry on through massive, hundred-hour-long RPG experiences like Persona or Dragon Age or Final Fantasy or Xenoblade or Baldur’s Gate not just for the carrot on the end of a stick. The interactions with the characters must themselves become an end, not just a means.

A pale elf with white hair looks longingly into the eyes of a cave bear, who returns him a tender expression. It appears as though they are about to copulate. In the corner, a live studio audience is seen celebrating.

Although it’s not a bad idea to keep ample rewards mixed in…

Learning more about these characters is the reward at the center of the labyrinth, but in the process, your player learns to love the process. Players no longer will play the game just to discover their party’s dark secrets, but to hang out with the party. That will keep a player moving through however much content you have to offer them – as the content itself becomes the goal, not just the rewards it can unlock. This, I think, is the secret spice to Baldur’s Gate 3‘s success. How this applies to its characters is a foundational pillar to its game’s design, but this philosophy also finds its way into all aspects of the design.

Combat As Player Expression

On another note about combat being intrinsically motivating. A major part of this Role Playing Game, based on a popular tabletop Role Playing Game, is the role playing. Now, not everyone engages with these systems, but I find it very clever how Larian utilized roleplay as a form of gameplay through its mechanics. If you have bought in to the world of Baldur’s Gate, then you may see the fun in entirely embodying your player character through their actions, dialogue responses, and fighting style. Maybe your character doesn’t kill. Maybe they kill everyone and push people off of cliffs at any given opportunity.

From a birds-eye view, an adventurer is seen shoving a scythe-clawed avian monster off of a giant mushroom, far into a chasm below.

More designers would do well not to underestimate the unfiltered joy of pushing things off of cliffs.

Combat and dialogue in this game is full of intentionally placed opportunities for various decisions with various results. Some players may encounter very clever strategies for defeating tough enemies, where as other players may not fight those enemies at all. Through this clever planning, Larian has made way for roleplaying to be an intrinsic motivator. If you are bought in to roleplay, then when combat and dialogue presents ample opportunities to engage in it, combat and dialogue becomes a lot more engaging.

Bringing it back, this highlights an important aspect of combat in games I feel is often overlooked. High-intensity gameplay like combat can be a source of player expression, as much as it is a challenge of skill. When a player chooses to be a mage instead of a warrior, or on a more micro level, when a player chooses to throw a punch instead of a kick, they are putting a bit of themself into the game. Any veteran player in competitive games will tell you that people develop playstyles – comfortable patterns reflective of their personality. This is true of single player games too. It’s satisfying to see a bit of your creativity pay off in a functional system! So even where roleplay is not directly involved, it’s important to consider a wide variety of viable player choices for solving gameplay challenges, as the creativity and personal expression that affords is also intrinsically motivating.

Player Expression As Player Expression

But combat is not the only way to encourage this behavior! Players are known for doing things ‘just to see what happens’. Getting to see what happens is the extrinsic motivator. Embodying the role of the character as the player conceives and perceives them, is intrinsically motivating – roleplay is a method of play that is done entirely for its own sake, for the joy of embodying a fantasy role. So to Baldur’s Gate 3‘s credit, it opens a lot of avenues to a lot of potential character archetypes. Unique dialogues related to what class, race, and background the player’s character is, kindly or cruel dialogue responses, branching story decisions. That’s all great for this, but it’s also all set dressing. What really impresses me is the avenues available for navigating the world that reflect back on the player character. In the early game even.

For example, there’s a goblin camp. You can run in swords and spells blazing, and fight them all. It’s tough, but doable. OR, if you’re a druid or otherwise have access to the talk to animals spell, you can sneak into their camp and convince their domestic spiders that their goblin masters are good eating, and get some help in the fight. OR, if you talked to some mercenary ogres the goblin leaders hired, you can give them a better offer, and get their help in the fight. OR, you can bypass fighting entirely – team up with the goblin leader and earn her trust. OR, ingratiate yourself with the goblins just long enough to find a storehouse full of explosives, and raze the place to the ground. And that’s just a handful of all the options available. That’s not even to get into all the little micro-decisions baked throughout the goblin camp which greatly vary the experience, and constantly get the player asking what sort of character they are playing. It’s quite impressive, I’ve seen the game turn people who are not super seriously into tabletop-type games, into out-and-out roleplayers.

Four characters from Baldur's Gate 3 are show in four panels. From left to right: Shadowheart, a dark-haired cleric woman in intricate armor. Her expression is blank. Astarion, a white-haired, pale-skinned elf with red eyes and a nobleman's coat. He is smirking, amused. Wyl, a dark-skinned man with cornrow hair and a false eye. His expression is disproving. La'zel, a green-skinned woman with a froggish appearance and facial warpaint. She looks as though she is about to explain something.

The Squad live reaction when you suggest murdering that old lady for her stuff.

I’d Write a Conclusion Here, But I’ve Got To Go Play More Baldur’s Gate 3 ©

So, uh, yeah. I just thought it was really neat how the narrative elements of Baldur’s Gate 3 like the characters are not treated as simple icing on the cake, but rather a material and core aspect of gameplay itself. It’s not the type of game which segregates story and gameplay. I think this is how they keep rocking such huge quantities of concurrent players. The next time you play, which for me will be right after I finish writing this, try and see how the character interactions are influencing your decision-making and how you engage with the game.

A wide panning shot of a group of adventurers in armor carrying torches, climbing down a set of ruined, craggy stone steps suspended over a river of lava. The steps lead to a large, ancient machine.

Gather Your Party And Venture Forth…

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…

Door Key Mechanics

It’s been a short, busy month, so this time I wanted to talk about something that might be of particular concern to me, specifically. One of my pet peeves. A real bee-in-my-bonnet moment. I’m going to get into why this particular design pattern bothers me so much in a moment, but first what am I talking about?

You ever find yourself at the heart of a deadly dungeon, having just slain a cursed demon dragon of darkness? Of course you have. You open up the chest he was guarding, and viola! A super cool, exciting, new weapon, spell, or other tool. You’re so hyped to get back out in the field and use this thing, but first you’ve got to figure out how to use it to make your way out of here. You start playing around with it, but pretty quickly you find that its use cases are rather… limited. Maybe it’s a whip that doesn’t really damage enemies – but it’s sure useful for hitting distant switches to open doors! Maybe it’s a freeze gun. It’s cool – I mean it can’t freeze enemies or bodies of water, but it can freeze waterfalls, to unblock doors. Maybe it’s a grappling hook! You can’t control the grapple or decide where to use it – it just pulls you to fixed targets so that you can reach previously inaccessible… doors.

You have just encountered, what I like to call the Door Key Mechanic. It’s a game feature masquerading as a fancy new play mechanic, but it’s not really. When you zoom out, and take a high-level top-down look at what all these mechanics actually do in the context of the play space… they just open doors. Maybe they pull specialized switches that then open doors. Maybe they disable electric fences so you can get to the doors behind them. Maybe they transport you to doors you couldn’t get to before in a predefined way, but that’s it. Above all it is interactivity that makes game mechanics compelling to me, and these are interactive in the most rudimentary way possible – do the thing, and a door opens.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having features in your game that specifically exist to remove some gate to the player’s progress. These sorts of items are all over the place. I mean, literal keys, for one. It’s an important purpose to fill. The presence of an inaccessible door is inherently tantalizing to the player, and finding an appropriate key gives a sense of puzzle-solving or excitement. The trouble comes in when it’s something a lot more complicated than a key or a special inventory item pretending to be more important than it is. Need some examples? Let’s do some examples.

I think the most egregious example I can think of is the last game produced by Sonic The Hedgehog creator and indicted insider trader Yuji Naka, Balan Wonderworld. It’s a great instance of what I’m talking about, because it also highlights the crux of the problem. You see, this game had several marketing angles, such as Naka’s involvement, the visual and stylistic echoes of cult classic games like NiGHTS Into Dreams, and most relevantly here, the fact that the game would feature EIGHTY different costumes! Each with unique abilities! Or in other words, game mechanics. Ignoring that several of the costumes are just variations or upgrades of others, we have to interrogate how meaningful and interactive these costume mechanics actually are.

A child in a pig costume runs over to a silver piston in a grassy field and slams the ground with its bottom, forcing one piston down and causing a different piston to shoot up. The child jumps onto it and grabs a gem.

Well, we have a ground slam for a start, the Pounding Pig, which doesn’t do anything except hammer posts and break blocks – basically just opening specific doors. There are jellyfish and dolphin costumes, which do little else but allow access to water terrain that otherwise gates you. There’s a spider costume that allows you to climb webs, which are also just simple obstacles – doors in other words. The Itsy-Bitsy Elf costume “Allows the wearer to pass through tiny doors” and nothing else. Lickshot Lizard sounds like a grappling hook, but it only works on stationary targets that are trivial to target – it’s just opening a door with extra steps. Happy Horn activates an event when stepping onto a pre-placed stage. Functionally the same as a key item. Gear King allows you to use specific gear switches, to open doors. Hothead lets you light torches to open doors.

A child in a rock star costume runs over to a stage in a grass field and plays a short concert to some monsters, and they turn into gems.

Riveting Stuff.

Important to note that ‘door’ here proverbially means any simple gate preventing player progress, but a gate of minimal player interactions. Flipping a switch causing a bridge to appear. Destroying a block to reveal a staircase. That’s all the same as opening a door. Like, there’s Balan‘s Laser Launcher costume…

“A robot costume that shoots a laser from its chest. Use the laser to break blocks and flip switches.” -Official Website Description

I can use the robot to open doors, OR open doors you say!? Okay granted, a lot of these very simplistic costumes in Balan can also be used for combat, but that is such a bare minimum. Doorkey Mechanics make one wonder ‘why is this even here?’ Like, why do you need a spider costume to climb webs? Most game characters can just do that, like on their own.

A small armored alien, Ratchet from Ratchet and Clank, traverses a small gap in a broken bridge amidst a futuristic sci fi metropolis. He does so using an energy tether thrown into a rift portal.

“Does it do anything?”

“It allows you traverse this door bridging a very small gap.”

“Yeah but does it do anything??”

It’s easy to criticize Balan. Door Key mechanics pop up in some of my favorite games too, though.

I adore A Hat In Time. It’s a delightful, fully-featured, cute, and compelling indie game in the style of classic 3D platform games. It feels great to control, it’s pretty to look at, and it’s just an overall fun time. We need more games like A Hat In Time. That said, of the six hats available in the game, which each provide unique abilities, I couldn’t help but wish the Ice Hat and Brewing Hat were more generally useful. The sprint hat makes you dash at breakneck pace, allowing you to bound over great distances – it’s super fun and super useful. The Kid’s Hat helpfully guides you where to go if you ever lose your way. The Time Stop Hat does what it says. However, the Ice and Brewing Hats flip switches and break barriers, respectively, only in hyper-specific scenarios. They can technically be used in combat, but I never once felt it was prudent to do so next to just, say, smacking enemies with my umbrella.

The Door Key Mechanic is a sliding scale, too. Game mechanics can be more or less door key-like. Hi-Fi Rush, a game I should really talk more about sometime, has mechanics that are Door Key-adjacent in the form of your party’s assist moves. Macaron’s punch assist breaks down hyper-specific walls and Peppermint’s gun assist shoots switches, but they can both be used in combat. The difference between Hi-Fi and say Balan, is that Hi-Fi Rush has very robust combat mechanics where that addition is not a footnote. Assists can be woven into combos and used in a variety of ways, defensively or offensively, to uniquely color each player’s experience. That’s interactivity, and that’s what makes a Door Key Mechanic less noticeable. The Legend of Zelda series has been occasionally guilty of making legacy items more door keyish. For instance, take the hookshot / claw shot item.

When first introduced in A Link To The Past, the hookshot was a metal spike on a spring loaded chain that could latch onto blocks, chests, rocks, and pots to pull Link rapidly to the target location. Not only that, but it can grab distant items and pull them to link, hit switches, stun some enemies, and outright defeat others. It’s used for unlocking doors, sure, but also for combat and traversal in interesting ways. Its uses are fairly prescribed, but not so much that it doesn’t feel generally useful.

In the sequel, Ocarina of Time, the hookshot was brought into 3D and it became even more generally useful. It still activates switches, pulls in items, stuns some enemies at a distance, and defeats others, but now in three dimensions. In addition, the list of things it can latch onto has been expanded to include most wooden or soft surfaces, like climbing vines, tree branches, rooftops, and rafters. The hookshot doesn’t just latch onto specific predefined targets, it also lets you grapple to anything it can stick into around the world! And there’s a logic and consistency to this general use that makes it feel like an organic part of that world. That kind of flavoring and context can also help alleviate the sense of artificiality that Door Key Mechanics invoke.

Later Zelda games would not be so magnanimous with the use of their hookshot analogues. The hookshot in The Wind Waker feels noticeably more limited, with fewer viable targets. Where in Ocarina of Time there were a lot more organic environmental targets to hit, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess lean somewhat heavily into literal bullseye targets, and floating targets, obviously specifically placed for Link’s benefit. The difference is stark in Skyward Sword, where the clawshot is used for little else other than clearing gaps to reach brightly colored, artificial bullseyes that exist in the world without context. The interactivity of the clawshot in Skyward Sword is severely limited.

My point is not that the more limited hookshots make these games bad – but rather that it makes specifically the hookshot item in those games a lot less compelling. Compare it to the Shieka Slate spells in Breath of The Wild, which can be employed almost anywhere, and used for almost anything – crossing gaps, attacking, blocking projectiles, climbing cliffs, retrieving items, escaping… flying, if you use them just right. That’s interactivity.

Here’s another Zelda example. In Majora’s Mask for the N64, the ice arrows allow you to shoot projectiles encased in freezing magic. Shooting the arrow at any body of water. *Any* body of water, an icy platform is produced, that Link can walk on. I’m sure you can already imagine the applications of that. This is in addition to the arrows being useful for stopping waterfalls, freezing enemies to use as platforms, or freezing them just to more easily defeat them.

In a dark interior pipeworks chamber flooded with water, Link from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Link shoots two magic ice arrows into the water, creating two ice platforms, which he hops across.

In the remake, the developers opted to instead restrict how these arrows can be used. There are shiny blue sparkles on the surfaces of water where the ice arrows were intended to be used. Shooting them there creates the usual ice platforms, however… they also opted to prevent the platforms from ever being created elsewhere, severely limiting the interactivity of this item, and risking the player engagement. Originally, the ice arrows were a tool – a new avenue of possibilities that gets the player thinking and invested in what they’re doing. The latter version makes them a prescribed door key to access only a very specific planned path, with no engagement required on the player’s part. I find game mechanics most exciting when they expand possibilities, not limit them.

In an interior pipeworks chamber flooded with water, there are some conspicuous sparkles on the water. Link from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, shoots magic ice arrows at each sparkle, although misses his target once, and the ice arrow fizzles on the water.

Heaven forbid anybody be required to do some lateral thinking while playing a video game.

When developing a new mechanic or feature for your game that might be a significant undertaking, ask yourself some questions; does this feature open up interesting interactions or decisions? Does it expand the play space? What are its use cases? How does the player interact with it? What does it accomplish? If the conclusion is that the feature accomplishes a similar level of interaction to simply unlocking a door with a key – if its use is no greater than removing a proverbial gate to the player’s progress, consider whether the feature is even worth developing, especially early on. Some of these features, such as the Balan Wonderworld costumes offer very little interactivity or engagement, but would have cost a huge amount of development resources for character models, bespoke animations, sound effects, and program implementation. The decision to add a feature is not one that should be done without forethought. Think about what each of your new features actually adds to the experience.

Link from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time runs up to an ornate golden chest in a dank dungeon. Light pours forth from it, and slowly, dramatically, Link holds aloft a golden key inset with a red skull jewel.

A key opens doors…

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…

Kingdom Hearts ‘Floatiness’ and Gamefeel

Alternatively: “What The Heck is ‘Floatiness’ and Is It Ruining Kingdom Hearts? I Settle it Forever“

‘Floatiness’ is the extremely scientific term that parts of the Kingdom Hearts fan community have adopted to refer to a sort of shift in how some of the more modern and spin-off Kingdom Hearts games feel to play, as opposed to their predecessors. I’ve seen this term come in and out of vogue when it comes to in-depth and armchair analysis of Kingdom Hearts‘s combat, but it’s always fascinated me. I’m going to try to define what this somewhat nebulous term is specifically referring to, and how it’s been supposedly creeping its way into one of my favorite action RPG franchises. What causes floatiness in particular? What is the greater context of design which is causing whatever this ‘floatiness’ is to happen? Perhaps this exercise can help us explore the often imprecise art of ascertaining gamefeel in general. I certainly hope so.

Sora, spiky-haired protagonist of Kingdom Hearts III spins his key-shaped sword around quickly, then slashes with an uppercut at the air in the dimly lit streets of San Fransokyo. He then jumps and does the same motion elevated about 15 feet in the air before falling back to the ground. — Pictured: Floatiness?

First off, we’ve got to define it, this floatiness. Informally, it is reported as the sensation that the Kingdom Hearts player character lacks weight, impact, and to my interpretation, immediacy, or some combination thereof. For those unaware, Kingdom Hearts is a series of action games with a particular emphasis on exaggerated, superhuman feats of acrobatic melee combat, favoring style, spectacle, and emotive action, akin to combat-heavy anime and manga. All that while immersed in a fantasy world full of Disney characters, Final Fantasy characters, and a unique dream-like fictional mythology of its own. Trying to define this term will be much of what this article is seeking to accomplish.

With combatants consisting primarily of magical swordsman and dark wizards, while borrowing aesthetically from classic Disney animation, Kingdom Hearts offered its players a combat system increasingly free of the bounds of gravity, allowing its player characters to bound meters into the air at a time, maintaining that airtime through continued swinging of their sword, with a cartoonish sort of physical logic.

So, all this in mind, I set out to compare the gamefeel of several Kingdom Hearts games in my own experience to try and get a better idea. To make this process somewhat more precise, I investigated what is by my estimation one of the key metrics in determining the gamefeel of an action combat system – the timing of the primary attacks. Every action in a game as visually rich as Kingdom Hearts and its sequels has a startup time and ending lag. The former is the real-time between the player’s button input and the resolution of the action they’ve input, the latter is the real-time between the resolution of the action, and when the player’s next input can be resolved. For example, if a player character is to swing a big hammer, they’ll push the swing hammer button. As their avatar lifts the hammer with a grunt and struggle to convey its weight, we have our startup time, and as he pulls the hammer back to his side after the big swing, we have our ending lag, with the avatar unable to run or jump while resetting the hammer, in this example.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts II swings his keyblade at a volleyball in elaborate spinning arcs, launching the ball further into the air with each strike, and Sora continues after it, ascending higher and higher before falling back down. — Trust me it… it does feel very responsive.

Now imagine the hammer is a comically oversized key and you have a pretty good idea of what we’ll be measuring. Floatiness became an almost absurdly hot-button topic among Kingdom Hearts diehards due to its relationship with the much anticipated Kingdom Hearts 3. As the successor to the beloved Kingdom Hearts 2, and first numbered entry in the series for a period of thirteen years (though by no means the only Kingdom Hearts game to release in that period), a lot of anticipation was placed upon what the game would feel like to play. Its gamefeel, so to speak. Kingdom Hearts 2 has stayed in many people’s hearts as an all-time favorite action game due to the smoothness of its combat system, as any fan would tell you. So comparisons were inevitable. The stakes were high.

Kingdom Hearts 3, despite being the best selling entry in the series, gained a healthy amount of criticism from long-time fans in regards to its gamefeel. Floatiness was oft invoked. The developers seemed to take feedback from hardcore fans seriously, as the game would be later patched in key ways to increase speed and fluidity of the gameplay. More on that later. So what’s the truth? Has floatiness ruined Kingdom Hearts forever? Are we doomed to forever circle the drain of game design discourse without knowing what on earth we’re actually talking about? I’ve spoken to friends who know how to use a computer and they allege that numbers are involved here, believe it or not. So I’m afraid I have no choice but to deploy the diagram.

Data World

First let’s define some terms. All footage I used for this analysis is from the Final Mix, 60fps versions of the games, captured on a Playstation 5. All values are measured in animation frames. For the sake of consistency, in each game I tested the animations of main player character Sora or his closest equivalent (In Birth By Sleep the resident Sora-like character is named Ventus, but he’s close enough and for our purposes we’ll consider him a “Sora”). The games I will be looking at are as follows:

Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts 2

Kingdom Hearts 3 pre-“Remind” patch

Kingdom Hearts 3 post-“Remind” patch

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep

Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance

“Startup” here is defined as the time between Sora beginning an attack and that attack “resolving”, here defined as the moment his weapon crosses in front of his body. “Ending lag” is the time between an attack resolving and when Sora can move again, no longer committed to the attack. “Cancel Time” is the time it takes before Sora’s first attack can be interrupted to perform his second combo attack. “Gravity Hang Time” is the amount of time between an aerial attack beginning and when Sora reaches his maximum falling speed. More on that later. “Engage” here means the time between inputting an attack and when sora can strike a distant enemy from a neutral position.

So these results are pretty much in line with what I expected going into this project. KH2 is the fastest game, KH1 is second fastest. BBS and DDD are dead-last, KH3 is about in the middle, while KH3 with its post-launch patch just a little bit faster than that.

Some surprises:

Every KH game seems to have the exact same startup time for the first most basic attack of a combo. Seems like they’ve been pretty happy with this one from the word ‘go’ and consistently on from there.

KH1’s movement lag from a grounded attack is insanely long, as long as DDD’s. KH2’s is way faster, and nearly the same as KH3’s.

KH1, KH2, and KH3 all cancel their first attack into an attack combo incredibly fast at just four frames, another astonishing level of consistency, although BBS and DDD combos take twice as long or more to come out.

KH2’s biggest advantages in speed are its gravity hang time, and time to engage enemies. KH3’s gravity hang time actually got worse with its post-launch patch, though not noticeably, and this has to do with a new attack added in the patch that has a longer animation in general.

BBS and DDD don’t do too badly in the enemy engagement department, better than KH1 and KH3 pre-patch, even. KH2 is still the champ here, but this fast engage time might be a saving grace for BBS and DDD.

There is a lot to talk about, so I’ll drop the chart here again real quick, just because I know you all wanted to look at it again.

Okay, So What Is It?

What’s what? Oh! Floatiness. What is ‘floatiness’? My hypothesis going into this was that it’s tied up with the aforementioned startup and ending lag statistics, which would have a huge impact on the speed of the game. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance, and to a lesser extent Kingdom Hearts 3 are somewhat known among hardcore fans as the ‘floatier’ games, the former two by far the most guilty. I had presumed that in gathering my data, it would bear out that those two games would have the higher numbers when recording the delays, lag, and hang time. Kingdom Hearts 2 would be the fastest game, only slightly faster than Kingdom Hearts, and Kingdom Hearts 3 would fall somewhere in the middle. Indeed this was the result. So. Case closed? Shorter periods of loss of character control equals better combat? Probably a little more nuanced than that.

Golden calf Kingdom Hearts 2 absolutely has the advantage over its successors and predecessor when it comes to attack commitment. Its startup times, ending lag, and combo speed are universally faster across the board. But… they’re not that different from KH1 and KH3, even pre-patch. Almost immediately when I started this experiment, replaying each of the games side-by-side I came to realize the nuances of how gravity works in each game.

The Gravity Situation

As the Kingdom Hearts series progressed, aerial combat became more prominent. I always imagined in my head that the first Kingdom Hearts game was “the more grounded one”. And it kind of is. In the first game, attacking launches Sora high in the air toward aerial targets, and repeated attacks can keep him airborn somewhat. Kingdom Hearts 2 pushed this much further, with far more automated and accurate tracking on enemies, pushing Sora high into the air with each attack. I was kind of shocked to find that in Kingdom Hearts 2, the game I associate most with air combat, gravity is much more powerful than it is in any other game. With a delay of only 16 frames in KH2, compared to KH1’s 20, and double that at 32 frames in BBS, KH2 by far is the most beholden to gravity when the player is not attacking. This makes gravity a function of the player’s inaction. Never are they airborne without making it a conscious decision. In BBS and DDD, being strung up in the air against your will is almost the norm. There is a huge delay between aerial attacking and being affected by gravity.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 1 jumps into the air and slashes at the three headed Cerberus from Disney's Hercules, before quickly falling back to the ground and dodging out of the way of a shadowy breath attack. — Gravity

Ventus from Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep (who resembles Sora) swings at an airborn enemy shaped like a pot. Several attacks miss, and Ventus is left hanging in the air for a moment before falling, after each attack. — Gravity

I think this is a major piece of the floatiness puzzle too. Being on the ground in these games naturally gives you a lot more options. You have access to your dodge roll. You are able to more precisely place yourself for things like blocking, or jumping out of the way, or lining up the right attack. Simply, being in the air is advantageous in some ways, but also a lot more risky. In the less ‘floaty’ games it feels as though being airborne is always a conscious choice, whereas the others place you there in spite of the player, and leave Sora hanging in a risky position for far longer than a player might intend. The ability to get back to the ground quickly gives finer control over the player’s risk vs. reward, and the game forms a more solid and consistent relationship with that risk vs. reward.

Gamefeel Good

The title of this article mentions gamefeel, so I’m going to take a moment to discuss that. Like ‘floatiness’ this term is a little hard to pin down, so, uh, how about wikipedia. They seem to know everything.

“Game feel (sometimes referred to as “game juice“) is the intangible, tactile sensation experienced when interacting with video games. The term was popularized by the book Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation^[1] written by Steve Swink. The term has no formal definition”
Wikipedia Article on Game Feel

Well that was absolutely no help whatsoever. Wikipedia cites input, response, context, aesthetic, metaphor, and rules as the features a game can change to influence gamefeel, and this seemingly comes from Mr. Swink as well. It’s as good a place as any to start, so let’s see how this applies to our floatiness dilemma.

I don’t want to get too into the weeds with these, so I’ll limit my observations to response, metaphor, and rules. Suffice to say I think KH does pretty universally well in the input and aesthetics department. Context is a bit more nuanced, but again, trying to limit our scope here.

Let’s be a little contrarian and try to make at least a very small part of this gamefeel equation tangible. We’ve already broken down that there seems to be a correlation between the delay between action and reaction in Kingdom Hearts, and the popular perception of how well the games feel to play. KH1 and KH2 are beloved with their snappy reaction times, KH3 is well liked but garnered a lot of fan feedback. BBS and DDD are liked but not necessarily for the fluidity of their combat, and I rarely see gamefeel cited among their strengths. The data easily illustrates the importance of response time as a variable.

The metaphor at play here is how the timing of attacks translates to what the game is trying to convey. The main thing the mechanics of KH is trying to convey is melee combat. All these varying measures of time and attack resolution and ending lag etc. is all metaphor for the physicality of swinging a sword at a guy. A real person cannot instantaneously move their arms, the sword has startup time and ending lag in real life. That’s why these time gaps are there in the first place. It wouldn’t be a very fun game if you pressed the attack button and just instantly won. So as in a real, actual battle, you have to consider how your various actions leave you open to counterattack. On the other hand, one can go overboard with this, as in real life you’re also trying to minimize your vulnerabilities, and a swordsman is not going to be flashy at the cost of leaving himself open to a hail of enemy attacks. These are things people intuitively understand, and so players bring with them preconceived notions of how entities should behave in these situations.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 1 blocks an attack from a dark ball with a mouth. Immediately, he counters with a series of fast strikes in the air. He loses altitude with each strikes, and ends his combo standing on the ground. — Pictured: Gamefeel??

Drill even further down and you get to the rules of the game itself. Enemies are attacking you, while you’re trying to attack them. If you are locked into an animation you are unable to deploy any defense to stop them, and so we have a game. Risk, and reward. However, if the player’s control feels disconnected from how these rules operate gamefeel is thrown off. In Birth By Sleep and Dream Drop Distance, attacking creates great gaps of no-player time, where inputs on your controller mean nothing. You are vulnerable to attack, and a passive observer in the world. This disconnect throws off both the player’s relationship to response and to the rules of the game, as overly long and committed attacks can become more of a liability than an asset. In KH1 and KH2 throwing out attacks is almost always fun and satisfying, and usually rewarding. It’s often a lot more burdensome to do so BBS and DDD. BBS and DDD have other methods of dealing damage besides the basic attack, but since the basic attack is so pivotal in the main series, a lot of players are thrown off by how minimized it is in these spin off titles, which primarily utilize the command deck instead.

The Command Deck

So why is Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance so damn slow compared to their peers? Well these two games share two very important elements in common. First, they were each developed for a handheld family of systems. Second, they share the game design system known as the command deck. These two points of similarity are very much entwined.

Kingdom Hearts and its two numbered sequels utilized the ‘command menu’, a little persistent menu in the corner of the screen that can be navigated in real time to select whether you want Sora to attack, use an item, or cast a magic spell, essentially. 90% of the time you will be spamming the attack button. The command menu was meant to evoke the strategic decision making of a turn-based Final Fantasy game, but re-tuned for an action combat context. Ultimately contextual combo modifiers became a much greater source of player expression in gameplay, and the strategic applications of the command menu are limited. However, it remains an elegant way to give the player a lot of options without bogging the game down with too many buttons.

When Kingdom Hearts went handheld it rethought its combat. Suddenly, we’re dealing with a much smaller screen, and the camera had to be pulled in on the player character to compensate. As a result, enemies can much more easily hit you from off-screen or sneak up behind you. Consideration was clearly given to a system that better fit playing on the go, where deep concentration on twitch-reaction may not be as viable or palatable. The command deck was the answer, a cooldown-based system where actions are selected from a rotating list and can be used at any time. Now the flow of combat is dictated by these ability cooldowns, and the regular attack combo was made to be more slow-paced, flashy, less freeform, and yes, more floaty so as act more like a stopgap to using the command deck, rather than the main form of attack itself. The command deck has a lot of advantages such as the ability to customize your attack loadout in a much more granular way, but it also has its own host of problems, which I won’t get into here.

Ventus from KH BBS slashes at green impish enemies on the ground. In the bottom left corner, the command deck can be seen. — In each game the command deck is present in the bottom-left

Sora from Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance slashes at the air while standing on the ground in a mailroom, then does in the same after jumping. The command deck can be seen in the bottom-left. — In each game the command deck is present in the bottom-left

The point is, Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance are deliberately slower games made so because they were designed to be played on the go, and utilize entirely new systems that weren’t designed with KH1 or KH2’s speed and flow in mind. Because KH3, BBS, and DDD share a lot of development talent though, it seems like a lot of the design philosophy of these handheld games bled over into KH3’s headliner console game, which was jarring for a lot of people.

Okay So… Is This Bad?

In my opinion, one of Kingdom Hearts‘ greatest strengths is the immediacy and responsiveness of its gameplay. A fine degree of control gives the player a much wider spectrum of possibilities in any given scenario, and this is what leads to a creative space within gameplay for players to express themselves through the gameplay. This fluidity also allows disparate gameplay mechanics such as movement and sword attacks to blend. Kingdom Hearts 2 always feels as though its many, many mechanics are in a harmonious conversation with one another. Engaging a ground enemy can be converted into an aerial assault, which can flow into a strategic repositioning, etc.

So yes, I think it weakens Kingdom Hearts‘ identity somewhat when some of the more experimental entries in the series have dabbled with slowing down the combat and making its pieces more discrete. The particulars are a bit beyond this already enormous article, but I did want you to understand my motivations for trying to understand how and why Kingdom Hearts 2 feels so different to play than a game like Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 2 slashes at a volleyball, sending it bouncing into the air. — Up… and Down

Kingdom Hearts is a series about ridiculous anime battles between magical wizards wielding baseball bat-sized keys as weapons. People fling themselves through the air to attack one another. It’s not realistic, but it exists within the heightened reality realm of animation. Its primary inspirations are, after all, some of the animation greats, including Disney of all things. Animation works to heighten reality because it has an understanding of its underpinnings. Even if people can jump twenty feet in the air, there still has to be a since of presence and weight. It has to give the impression that some sort of underlying laws of physics are at play even if they aren’t one-to-one to our own laws of physics.

Despite appearances, it wasn’t a magic genie spell that made KH2 so satisfying to play. It was hard work, clever planning, likely some very precise number tuning, and likely a whole lot of playtesting. I want to know the nitty gritty of what made Kingdom Hearts one of the smoothest action games in existence, what distanced it from that, and what brought it closer to that esteem once again. Because you see, there are still those Kingdom Hearts 3: Remind post-launch changes to talk about.

Kingdom Hearts III And The Combo Modifier

In Kingdom Hearts, Sora has a very basic attack combo, with little by way of alternate options for the player, at first blush. You press the attack button, and sorry does the next hit of the combo. Rinse, repeat. The wrinkle though, is that Sora can gain abilities which cause his attack combo to behave differently depending on where Sora is standing relative to his target.

Kingdom Hearts 2 pushed this contextual combo modifier idea much further, with hosts of new options that allowed the player to flex mastery over the system through mastery of manipulating these contextual attacks. They did things like make engaging enemies faster, extending the combo, increasing the power and range of combo finishers, among other things.

Kingdom Hearts 3 launched with its share of combo modifiers, but they lacked the breadth and applicability of KH2’s abilities, and they did little to speed up combat overall. That is, until it was patched in anticipation of the Kingdom Hearts 3: Remind DLC. Numerous combo modifiers were added which increased the overall speed of Sora’s basic combo attack and made the game feel overall more responsive. I don’t think the Remind DLC gets enough credit for just how much it improved, and it’s kind of refreshing how in tune it is with popular feedback. Real people playing your game can tell you a lot about that mystifying, all-important yet elusive gamefeel.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 3 showcases an attack combo with a flashy series of slashes accentuated with powerful light energy, these attacks come out rather rapidly. — Combo Modifiers

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 3 showcases an attack combo with a series of slashes. These attacks come out noticeably slower than the other image in this gallery. — Combo Modifiers

Airstep is Literally a Game-Changer

Kingdom Hearts as a series has done a decent job with teaching players about its systems and how they work. Some of the more advanced mechanics that deepen higher-level play are a bit more obscure, but usually reaching a baseline level of competency at core systems is pretty straightforward. Kingdom Hearts 3, however, I found stumbled at instilling the importance of oce of its most important new mechanics, the airstep. The airstep allows the player to manually aim the camera toward a distant foe, and fling Sora at them at high speed for a relatively quick engage across a huge battlefield. This was obviously done to compensate for the much larger environments featured in KH3 as compared to older games, but utilizing this move frequently and often, even in close quarters, really does change the way the game is played.

Airstep can cancel out of nearly any other action, you see. In terms of making the game more fluid, or moreover in terms of giving the player fine control over their actions, the airstep affords an enormous amount of power and precision to determine the pace of fights in Kingdom Hearts 3. This along with the ability to cancel combo finisher attacks, which was added in the Remind DLC update, makes the whole combat a lot more cohesive and much more fluid than you might initially expect based on the raw frame data. Speaking of which, the frame data was improved in that update as well! The fact is that this latest iteration evolved the combat in a lot of interesting ways that I don’t want to see abandoned in favor of just making the series going forward exactly like everything that came before.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 3 blocks an attack, before the camera zooms in on his enemy, Sora then zooms to their location in a flash of light. — Here Sora is sent at the boss straight out of a guard, exploiting an opening in an exciting way

Kingdom Hearts Is Doing Fine, Actually (But It Can Do Better)

So yeah, when people say Kingdom Hearts 3 feels ‘floaty’ as compared to Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2 the evidence is there. Attacks are less responsive and more of a commitment, generally, and gravity is turned off more liberally. You will literally find Sora floating more without direct player intervention. However, the frame data differences, discounting the gravity aspect, are minor at best. It’s really that gravity delay that accentuates the small differences to give a pretty stark impression. Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance are so far afield of the gamefeel of the main series games that it’s clear there was no intention of recreating those mobile games for KH3’s release. The developers have further made it clear their intention to deliver an experience their longtime fans can enjoy with the changes made to the Remind DLC.

In fairness, it had been 13 years since a main Kingdom Hearts game had been made when KH3 was released in 2019. With just a few tweaks I feel they were able to bring it up to parity with KH and KH2 in terms of fluidity. It’s not the tightly wound, exceptionally blisteringly fast experience of KH2 precisely, but do remember that KH2 was developed only three years after the original, so the developers were coming right off the back of designing an already exceptional combat system. The experience was fresh. From where I stand I don’t think the future of KH is in any danger. Three years on from KH3 as of the time of writing this in 2022, and KH4 seems to be around the corner, poised to improve in ways reminiscent of how KH2 improved.

The Kingdom Hearts 4 reveal trailer doesn’t actually show any basic attacking in favor of mostly displaying the new movement options, and any gameplay it does showcase is subject to a lot of change to begin with, but what it does show looks pretty snappy and responsive to me. I’ll let you be the judge. The KH team learns quickly, and their intentions for this series’ gameplay have been made clear vis a vis the Remind DLC update. They understand the data I’ve so painstakingly gone to lengths to describe and how it affects gameplay, clearly. The KH3 update was so precision built for improvement it’s kind of astonishing. And, with KH4’s refocus on ‘reality’ as an aesthetic, I would not be surprised if a little more gravity came back to the party to polish the combat system even further into something really special.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts stands on a floating platform with a shield-wielding enemy, and rapidly dashes at and through them, holding out his keyblade.

Whatever you’re talking about, I don’t care…

Difficulty as Narrative Design – The Emotions That Might Happen When You Fight Sans

I’ve had some stuff on the brain lately, in regards to difficulty’s place in design, which is what tends to happen when you play Elden Ring for so many hours straight. I’ve also been replaying Toby Fox’s Deltarune with a friend, another game that uses difficulty in interesting ways. I’ve had this thought for a while, to do a write up about how difficulty can be, and is, deployed in design to affect the greater experience. This article contains major spoilers for Undertale and mild spoilers for FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.

To be unambiguous here – difficulty is a very nuanced and at times personal subject in design that touches on a host of other things such as game balance, technical depth, general play enjoyment, and of course accessibility. These are very complex subjects that deserve their own discussions. What I’m specifically focusing on in this article is how difficulty can be deployed with purpose, and often has more relevance to the overall design than is often attributed to it, as a simple measure of player competence for the purposes of challenge. I wanted to look at an example of a game where difficulty is an intimate part of its narrative design, where the reactions it illicit is very much a product of how difficulty is utilized.

The idea that difficulty in gameplay can be a narrative tool should be fairly straightforward to grasp when looking at a couple of examples. In Elden Ring, all of your primary boss characters are demigods, children of gods, who once fought over the shards of the titular ring. The demigod Radahn fought his half-sister Malenia to a standstill. Radahn is oft touted as the strongest of all demigods – he holds the stars in stasis by his own power – he takes an entire platoon of elite soldiers in gameplay just to take down! This assertion that Radahn is the strongest remains more or less unchallenged for some time. There are harder bosses, but none that require so much backup to defeat, nor any nearly as hobbled with injury as poor Radahn.

There is a secret and hidden boss, however, another demigod called Malenia, who is still alive. When Radahn is found, Malenia’s power, the same power that has scarred the landscape around Radahn has left him ‘divested of his wits’, and fighting like a wild animal. Malenia, however, is more or less totally lucid, angrily awaiting the return of her missing twin brother and liege lord, Miquella. Malenia has never been in better form – there was nothing stopping her from taking Radahn’s shard of the Elden Ring and yet she did not, so clearly she has no interest in ruling. Indeed her dialogue reinforces the notion that she fought only for loyalty to her brother’s ambitions.

Two warrior women face each other in a lush cavern filled with white flowers. One has red hair and is in golden Valkyrie garb, with a sword. One is in a blue hood, with a spear. The Valkyrie ascends into the air and swings her sword with such ferocity it creates white-hot slashes of air in a blurring flurry around her. The blood-hooded woman runs and rolls around the attacks. — I can practically feel the hairs being shaved off the back of my neck.

Any who’ve fought Malenia will tell you, the idea that Radahn could stand a chance against Malenia in combat, is laughable. They could tell you entirely because of how demanding of a boss she is, how difficult she is tells you the entire story. There’s no possible way she left her encounter with Radahn in defeat, or even in a draw. Her swordsmanship is deadly and near insurmountable, and she hides an even greater power beyond that. She defeated him, and he was left without his senses. She must have left because her brother, the real aspirant to the Elden Ring, went missing. The player will know this intuitively, through experience. They lived it. They will feel it in their bones. Radahn could not have defeated Malenia, and the rest of the story follows. Without Miquella, there would be no reason to collect Radahn’s shard. If you’ve explored the world of Elden Ring thoroughly, this line of thinking is vindicated, as you’ll know Miquella underwent a sudden and shocking disappearance, followed by an extended and secretive absence.

A woman in a blue hood runs her spear through the chest of a taller woman with red hair and golden Valkyrie garb, the stabbed Valkyrie falls onto her back in a pool of blood as the spear is removed. — Difficulty is a marker of power in games, and examining power is essential in stories of conflict

If you’ll indulge me to invoke the first of two quotes from Bennett Foddy, designer of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, a notoriously difficult game.

“The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game its flavor. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything.” – Bennett Foddy

All that said, difficulty is not just a mechanical gameplay consideration. Like all aspects of a game, it is an essential part of the cumulative experience. I am of the opinion that if an obstacle within your narrative is meant to be threatening, formidable, out to kill our dear player character, then the player should get the sense that this force is threatening and formidable. To trivialize it, or deny the sensation that there is an opposing force trying to halt the player’s forward motion, is to render the narrative dishonest, and rob it of its power. If conflict is about power, than difficulty is one of the most genuine ways power can be communicated in an interactive system. This isn’t to say that every game needs extreme challenge, or even that every game with conflict is necessarily trying to create the aforementioned sense of opposing force. This is but one type of experience you might seek to create, a goal your art may aspire to. In fact, this is just one way to deploy difficulty as a mode of narrative design. That brings us to Undertale.

The skeleton Sans stands in a black void, above a battle UI overlay. He says "ready?" then suddenly unleashes a barrage of bones and laser beams to attack the player, represented by a red heart-shaped cursor. — “No.”

In Undertale, the story is persistent – and any runs of the game, even when reset, are remembered and color the experience of playing Undertale going forward in little ways. Death and resetting is diegetic, meaning the player character is literally dying and coming back to life at a previous point in time, within the game’s fiction. In this way failure is kind of inherently tied to the narrative. Undertale comes packaged with a few predefined paths to play that present themselves based on how the player tackles obstacles. Killing monsters casually as they come to confront you will result in one of several ‘neutral’ endings, in which the player’s human character escapes the world of monsters, which is left in varying states of disarray as a result. The ‘pacifist’ run will see the player avoiding lethal violence, and reaching out the hand of friendship to major characters to achieve the best world for everyone. The ‘no mercy’ run is the third and most obscure path, in which not only is lethal force deployed against all obstacles, lethal force is deployed against every potential obstacle, wiping out all monsters in the underground.

To do this, the player has to spend an inordinate amount of time trawling around for enemies to fight. Every single one needs to be killed for the No Mercy ending to hold true. This process is long, repetitive, somewhat dull, and even grueling at times. And yet, it remains an immensely popular way to play this already immensely popular game. There is a purpose to all this consternation, though. I think it pretty noncontroversial to say Undertale‘s ultimate message is one of nonviolence – that the best way to solve conflict is through open communication and a curious, empathic heart. The No Mercy run exists as a counterpoint to this message, to prove its efficacy. Killing everything in Undertale is a pain, frankly. It takes a lot of effort but not necessarily the kind of effort a player seeking challenge might be after. More of that exists along the less violent story routes. No, Undertale is instilling through the avenue of frustration that ‘the easy way out’ isn’t always easy, and while ‘the high road’ isn’t always easy either, it’s a heck of a lot more fun than willful cruelty, which is a continuous and conscious effort on the part of the abuser.

And yet, most playing through will persist. They have buy in, and as Undertale expects, most will be curious enough to want to know what happens next, not in spite of the frustration, but perhaps even because of it. One of Undertale‘s most infamous features is the normally comedic, friendly, and jovial character Sans, who is a bit of an internet meme. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of them has to be his sudden transformation into the game’s greatest and most stubborn challenge. The boss battle against Sans, with one other exception, is the only real challenge in the No Mercy run, with all other opposition crumpling like paper before the player. The player has not had a ramp up in difficulty in this point, and Sans comes out of the gate swinging with one of the most demanding gameplay experiences in modern popular interactive media. No punches pulled here, Sans is meant to be a brick wall of a boss, one that will have to be worn down with patience if it’s to be cleared at all.

Sans the skeleton stares you down from a black void with a battle UI overlay, as the player's heart-cursor, now blue, jumps across platforms littered with bones. — I have SO MUCH patience right now, you wouldn’t believe. Oh god the patience I have.

Fans of Undertale have such a personal relationship with it, and given its immense popularity that is quite impressive. The player at this point, is acting as an agent within the narrative, separate and apart from their controlled character, Frisk, who ambiguously is either mind-controlled by the player, or influenced by the player subtly to act or fight. Sans tries everything he can to appeal to the player to start over, to do anything but follow through on the path they’re on. He pleads, he appeals to humanity, he threatens, and he even cheats. After each failure, Sans comes up with some new unique dialogue with which to taunt and belittle you for trying. The player can come back as many times as they want to try again, so words and his ability to act as an immovable object are Sans’s only real forms of power over you. The ironclad stubbornness of this encounter, the unerring, unflinching confidence in its unreasonableness makes it feel real, like Sans is a thinking actor specifically trying to get under your skin, and make your goal unreachable, and that is what makes it feel personal.

Sans the skeleton says, "sounds strange, but before all this i was secretly hoping we could be friends. i always thought the anomaly was doing this cause they were unhappy. and when they got what they wanted, they would stop."

He then fires a bevy of skull-shaped laser cannons at the player's red cursor. — Oh. Kind of makes me feel bad I’m trying so hard to kil- OH GOD LASERS

Sans isn’t trying to kill you – he knows that is beyond his power. He’s trying to wear you down, to frustrate you, to bore you, whatever it takes to make you give up on your killing spree, and maybe start over, or even give up. The story was very carefully set up to make this a legitimate way to cap off the narrative. In Undertale, the story is persistent – and any runs of the game, even when reset, are remembered and color the experience of playing Undertale going forward in little ways. In Undertale, giving up and starting over is a legitimate and designed-for chapter of the narrative.

The skeleton Sans sends an onslaught of bones and laser beams at the player's heart-shaped cursor, turned blue now. After a moment he sends the blue heart careening into a deadly maze of bones as it flies against its will to the right side of the screen. — What a reasonable amount of garbage that can instantly kill me, on the screen, all at once

Giving up can mean a new beginning, a world where the player is not a force for destruction and misery, but a force for change and friendship. Whenever I play Undertale, I love to play the part of the sinister player destroying the world and its inhabitants for callous entertainment (and in a way, I truly am that), but then our protagonist, Frisk, overtaken by sorrow after killing Sans, is able to wrestle back control and ease me into a more peaceful, and ultimately more fulfilling world. I’ll play a No Mercy run just up until I’ve killed Sans, and no further. I’ll then roleplay the regretful monster, the powerful demon whose lost everything, and has no more mountains to conquer. From there I return, back to the beginning of the game, anew with a desire to learn and try again. Undertale makes failure an avenue for learning and improving at the game yes, but also a potential narrative moment of fulfillment.

I love this scenario. It creates a full arc for me, as the will and intention of the player character Frisk, to go through. It’s a rich narrative that unfolds entirely through gameplay that I get to be a part of. That’s the real magic of difficulty in games for me, it’s something entirely unique to the medium, a level of interactivity other forms of art simply cannot achieve. Sans is blisteringly difficult, to the point that he may even feel antagonistic to the human behind the screen. But the game isn’t trying to punish you, nor look down on you, it’s trying to play with you. It is a game, after all. It is interactive theater, a stage show where you are the star. And maybe just maybe you’ll get something valuable out of the experience.

“Death and rebirth, trying and overcoming—we want that cycle to be enjoyable. In life, death is a horrible thing. In play, it can be something else.“-Hidetaka Miyazaki

You are meant to be along for this emotional ride through joy, through sorrow, through fear, through love, through distress, and yes, through frustration. It’s a frustrating thing to be denied passage, to face an opposing force that’ll do everything in it’s power to stop you. If the art is to be evocative, it may be necessary to instill that sense of frustration. I will deploy the second of two Bennett Foddy quotes, as I admire the way he puts it;

“What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it if you got this far, feeling frustrated. It’s underrated. An orange, a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. It’s coffee, it’s grapefruit, it’s licorice.” – Bennett Foddy

Sans the skeleton sleeps, standing up, in the center of a screen with a battle UI. A red heart-shaped cursor moves over to the UI button labeled "FIGHT". A slashing effect moves toward Sans, but he slides out of the way and begins to speak, but is cut off by a second attack, which leaves a violent gash across his chest. — Frustration and loss isn’t just a roadblock to joy and catharsis, it’s an essential part of the whole.

Frustration is not the opposite of fun. I think the runaway success of games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Undertale, games that very much use frustration as feature of their storytelling, are strong evidence of this. There are hosts of games that follow similar patterns. When you play and watch people play difficult games as much as I do, you begin to notice that not only is frustration not a deterrent to the fun for most, it often accompanies the highest highs of player’s positive emotional reactions. Art is not a vehicle for merely delivering joy and nothing else. Life is a rich tapestry of a variety of emotions, and if art is to speak truth, then I think it’s worth considering how best to accurately reflect that. I’ve been talking a lot about feelings and emotional reaction, and I can’t overstate how subjective such things can be. You’re walking a fine line when utilizing traditionally negative emotions such as frustration to tell a story. As I said before, difficulty is a very nuanced and complex topic and this is just one aspect of it, one feature of difficulty to consider when configuring the shape of the experience you want to create. Difficulty can be used to tell and legitimize interactive narrative in a very profound way. That said, not all games need to, and by no means should they, take the same shape. Knowing how best to achieve the goals of your design starts with understanding your goals, and understanding the tools at your disposal.

Sans the skeleton sleeps soundly, standing up, in the center of a screen with a battle UI overlay.

You have something called ‘determination.’ So as long as you hold on… so as long as you do what’s in your heart… I believe you can do the right thing…

Dark Souls 3’s Brigand Twindaggers or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Status Effects

It is February 2022, my dudes, and you know what that means. Elden Ring is around the corner and there was absolutely no way I wasn’t going to just talk about Fromsoft games all month. I want to share an interesting experience I found while playing Dark Souls 3 as it pertains to a specific weapon found in the game, the brigand twindaggers. This is less a breakdown of this weapon’s moveset or particular attributes and more a little anecdote about how the daggers won me over once Dark Souls 3 had sold me on using status effects on my weapons, and the subsequent analysis that followed.

In RPGs with character customization I love to bring in my own stock of characters to populate the world, and there are some old standbys I revisit frequently, such as a thief who wields a pair of daggers, whom is often my player character in Fromsoft games. If at all possible, I will deck out my characters in their appropriate gear. I kind of like the RP side of RPG that way.

In Fromsoft’s Bloodborne, an action RPG that preceded Dark Souls 3, there is a weapon called the blades of mercy, a sword that can transform into a pair of daggers. I often refer to this weapon as a lawnmower – it absolutely shreds enemies to pieces with a massive amount of damage output. It scales incredibly well with Bloodborne‘s equivalent of the dexterity attribute, and its moveset is a flowing, seamless series of rapid strikes. Its the most satisfying to use pair of daggers in any of Fromsoft’s games to that point, so I had high hopes and expectations when it was revealed that Dark Souls 3 would have, as a new feature, paired weapons – weapons that come in a set, made specifically for dual wielding. I went over the game with a fine-toothed comb when I got it, clamoring to find a pair of daggers. Surely if paired weapons were a thing, I’d find dual wield knives.

And so I found them, and it quickly became difficult to contain my disappointment. Compared to Fromsoft’s previous outing with dual wielded daggers, these brigand twindaggers had a slower moveset with a much longer startup, and tremendously pathetic damage by comparison. They didn’t even scale that well with dexterity. I tried to like them, and tried to use them throughout my first play-through, I really did. In the end, there were just so many better speedy weapons, whose damage scaled so much better, that I could really not justify using the daggers any longer. I ended up embracing my inner edgelord and used a paired katana and wakizashi, two japanese style swords, as their damage output was insane compared to the daggers.

I had a blast on my first playthrough of Dark Souls 3, but I always regret not making a player build I was satisfied with involving the daggers. It didn’t feel true to my player character to not have him using knives, and I wished the knives were better. They didn’t really need to be though, after some experimentation, I would discover I just needed to change my approach. It started when I saw a player versus player showcase of the brigand twindaggers. The very skilled video author was destroying human opponents, seemingly with ease, utilizing the weapon I had condemned as largely useless. His secret? The daggers were enhanced with a bleeding effect. The Dark Souls series has always had weapon status effects, special attributes that can be applied to weapons to make them debilitate enemies in specific ways, applied if enemies are hit enough times rapidly. Primarily, this takes the form of bleed weapons and poison weapons.

On two pedestals, side-by-side, sits a jagged stone covered in a shiny oozing red liquid, dribbling onto one pedestal. On the other, a pair of curved knives crossed over each other. — Like peanut butter and jelly.

Enhancing a weapon in Dark Souls always modifies its base damage and damage scaling in some way. Status effect weapons on the whole tend to deal a lot less base damage as a tradeoff, and so I’d often shy away from them not just in Fromsoft games but in RPGs in general. It just felt like it was an unnecessary extra step, compared to simply dealing more damage directly. But I wanted those daggers to work, so I gave it a try. In Dark Souls bleed is a status effect that builds up by hitting your target repeatedly, and when it’s built up completely, the victim loses a large chunk of their health to a hemorrhage, all at once. It’s a rather cool mechanic that gives the player a smaller micro-goal to achieve while fighting enemies, that is, quickly building up bleed, in addition to just fighting. It makes for an interesting playstyle and when I tried it out, I found I was having a ton more fun than before. Even when modified, the daggers still deal similar damage to their sharpened variant, and yet now acted as a powerful poison or open wound delivery system.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a frostbitten undead ghoul, in a snowy medieval city. The ghoul gushes blood as they are struck. After several hits, the ghoul's health indicator suddenly takes a large amount of damage. — See how quickly enemies vulnerable to bleed pop like balloons? It’s a great time, all round.

Status effects in Dark Souls 3 just work. Astounding. But why is this such a pain point for me in so many other RPGs? What is it about Dark Souls 3 in particular that makes it work? I think I’ve identified a few factors that majorly contributed to my enjoyment of using bleed and poison variants of the brigand twindaggers. First off…

It Works

Yeah okay so this one is a little self explanatory. Players aren’t likely to use a game mechanic that doesn’t work, obviously. It goes deeper than that though, players aren’t likely to use a game mechanic that isn’t effective. Every enemy in the game could be vulnerable to bleed, but if it only did a piddly pathetic amount of damage nobody would care enough to go that route. Thankfully bleed is very effective, and can often kill enemies even faster than raw damage. It was also seen fit to make nearly every enemy in the game vulnerable to bleed, a very wise decision. Some are resistant to it, some weak to it, but only a handful are completely invulnerable to bleed. Was this point even worth mentioning? Yeah I think so. Each of these points is something I’ve seen failed in many many games before. There are tons of games where status effects are simply unreliable to the point of near-uselessness. What good is a poison effect if it takes a dozen tries before it actually sticks? What’s more, what is the point if the poison is super hard to apply, but it barely does anything as a result? By then I could have just beaten by opponent to death with a stick. Floundering around with weak status effects feels terrible, and they need to be at least as viable as the more straightforward option.

It Works On Bosses

I cannot stress this one enough. Nothing will make me drop a combat mechanic which requires a time investment more definitively than seeing it is ineffective against boss encounters. Often in combat centric games bosses are the height of the combat system, pushing it to its limit where the most fun to be had is, or even the central axis about which the rest of the gameplay turns. If a combat mechanic breaks down in a boss fight, as a player I often feel as though it’s not worth my time. Status effects work on bosses in Dark Souls 3, generally, or at least frequently enough that I never find myself despairing at the futility of using them.

It is so strange to me that so many RPGs see fit to make bosses immune to status effects. On the one hand I can see the perspective – status effects tend to be very powerful in certain contexts, especially when they are not direct damage dealers, like disables or other utility effects, and one does not want to trivialize combat encounters. And yet. If one has been relying on a certain game mechanic, they begin to take ownership of it as a playstyle. They feel clever or powerful for utilizing it. Taking it away at the most crucial encounter feels awful. There are ways to design around the brute force method of just making bosses immune. Perhaps bosses are merely resistant, and incur a diminished form of status effects applied to them. Perhaps bosses have the ability to remove their own status effects under the right circumstances, or perhaps they last less time. Perhaps status effects are balanced as such to simply be generally useful, but not overly powerful against bosses. I think it’s rarely ever wrong to let players think around a problem, and removing a strategic tool such as status effects from their arsenal, when they can be employed elsewhere feels like player punishment.

In Dark Souls 3, applying a bleed effect deals a flat chunk of damage to enemies, usually enough to kill lesser foes. On bosses, it’s merely a nice step toward their defeat, but not an utter showstopper by any stretch. For bosses that may be felled too quickly if they are bled out repeatedly, it was decided they would be resistant to bleed effects. You can still get that extra damage, and it’s not that hard to do, it just takes a little longer, and the balance is kept that way. There are some enemies and bosses which are immune to bleeding, but not nearly enough to make me question the status effect’s efficacy, and what’s more it contributes to the overall fiction of the game, which has to do with my next point.

Strong Feedback

Dark Souls 3 has very strong audio-visual feedback for when you’re wailing on an enemy. Blood shoots out in exaggerated sprays along with a crunchy *squelch*ing sound with each strike of your weapon. Against armor, you can hear the rattling clang of steel on steel. This is obviously good design from a gamefeel standpoint, but it also provides the very useful advantage of illustrating what can and cannot be inflicted with a status effect. Hitting stuff that can be bled tends to use that exaggerated blood graphic I mentioned, but things that are resistant or immune will show less blood when struck, or none at all.

A well-armored women swings a wrist-mounted blade at a cage full of reanimated corpses. Blood shoots out when it is struck, and after several hits, an explosion of blood gushes from it. — A cage full of reanimated corpses? Can the cage bleed? Kind of ambiguous, except that it shoots blood off when hit. Okay so it can be inflicted with bleed!

I’ve mentioned that some enemies are immune to status effects and how that enhances the fiction of Dark Souls 3. What I mean by that is, it is effectively intuitive what enemies can and cannot bleed. Bulbous fleshy beasts, dripping and shambling undead, living creatures. Things that obviously have blood, are all vulnerable to the bleed effect. Things like enchanted empty suits of armor, a giant tree, skeletons. These things obviously do not have blood, and thus do not bleed. It seems like a simple trick not to miss, but yet again I’ve seen this very concept done poorly too often. Consistency is key. The player shouldn’t have to guess, or at least not guess blindly whether or not their combat tools will even work. Obviously you can’t bleed a skeleton, but obviously you can bleed a giant rat. Design the game so players can trust their own eyes and ears, and the play experience will feel much more seamless. Immunities and resistances should have logical reasoning grounded in the rules of the real world, even if the game takes place in a fantastic one, so your player has a hint of familiarity with which they can decipher the rules of your game.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a giant rat with exposed wounds. The rat gushes blood as it is hit, and quickly keels over dead. — Giant fleshy rat with exposed red meat? Blood pinata. Spooky skeleton? Not so much. Notice the understated hit effect on the skeleton vs. the huge amount of blood on the rat.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a cloaked skeleton in an dank catacomb. The skeleton takes damage. but the hit effects against it are dull and understated. — Giant fleshy rat with exposed red meat? Blood pinata. Spooky skeleton? Not so much. Notice the understated hit effect on the skeleton vs. the huge amount of blood on the rat.

We’ll have to come up with some **other** clever solution to deal with the skeletons

Conclusion

So I guess my takeaways from this experience are twofold: certain weapons can be satisfying to use in how they fulfill certain gameplay niches. The brigand twindaggers are an excellent status effect tool in how they apply effects quickly through rapid hits. My other takeaway is that a lot of games could do status effects in a much more satisfying way that makes them feel powerful and useful, something a lot of the designs I’ve seen are often too bashful about. They can be a viable alternative gameplay style all their own, you just need to put in the legwork to make sure this gameplay style feels strong and effective. Locking it out of boss fights makes it feel like a lesser, illegitimate gameplay style, an afterthought. Players should be able to discern the applicability of status effects with audio and visuals alone, without having to consult a wiki. Overall, I think status effects can be underappreciated in games mostly because they so often could be implemented better. When games get it right, I think it’s worth giving a closer look to see exactly what went right. Status effects in Dark Souls 3 were fun enough to use, and strong enough to completely reverse my opinion of an entire weapon’s implementation.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a giant armored mage wielding a flaming staff. in a snowy medieval city. The mage gushes blood as they are struck. After several hits, the mage's health indicator suddenly takes a large amount of damage.

Such weapons inflict lacerating damage. Most effective with sharp or spiked weapons…

Dota 2’s Dark Willow: Effective Audio-Visual Feedback, and Mechanical Synergy

Dota 2 is a game of the genre MOBA, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. In simpler terms, it’s a team-based game with a focus on combat and strategy. It’s played from a bird’s eye view, and features a number of colorful fantasy heroes to choose from. Dark Willow, the mischievous, slightly sadistic thieving fairy is my personal favorite, and I wanted to just jot down my thoughts on how effectively her abilities are communicated through audio-visual feedback.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy glides down a pathway.

Text chat:
Someone says "usually pick turbo just to dark willow"

I respond "That was my plan" — “Let’s have some fun, shall we…”

Audio-visual feedback is as it sounds; the fairly basic concept that important information should be communicated to players implicitly through their senses, and that things like affirmations of success or confirmations of failure should be communicated in this way. For example, if a player character swings a sword, that sword swing should make a distinctly different sound whether it misses its target, strikes an enemy, or strikes a wall. It should probably look distinctly different in each of those cases as well.

Dark Willow has five abilities. Bramble Maze allows her to sprout a circle full of equally spaced bramble bushes at a distant location. Enemies will have only a narrow space to squeeze between the brambles, and if they touch one they are rooted to the spot and damaged. Shadow Realm allows Dark Willow to hide in a shadow form, immune to most attacks, then burst out with a powerful shadow attack. The longer she is hiding, the stronger the attack, so long as the ability does not wear off first. Shadow Realm can later be upgraded to fire a barrage of shadow attacks. Cursed Crown is a curse Dark Willow places on a target, causing it and nearby allies to be stunned exactly four seconds after the curse is cast. Bedlam causes Dark Willow’s wisp minion to orbit her, firing destructive magic at nearby enemies. Terrorize projects the wisp to a distant location, causing any enemies at that location to be terrified and sent running toward their base.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A number of heroes do battle in a river. A series of blue concentric circles indicates where a bush full of brambles is about to sprout. When the circles are lined up with enemy heroes, the brambles rise up and capture them. — Here you can see me line up exactly where the brambles should be placed, so I can catch multiple targets, thanks to the handy previsualization UI.

A lot of Dark Willow’s power as a hero comes from the synergy between her various ability mechanics. Bramble maze does a great deal of damage and holds foes in place, but they have to touch the brambles for this to happen. Luckily, Dark Willow has the ability to force enemy movement in the form of Terrorize, clever of use of which can cause enemies to flee in terror into her brambles. Cursed Crown is a strong stun that can disable multiple opponents but only if they are standing together, which is why Terrorize, in conjunction with Bramble Maze, is so effective at sticking enemies together. Dark Willow can dish out immense damage with Bedlam, but only if she gets close, and she is not very durable herself. Luckily, Shadow Realm renders her immune to most dangers, which she can use in conjunction with Bedlam. The fact that Shadow Realm can cap off this combo with a burst of damage is a nice compliment to the more sustained damage of Bedlam, which can be more easily reacted to.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy sneaks up from the trees on a man made of lightning. A bramble sprouts beneath him and captures him. The fairy flies up with her wisp, which tears him apart. — Clever use of synergized game mechanics can make your player very powerful

Because it is so important to coordinate your various abilities together like this, it is essential the player can develop a seamless feel for how the various timings, cast ranges, and nuances of her abilities work, without having to look at a detailed explanation. That’s where audio-visual feedback is essential for making gameplay mechanics like this synergize in an effective way that’s satisfying and fun for the player. Dark Willow’s Shadow Realm is an excellent example of this.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy is surrounded by shadows before a red circle begins to glow around her feet. It becomes more distinct over time. — The red aura around Dark willow becomes more and more distinct as the shadow realm attack becomes ‘ripe’ for unleashing.

First off, Shadow Realm is kind of a complicated ability when you break it down. When its button is pressed, Dark Willow becomes subsumed in shadow and immune to most enemy attacks, which is easy enough to understand. However, during this period Dark Willow is also charging up an attack. This shadow attack reaches the peak of its potency after 3.5 seconds of charging, but the ability itself ends after 5 seconds. So there is a period of 1.5 seconds in which it is optimal to use Shadow Realm’s attack competent. That’s a little unintuitive, or rather it would be if not for the audio and visual considerations. After 3.5 seconds of Shadow Realm, Dark Willow is surrounded by an additional visual effect: a red circular aura that surrounds her and gives the impression of peak power. As soon as Shadow Realm begins, a distinct and almost melodic humming sound begins to emanate from Dark Willow, it gives a sense of building power and changes over time. Its intensity crescendos after exactly, you guessed it, 3.5 seconds. The humming then peters out for the remaining 1.5 seconds, giving a strong impression of when the attack should be dealt.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy becomes surrounding in shadows as a wizard is caught in a bramble patch. A wisp flies around the fairy and attacks the wizard, before the fairy throws her own projectile, but it fails to kill the wizard. — Here, I crucially missed the shadow realm cue, and my attack fails to kill my target. Entirely my own misplay, but emphasizes the importance of those cues.

This sort of feedback is also helpful for those opposing Dark Willow. Without having to count, any player can get a pretty good idea of when Dark Willow is most likely to release her shadow attack. Giving easy access to this sort of information is conducive to a healthy competitive game, allowing complex strategies to form. Knowing what your opponent is capable of, if not necessarily what they intend to do, you can act and react to game events as they occur. Acting and reacting is the core of competitive gameplay. If each player doesn’t have the right information to available for them to utilize, there is no counterplay, there is no game.

Curse Crown is a very interesting example of this concept. It counts down, loudly and with a visual timer represented by four icons for each of the four seconds in the countdown, but this countdown is a strategic benefit to both Dark Willow and her victim. The victim will know that standing near allies when the countdown pops means putting those allies in danger. Dark Willow will be eagerly awaiting for her victim to become stunned and helpless, so she can unleash her most powerful offense. The strong visual feedback makes for a better experience for both the victim and user of the spell. By giving both parties this important information as a readily apparent graphic and audio cue, they can both formulate plans to deal with the respective obstacles to their goals, which is itself the fun of the game.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy sends a wisp out to scare a giant lizard man, who flees in terror. Where the lizard man stood, a zombie comes back to life, and chases the lizard man together with the fairy. — With terrorize, enemies are driven off of my allies, and with shadow realm, I can further pursue and subdue them.

As the victim is stunned, Dark Willow may try to line up a Bramble Maze on them, to further damage and disable them. Typically, you’d want to place the brambles in the enemy’s path, so they move into the bush themselves. If they are stuck in place though, one can carefully line up the bramble to appear beneath your target’s feet, thanks to a convenient target-preview interface that will shadow the Dark Willow player where exactly they brambles are going to appear. For the opponent’s part, the brambles are distinctly shaped, leaving little ambiguity as to where it is and is not safe to walk.

As you may have gleaned, Dota 2 can become fairly visually loud, with ten individual heroes all throwing out impressive and explosive spells like this. That’s why it’s so important to keep a distinct visual not only for each ability, but a distinct visual style for each hero as well. It should be unambiguous when it is Dark Willow in particular using her spells, so that enemies and allies have a fair amount of information with which to react. Dark willow’s visual effects are uniformly composed of dark violets and maroons, evocative of shadowy undergrowth and wild flowers, which is also thematically relevant to her character as a dark fairy. Big and important abilities that can completely shift the tide of battle, such as Terrorize, tend to be louder and more immediately noticeable, in proportion to their power.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A large number of heroes do battle. A fairy throws increasingly powerful projectiles at a lightning man. When the lightning man falls, a friendly zombie is frozen in ice, and his allies are forced to attack him. This ends when a fairy sends her wisp to terrorize nearby enemies. Afterward, the fairy turns to throw her projectiles at a fleeing wizard. — In an extended battle, there’s LOTS to keep track of, so knowing the visual and audio cues becomes an essential skill. It’s better to make that learning curve as painless as possible. It may be hard to track Dark Willow in all this mess at first, but look out for her midnight color scheme.

Audio-Visual Feedback is one of those things you really have to nail, if you’re game’s to be any good, honestly. If a lot of important information is moving around in your game and it doesn’t reach the player in a prompt and unintrustive way, it can severely hamper the experience. Dota 2 is pretty good at it, considering all the challenges of keeping things clear and readable that comes with the MOBA genre. Dark Willow is a particularly strong example, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to her and her playstyle.

The aftermath of a green explosion in an open plain is overlaid with the words 'Radiant Victory'. In response to someone asking 'why did you mid' I respond 'so wed win, like this', to which someone responds 'like milk'.

A scoreboard follows.

You thought you were winnin’?

Sonic Adventure 2: Combat as Traversal

Sonic Adventure 2 is loved and it is hated. As an early adaptation of the 2D platform game star Sonic the Hedgehog it is rife with both 3D growing pains and extravagant, outside-the-box ideas. I find it notable for a great number of things. I’m particularly fond of how the game integrates its main gameplay attraction of momentum-based platforming- going fast, in so many words – with enemy encounters. More precisely, how this enemy encounters do not intrude upon the traversal gameplay, as the combat itself becomes a form of traversal.

Specifically I am talking about the Sonic and Shadow Action Stages, as they are relevant to what I’m getting at here, with the treasure hunt and mech stages being their own beasts. The Action Stages as such involving running across long, winding highways filled with deadly robots and ridiculous loopdy-loops. The first thing to note about these enemy robots is that they barely attack Sonic. Maybe a laser or bomb or two will be launched every few seconds. The thing is that Sonic stages need obstacles for there to be a game. Speed is meant to be a reward for performance, and if there’s nothing to overcome there’s no way to perform. An excess of obstacles though, quickly grinds down the experience to one of attrition, with frequent starting and stopping that strips away the core gameplay. In other words, Sonic has to have a very low skill floor and barrier to entry. Complicating this with more involved combat breaks the flow of Sonic that is one of its staple selling points.

Sonic (Sonic Adventure 2), in a tropical jungle environment, rolls into a ball and dashes straight ahead at high speed, blasting through a robot and running ahead as if the obstacle was nothing. — Yeah, that robot did not put up much of a fight.

So enemies in Sonic Adventure 2 are barely obstacles, and will generally be destroyed in one strike. They’re more like platforms in and of themselves, as the act of attacking them can propel Sonic forward and allow him to bridge gaps. By making the act of combat also an act of traversal, it blends more seamlessly with the main gameplay of traversing at high speeds. Sonic doesn’t have to stop and build up any sort of combo or other combat-centric mechanic to deal with enemies. He can simply vanquish them as he runs by, they’re more like a speed bump than a wall.

Sonic (Sonic Adventure 2) spins into a ball and launches into the air in a San Francisco-like cityscape, bounces off three flying robots, destroying them, then jumps off a hapless humanoid robot as it jumps out of a hidden spot. — Being able to careen past this humanoid robot at the end is hilarious, and fun. Stupid enemies can be a feature!

By necessity, this is also somewhat an article about the homing attack, introduced in the original Sonic Adventure. The homing attack was a pretty clever solution to adapting Sonic’s primary method of attack, which is to say jumping into things as a spinning ball, from his 2D genesis games to 3D space. By pressing the jump button in mid-air, Sonic will do an air dash with a burst of speed, and home in on a nearby enemy, destroying it, if there is one. It’s still possible to precisely jump into enemies as Sonic in Sonic Adventure 2, but it is cumbersome, a pain, and more pertinently, slow. That’s the real undercurrent here, that every time the Sonic franchise has endeavored to include more complex or involved combat into its gameplay it’s operated mostly to slow down gameplay or distract from the core fantasy of playing as Sonic The Hedgehog. Obviously, to go fast, or in a more practical game design sense, to build and maintain momentum and feel powerful in doing so.

Sonic is at its best when speed is an expression of skill that gives the player power over their environment. The homing attack essentially compensates for the third axis of a 3D game in a way that makes using a homing attack comparable to jumping Sonic into an enemy on a 2D plane, in terms of complexity. What’s more, if there is no enemy is available to home in on, the attack operates more as a normal air dash, giving Sonic a degree of momentum in the direction he is facing with little to no ending lag. With the homing attack as Sonic’s primary method of attacking, combating enemies because an integrated part of movement itself. You’re always moving while attacking, and almost always attacking while moving as well. Part of the reason I chose Sonic Adventure 2 in specific to cover this topic is because the homing attack’s lack of ending lag is not always the case in every Sonic game. I feel as though the evolution of the homing attack across the series is something that could fill out its own write up.

In a grassy urban park, Sonic (Sonic Adventure 2) spins into a ball and dashes ahead at high speed, bouncing off a humanoid robot, destroying it, and bounding over a fence. He then speeds across the grass to two flying robots, which Sonic bounces off of and destroys in one smooth motion. — The homing attack would never feel nearly as satisfying as this again.

The game implements some clever ideas with the homing attack too. It allows strings of enemies to act as a sort of make-shift bridge to get to hard-to-reach areas. It allows Sonic to climb up more vertical surfaces if they’re lined with targets. Common elements in Sonic that need to be interacted with, like powerups and bounce pads, are less easily missed with the homing attack. If every one of these targets needed to be precisely collided with, Sonic’s own speed could make the process disruptive, and the homing attacking does away with that awkwardness as well.

Sonic (Sonic Adventure 2) swings through the air of a tropical jungle on a vine, then briefly runs across a grassy platform before rolling into a ball as he jumps and homing in on two flying robots, destroying them, then homing in on a red bounce spring. — No stopping to fight, fighting is going, because this is a game about going!

All of these advantages Sonic Adventure 2 rings out of the use of simplified combat are things that later Sonic games double back on at various times, that I feel makes them overall weaker. Sonic Heroes and Shadow The Hedgehog populate their levels with slow combat encounters full of enemies that will take multiple, repetitive attacks before allowing the player to return to the main gameplay loop of high-speed platforming. Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) and many of the later “boost” style games like Sonic Colors sport a homing attack with greater ending lag and less seamless momentum, making them clunkier and less generally useful for traversal. When combat is an end onto itself, rather than an element of the greater gameplay which adds to the overall experience, the combat itself has to be extremely engaging. The problem with putting extremely engaging combat into a game primarily about traversal, is you’re now overloading your design overhead with two very complex, very essential systems that need to not only both have a great deal of depth, but also not interfere with one another. It can be done, but it’s not something to be undertaken lightly. When Sonic attempts to flesh out combat in this way it has thus far for me invariably fallen flat. If there’s any point I was trying to make here, I think it’s that combat does not always have to be an end onto itself, and can be simplified to serve a greater design purpose. That from a guy who has an embarrassing number of hours in the sorts of high-complexity combat games that are the antithesis of the homing attack. Sometimes less is more.

Sonic Adventure 2‘s weakness, when it comes to combat encounters, I feel is largely in its boss fights. The game is not without some fun to be had in boss encounters, but this is definitely one area in which the Sonic franchise has usually improved over time. If the unity of combat and traversal is the game’s strength, as I have claimed, then the scarcity of boss battles that take place while Sonic is running a distance is pretty alarming. Later Sonic games would have Sonic running down an infinitely long highway as the boss keeps apace with him and the two exchange blows that way. It seems a natural fit to Sonic’s gameplay, so the question of a lack of this sort of encounter in Sonic Adventure 2 may have been a technological one. The game includes precisely one boss encounter of this type, but it is rather simplistic compared to what would come later.

Combat in the Sonic series never felt so satisfying to me as when it was merely a tool of traversal. It had its place, populating the Action Stages with obstacles that were not too intrusive to the overall experience. Often I find games, especially platforms, shoehorn combat into spaces where it does not belong, and this intrusion can disrupt the flow of a game, which can be dire for a game like Sonic, so dependent as it is on that flow state. Sometimes the best way to design a system is knowing when to simplify, and knowing when to hold back, knowing the proper place for each element. The prospect of the upcoming Sonic Frontiers is an exciting one, following in the trend of open world games inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild, itself a game primarily about traversal, but applied to the momentum- based platforming of sonic. The synthesis of those unique gameplay styles could be something really special. I hope the design keeps its emphasis where Sonic really shines – on the traversal – with combat not intruding too much on the fantasy of gliding across vast landscapes with super speed.

Sonic (Sonic Adventure 2) runs along metal scaffolding over an artificial bay. He spins into a ball then launches into the air, destroying several flying robots before landing on another scaffold.

Talk about low budget flights! No food or movies? I’m outta here…