There’s a specific design ethos that I’ve noticed runs through a lot of roguelike games such as Risk of Rain 2 and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. These are action games in which the player collects a myriad of various weapons, powerups, and augments to enhance their combat capabilities. These items often do weird and wild things that greatly change up the gameplay, and yet, they all almost always work together in ways that never cancel out. Every item you collect remains significant throughout your run of the game, and adding new powers on top of it only further enhances your abilities, and often, these items even synergize in exciting ways that multiply your capabilities. Risk of Rain 2 and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth adhere to this design philosophy almost religiously.
A lot of games have cool effects and weapon qualities that augment your combat abilities, but tend to lean toward special exceptions, edge cases, and fuzzy inter-connectivity between combat abilities. For example, I play a Dark Knight character in the online RPG Final Fantasy XIV. The Dark Knight can spend the resource MP on special abilities which deal extra damage, allowing them more attacks in the same amount of time than they’d normally be able to do . The Dark Knight can also activate an ability called Blood Weapon to restore some MP with every attack ability they land for a few seconds. I’d often find myself wondering if I can generate MP with the same abilities that spend it, as they are technically attack abilities. Through experimentation, unfortunately, the answer is no. I feel as though storing up MP to spend before using Blood Weapon to get in more hits is a cool ability synergy I’m missing out on because of this arbitrary lack of inter-connectivity. Blood Weapon also specifies in its description that extra MP is not awarded for using AoE abilities which hit multiple enemies, another case of non inter-connectivity of abilities. A lot of RPGs do this, Final Fantasy is just one example. This can not only cut off cool synergies that reward exploration of ability interactions, but also makes systems more difficult and complicated to read, as the player needs to parse sometimes very complicated layers of exceptions when it comes to understanding how things work. Being able to critically strike with normal attacks does not guarantee one can critically strike with special attacks, etc.
Something that a lot of roguelike games such as The Binding of Isaac and Risk of Rain have embodied, is a system of interconnected combat abilities which do not interfere with one another, and coexist with very few special exceptions. I never find myself asking the question ‘do these two things work in concert?’ while playing Risk of Rain 2, as pretty much invariably, they do. Sometimes this happens in ways you may not even expect, but are a welcome synergy when you realize. For example, Risk of Rain 2 features an item which will spray razors at nearby enemies when you take damage, and even these razors will apply any attack effects the player has, like bleed and critical strike, among others. This opens a world of possibilities, where things like building a loadout in which taking hits is a viable method of destroying enemies, may be plausible.
Here my tears (bullets) are capable of blocking enemy projectiles, shooting out of the back of my head, and inflicting fear on enemies, all-in-one!
There are a couple of big advantages to this strategy. As I explained above, it allows for a much grander scope of variety when it comes to player loadout, which often translate to a grander variety of playstyles. Variety is always an excellent tool for increasing replayability, expanding your games appeal, and just generally enhancing interest. Another advantage is a clarity and unity of combat attributes when it comes to the player’s loadout. You’re demanding less parsing of systems, rules, and exceptions on the part of the player if it can be assumed that any advantage they obtain from an item or powerup can be applied universally.
Notice that the arc of lightning, itself a powerup, originates from the missile, another powerup. Powers in Risk of Rain can be nested, and synergize in this way.
To be clear, there are also advantages to making exceptions to ability interaction, even beyond the technical overhead. Design wise, lots of games have made interesting decision making out of a specific separation of abilities. One of the most common forms this takes is separate magic and physical ability types, wherein each set of abilities have their own advantages and disadvantages that don’t intersect, which leads to compelling strategizing on the part of the player. Sometimes having to choose between one advantage and another is a good thing, both for strategic depth and for fun. Another advantage to compartmentalizing game mechanics in this way is simplicity for the designer’s sake. Making sure everything in a very large pool of game mechanics mix and mingle in an organic way can be a daunting task.
The disadvantages, however, become apparent when abilities do not combine in ways that feels like they should. If a special item exist that causes your bullets to split on impact and hit multiple enemies, and there’s another item that causes your bullets to bounce between enemies, it stands to reason having both my allow your bullets to split as they bounce between targets. In The Binding of Isaac, this is the case! Although I’m sure you can imagine a fair few games with similar scenarios in which these items are mutually exclusive, and that cuts off a lot of interesting gameplay opportunity!
Passive damage is one of my favorite ways to play Risk of Rain 2
I love how in this clip, my passive lightning-emitting item is launching missiles and spraying lava at enemies. I have an item that causes me to do so when damaging enemies, and indeed that means all damage I deal, no matter the source. This comforting reliability, that any special bonus to attacks I pick up applies to all forms attack allows me to play the game in whatever way I want. If I prefer to use the shotgun, I can. If I want to focus on passive damage, I can. If orbital strikes are more my thing, that works too.
I do love those orbital strikes.
Another example of this from Risk of Rain 2 that I love are the mobility items. The Hopoo Feather allows your character to perform a double jump, or in other words jump a second time in midair before touching the ground. If get multiple Hopoo feathers… you just get more midair jumps. In fact, I was lucky enough on my last run to get three Hopoo feathers, meaning I can jump a total of four times in one. This insane level of mobility is something many games would shy away from, the fact that Risk of Rain 2 does not makes all of its systems feel a lot more organic and reactive to the player.
Get enough items in this game, and you can basically fly.
Overall, I tend toward preferring this sort of game mechanic parity that allow unambiguous and universal interaction between mechanics. When every stacks with everything, I find it all much simpler to understand as a player. I also find it affords a lot more room for creativity in playstyle by allowing a multitude of interesting and often bizarre combinations. There’s a lot of design overhead necessary to make sure everything works together seamlessly and without jank, and not every gameplay system will be conducive to this level inter-connectivity of gameplay mechanics
Heya, I’m taking off this week for American Thanksgiving. It’s been quite rewarding writing this blog the last few months. This was initially just a personal project to get my thoughts and musings on game design in writing, something to regularly flex that muscle.
For all those who’ve visited you have my heartfelt and sincere thanks! If any of you’ve gotten anything out of my writings all the better. I hope to keep doing this for a quite a while, at least. If you’re seeing loved ones, I hope you have a nice and relaxing time. Have a good one and stay safe out there.
Sonic The Hedgehog is an exquisite corpse of a franchise with a history as deep, interesting, and confusing and some of earth’s mightiest empires. You could fill volumes on the ins and outs of this thing. I cannot deny, I love this weird little rodent and his weird little world immensely. Yes, I’m as excited as anyone for Sega’s next absurd windstorm of a Sonic title, despite all the, uh, feedback, I’m about to unleash. Sonic has had some very high highs for me, and it’s a series that does certain things in gameplay that have never quite been captured elsewhere. There’s a laundry list of things people like to complain about in regards to this series, and I’d probably agree on most fronts too. Instead of the usually suspects, though, I want to complain about something I haven’t seen brought up before. It’s something that’s been with Sonic since the beginning, actually.
I don’t know if this is something that only bothers me. Perhaps that’s why I feel the need to get this jotted down and explore my feelings about it, but the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise’s rings system is weird, right? In Sonic The Hedgehog, and near every sequel and spinoff to that game since, rings have acted as the primary collectible – a sometimes currency, sometimes score counter, and almost always a barrier against the failure state. While rings in Sonic games frequently have some use within the game that make them valuable, their primary purpose is to prevent a Game Over. When Sonic is hit by an enemy or obstacle, he’ll lose all the rings he’s collected, spilling them out into game space, where they can be re-collected. If Sonic is again hit without any rings, the failure state engages, and Sonic is returned to the last checkpoint.
To elaborate on what bothers me about this system I went and tried to elaborate on what makes a compelling health or damage system in general. To me, there are three things to guide the design of a successful player health system. A successful health system may include one or all of these. First, the health system provides a balance knob by which the designer may tune how many mistakes a player can make before incurring a greater failure state like a Game Over. It makes for a pretty simple tool to balance the game. If it’s too hard, players can simply be given more health or ways to restore their health. Furthermore, this balance can change as the player collects upgrades and gets stronger, or encounters more deadly enemies. It’s good for tuning the interest curve. Secondly, health systems can create a sense of tension or danger, to shore up the threat of the player’s opposition. Instant death makes for threatening enemies too, but that little bit of anticipation a more graduated health system provides, as the player slowly watches their strength wane with each hit they incur, it exaggerates and emphasizes that danger. Third, health systems can be used to incentivize players in interesting ways to guide the gameplay, by tweaking how it is that players regain or maintain their health through specific behaviors. Doom 2016’s glory kills, which reward aggression when the player is low on health, comes to mind.
So how does the blue blur do on all of these fronts? Well, the ring system is rather limited in that having rings only prevents Sonic’s defeat through a single mistake, before more rings have to be collected. In this way it doesn’t do much for balance. By virtue of how the system works, rings are always available when you get hit, unless you’re over a bottomless pit and will just die from the fall regardless. Rings are also plentiful enough in the world that tense moments of danger are few and far between. This is a good thing in a sense, Sonic is a game about flow and freedom, less one about oppression or danger. The result, though, is often that getting hit is just annoying – a disruption to that flow- more than anything else. Sonic gets a lot of its somewhat undeserved reputation of excessive simplicity from this. It’s hard to fail (instant death traps aside), and very easy to get annoyed.
I feel like this ‘scattering rings everywhere’ thing works better in the 2D games, generally. With one less axis to worry about, it feels less restrictive.
Finally, rings are indeed a highly incentivizing aspect of Sonic games, especially those of which have a store in which rings can be exchanged for prizes, although this brings up an important point. I feel as though rings are desirable more for their excellent audio-visual design and feedback. It’s fun simply to hear and see the cheery, shiny sound and sparks of collecting them, and watching the ring counter go up, rather than for any practical gameplay reason. The reason for this is that collecting an excess of rings does very little to contribute towards the player’s success. Sure, having a certain minimum number of rings makes it far less likely you won’t be able to pick up another ring before it disappears, once the player gets hit. However, there is a maximum number of rings that can actually be displayed on screen before any excess rings simply evaporate. You get no real advantages having 200 rings over having 20 rings. So, Sonic‘s health system doesn’t do much to incentivize interesting gameplay. On the contrary, actually, since having a single ring can theoretically keep Sonic alive indefinitely, the player isn’t really incentivized to learn about their obstacles or enemies because getting hit doesn’t have much of an impact or consequence. Some Sonic games have attempted to address this, by having Sonic only lose a fraction of his ring total on hit. The results are a similarly toothless health system, in which hoarding large numbers of rings essentially trivializes any threat enemies could possibly pose, without addressing any of my other issues with the system.
Stop to pick them up, or ignore them and keep going. Kind of just pointless or disruptive.
One thought I’ve had on it is how starkly getting hit in this game kills momentum. I get it, it’s kind of the point. In lieu of a persistent tracker for how many mistakes the player makes, getting hit simply means halting forward motion, which means you don’t hit that all important state of flow that makes Sonic games so enjoyable. That annoyance is your incentive to get better at avoiding obstacles. At the same time though, if that’s what we assume the player wants – to go fast- then it is odd that rings are scattered around the player when they’ve bit hit at random, or in the case of the 3D games, in every direction on the floor. Surely, we only want to incentivize the player to go in one direction – forward. If a player wants to re-collect some of their lost rings, as they surely would, then they can’t immediately continue their forward momentum where they left off, they have to take a moment to mill about collecting the rings. It’s just a bit odd. Elsewhere in Sonic games, free-floating rings are used as signposts to guide that sense of forward momentum for the player. If you see a path of rings, it’s generally a clear and safe path forward to gaining speed.
Sonic Heroes loves to kill forward momentum. It’s basically its favorite thing.
Losing rings normally does not create much of a sense of tension for me either. Getting hit in a Sonic game rarely creates any palpable danger for Sonic, outside of falling into instant death pits. This all-or-nothing approach makes enemies in Sonic games rather toothless, until they aren’t in very specific scenarios, which can often feel cheap – as though the difference between losing some rings and having to start over is outside of the player’s control. You lose any sense that dangerous things in the world are actually dangerous, and more like the environments are dangerous in a way that’s almost arbitrary.
Are we really expecting the player to double back and chase those rings here?
What if, instead of spraying rings in every direction, when Sonic is hit, rings fly out ahead of Sonic relative to the direction he’s moving, so that when it comes time to re-collect rings, Sonic needs to keep moving forward in the direction he was going? He needs to regain his lost speed to regain what was lost. First of all this make sense. If Sonic is losing speed and letting go of his rings at the same time, they should logically pour out in front of him as they retain their previous speed. That’s a secondary concern, but not an unimportant one. I think making the rings behave realistically that way could contribute to keeping the gameplay flow even when Sonic gets hit, which is my primary concern here. The main thing this would accomplish is keeping the re-collection of lost rings as a harmonious part of simply playing the game, which is to say, running forward. Sonic is all about doing things while running forward – defeating enemies while running, avoiding traps while running, and yes, collecting rings while running. In this scenario not only is there a greater challenge, a greater uncertainty of re-collecting what was lost that calls on player skill, but it’s far less disruptive, not requiring the player to behave in a less fun and interesting way as punishment for being hit. On the contrary, your punishment for being hit is a momentary increase in intensity and demand of skill, or in other words, a heightening of tension.
When I say ‘fly out ahead of sonic’, I mean send the rings into the distance, so you have to like, build up speed and run after them. Maybe we could even ease up on the ‘knock Sonic on his ass’
Sonic is as inseparable from his rings as Mario is from his coins, which was the point, of course, when Sonic was invented in the 90s. Sonic was meant as a counterpoint to Mario, to stand out as different. He’s younger, faster, and has an attitude. His game is about speed, and his collectibles serve as health, in a way. It’s certainly novel enough to have survived about a billion iterations on Sonic games, but I’ve never totally understood how it fits in a game that’s about speed. Everything good that I love about the Sonic franchise is somewhat apart from this one odd yet oddly persistent gameplay mechanic. The classics like Sonic can provide a useful lens to see how certain design goals can be successfully executed. However, I’d never want to design something in a way just because that’s how it’s always been done. The weird ring system has its advantages, like near any mechanic in the right circumstances, but I’m still skeptical it’s the best solution for what Sonic is and could be.
Don’t give up on the sun. Don’t make the sun laugh at you…
Mega Man X, released in 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, marked a big step forward for its sister-series Mega Man, as well as for 2D action games in general. It’s a game about robots, fighting robots, with cool weapons and powers. The protagonist of Mega Man X was cooler, sleeker, just a liiiiiiiittle bit more Bladerunner (maybe like 10%) and slightly less Astro Boy. The titular Mega Man X was made to be stronger, faster, more capable than his older predecessor. Nowhere was this made more apparent than in the movement system, which included two new movement mechanics, the Dash, and the Wall Jump.
The fighting robot Mega Man, starting with Mega Man 3, is able to slide, which changes his hitbox for registering enemy attacks to a wider, shorter rectangle, meaning it could be used to dodge certain projectiles, while also making him move slightly faster in quick bursts. The Mega Man X dash was an evolution of this, retaining the change in hitbox while also greatly magnifying the speed of the ability. It was made more powerful in that sense, but also made more generally useful with an additional technique. Jumping out of the Mega Man X Dash would allow the player to clear greater distances with their jump, as the Dash’s bonus speed would not dissipate until they hit the ground or a wall from said jump.
The protagonist of Mega Man X can jump into a wall, cling to it, and slowly sliding down its length. When jumping from this wall slide, he can gain additional height by jumping off the wall. The interesting thing, is that because of the high degree of aerial maneuverability in this game, it’s possible to change direction mid-air immediately after a wall jump, and reattach to the wall at a higher elevation, effectively allowing the player to climb any vertical surface. This is known as the Wall Kick. 2D action games, obviously, have two axis of movement, though generally one access is rather strictly limited, the vertical axis. The Wall Kick gives a vector of control over this space while maintaining the advantages of limitation through gravity have on the game world. Giving the player a limited method by which they can break the rules of gravity offers the overall design a certain dynamism. The player now has two modes of operation they can switch between on the fly without even thinking about it – aerial oriented and ground oriented.
Secrets and extra areas like this are littered all over the place, giving the levels a rewarding sense of scale
These two moves, simple though they are, were designed intentionally to be extremely powerful, and extremely dynamic by giving them a huge possibility space with a wide range of use cases. Wall climbing can be used to avoid attacks near the ground, to reach hidden areas, or to get over and behind a troublesome enemy. The dash can be used like a dodge to quickly position the player out of harms way, to clear a level faster by stringing dashes together, or to clear large horizontal spaces with the dash jump. Those are just a few examples. With such a broad range of possibilities, this empowerment of the player greatly raises the skill ceiling of this games, making mastery more rewarding, while broadening what can be done in the design of levels and bosses. It’s the applicability of these moves, in particular that widens the possibility space. Mega Man X can climb any vertical surface, and dash at any time. Because these moves are always available, the game needs to be designed with them always in mind.
From here, bosses start to incorporate this possibility space into the overall plan. If a player is made more powerful, in this case given a broader degree of control over their position in 2D space, then the environment needs to be designed to both accommodate and interact with that power. You’ll notice a lot more verticality in the level design of Mega Man X over Mega Man. Trees, tall buildings, and aircraft are common. The original series did play with vertical movement from time to time, but mostly in the form of moving platforms and falling – not things the player had much control over.
Chill Penguin here is pretty simple, but at least the extra verticality gives him more to do than just running back and forth across the screen
With this added degree of control comes added obstacles. A Mega Man game in which enemies never posed a threat to you while wall-climbing would mean losing the game’s notable blend of combat and traversal for the sake of this new mechanic. Rather than make it incongruous, the Wall Kick feels like a natural extension of Mega Man‘s movement systems, that flows with the established gameplay. What’s more, by introducing threats and problems to solve in the context of using the Wall Kick, the Wall Kick is made to have functional, practical application in and out of combat.
Tall shafts like this become a lot more common as the series goes on. I feel like a ninja!
I know the title of this piece says Mega Man X, but the Mega Man series, overall shows an increasing level of acuity when it comes to making use of the Wall Kick and Dash abilities. The story and general gameplay aesthetic of Mega Man X continued on to the Gameboy Advanced Mega Man Zero titles, as well as the Nintendo DS Mega Man ZX titles, which are direct sequels to the Mega Man X series, despite the change in subtitle. Faster and snappier than ever in both control and combat design, they really illustrate the limits to which the Wall Kick and Dash can really push Mega Man. Mega Man X itself has some fun and memorable bosses, but they only scratch the surface of how the new movement can be leveraged to make new and more interesting boss encounters. X and others like him will find themselves climbing walls to reach weak points, ducking projectiles, and clashing with inhumanly fast foes as the series goes on.
Killing robo goons from below just never gets old. It’s all so seamless
Bosses like Deathtanz Mantisk (which, incidentally, may be the single best name for a boss enemy in any video game ever made. I’m serious. Just, try saying it out loud. You’ll see.) utilize vertical space in really interesting ways, creating a counterpoint to the player’s ability to climb walls. Now not only can the player climb walls, which is fun, but they can outmaneuver their foes by doing so, which is fun and empowering! When this terrifying death-robot zooms across the screen, narrowly missing Mega Man Zero with a razor-sharp scythe blade, as the player readjusts their position with a dash, the sensation of taking part in a sci-fi-anime-robot-battle becomes very real. A high-powered player character creates high-powered situations, if the enemy and level design rises to meet these elevated powers.
Very few games make me feel as capable as a good Mega Man
The best part of all of this is that Dashing augments the Wall Kick, meaning both of these maneuvers can be used in concert to an even more powerful effect. Using to verticality to your advantage is powerful. Moving great distances in quick bursts is powerful. So, moving great distances in quick bursts through vertical space is extremely powerful. Mega Man is able to populate its many entries with some of the most visually impactful and fluidly playing boss encounters in the business leveraging the possibilities allotted by this high level of player power. Growing up on these games, they’ve had a big influence on me, and I tend to, when designing, leaning towers player empowerment. The more powerful a player is, in a practical and broadly applicable way, the more room there is in the design to do crazy and surprising stuff with environmental and enemy encounters. Because Mega Man can traverse so much vertical space so easily, there needs to be wild, sprawling vertical spaces filled with interesting things to see and do, things that wouldn’t be possible if he were more strictly adhered to the ground. There’s something to be said for more limited player power depending on the overall design goals, of course, but Mega Man very succinctly shows the design advantages of allowing the player a great deal of power.
Omega’s encounter has no walls on which to climb, although this is because, as an early boss, he exists to teach you the merits of ducking and jumping projectiles with the dash
The simple combination of a dash and a powerful yet limited method for traversing vertical space has become an extremely effective tool for 2D action games in creating elaborate and spectacular combat systems. It’s no surprise to see surprise to see spins on it utilized in such titles as Hollow Knight, Azure Striker: Gunvolt, and Super Meat Boy. It’s just a very elegant way to give the player a way to leverage the huge amount of air control they have in those games for interesting combat and traversal scenarios. Metroid has been exploring its own take on this concept to similar effect since 1991, actually two years prior to the release of Mega Man X, but no series has quite so thoroughly explored its possibilities as that of the blue bomber.
I love parrying things in video games. You might have already guessed that. I’m always looking for how and why things work or don’t work in games, so I have a particular interest in one of my favorite gameplay mechanics, the parry. So what is a parry? In the context of an action game, I’d define it as a maneuver the player can execute on the fly to nullify incoming damage and disarm enemy defenses, which requires an acute execution of timing to succeed. Commonly, it’s a button press that initiates a short window of animation during which, if an enemy attack connects with the player character, the parry activates. After considering how to approach the design of this gameplay mechanic, I’ve decided there are three pillars of a good parry mechanic: usability, versatility, and impact.
Usability describes the practicality, from the player’s perspective, of actually using the parry at all. How restrictively difficult is the timing necessary to succeed in using one? Is the risk of using the parry worth the reward? How necessary is the use of this parry to succeeding within the game? Are there other specific considerations like spacing that make the parry more or less practical?
Versatility describes the frequency of general use cases for the parry. Can the parry be used to deflect any attack encountered in the game, or is it limited in some way? Can even large and powerful enemies be parried? Do you need a specific weapon or in-game skill to use the parry? Is the parry’s reward worth forgoing a more straightforwardly offensive approach?
Impact is at the center of what makes me want to use a parry. A parry can be powerful, but ultimately I am motivated to use it by how fun it is. What’s the audio-visual feedback of a successful parry like? Do I get a rush from disarming my opponent, or is the reward for parrying barely noticeable? Does it make me feel powerful? Does it make me feel skilled?
FromSoftware or FromSoft is a Japanese game developer well known for their popular action games, all of which in recent memory include a parry of some kind. I want to run through three of their flagship titles, the original Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and analyze their respective parry mechanics through this lens I’ve come up with to see how it can be applied to specific cases.
The parry mechanic in Dark Souls is an interesting beast. A favorite of the game’s more hardcore fans but, in my experience, one that new and even many veteran players ignore completely. It’s powerful, and it’s fun to use once you get the hang of it, but that’s kind of the problem, it’s not very fun to learn to use, and many players will not bother with it, as it is far from essential to completing the game. I’ve found most friends I’ve introduced to the game simply ignore the utility of parrying, or try it once and discard it in favor of the game’s more developed mechanics.
Though powerful, the parry in Dark Souls is stiff, restrictive, and difficult to master
The parry in Dark Souls suffers severely from a lack of usability and versatility. Usability, as I explained, is my concept of how practical it is for a player to actually execute your parry maneuver consistently and successfully. Firstly, this parry is not universally available – the player must be wielding a small or medium sized shield in their off-hand. Given the wide and varied options of character customization in this game, it’s possible a player won’t be using a shield at all. I think the greatest source of dissuasion for using this mechanic, though, is how difficult it is to succeed with it. Dark Souls has a very specific and narrow window of time at which a parry will succeed. An enemy’s attack must connect with the player character during this 6 frame window – that’s one fifth of a second. Needless to say, it is a difficult mark to hit. Now, with practice one can hone in on Dark Souls‘ very consistent and reproducible rhythm. Not every enemy attacks with the same timing, but they all share a fairly general pattern of wind-up, swing, and follow-through. Once you get it, you’ll find parrying a pretty consistent tool.
Failing to parry can result in incurring massive damage, and its timing is excessively strict
However, the skill floor to reaching this point of consistency is restrictive, even by this game’s standards. Given how great the risk is of failing a parry in this game, and how the game itself trains players to be extremely risk-averse with enemies that deal massive amounts of damage when interrupting player actions, players are naturally disinclined to even take those risks. Thus, they’ll not learn the parry timing. What’s more, most enemies can be thoroughly dispatched, with far lesser risk, by simply striking them down with your favorite weapon or spell when the foe’s defenses are down, between their attacks. I conclude that the parry in Dark Souls is not entirely practical, or usable without a great deal of personal investment, time, and effort most players will find better spent in learning the nuances of movement, dodging, and attacking. These options are far more practical, realistically, even if the parry becomes very powerful once one masters it.
The impact of this parry is intense, and intensely reward, so it’s a shame it’s so hard to use
This would be enough turn off most players from the mechanic on its own, but the move also struggles in the versatility department, meaning the frequency of its general use cases. Dark Souls is filled with enemies that can be parried – essentially any enemy that can suffer a backstab. I’d always say that any enemy with an obvious spine that your player character can reach can probably be backstabbed and parried, as a general rule of thumb. Not every enemy matches this criteria though, and nearly none of the game’s 25 boss encounters do either. Boss encounters are a major part of this game, and something players will be spending a lot of time on. They’re also notoriously among the game’s most difficult and high-intensity segments. Since parrying is useless in those encounters, it further disincentivizes paying the mechanic any time or energy. If you can’t use a move for a game’s greatest challenges, what worth is it? Any real world skill building towards parry mastery is, objectively, better spent on other things, if finishing the game is your goal.
I like using the Dark Souls parry – it’s got excellent impact. A harrowing low boom sound effect accompanies its successful use. Parried enemies reel in a wide, exaggerated swooping animation, soon to be followed by a riposte that drives a weapon straight through them, gushing comical amounts of blood (if the foe has blood). It all really accentuates the player’s power and superior skill over the opponent. The totality of the audio-visual feedback here is excellent, it’s just a shame so few will ever get to actually see it. The move is simply not useful to a significant portion of the player base.
When a mechanic like this goes so underutilized by your players, the designer might ask themselves what’s causing this discrepancy, and what can be done to address it.
In Bloodborne, FromSoft wanted to shift to a more action-oriented system, less about patient and considered movements, more about reaction and aggression, as compared to Dark Souls‘ more traditional RPG inspired roots. As part of this shift, the parry in Bloodborne was made to be more of a central mechanic than in Dark Souls, something to be expected of the player regularly throughout combat encounters. So that means getting players to actually use it. First, FromSoft needed to address usability. Bloodborne‘s parry is unique in that it takes the form of a projectile. This accomplishes two things. One, it makes accounting for space exceedingly easy for players. Dark Souls was fairly strict about where player and opponent were standing for a parry to successfully work. In Bloodborne, if an enemy is shot during the tail end of its attack animation, it will be parried, no matter its distance from the player. Two, this means the player does not have to put themselves in direct danger to parry, as an enemy can be parried even if their attack is very unlikely to actually hit the player. The risk to parrying now feels much more proportional to the benefit, making it a valid alternative to just wildly attacking.
Even when incurring damage, it’s possible to parry in Bloodborne, the mechanic is forgiving
As the timing for Bloodborne‘s parry is now timed to the enemy‘s attack, and a moving projectile, rather than lining up the player’s parry animation with the enemy’s animation, the player really only has to track one movement, the enemy’s. Together, these elements remove a ton of cognitive blocks on actually using Bloodborne‘s parry system, so its usability is extremely effective by comparison. Bloodborne‘s parry is also extremely versatile. When looking at the 30 or so bosses in the game, about 15 of them can be parried, roughly half, making mastery of the parry a far more effective tool in way more situations than it was in Dark Souls. Bloodborne doesn’t shirk in the impact department either. The same familiar boom sound effect accompanies a success, and can be followed up with a violent and beastly visceral attack that grabs the enemy’s insides, twists them, and rips out a huge gush of blood, knocking the foe to the ground and stumbling nearby enemies. The player hunter’s sense of superiority over their prey is the focus.
Even the biggest and burliest can be parried, and at a distance too!
The Dark Souls parry had another issue I didn’t mention; if you did master it, and made it a consistent tool in your arsenal, many enemies outside of boss encounters become exceedingly easy to deal with, even if they are still fun to beat. Nevertheless, this runs the risk of the move becoming too powerful, especially if it’s easier to use. FromSoft’s solution to this was to make parry attempts a limited resources. This elegantly maintains the risk of attempting a parry, while assuaging the frustration of losing one’s own progress as a result of said risk. There’s still some risk of injury to a failed parry, but it’s much less likely than in previous games, most of the risk is the parry-centric resource of quicksilver bullets.
If Bloodborne made parrying a more central mechanic, then Sekiro made parrying a core mechanic, one of the primary action verbs of the game. Parrying is most of what you do in combat. Formally, the Sekiro move is called ‘deflection’.
To accomplish its design goals, Sekiro‘s parry is made to be even more accessible and low-risk than Bloodborne‘s. A deflection can be directly transitioned into from a block (which itself nullifies incoming damage), and a block can be transitioned to directly from a deflection. Both ‘block’ and ‘deflect’ are activated with the same button, block is simply the result of holding it. Deflections are initiated when the button is compressed, not when it is lifted, so erring on early deflections makes the maneuver even safer – deflections that fail for being used too soon simply result in a block. No damage is taken either way. The limiting resources of Bloodborne are gone here, at least for parries, so player’s will often find themselves using the deflection move even more than they attack, but this was the goal. Sekiro aims to evoke the back-and-forth clanging of cinematic sword fights, and the game is built around the interest of deflecting a series of attacks in quick succession. Any one given deflection is easy, but the difficulty can be smoothly ramped up by stringing a sequence of them together.
Sekiro conditions the player to use a series of parries as a defensive, and offensive tool
We’ve come a long way since Dark Souls, with a skill floor that is extremely approachable, without sacrificing the skill ceiling. Where the parry window of Dark Souls was only 6 frames, one fifth of a second, Sekiro‘s deflection window starts at the extremely generous, by comparison, half-second. This deflection window decays in size if the player abuses the deflect button. Deflecting rapidly and repeatedly causes the window to shrink down to only a small fraction of a second. The goal is to make any given deflection easy, but the player is encouraged to use their own powers of reaction and prediction, rather than relying on spamming the button. Even still, this window decay is also generous, as the deflection’s full capability is restored after only a half second of not using it.
All this to say, Sekiro has extremely generous usability for its deflection mechanic. It has to, as deflection is the primary tool for defeating enemies in this game. Were it as restrictive as the parry in Dark Souls or even Bloodborne, it would be an exercise in frustration. To counterbalance this, the individual reward for one Sekiro deflection is much lesser, and you need to do a lot of deflections to add up to a bigger reward.
Sekiro is a masterclass in parry versatility. The deflection maneuver is applicable to nearly every encounter in the game. It’s extremely generally useful, so much so that exceptions, attacks which cannot be deflected, are unlikely to be deflected, or require other special maneuvers to deflect, are given their own glowing red UI graphic to further make them stand out. Outside of that, if it deals damage, it can be deflected by the player’s sword, near-universally. Formalizing what can and can’t be parried in this way is also helpful for usability, as it removes guesswork on the part of the player.
When deflecting successfully, right orange sparks fly like a firework cracker was set off as a cacophony of metal sounds clang in satisfying unison. The audio-visual feedback for a successful deflection is actually kind of subtle, compared to simply blocking. It is merely a heightened, more intense version of the block visuals, just distinct enough to unambiguously be its own separate function to ensure players know when they’re succeeding, but similar enough to not be distracting. This makes sense, as players are expected to deflect a lot of attacks in any given encounter. A series of successful deflections looks and sounds like a larger-than-life battle of master swordsmen, with sparks showering about amidst the metal clanging. When an enemy has finally been deflected past the limits of their endurance, Sekiro will delight players with some of the most lavishly animated executions in video games, anything from the tried and true gut-stab, to decapitating a gorilla with a hatchet the size of a refrigerator, to gingerly extracting tears from a dragon’s occular injury. The impact of Sekiro‘s parry system is not only good, but usually proportional to each situation, even though the overall impact of any one given deflection is not super intense.
It’s clear somebody at FromSoftware loves parrying things almost as much as I do. It’s a common mechanic for a reason, giving players an area of skill to strive for mastery over, which reinforces a sense of power. Few things can make a player feel more powerful than successfully turning enemy attacks against them. Over the course of these three games, FromSoft has made parrying more and more central to the experience, to the point of it becoming the main point of focus for Sekiro. It’s clear there was an awareness of how neglected parrying was in Dark Souls among casual players, and even some veterans. They needed to find ways to make using it more attractive, without sacrificing the sense of power it imparted, the thing that makes it fun in the first place. While the Dark Souls parry has its flaws, I’m glade they persisted in iterating on it. I think Sekiro and bloodborne have two of the most consistently fun combat systems out there, and the excellence of their respective parry mechanics are a huge part of that, in Sekiro especially, which deserves its own write-up, eventually. The metrics I’ve come up with here to assess parry mechanics are just the way I look at things, though. It’s useful to look at design through a variety of lenses. So the next time you stab some zombie in the face after battering its arm away like you’re in a kung-fu movie, think about why and how that maneuver works the way it does.
Alright to finish off Spooky Month I’ve got to talk about the spookiest game franchise there is; Luigi’s Mansion. It’s the superlative. There is no other. That’s science. Luigi’s Mansion is an action adventure game (does that mean anything?).. Luigi’s Mansion is a spooky ghost-catching action game centered around methodically exploring a creepy mansion whilst engaging in periodic encounters of high-action ghost-hunting that punctuate the gloom. It released in September 2001 for the Nintendo GameCube, received a sequel in March 2013 titled Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon for the Nintendo 3DS, and a second sequel, Luigi’s Mansion 3, in October 2019 for the Nintendo Switch. All the games’ action plays similar on the surface, involving a lot of running around, bumping into things while you fight ghosts in a tug-of-war scenario. They’ll drag you around the room, and you’ll suck them up by the tail with a vacuum cleaner. The player can lean Luigi around in different directions to have a limited control of his movement while the ghosts try to escape his vacuum. Leaning away from the ghosts drains their energy faster, and poor movement control might let the ghost escape. The combat of Luigi’s Mansion is easy to grasp and instantly satisfying. What I’m interested in though, is how the simple systems were iterated on in its followups. In particular, why I found the combat of Luigi’s Mansion 3 so blase so often.
The game doesn’t look that bad for being over 20 years old. At least I didn’t use the 3DS version.
Aha, yes. Plot twist, I actually think the combat in Luigi’s Mansion3 is pretty weak in comparison to its predecessors. The games play mostly the same, and there aren’t that many elements in play here, relatively speaking, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to suss out what’s going on here. Luigi’s Mansion 3 introduced a mechanic called the slam to Luigi’s arsenal, which allows him to, after vacuuming a particular ghost for a short time, repeatedly slam the ghost into the ground, in any direction, stunning and damaging other ghosts while annihilating his main target’s energy. It quickly becomes a one-size-fits-all solution to any ghost altercation outside of boss fights, and isn’t an especially engaging mechanic on its own.
My brain cells preparing to critique one of the Nintendo Switch’s most critically acclaimed games
Luigi’s Mansion 3 was never going to miss out on its well-earned popularity for lack of a more considered difficulty curve. Being too easy isn’t exactly the problem I have. Luigi’s Mansion 3 was always going to be popular because it is one of the most lavishly produced, polished, and animated Mario games of all time. I don’t really think Luigi’s Mansion 3 has bad combat. On the contrary, I think one among the many reasons for Luigi’s Mansion 3‘s notable anticipation was due to its less talked about predecessor’s proof of concept. It showed that the off-beat, frankly weird gameplay of Luigi’s Mansion was a formula with staying power that had room to grow as a robust system. Indeed, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon doesn’t quite get the credit it deserves for what it contributed to the notoriety and design ethos of Luigi’s Mansion. Luigi’s Mansion 3‘s combat has its basis in Dark Moon and works well enough as a result. Dark Moon is where most of the changes to the formula came from and they are for the most part, positives.
The strobulb is Dark Moon‘s first prominent addition. Where in the first game, sweeping one’s flashlight over a ghost’s exposed eyes was sufficient to stun it and open it up for being captured, Dark Moon requires an active button press. The light will flash brightly, and anything caught in its cone will be stunned. The strobulb can also be charged up for a wider flash that is less likely to miss its mark, and has the added bonus of hitting many more ghosts at once. The original GameCube game made stunning ghosts in this way passive – simply sweeping the light over them is sufficient. Speaking of passivity, I liked the way the first two games in this series made defeating ghosts such a concerted effort. They would drag Luigi about the room, possibly ramming him into obstacles. The player’s own control input was the only thing stopping them. Admittedly this aspect of being dragged around a room began to be de-emphasized in Dark Moon, and that trend continued in 3.
Finished in a flash … *cough*
On the flip side, Dark Moon added the power surge ability, which would let Luigi deal extra damage to a ghost he had been focused on for a certain amount of time, uninterrupted. Adding this simple additional button prompt helps keep the player feeling like an active participate, among other advantages like rewarding skilled play. The slam move is an iteration of the power surge, whereas now pressing the button after focusing on a ghost will slam it into the ground for massive damage, and this can be repeated multiple times on one charge. The move is so powerful and repetitive I often found myself passively clearing rooms of ghosts without thinking much of it.
That’s not to say that passively oriented gameplay is inherently a negative. There’s plenty of passive gameplay in Luigi’s Mansion anyway. It’s an atmospheric piece about slowly creeping through an abandoned estate. If action is half of what you do, the other half is kind of just wandering around, albeit in a extremely realized world dripping with personality. The point is, the action could stand to have some active engagement to accentuate and contrast the more low key exploration. I think something that made the original GameCube game’s spooks stand out as so, well, spooky was how legitimately threatening ghosts could be, and how that threat made a real intrusion upon the quiet tension of Luigi’s nervous wanderings. Luigi’s reactions are telling me that I should be elevating my heart rate when ghosts appear, after all. The ghosts need to pose a legitimate threat.
Ghosts’ erratic movements can reposition Luigi into obstacles if you’re not careful
Luigi’s Mansion 3 is not lacking for interesting boss fights that feel legitimately threatening, but while bosses are often a highlight of their games, moments that stick out as particularly exciting or memorable, they’re not what you’re going to be doing in an adventuring game like Luigi’s Mansion 80% of the time. If most of what you do is fighting mooks, or if even half of what you do is fighting mooks, fighting those mooks may as well be fun, or at minimum engaging. I found the slam ability’s overwhelming power and utility distracting from this. I wasn’t engaging the core Luigi’s Mansion experience like I used to. I missed those chaotic tugs of war. What’s more, the animation for this maneuver just looks… wrong. I did mention this is among the most lavishly animated Mario games ever, and it completely is. There’s some real talent and attention to detail on display here, so it’s kind of confusing how strange the transition is on this loop of Luigi slamming the ground. The way he’s leaning his weight around just doesn’t make much visual sense. It looks much more like he’s supposed to shift from slamming on one side to the other, yeah? The natural motion here would be for him to swing the grappled ghost over his head. This is fairly obvious if you go out of your way to alternate what side of Luigi you’re slamming the ghost on.
The biggest problem, though, is in how powerful the slam move is, relative to how easy it is to use. The power surge mechanic in Dark Moon only served to accentuate and accelerate the flow of gameplay as it happened. An enemy with a piddling 10 hp is probably going to be captured by a skilled Luigi pretty quickly regardless, so the addition of the power surge mechanic would let a skilled player skip that extra 5 hp at the tail end of the engagement – we all knew they’d get through it no problem anyway. In this way it’s a reward for skilled play that keeps things smooth and flowing, but it doesn’t overtake the game’s main combat mechanics, it merely augments them. The slam, on the other hand, functionally replaces the combat of Luigi’s Mansion as it had existed up to the point of Luigi’s Mansion 3. It’s not a extra tool that augments gameplay, it’s a sledgehammer that is overwhelmingly more powerful than engaging with the game’s other tug-of-war mechanics. More often that not, the goals of struggling in a ghostly suction-y duel are shuffled aside for the goal of simply reaching the point where you can start slamming which, while rewarding in its own way, gets awfully repetitive in how readily available it is. It begins to homogenize the combat encounters of the game.
The slam animation loops really awkwardly, and IT DOESN’T SUCK UP GHOSTS WHAT?!
I have to touch on the fact that when defeating a ghost using the slam, it does not, I repeat, does not, get sucked into Luigi’s vacuum. Defeating ghosts in Luigi‘s Mansion near-universally results in the ghost’s malleable body getting all smushed into the mouth of the device, before disappearing into it with a satisfying slurp and *pop* sound. Delightfully expressive flails of panic from the victimized ghosts accompany. It’s the punctuation of ultimate victory over your foe. The cherry on top. The fullest realization of the fantasy of Luigi’s Mansion– being a ghost hunter. Any and all dark spirits no matter their might may be laid low before the great equalizer of an overcharged vacuum cleaner. There’s little more satisfying than that in the game. The idea that the most powerful move in Luigi’s Mansion 3 is also the only way to dispense with ghosts without that oh so sweet final animation of a ghost being sucked away into oblivion is utterly baffling to me. How is a ghost even destroyed? Is that not the point? They’re already dead, so you need to capture them with a device, right?
Ahhh, that feels better
This may seem like a minor point, but I cannot under-emphasize the importance of nailing the aesthetics of your game to work in concert with its mechanics. Would Luigi’s Mansion be as fun if everyone and everything were replaced with featureless blobs? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think its as fun if it’s missing even this one crucial animation and sound effect. Destroying ghosts just doesn’t feel right compared to capturing them in this setting. Imagine your favorite tense or emotional scene from your favorite dramatic game, or movie. Now imagine it set against the backdrop of this music. I just cannot reconcile the incongruence here. If you defeat a boss ghost with Luigi’s slam ability, the ghost-getting-sucked-into-a-vacuum-cleaner animation plays in its entirety, because of course it does. Why is this not the case for regular ghosts, whom you will be encountering far more often? It throws off the whole vibe of the game, so I have to physically restrain myself from using the most powerful tool in Luigi’s arsenal if it would finish off a foe, and that feels terrible.
Ahhhh, one more for good measure. So satisfying
Now if this sounds pretty harsh, don’t worry, because this is the part where I shower praise on the slam mechanic, as it is not a bad concept by any stretch. One of the greatest strengths of Luigi’s Mansion is its slapstick and cartoonish aesthetic. Action in these games quickly becomes outlandish and comedic as kitchenware flies off of shelves, vases are smashed, and tablecloths go whipping about in the scuffle. The thought of a struggle with Luigi escalating to the point that he’s literally slamming stubborn ghosts over his head like he’s hammering a tent peg into the ground is inherently hilarious, and perfectly congruous with the game’s general feel. Having this big and bombastic move to build up to gives every encounter a concurrent goal alongside simply ‘defeat all the ghosts’. It does potentially offer an interesting choice between slamming ghosts or simply sucking them, were it rebalanced to make the latter method more viable. The addition of an attack specifically for dealing with large crowds of ghosts also fills a niche in Luigi’s moveset that could allow for a far more varied and interesting array of encounter designs.
There are so many possibilities. Ghosts that wear armor which needs to be slammed into pieces before they can be properly captured, ghosts that can only be captured after they’ve been slammed into water, ghosts that only take damage if other enemies are slammed into them, rooms full huge numbers of ghosts that are best dealt with using the slam to thin out their tanks. The list of goes on and on. If it were just a little less frequent, if it were just a little less powerful, if it didn’t replace the more seamless power surge ability, and if it were just a little more in line audio-visual-wise with the rest of the game (by which I mean, allow the slam to suck up regular ghosts like it does bosses), I’d probably be over the (dark) moon for this addition to Luigi’s repertoire. The point is, the slam is a potentially excellent addition that fumbles in the execution.
Personally, I think a slam in this scenario would’ve been a bit excessive
What’s frustrating about this, is that Dark Moon had already figured out how best to implement this. In the game, there are instances where the power surge technique can charge up to multiple levels, by spending more uninterrupted time connected to a particular ghost. In essence, by proving you are able to keep up with a ghost for a longer period of time, you are rewarded with a great amount of damage you can ‘skip’. A longer charge yields greater damage, but also requires making a meaningful decision as to whether hanging out for a little longer for a little extra damage is worth it. Why not implement the slam in a similar way? After suctioning a ghost for a short period of time, you could power surge to get some extra damage. Useful for quickly dispatching small ghosts, or for pumping the damage on a ghost you’re not totally sure you can hang onto much longer. If you can, however, stay connected for a decently long period of time, you can instead slam them for much greater damage, and the added bonus of stunning and damaging other nearby ghosts. This implementation would be a lot less repetitive by making the slam more specialized, requiring a greater investment of time and risk to perform. By specializing the slam more, you improve the flow and perceived speed of the game, because Luigi’s tug of war action with the ghosts is no longer being constantly interrupted. The slam now acts as a crescendo to more gradual and engaging interest curve within each combat encounter, while most of the benefits of the previous version of the slam remain intact with the power surge as a replacement.
Right. I’ve gone on and on about the changes to the combat formula of Luigi’s Mansion that I didn’t care for. To be clear, I did not dislike the game. It’s gorgeous, funny, and engrossing with an abundance of creativity on display. Its polish is outstanding in almost very way, but it could’ve have been even better if all of its gameplay was as overachieving. That’s the ultimate takeaway I have here. Luigi’s Mansion 3 has almost all good ideas, but not all of those ideas are executed as superbly as they could be. The way the slam ability ironically beats the game’s own combat mechanics over the head distracts from the combat’s other strengths, and moves the game away from those strengths. Luigi’s Mansion3 deserves a lot of praise for bringing one of the Mario franchise’s weirdest entries back into the limelight and to a bigger audience than ever before. I just hope they keep iterating on its quirky gameplay and don’t forget what great ideas all of its games brought to the table. I hope a new surge in its popularity doesn’t mask the fact that no game is perfect, and Luigi’s Mansion still has room to grow. Forgetting that, would be the spookiest fate of all. Happy Halloween everybody!
What do they feed you Mario Brothers anyway… Gullible Soup?
In honor of Spook month, I wanted to analyze the design of Metroid Fusion‘s arguably spookiest boss, Nightmare. Certainly a spooky name. I’m fascinated by gameplay that leaves a lasting impact on people, experiences that are remembered long after the game’s last play session. Nightmare seems to be one of those special few bosses that everyone remembers, if they’ve played the game he debuted in. There’s something viscerally haunting about Nightmare in particular that sticks with you. In a game full of terrifying encounters with predatory aliens on an isolated space station, he manages to stand out as this weird, horrific science experiment gone wrong.
In Metroid Fusion you play as galactic bounty hunter Samus, once again finding herself in the unenviable position of being trapped in isolation with ravenous alien monsters that want to eat her face. Unfortunately for them, wanting to eat Samus’s face is the leading cause of death in the Metroid universe, so the player and Samus will team up to claw their way through the abandoned space station to recoup Samus’s gear, destroy the monsters within, and blow the place to kingdom come.
To give a quick rundown of Samus’s capabilities, for those who have not played Metroid Fusion, Samus primarily does a lot of running, gunning, and jumping. Samus can jump high into the air and, at this point in this game, perform the space jump – where she can gain extra height in mid-air as much as she likes, so long as the jump button is pressed just as Samus begins to fall from the previous jump. Think a standard double jump, except with no limits. An infinite jump, a space jump, if you will. She can make herself a smaller target by curling into the morph ball form, with which she can also roll around in tight spaces. Samus can shoot horizontally in basically any position except the morph ball form. She can also aim vertically while standing or jumping, but diagonally upward or horizontally while running as well. Her primary weapon is a beam that can be charged up while moving then released for extra damage, and she has a limited stockpile of missiles she can fire in place of her beam. They do about as much damage as a full charged beam, but have expendable ammo.
Very ominous, the way you keep turning your sprite renderer on and off
It’s hard to describe what exactly Nightmare is. He’s some sort of awful military experiment with gravity manipulation. It a bio-mechanical monstrosity hooked up to a gravity device, and perhaps some sort of life support apparatus, sealed within with an ominous mask. He has very limited animation, with basically only a few details on his arms and *ahem* face to distinguish him. He kind of just stares in one direction and floats around, but visually it works because of the kind of character he is. He’s pretty horror-themed, with his thousand yard unblinking stare and immovable stance in one direction reinforcing this sort of awful, emotionless terror-machine.
The Nightmare boss fight is made up of three distinct phases that seamlessly transition from one to the other linearly as the Nightmare creature takes damage. As is often standard for 2D action games, Nightmare’s behavior pattern is actually rather simple once you break it down. In the first phase, Nightmare will only do two things. First, he’ll fire a salvo of laser projectiles that move horizontally in a line from his arms. Several are fired at once, forming an obstacle that is just high enough for Samus to be able to jump over, if they’re fired near the ground. This is complicated by the second thing he does; he will track Samus’s vertical position with his own, levitating up and down to match her “y” position on the screen. It’s not one-to-one though, Nightmare overshoots Samus’s position, and if she quickly changes her vertical place, Nightmare will have to take a moment to reorient itself as a result.
This movement creates the sense that Nightmare is an intelligent predator going out of its way to aim its deadly lasers at Samus, although in truth they aren’t aimed as such. Nightmare is repositioning its entire body to fire at Samus. This overshooting vertical motion is a simple and effective way to convey the illusion of intelligence in enemy AI. An enemy that perfect lands its shots every time, with no room for error is even simpler to implement, but it’s not very satisfying to fight against. By having Nightmare overshoot, he seems more alive, with the capability of making error, while staying motivated and on target – he tries to shoot Samus, but does not do so perfectly. Once the player can properly manipulate Nightmare’s movement, they can defeat him much more easily. One could even say that Nightmare’s movement is an extension of the player’s own as Samus. It’s always a response to how she moves, that is then disrupted by the lasers which fire on their own time, beyond the player’s control. Having mechanics interact like this instantly multiplies the number of situations that are possible, and this simple interaction alone drives the entire first phase of the fight.
There’s one more complication, however. Nightmare is immune to Samus’s weaponry on most of his body, vulnerable only at one specific weak point – his gravity device. Dodging Nightmare’s attacks in the first phase is not a terribly daunting task, as again his movement is totally lead by Samus. The position of his weak point forces you to try to manipulate him in a certain way, though, and this may put Samus in harm’s way. It’ll be easier to understand how this work by understanding how Nightmare is shaped:
Very definitely NOT shaped like a friend
As you can see, Nightmare is made up of these four primary parts, very approximately outlined here. None of the areas marked in green can take damage, but the red gravity device can. So now first phase is a game of landing your shot in that small space between his arms, which will otherwise block your fire. Seems difficult, but is thankfully alleviated somewhat by a beam upgrade Samus will have by this point in the game, which makes her shot very wide, so damaging Nightmare requires a precision, but not pinpoint precision shot from Samus. This also means hitting Nightmare is much easier with the charge beam than with missiles, ensuring the player is taking some time to charge up, and therefor interacting with Nightmare’s attack pattern as the fight goes on, none of his mechanics can go ignored. To access this weak point, Nightmare needs to be high enough in the air, and thus the ladder on the back wall Samus can use to goad him into exposing himself. This little scenario will also give the player ample time to observe and learn about how Nightmare’s movement works. If the player can successfully repeat this cycle a few times, Nightmare will activate his gravity field, and we enter phase 2.
Shaped like an enemy, even
Nightmare’s gravity field makes Samus heavier, causing her jump to get a lot less airtime, and her running movement to be a lot slower. At the same time, Nightmare will be encroaching on Samus slowly, characterizing a very off-kilter and haunting vibe. Nightmare does not track Samus’s position here, but rather simply bobs up and down a short distance. This happens rhythmically and regularly. He notable stays in his higher position for a longer time than his lower position, designed such so that the player has time to aim a beam shot at the gravity device. His lasers now fire only two at a time, so Samus’s shorter jump can clear them, but they follow their own regular timer that is desynched from Nightmare’s movement, meaning they can fire at any vertical “Y” position, so the player will have to duck or jump the lasers on the fly. This shift to a more reaction-focused mechanic reinforces a sense of being on the backfoot, of the terrifying creature closing in you, literally forcing you into a corner.
Similar pattern, new context
The method of attack remains the same here, but it’s re-contextualized, as Nightmare now moves of his own accord, meandering around like a zombie, rather than following your lead. He reminds me of a horror-movie monster, the way he sort of just vaguely shambles toward you. The fight remains simple, but the distortion of the environment, the ooze dripping from his eyes, and the ominous humming of his gravity device, along with the subtle shift of the mechanics toward reaction-based gameplay really sets the mood. The aesthetics do a lot of work here, creating a building tension going into the third face, er, I mean phase, which starts with..
AAAAAAH DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIIIIE
HOLY mother of god what IS that!? Augh, yes his mask comes off to reveal this grotesque melting abomination once you’ve destroyed the gravity device. At this point Nightmare will gradually move toward you, firing lasers in a new much more aggressive pattern, forcing Samus off the ground. If Samus tries to jump over Nightmare, he will fly off screen then back on in an attempt to ram her. Nightmare is responding to Samus’s movements again. It’s more obscure and aggressive, but still predictable. Once you understand that bosses like Nightmare are only responding to their circumstances (aka you, The Player), you can predict how they’ll react and use that to your advantage, and this applies to pretty much any AI enemy. Incidentally, this is largely how competing against real people in games works, too, although they might be a bit smarter than Nightmare. At any rate, he’s now vulnerable to missiles, so blast his exposed face to smithereens. It’s a lot easier to damage him in this phase, so it’s simultaneously cathartic as his increased aggression continues to build tension. The extra room and freedom to move about more of the arena creates a sense of a shift in tone. Samus is now in a position of greater power, and Nightmare a position of greater desperation, to match his screeching unmasked face.
Oof
It’s worth going over here a kind of ‘soft’ phase 4 for Nightmare. Nearly every boss in MetroidFusion, once defeated, releases its Core X, a parasitic creature that contains some of their power. Samus must defeat this as well, before she can breathe a sigh of relief. The Core X is a pretty simple floating target that can be taken down with a few missiles. Beam attacks don’t damage it, but they do release some health and ammo restoring items. The Core X’s behavior is to simply follow Samus’s current position, and move towards her to ram her. You’ll notice it uses that same ‘follow but overshoot’ technique Nightmare employed, except in both the horizontal “x” and vertical “y” positions. If you know to look for it, you’ll see this mode of movement in AI design everywhere. I always found these Core X encounters a very interesting kind of denouement to boss fights, where there’s still some danger, but not nearly so much, as the heightened tension eases out. It’s a pretty satisfying cap off to hard encounters, and not many games do anything similar. It’s unique.
Wobble wobble wobble
It seems to be the case that Nightmare’s design is intended to exercise all of Samus’s mobility options. The presence of a ladder on the back wall gives the player easy access to the air above Nightmare for some evasive space jumps, certain Nightmare attacks are best evaded by Samus’s famous morph ball, and a command of Samus’s ability to fire diagonally while moving gives a huge advantage in this fight. Nightmare is one of the first bosses in Metroid Fusion that really pulls together a lot of Samus’s various capabilities, and, even though he’s rather simple and straightforward, he does a great job of it. He marks the beginning of the endgame sections of Fusion, and can be a bit of skill check for people, so they may very well get stuck on him for a time. This coupled with the outstandingly horror-filled atmosphere that follows from his horrific design, reinforced by AI behavior reminiscent of a lumbering horror villain, and you’ve got a recipe for an extremely memorable encounter.
This thing is out of control. Hurry before it destroys the entire station…
It’s spooky season, and I’m gonna talk about one my favorite spooky games, Hollow Knight (Science fact: a game doesn’t have to be scary, to be spooky). I mean, hey, it’s got ghosts and zombies and curses and lots of tombstones, so it counts. Hollow Knight is a 2017 side-scrolling 2D action game. It has other genres too, but I won’t be getting into that, an interesting topic in itself. Mainly I want to look at its very elegant combat system, specifically the way it handles health and healing. In Hollow Knight you play as The Knight, a mysterious little guy wandering a vast, sprawling underground kingdom of bugs once teeming with life, now racked with curses, beasts, and sorrow. Everybody, you included, in this game is a bug, if that wasn’t clear. Lot’s of danger out there for a bug. You’ll get into plenty of scrapes, and will need a reliable way to patch yourself up after a fight. Thankfully, you obtain the ability focus pretty early on, which allows The Knight to restore health by expending a resource called SOUL.
So what design purpose does a healing spell like this serve in a game? If you think about it, the presence of a heal really just artificially extends the number of mistakes a player can make before triggering a fail state. Why not just extend their health pool? What is the advantage of a healing spell? There are a number of reasons you can put something like this in your game. Healing hides information from the player, in particular how long they can survive encounters, making their success and failure less certain. A healing system can act as a safety net against frequent failure states for less skilled players to lean on. Hollow Knight accomplishes these things with its healing system, as its an exploration-based game that requires long ventures between check points. As to why Hollow Knight uses a certain specific implementation of healing in particular, I think it serves three primary purposes.
Creating tension
Teaching situational awareness
Allowing meaningful decision-making on the part of the player
I will elaborate, but.. Okay first, it’s time for some math. To heal, The Knight need only stand still and concentrate for precisely 1.141 seconds. This will restore one unit of health, which usually translates to one hit of damage from an enemy. For each subsequent 0.891 seconds The Knight holds focus uninterrupted, another unit of health will be restored. This costs the resource SOUL, like I said, and this resource is accrued whenever The Knight deals damage with a melee attack to an enemy. SOUL has a maximum value of 99, and it costs 33 to restore each unit of health. 11 SOUL is restored to The Knight each time an enemy is struck by the melee attack. This means, from a full SOUL meter, the player can restore 3 hits of damage to their health. For each additional unit of healing, they’ll need to successfully strike the enemy 3 times. In other words, to succeed in Hollow Knight you’ll need to be hitting an enemy while receiving damage at a ratio of 3 to 1, while successfully casting your focus spell without being interrupted, of course.
With this system, you just have to be good enough. Comforting, in the dark caverns of Hollownest
Those time figures, 1.141 and 0.891 seconds, seem awfully precise, and that’s probably because they are. My thinking is that these figures were arrived at after extensive playtesting against Hollow Knight‘s wide variety of enemies and bosses. Because The Knight needs to stand absolutely still during that roughly one second of time, it was pretty essential that it’s possible to safely do so during boss fights without being interrupted, otherwise the healing ability would be completely useless. However, if it was always safe to do so, or if the safe windows of time in which the healing could be done were always obvious or easy to react to, the game’s challenges and combat gameplay could be in danger of being trivialized. That being the case, I don’t doubt that a lot of consideration was put into these figures, as they carry the heavy burden of creating tension during combat encounters. A lot of that tension happens in the final moments of the focus healing animation. You may find yourself waiting with bated breath as that one second of focus seems to stretch out to years, an angry bloodthirsty beetle bearing down on you.
Hollow Knight‘s combat can be broken down into small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale encounters. Large-scale encounters are things like boss battles and long gauntlets of enemies. Small-scale encounters are the moments of fighting against smaller enemies found wandering around the world. Medium-scale encounters can be found somewhere in the middle, being rooms full of those small-scale encounters like enemies, or tougher enemies strategically placed to challenge the player. The healing system in Hollow Knight needs to be versatile and universal enough to function in any of these situations. During and after fights against small enemies, the healing focus spell can usually be used pretty safely, without interference, as enemies can be easily retreated from. Resources for healing are provided in return for successfully striking enemies, so as long as the player is engaging with the combat to a certain minimum level of success, these small encounters will provide some sense of danger without bringing the player closer to failure. On a medium-scale, the healing system being so tied to successful combat helps keep an encounter’s obstacles threatening. It is possible to bypass much of Hollow Knight‘s dangers without fighting, but if a slip up is made, no additional resources can be obtained without engaging an enemy. This ensures the player is consistently engaging with the game’s mechanics, and learning to fight as they explore. Ironically, although the healing system exists to keep the player safe, the way it works, hinging on a delicate balance of risk and reward, promotes engaging with the game in such a way that tension is built, and that there remains an ever-present sense of danger.
Not minding your spacing or timing can get you into trouble
Large-scale encounters are where things get really interesting. If the player can heal indefinitely, then how do you build tension in a boss encounter, when the player should theoretically be in the most danger? This is where the ratio of how many hits a player needs to land to restore health, how quickly a heal can be executed, and how frequently a boss attacks the player had to be tightly balanced. As the game goes on bosses will provide smaller and smaller windows of time for the player to heal, but there always must be some possibility of healing or else the system would feel broken. At the same time, by requiring those three all-important melee attacks of the player before allowing them to heal, engaging with the boss’s combat mechanics is essentially enforced, with that aforementioned ratio of hitting-to-getting-hit acting as a sort of design guide for how boss fights should be structured. It gives the designers a pretty good barometer for how to tune the difficulty of Hollow Knight‘s fights. ‘At any given point in the game, the player should be averaging 3 hits against the boss for every 1 hit they take, if they are to defeat it’.
Boss enemies will give you plenty of space to heal, the key is knowing where to find it
This all of course assumes the player can successfully heal against frantically aggressive bugs (the creepy crawly kind, not the game-breaking kind) that want to kill them. Knowing when to attack and when to heal is one of Hollow Knight‘s most essential skills, and it ties in with that relative spacial awareness I’ve mentioned in other topics. The focus spell teaches the player to keep their eyes open for the various tells and telegraphs of their opponent, to be aware of their Knight’s relative position to the enemy, and how to exploit gaps in the enemy’s activity. Utilizing and capitalizing on situational awareness is one of the best ways to make a player can feel powerful or skilled, as though they have some secret knowledge that puts them above the opposition. Gently nudging the player to get good at sneaking in healing spells in-between the boss’s attacks reinforces that feeling. Making meaningful decisions is also how a player stays interested and invested in a game, it’s how to make their agency in the play space feel impactful. Deciding when to start up a heal in Hollow Knightis a meaningful decision, but the game pushes this idea further.
Using SOUL to attack is a risk as you can see in this clip of Hornet… basically whupping my ass
You see, SOUL can be spent not only on healing spells. Early on The Knight will obtain a projectile attack spell called vengeful spirit that deals even more damage than their normal melee strike. Other attack spells will also be obtained at various points throughout the game. These attack spells draw on the same SOUL resource, and cost the same 33 point value as a heal. Suddenly, the player has options in combat. Heal one hit of damage, or deal extra damage? It’s very tempting to go aggro with those powerful spells, especially against tough enemies with deep health pools. If they die quicker, that’s less time the player’s spent potentially making mistakes, after all. So now the player is being made to think critically about the overall situation, weighing their intake of SOUL versus how often they need to heal, factoring in their confidence in their own abilities into how SOUL should be spent. It becomes a series of interesting decisions all happening in rapid, in-the-moment succession. It makes the combat overall more interesting, while also rewarding mastery of the game, as skilled play will allow the player to launch the satisfying and crunchy magic attacks more often while healing less, defeating enemies and bosses more quickly.
As you can see in this clip, I make the impactful, meaningful decision to fail spectacularly
So Hollow Knight‘s healing system accomplishes a lot by playing with the player’s investment of time, sharing a resource with the player’s offensive magic, and tying its efficacy to the player’s success in combat. It creates a satisfying risk-reward experience where the risk is determined by the player’s skill and self-knowledge, as well as a tense and exciting atmosphere in combat.
Very tense. The Knight nearly pee’d their pants here. Do bugs wear pants?
I think it’s worth considering some alternative healing systems games similar to Hollow Knight often employ. Hollow Knight lets you heal indefinitely so long as your combat performance is up to a certain par, but some games will put a hard limit on how much healing you can do before reaching a checkpoint, potion shop, or other such demarcation. Limited quantity healing systems do have some unique strengths. They still give the player ultimate agency over whether and how to use healing resources, like in Hollow Knight, but also give an emphasis on a player’s overall performance, rather than Hollow Knight‘s more moment-to-moment focused system. You can make a lot of mistakes in HollowKnight but still recover to full strength with some acutely skilled play. With limited quantity healing, you can succeed with skilled play even if you make a lot of mistakes, but the tension will remain high when you’re all out of healing, as your mistakes cannot be undone. Both systems have a lot of potential, depending on what player experience your design is geared toward. I think Hollow Knight‘s implementation is pretty perfect for its world design. With fewer check points and an emphasis on prolonged exploration, it makes sense to make The Knight’s healing resources theoretically indefinite.
Another alternative is health pickups, a very common healing system. In game series like Metroid and Mega Man you can restore health through health pickup items randomly dropped by defeated enemies. This accomplishes a similar end as Hollow Knight‘s healing system, with a safety net against failure being rewarded for successfully fighting enemies. There are a couple of key differences though. For one, health pickups are usually randomly generated by defeated enemies to keep the flow of healing less continuous, and more uncertain. There is a certain excitement unique to finding a healing item right when you most need it. During extended combat encounters without an abundance of targets, such as during a boss fight, naturally there won’t be any health pickups. Games with a health pickup system often try to circumvent this latter issue by throwing smaller enemies into the middle of boss fights that drop health pickups, but that comes with a couple of problems too. For one, the presence of smaller enemies in a boss fight can distract from the fight’s core mechanics and design appeal, especially if it’s meant to be a pitched duel between some important character and the player. For another, that scenario is now rewarding healing for engaging with the small enemies, rather than fighting the boss directly, which may not be the intended experience. Players might spend a lot of time only engaging with smaller enemies to collect health pickups, and ignore the boss. The alternative is simply balancing boss fights such that players aren’t expected to heal during them, or having the boss themselves drop health pickups at various times, but at that point your creeping awfully close to Hollow Knight‘s rather elegant solution anyway.
That elegant solution is not the best way to do healing necessarily, no design scheme is objectively the best one in every situation. It may just be the best one for Hollow Knight though, and it’s hard to argue with the precision of its implementation.
Whew! Got through an entire gameplay analysis of HollowKnight without once mentioning Dark Souls… wait, damn it.
What’s that, an excuse to talk about Kingdom Hearts again? Yeah so you may have heard that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is receiving its final playable character for the foreseeable future. I’ve long had a huge admiration for the way the Smash team is able to adapt characters from their home franchises while retaining the charm and feel of that source material. It’s why your Mega Mans (added 2014) in Smash feel more like they stepped right out of the game Mega Man than Sonic (added 2008) feels right out of Sonic. Especially in more recent years, a prominent design goal of new Smash fighters seems to be matching the experience and feel of playing the game that fighter first appeared in. In this case, KINGDOM HEARTS! Yeah, I’m a bit of a fan, so I’m just gonna gush for a minute about how Sora’s been ported from an action RPG into this platform fighting game, and analyze some of the choices that were made to do it.
Sora is the protagonist of Kingdom Hearts, a 2002 3D action RPG in which he fights using magical abilities and an enormous key. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a platform fighting game, a genre essentially invented by Smash Bros. itself, in which multiple fighters compete in a 2D fighting arena with lots of platforms and aerial space. Naturally, the 3D spaces of Kingdom Hearts, such as Sora’s attack swings, had to be mapped onto a 2D plane, and you can see that was done pretty much one-to-one. Sora’s attacks feel familiar in terms of reach and timing to his original game. So immediately, you can tell somebody is a huge fan of the first Kingdom Hearts game. Although other entries in the franchise are represented through costumes, and a couple of Sora’s attacks, the lion’s share of his moves are evocative of the debut in Kingdom Hearts specifically.
“*&&X%” means “heart” in gorilla
The three hit combo is one of the most fundamental aspects of Kingdom Hearts. It’s a game filled with disney characters, and as such was initially marketed to a younger audience, so one of Kingdom Hearts‘s chief design goals is the ease of accessibility to its combat. Sora’s combo attacks home in on and reliably stun enemies in his original game. Lots of action games have very complicated series of specific button inputs necessary to make your player character do cool stuff and feel really powerful. 90% of attacks in Kingdom Hearts will be triggered by one, maybe two buttons simply pushed in succession, the idea being that the minimum knowledge and prowess necessary to make Sora feel cool and powerful should be very easy to achieve, so players of all skill levels can, at least, feel cool and powerful even if they aren’t ready for the game’s toughest challenges yet. This is a design philosophy Smash and Kingdom Hearts share in common. Several of the newest fighters added to Smash have felt a bit more complicated than earlier entrants, especially as guest fighters from more traditional fighting games were added. I think it’s significant that the decision was made to make Sora notably simple to pick up and play, without any of the complicated inputs or resource management of other new Smash fighters.
Oh boy you’re gonna be seeing a lot of this online… >:)
The Super Smash Bros. attention to detail really comes through in each of these new fighters. I think my favorite detail in Sora’s moveset is the aerial 3 hit combo. Stringing several attacks together from just one move like this is not something Smash fighters are normally able to do, at least not in this particular way, it’s unique to Sora. Aerial combat in Kingdom Hearts is essential. Square Enix had never really moved into the 3D space before the way they did with Kingdom Hearts, incorporating a full range of movement both horizontally and vertically. Kingdom Hearts goes out of its way to fully utilize these dimensions by giving Sora a powerful jump, and the ability to attack anywhere in the air. Gravity is just a gentle suggestion, in Kingdom Hearts. With access to the 3D space around a target, this would let the player jump into a variety of attack angles to really push what was possible in this combat system. This is true of all fighters in Smash Bros., probably to accomplish the same thing. In Kingdom Hearts 1 in particular, as opposed to its sequels, short-hop combos, in which the player would jump the minimum height and quickly hit an enemy with aerial attacks, would result in a much faster combo that can sneak through in more situations. It was a powerful and common technique you could use to push your skills in the game further, so I was absolutely delighted to see an adaptation of this highlighted in the Smash presentation, used in the exact same way.
Sora’s smash attacks borrow from various attacks he’s used throughout the series. His down smash is the finishing leap from Kingdom Hearts 2, which would replace your combo finisher on command, and propel enemies into the air for further combos. Sora’s up smash is the Ripple Drive from Kingdom Hearts 1, albeit without its magical effects. Sora lifts his keyblade above him to damage an area of foes around him. The Smash version actually retains this ability to hit multiple enemies at once.
The poke
Sora’s specials are all direct references to attacks from Kingdom Hearts 1. The magic available, firstly, all behaves as it does in that debut game. Firaga is a repeatable, spammable, almost rapid-fire series of small projectiles. Thundaga is a vertically-oriented series of lighting strikes that can clear out a wide area. Blizzaga is a shotgun-pattern spray of particles, although it curiously did not freeze enemies in the original. The notable thing about Sora’s magic in SmashBros. is the way it rotates, which was not a feature of the original game. This rotation does, however, reflect the way that Kingdom Hearts is menu controlled. Yeah. Kind of odd for an action game, but all of Sora’s actions outside of running and jumping are operated by selecting them from a menu in the corner of the screen. Yes, even attack is a menu item, and so was magic. Each spell could be chosen from an expanding sub-menu, which is what this rotation of spells in Smash represents. A few of the other DLC smash fighters do this, using a similar but not quite the same mechanic to representsomething from the original game when it was not feasible to lift it directly to Smash, like with the Persona fighter Joker, whose rage meter does not feature in his home title. It does, however, somewhat reflect the themes of Persona 5 – rebellion and defiance.
The Sonic Blade (actually a move Sora learned from Cloud Strife of Final Fantasy VII, fun fact.) allowed Sora to dash across the battlefield repeatedly, piercing enemy defenses and clearing out crowds of enemies. In Smash, this move has been given an aerial component, probably for a couple of reasons. First off, the original Sonic Blade was notable mainly for how it would zigzag across enemies, hitting them at multiple angles in a row. On a 2D plane, you can’t really convey this without, well using both of the two dimensions, so Sonic Blade has to go up now. The second reason reinforces the overall design of Sora in Smash, which is the archetype of an air fighter. Smash, along with many other fighting games, utilizes certain models for its fighters, or archetypes, such as fighters that are heavy and difficult to move, fighters that can quickly close distance, or fighters that are dangerous to cross with in the air. Sora falls into the latter category, and this too is a reflection of his original game, which included a lot of fighting mid-air, where Sora was able to home in on enemies like a bird of prey. In addition to reasons I’ve mentioned such as the full utilization of 3D space, there are also segments in which Sora can literally fly, and all the fighting takes place in the air! So making Sora a huge aerial threat fits perfectly. Sonic Blade in Super Smash Bros. can be directed manually by the player, which is technically possible in Kingdom Hearts, just not with the control stick – You’d have to change your lock-on target mid-attack to change Sonic Blade’s trajectory, but they thought of that! Smash Bros. features the blue lock-on indicator from the original game when chasing down a fighter! See what I mean about that attention to detail?
Gotta go fast
Speaking of air fighting, Aerial Sweep and Hurricane Blast are among the tools in Sora’s toolbox from his debut game that made air fighting so powerful. Sora’s attack combo is set and invariant until he levels up through experience. Once he does, he can unlock new abilities that extend or modify his attack combo. Arial Sweep and Hurricane Blast are both such modifiers. The Kingdom Hearts modifiers operate in an interesting way, where they may only activate when Sora and his target are in certain positions relative to each other. For example, Hurricane Blast, an attack in which Sora spins his keyblade vertically like a pinwheel around his body, activates if Sora attacks an enemy at a lower elevation than him, while midair. Aerial Sweep activates if Sora is grounded, and attempts to attack an enemy at a significantly higher elevation, without jumping. Kingdom Hearts combo modifiers were so compelling because, while they tended to deal more damage with more advantageous hitboxes than regular attacks, they needed to be set up with careful positioning, making the player change the way that they play as they level up, and think more critically about the game space. Super Smash Bros. is a game almost entirely about critically engaging with the game space, so both Hurricane Blast and Aerial Sweep are situated appropriately in Sora’s moveset to reflect their uses in Kingdom Hearts. Hurricane Blast can close distance with foes beneath sora, and Aerial Sweep does the same for foes above.
Finally Sora’s got his counter. He takes a defensive stance, and if an enemy hits him during that short window of time, Sora retaliates with an attack of his own. It’s a common mechanic in Smash, but I can see why it’s so oft used. Fighting games are inherently games of prediction, and some of their most exciting interactions are between players pulling one over on each other by anticipating an attack and turning it against the attacker. It just makes sense to include a mechanic specific to that sort of interaction, even if it is perhaps somewhat overused for various fighters. This kind of had to be in Sora’s kit, though, as it’s one of the primary methods for defeating the more difficult foes of Kingdom Hearts. Sora even had an ability specific to it that would increase his attack speed and restore magic points when he successfully countered. Countering is so integral to Kingdom Hearts that Sora can even convert a blocked attack of his own into a counter in his original game through the clash system, although Smash has its own system for handling clashing attacks between two fighters, so it wouldn’t make sense to give Sora the advantage over everyone else on that front.
Counters: destroying the darkness and ending friendships since 2002
So yeah I couldn’t be more chuffed. One of my favorite video game heroes from one of my favorite games is now.. in another of my favorite games, a celebration of all things video game. I pretty much just wanted to geek out over how incredible the translation to Smash fighter has been for Sora, and hopefully I pointed out something or other that you didn’t notice before. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some labbing to do…
If you’ve ever been in a literature class you may know the basics of how characterization is generally conveyed – how a character acts, how a character speaks, how other characters act and speak in response. Typically this is done through audio and visuals, you can see and hear all these things play out to get an idea of a character’s personality and vibe. Games, of course, have their own interactive advantage. There’s a way to characterized that only games are capable of. The way a character plays, the way the systems and mechanics that make up their utility incentivize and reward certain methods of play can also be tools of characterization. There’s personality in a playstyle.
I’ll be using as a case study Yuuki Terumi from the traditional 2D fighting game Blazblue, as I think this character is a particularly acute example of what I’m talking about. A fighting game, specifically a traditional 2D one, if you didn’t know, is a game about pitting two fighters, each controlled by a player or an AI, against each other in a relatively small arena, with nothing but their fists (or swords) and their wits. First guy to die loses. A game more or less similar to Blazblue you may have heard of is Street Fighter. Fighting games can get pretty heady with strategies and counter-strategies, feints, double-fake-outs, predictions, counter-predictions, etc. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of interesting player behaviors that go into a fighting game match, so there’s also a lot of room to explore game mechanics to characterize these behaviors.
I’ll try to give the simplest explanation for the rules of fighting games to define our terms here. Each player (or AI) picks a fighter from a roster of unique combatants. They try to hit each other without being hit in return. Landing a hit generates meter, a special resource that can be spent on special, powerful maneuvers. Getting hit also generates meter, but slightly less, while you lose HP. When your HP reaches zero, you’re out.
Just a game about two dudes kickin’ each others asses. There’s a purity in the simplicity of it
Games are defined by their rules, and so it is with playable characters. Even in the most open-ended game one cannot do anything in the play space. You’ll always be limited by what your play avatar or player character is or isn’t capable of. Given this inherent fact, the design of what can or can’t be done in a game defines the game’s character. When you’re assuming the role of Pac-Man, you play a hungry guy who loves fruit, is wary of ghosts, but is also quick to turn the tables on those ghosts when he gets the upper hand. Well, that’s all that Pac-Man is capable of, which is exactly the point. It’s extremely rudimentary in the case of Pac-Man, but this basic idea of characterizing through play can be expanded far in a lot of directions. When a player is incentivized to behave a certain way in a given play space, it characterizes their play, which can reflect on the character they are playing.
So how does Blazblue accomplish this in this case of Yuuki Terumi? Characterization begins with first impressions, and the first you’ll get of Terumi is his appearance, so let’s have a look.
Good God. He looks like a used car salesman half-heartedly dressed in a voldemort costume cobbled together at the last minute from miscellaneous articles found in a party city. He is impossibly cool. I will never achieve a fraction of this man’s sense of style. LOVE this guy. So there’s not a lot to go on here without further context within Blazblue‘s world. Some people might have that context, but many won’t, picking up the game mostly interested in some fun fighting game versus action without delving into the story mode. We get the sense from his posture that Terumi is perhaps a shady, underhanded fellow. He wears a suit, but loosely, maybe it’s just a facade of professionalism. The bright yellow cloak with wicked black patterns on it is a lot more striking and threatening, maybe even villainous.
Terumi is what’s known in fighting game communities as a rushdown character, meaning to succeed he generally wants to get in an opponent’s face, put up an oppressive offense, and not let up. Let’s take a look at some of Terumi’s basic moves to see how they reinforce this playstyle.
Nothing but his fists, his wits, and an absurdly large collection of knives
Basically everything Terumi can do, is either fairly short-ranged, or physically moves his character forward, toward the opponent. The game is trying to gently nudge all Terumi players to behave in a certain way – close in on your foe quickly, and use the tight space to your advantage. “Attack, attack, ATTACK!”, the game seems to say. Playing rushdown is all about keeping your foe guessing to get around any potential defenses they may mount against you. In a word, you’re manipulating your opponent into making mistakes, never giving them a moment to breathe. You want to make them seem stupid. You want to be dancing circles around them. Aggression and manipulation. It’s a pretty elegant abstraction of Terumi’s proclivity for psychological torment. It all paints a pretty vivid picture of a man that thrives off of schadenfreude, who feels superior, who’s powerful and knows it. I mean how often do you see curb stomping as a gameplay mechanic? Absolutely brutal.
I want to evilly cackle just watching this
One of Blazblue‘s primary mechanics is drive. It’s a special form of magic attack unique to each fighter, providing a unique mechanic that individualizes each character’s play style. Differentiation like this is great for making each fighter feel different, which is further great for your game’s variety and long term interest. It’s also excellent for characterization, with each drive mechanic reflecting on the characters’ various personalities. In Terumi’s case, his drive is called Force Eater, and its unique mechanic is as follows. Normally, as I mentioned earlier, each of the two fighters on screen build up meter when they deal or receive damage – more meter in the case of the dealer than the receiver. However, when Terumi deals damage with his Force Eater, he steals all of the meter his opponent would have generated through received damage, for himself.
It’s pretty intuitive that taking anything from a player that feels rightfully theirs makes things personal, and that’s the idea. Terumi breaks the almost sacrosanct understanding that taking damage refunds a resource as a consolation, but nothing is sacred to Terumi. It’s a subtle thing. Your opponent may not even notice that you’re stealing from them, but as a Terumi player you’ll know. You feel like an absolute bastard for doing this and it’s great. This is your primary method of generating meter, and how you fuel your play as Terumi. To be Yuuki Terumi means taking from others to survive. If you follow the game world’s narrative definitions that meter = magic = the soul, then Terumi eats away at his opponents’ souls to fight them. Pretty apt. The end result of all this is that Yuuki Terumi can generate a dizzying amount of meter in a very short amount of time, which further reinforces the next point I want to discuss, his supers.
Watch the respective fighters’ meter (the number in each bottom corner) when Terumi just kicks his opponent vs. when he uses his green drive attack
In traditional fighting games like Blazblue, a super is a big, stylish, spectacle-rich attack that deals a lot of damage at the cost of some of your meter. It’s the big haymaker attack that you gradually build up to. Most characters in Blazblue have two normal supers to choose from, sometimes three, and rarely even four. Terumi has SIX. In fact, most of his versatility as a fighter comes from his supers. Tools that some more specialized characters might have, like counters and and ranged attacks, are only available to Terumi through his supers, requiring him to spend meter to use them. So not only is Terumi a power-hungry soul eater, but he also delights in spending enormous amounts of that magical energy he siphons, burning through it like it’s nothing, unleashing a deluge of power other characters struggle to scratch the surface of. Because Terumi can generate so much meter so easily, you as a Terumi player are almost always flooded with the stuff. You cap out at 100 meter, and money in the bank does nothing for you, so it’s most efficient to be spending it frequently. This promotes an extremely aggressive playstyle, which is good, because Terumi is an aggressive guy.
Terumi’s words drip with venom, and also everything else he does
You’ll notice a lot of growling, sneering, and jeering coming from Terumi. He’s constantly berating, insulting, and taunting his opponents. He clearly doesn’t think much of them and wants them to know it. Gameplay is the core of what we’re talking about here, but gameplay has to work in concert with audio and visuals – all three are essential to the overall experience. The animation does a lot of heavy lifting here too, as you may have noticed. It can communicate some nuances of Terumi’s character that don’t quite come out through gameplay alone, such as the elegant yet slippery, almost dance-like way he moves, like a snake. There’s also a lot of snake imagery here. Okay yes, the snake thing isn’t all that subtle. Terumi = snake.
Yes, this is a thing you can actually do to people in this game. You monster
Feeling superior isn’t just a kick for this guy, it’s like an obsession, or a need. It’s as if he’d disappear in a puff of green smoke if ever a single person in a room with him wasn’t made to feel lower than a worm. He’s powerful, and he knows it. From his unassuming form he can unleash a torrent of magic that puts others to shame, and he loves doing it. He’s cruel, sadistic, and aggressive. He doesn’t want to just stomp you into the dirt, he wants to machine-gun stomp you a thousand times per minute until you’re a red paste on the ground. The game treats you like a bloodthirsty sadist, so that’s what you become to play Terumi. Blazblue is so effective at this, I often find myself repeating caught up in Terumi’s rapturous celebration of his own ability when I land a particularly nasty combo. It’s all in good fun, of course. Of course. Is this that “role playing” I’ve heard so much about? They should make games about that kind of thing.
“DAMN I’m strong!”
So how do you make your player feel like Spiderman.. or Batman, or Pac-Man or whoever? Build systems that incentivize behaviors reflective of Spiderman. Construct your gameplay mechanics around these behaviors so that a player will naturally be inclined toward doing things that Spiderman would do, and back up these behaviors with coordinated audio and visuals that promote feeling the way that Spiderman would feel. If your gameplay mechanics are built well, if they’re fun, you can even give players a reason to have fun roleplaying. Becoming a character within a narrative is something you can only do with a game, so make it fun to become your game characters for a time and make an experience players can’t have anywhere else.
Parry Everything 