Capcom's releasing a Street Fighter collection for all major formats. This is a welcome development, as it's been a while since we've gotten one, and there's not an ideal way to play Street Fighter Alpha 3 on a more recent system. Yeah, I could play the PSOne game (with its tons and tons of access time) on my Playstation 3, or risk my thumbs and eyesight on the PSP version, but this seems a lot more convenient. There's no word yet on whether the additional characters from the older console versions will be included, and I'm confident that Capcom won't be including the versus mode from Street Fighter Alpha Anniversary, which gave the cast their moves from the Marvel vs. series. Having said all that, I'm still eagerly awaiting this release. Horizon Zero Dawn has lost a bit of its flavor after sixty hours, and it'd be nice to have another reason to fire up my Playstation 4.
I was hoping that Nioh would provide that motivation, but alas, the game isn't really doing it for me. Right from the start, you're presented with an insurmountable challenge... the lead character is forced to burst out of a prison cell and battle a fully armed and armored captor... while in his underpants. Gee, using the WHOLE hand, Tecmo?
Things don't get any easier when William (...William?) washes ashore on a Japanese village. From there, Nioh becomes a struggle to reach each new save point, and progress comes at a glacial pace... you'll cut down three soldiers, lose to the fourth, and get dragged all the way back to the last shrine you found, no matter how far away it was or how close you were to the next one. You'll need a lot of patience to play this game, I'll say that.
I'll also say that you're going to need a Rosetta Stone to make sense of the dense gameplay. There are multiple stances, and a "ki burst" which refills your constantly dwindling stamina, and ninjutsu, and a half dozen different kinds of skill points to earn (prestige points?!), and a Guardian Spirit with its own abilities, and... damn, it's exhausting just thinking about it. Nioh was spearheaded by Koei's Kou Shibusawa, the creator of Nobunaga's Ambition, and his obsession with historical events and complex-beyond-reason play mechanics is painfully evident in this release.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that the industry's current fascination with the Dark Souls style of gameplay is getting tiresome. We've had four games in the series counting Demon's Souls, the more aggressively paced Bloodborne, and at least a dozen mercilessly difficult knock-offs from other companies. Can we move past this trend already? I don't want to "git gud" anymore. I want to get something that's fun.
I'm not sure I need that many versions of the same three games (and Street Fighter 1), but I know I'll definitely be picking up this compilation regardless. It's great that Capcom and Digital Eclipse are doing this, and I'll gladly support it. Especially if it improves our chances of seeing a Capcom Marvel collection or ports of more of the big C's 90s games farther down the line.
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of Nioh, I was initially rolling my eyes at you playing the whitest guy in Japan too, but apparently William is based loosely on William Adams, a real-life white samurai from the Sengoku era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Adams_(sailor)
Kou Shibusawa does his research, I'll give him that.
I'm not completely sick of the super hard Souls-like train, but as someone who's always enjoyed Dark Souls and Bloodborne more for the atmosphere, exploration, and subtle world building than the brutal difficulty I can certainly relate. Like, I'm looking forward to playing the full version of Nioh,* but I don't need brutal kill-ya-dead difficulty to enjoy a Sengoku era Japan game. I'd be fine with just some modestly challenging foes that do scratch damage.
* Was definitely considering picking up the complete edition when it was on sale after the game awards show, but I went for Doom 2016 instead 'cuz I've been meaning to play it for a while now. Loving it, the single player campaign's a real "gameplay first" kinda experience you don't see too often anymore.
What's really frustrating about Nioh in particular is that the difficulty seems to be front-loaded. You're unarmed and largely unclothed at the start, resulting in a lot of quick, brutal deaths. That alone would probably convince a few players to give up and try something else.
DeleteBeating the prison guard makes the rest of the mission a lot easier, but once you arrive in Japan, there's a lot of the game you won't have access to until you defeat Onryoki, a giant demon armed with two iron balls on chains. You won't even get the sneak attack, which lets you do tremendous damage to unsuspecting enemies and would have made the Isle of Demons mission less of a pain in the ass.
I dunno, I just don't see the point in making the prologue as tough (or tougher) than the rest of the game. It creates a barrier for progress and discourages players from giving Nioh a fair shake. The strategies for killing Onryoki on YouTube are filled with comments by players who lament that he's been a brick wall.
I beat him after eight or ten attempts, but I feel like I got lucky. I kept giving armor to the little green guys at the shrine (because you can't buy items yet... see figure one) and they kept giving me elixirs. I needed them ALL for the boss, plus some back-up from my invincibility-granting guardian spirit. Even then the outcome was too close for comfort.
I will give Kou Shibusawa credit for knowing his history. There's an "Obsidian Samurai" about halfway through the game... I haven't reached him, but he's apparently based on Yasuke, a real-life African samurai. Beat him and you get an Atlas Bear as a Guardian Spirit... and that is based on a now-extinct breed of brown bear from Africa. I like to think I know my ursines, but the Atlas Bear is so obscure that I didn't even know of its existence until maybe a year ago. Talk about your deep cuts.
Totally agreed, putting a wall right at the start like that is a serious dick move. Like, start easy and let the player work their way up to more difficult challenges. More devs should've taken notes from the nasty-looking but easy to kill fat demon in Dark Souls 1's intro...especially FromSoftware themselves.
DeleteAnyway, I remember Ball 'n Chain Yokai from the Alpha demo. He was a colossal asshole wall there, too.