What I'm Playing (Volume 79): Final Fantasy Explorers

I really wanted to play a handheld platformer, but I didn't have any to play, so I decided to chew up some time with some lengthy RPGs until I get enough budget to add some platformers to my collection. The first one that I decided to play was a Final Fantasy game released for the 3DS in 2016 (in North America), Final Fantasy Explorers.

The game is essentially, as far as I can tell from reviews, a pretty shameless ripoff of the Monster Hunter series, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to play it. I don't have any Monster Hunter games, but was thinking about getting Monster Hunter: World for PS4, but wanted to cut my teeth on a similar game I'd actually played before forking over the cash for a newer game. Plus, I just really like Final Fantasy.

For those like me who were unaware, the basic Monster Hunter framework is that of an action RPG, except for the wrinkle that your character doesn't develop according to traditional RPG mechanics. The path towards greatness in Monster Hunter is that killing enemies while doing quests yields you lots of materials which you must combine to create new weapons and armor, or upgrade your current weapons and armor. This gives the game a certain grindy nature to it that definitely feels like a classic Square/Enix RPG, but also allows you to customize the type of character you want to be by forcing you to spend your limited materials to advance your character in the desired direction. So if you want to develop your character to be like mine, a damage dealing Monk, then you'll need to spend your materials to craft knuckles to improve his power, and not worry as much about his armor until it becomes a grave danger to your existence. Your strength is measured in equipment level, rather than in level, which is definitely different than most RPGs which have a persistent measure of strength with armor layered on top of it. In Monster Hunter, all you are is your equipment, so you had best choose wisely!

I'm not sure about all of the differences between Final Fantasy Explorers and the Monster Hunter series, although I sure there must be some. The most obvious differences are in setting and recurring characters, and Final Fantasy Explorers certainly delivers plenty of fan service for long standing fans of the series like myself. You'll encounter chocobos, cactuars, iron giants, lamias, and plenty of other standard enemies from the series throughout your journey through your new world. Your main quest revolves around better learning to harness power from the crystals to fully explore your world (shocker). The main bosses in the game are your classic summons from the series, including Ifrit, Ramuh, Shiva, Bahamut, and Alexander. You can equip magicite from other worlds to temporarily become classic Final Fantasy characters, including Cloud, Squall, Yuna, Cecil, and Aeris (don't start with that Aerith nonsense). All of these elements put a shiny Final Fantasy veneer onto the game that will definitely make it a good entrance point to the genre for the Final Fantasy fan.

The character progression felt a bit stilted to me. It was pretty rare that I failed to complete a mission on the first try, making it far less important to me to be continually upgrading my equipment. If you did happen to die, you'd be penalized by losing 5 minutes off of your mission timer, which meant very little, as each mission lasted nearly a half hour. I barely bothered trying to avoid or heal damage throughout, as I could just put out as much damage as possible, die, come back to life with full health, rinse, and repeat. Keep in mind that this is a game that is intended to be played online with friends, so the fact that I was able to clear out the entire main quest without any help and with very little damage mitigation is a sign that the game was just too easy. Perhaps even more damaging, even when you finally got a new item or skill, or seriously upgraded your old ones, the difference would be very slight, which definitely discouraged the player to engage with the process of developing their character gradually. The basic process for me was to clear out every mission of a certain star level, then blow all of my materials to take a huge leap forward for the next level of difficulty, which was frankly a bit boring, as each star level features from between 5 to 20 missions, each of which will take you at least 15 minutes. It felt needlessly grindy in this, as the rewards for completion weren't very impactful, and by the time you'd get to the next difficulty level, all of the gear you'd been building for was now very outdated by the newer released items (which were then unattainable because they required higher level loot).

The controls of the game were fine, but they were definitely not ideal. A game like this really needed a good camera control mechanism, and this game had a pretty poor one. Despite being playable on the New 3DS, which has a control stick/nub that would be ideal for this kind of game (I believe it's usable on the newest Monster Hunter on the 3DS), this feature is completely unused in Final Fantasy Explorers. You do have a button to lock the camera behind you, and also to lock on to a nearby target, but this lock on button only will lock on to the biggest enemy nearby, which gets annoying for me, as I like to focus on picking off the weaklings and then turning my attention to the big guys after that. In order to link onto the smaller enemies, you had to use the touchscreen, which was beyond irritating. The actual combat mechanics themselves were fun, though, featuring a Diablo-esque flow in which you burn all of your resources casting your abilities, and then fill your meter back up with basic attacks, only to burn it all again in a flurry of damage.

The music and sound was frankly unremarkable. I literally have no remarks.

This game was shiny, fun, and not terribly impressive. From what I've heard, most of the Monster Hunter games are better versions of this, and I enjoyed it enough to dip my toes into the Monster Hunter water if I find a good deal out there in the wild, but I'm not exactly rushing into it. But it wasn't bad by any stretch, just an average game in a sea of action RPGs. For fans of Final Fantasy, it will definitely amuse you for several hours, and you may enjoy it enough to put in the 20 hours necessary to complete the main story. But I can't see people, other than the most hardcore fans of the genre, putting in the hours and hours necessarily to do all of the end game tasks that come with the game, unless you also had a few friends who wanted to play along with you. I'll give it a 7.8/10.

My next game will be yet another time burning RPG, and will be an especially trick teaser!

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 78): Donkey Kong Jr.

Donkey Kong Jr. is the sequel to Donkey Kong, and for this review, I played the NES version. I wrote pretty extensively about the original game here, so if you're interested in a more detailed run through of the concept, you can check it out!

I played Donkey Kong Jr. because I was running through the games on the NES Classic that I wanted to beat, and it seemed like a quick and entertaining run through, and it delivered exactly that. The basic premise of the game is pretty clever. Following the capture of Donkey Kong by Mario in the original game, Donkey Kong is being treated cruelly by Mario, as he keeps him locked up in an astonishingly small cage and is cracking a literal whip at everything that moves! You take the role of Donkey Kong's son, Donkey Kong Jr., as he must navigate a gamut of obstacles to rescue his father from the villainous Mario. I do believe that this is Mario's only game as a villain, which is a great deal of fun.

The controls are similar to those in the original game, but DK Jr. has a few additional abilities that Mairo lacked. He can now climb up and down on vines, and this is where the real strategy comes into play. He can hang on to a single vine with two hands, enabling him to slide quickly down the vine and reduce his hitbox, or he can hang on to two vines with two hands, enabling him to climb more quickly, but also expanding his hitbox. Managing your positioning to enable maximum speed to avoid the birds and other creatures which Mario sends at you is really important, as you no longer have access to Mario's hammer, needing to resort either to avoiding enemies, or to drop fruit on them from above. The climbing mechanics are great amounts of fun, and give Donkey Kong Jr. a much more fluid and entertaining control scheme than the original. You can still die from falling from too high a distance, but for the most part, you'll be climbing or jumping on flat platforms, so that one irritant is not too big of a downside.

The music and sounds are pretty good, but not quite as iconic as in Donkey Kong.

The levels are far more varied than in Donkey Kong, and each one is fun in its own right.

The game is not nearly so innovative as the original, but definitely polishes off some of the rough edges of its predecessor. It still feels far too clunky in a post Super Mario Bros. universe, without the incredible leap forward of the game it follows. It feels a bit like Final Fantasy V compared to Final Fantasy IV. Final Fantasy V is, in my opinion, significantly better than Final Fantasy IV, but you the jump is small compared to Final Fantasy IV versus the field of RPGs to date before it. So I'd rather play Donkey Kong Jr., but I still have to marvel at Donkey Kong in a way I never will with Donkey Kong Jr. I'll give it an 8.5/10.

Up next is actually a game I teased months and months ago that I finally finished, so feel free to search through the archives to find a tease that I never delivered on. There's also another tease floating around that I'm still working on, so you can get a pretty good sense for what's coming in the next few weeks if you really care to!

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 77): Ninja Gaiden

Next up on my NES Classic odyssey was a journey through the Tecmo classic, Ninja Gaiden. I'd played this game on cartridge before, but it was just too hard and long for me to clear on cart, so I decided to tackle it on the NES Classic so that I could save and break it up between days. Now that I've stretched my muscles at the game, I could probably beat it in one sitting now with some practice, but for the first run through, having some save states to allow me to pop in and out of the game as my schedule allowed was greatly appreciated.

The game tells the story of the player controlled protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa, who goes on a quest of revenge following the death of his father (his name is Ken, for a nice combo of Ryu and Ken-I don't know if this is coincidence, homage, or theft, but Street Fighter was released 2 years earlier). On his way to vengeance, Ryu discovers a sinister plot of typical 80s anime heft and delivery, and his quest of revenge broadens to save the world! 

Ninja Gaiden is, to put it politely, a polished clone of Castlevania. The UI is the same. The controls are the same. The basic structure of the game is the same. You get powerups not from killing enemies, but by killing lanterns on the wall. And yet, despite the overwhelming similarities between the two games, Ninja Gaiden definitely has done enough to differentiate the two games to warrant having a separate series.

First, Ninja Gaiden was certainly part of the ninja zeitgeist of the late 80s and early 90s, with Ninja Turtles, Ninja Scroll, Shinobi, and 3 Ninjas (I'm definitely forgetting some). Ninjas were just cool, and far more cool at the time than vampire killers/horror themes, although they would get their own zeitgeist later.

Second, the actual control of Ryu is actually far more responsive and enjoyable than that of Simon in Castlevania. Ryu can move throughout his jump, flips around delightfully, moves more quickly, and even has an additional power (see below).

Third, Ryu has the power to cling to walls, enabling him to flip back and forth on the walls to give you some fun ninja style interaction. Taken as a whole, the controls are just delightful, and really make you feel like a ninja as you're flipping, wall jumping, and slashing your way through the game.

Fourth, and finally, the game gives you its most lauded feature, the cutscene! These are, frankly, jaw dropping for the era. There's not a ton of animation, but for the NES, this was as detailed as story conveyance had ever been in an interactive format. There had been several RPGs with in-depth stories conveyed through text, but actually animating them was truly a landmark achievement, and it works well, even today. The plot it communicates is also pretty good, with plenty of twists, turns, and character development to draw your into the world of Ninja Gaiden in a way other games of the era really couldn't match.

The music for the game is pounding and excellent, with a bunch of really memorable tunes to it.

The length of the game is very good, and with the amount of repetition you'll need to do, a kid in 1989 would have definitely gotten some good bang for his buck. There are 6 worlds with several stages in each, with a boss at the conclusion of each.

Despite all of the brilliance, there are some things about this game that just flat out suck. The boss fights are beyond stupid, and if you like them, I think you're stupid, too. Several are just identical to earlier bosses, and most just feature you running up and slashing the boss until he dies.

There's hard, there's Nintendo hard, and there's Ninja Gaiden. This one plays a lot more like the truly unfair games on the NES, like Silver Surfer or Battletoads, that were designed with the old arcade mindset of getting kids to pump quarters into the machine, rather than with the Super Mario Bros. mindset of teaching mechanics and gradually sloping difficulty until you are naturally prepared to meet the more challenging aspects of the game. I don't necessarily have a problem with repetition as a teaching tool, having had to grind out beating that stupid Yellow Devil for a long time in Mega Man, but Ninja Gaiden's difficulty is so seemingly random that it makes it for which to prepare. You'll wait out a bird flying at you, jump over him, jump over the gap, and find that the game simply spawned another bird right in front of you in the middle of your jump! Other times you'll jump over enemies and no new ones will spawn, with no apparent logic as to why. There are birds, and you'll hate them! You'll find enemies on tiny postage stamps of platforms, and you'll need to leap at him with precision, not so high that you can't reach out with your sword, and not so low that you can't both kill him and land on the platform. If you get a game over on a level, you'll return to the beginning of that level, but if you die on a boss, you go all the way back to the beginning of the world! In World 6, a particularly savage place, this will absolutely crush your morale beyond all reason. It took me probably 45 minutes each time to get through World 6-2, meaning that dying against the end boss (which I did several times) meant an extra hour of grinding through things that I already beat once.

There are plenty of dumb moments like this in my favorite of the holy trinity of NES third party series, Mega Man, but they are far fewer and far less frustrating than here. And compared to the gold standard of difficulty curving in Super Mario Bros., this game is downright regressive.

Despite all of that, I still enjoyed this game quite a bit. It definitely broke a lot of new ground, and created a more enjoyable experience for me than Castlevania, despite not being quite as innovative due to its rampant theft of so much of the Castlevania formula. I'd definitely recommend any of the Mega Mans from 2-6 as a pure gaming experience, but there is definitely something about this game that helps it to stand out from the crowd and presents a really fun time to the player. I'll give it an 8.8/10.

Up next is a quick jaunt through another game on the NES Classic, teased below.

-TRO