Rustled Jimmies: Adding Cards Where They Don't Belong

Ghost here and thanks for joining me today.

So here's something that irritates me

You're playing a video game and you find it to be pretty amazing.  You love the story, the game play, the characters, and practically everything about it.  A few months/years down the road you hear of a new entry into the series.  Since you adored the first one, you'd be crazy not to pick up the next game.  You start the game and find familiarity with the characters and world.  You're just about to get into the game and the fast-paced action you are used to from the previous entry and WHAT'S THIS??? Suddenly any traction that the game has is brought to a grinding halt and whoever/whatever is explaining combat begins to pull out a playing card and explain the use of playing cards during combat.

*sigh*....... where to begin?  Let's use one of my favorite whipping boys, Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, and more recently the slow agonizing death that has fallen upon the Paper Mario series. 

Those of you who know me or read this blog know that I love everything about the Kingdom Hearts series with the exception of Chain of Memories (and kind of Dream Drop Distance but that is more of a personal annoyance with the time limits...anyway back to what I was saying).  Chain of Memories has been a particular thorn in my side for the last 13 years.  I could easily have let it slide and forgotten about it during those years but Square keeps bringing the stupid game back up every 5 years or so.  Kingdom Hearts was a great adventure with some nice semi-button-mashy controls that were easy to use and fun to master.  For the follow up game, let's take ALL that fun and ease and chuck it right out the window to be replaced by battle cards.  These battle cards are limited in number and function, run out and you have to replenish them, or can disappear entirely from combat if you need to use a more powerful attack...which you need to do fairly often.  The ease of playing is replaced by tedious card buying, organizing, and wasting time trying to plan your cards to sit in a certain way which takes a university level genius to actually plan successfully or else you'll be eternally unable to beat the final boss of the first half of the game.

Then we have Paper Mario... specifically Paper Mario Color Splash.  I'm not sure who at Nintendo has a cactus up their anal cavity when it comes to the Paper Mario series but they really need to cut it out.  Paper Mario used to be a charismatic set of games with some nice simple turn-based combat that most people seemed to love.  However, it's almost like someone went "Hey, you know that turn-based combat we've given the game that is slow by nature?  Yeah let's find a way to make that more obnoxious and even slower!"  The bad started with Paper Mario Sticker Star when the usual attacking commands were replaced by one-use stickers and everyone hated it.  Paper Mario Color Splash took that criticism.... and ignored it entirely to make everything worse.  The old simple combat of attack an enemy then defend for a turn now consists of the following; choose a single-use battle card from your hand, drag that battle card to a portion of the screen, use paint to color the card as much as you like to increase the damage output of the card.. provided you have collected paint to do so, choose a target, and finally flip the card towards the TV screen to start your attacking phase.  Do I even need to explain why this is a bad idea?

Cards in Video Games done right

Adding cards to combat is always a terrible idea.  The two ideas do not belong whatsoever and do nothing but make combat far more tedious and stressful than it should be.  Fast paced action is turned into insanely slow and meticulous planning.  It turns game franchises that used to be fun into a dying wasteland.  Kingdom Hearts learned from their mistake... sort of as they abandoned that for future games but keep releasing chain of memories in its original combat form.  Paper Mario seems to have not gotten the hint that adding cards where they don't belong is a horrible thing.  Cards in video games should be set aside for actual card games in video form (Solitaire, Pokemon TCG), collectables for the game, or as side content that can be ignored completely if you wish such as playing Caravan in Fallout New Vegas.  Any game executive or game developer who voices the idea of adding card based combat to a game should not only be fired on the spot but deserves a surprise colonoscopy with a steel boot!

So.... that's something that mildly annoys me occasionally.

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If you want to see my other Rustled Jimmies rants then simply click here.

Rustled Jimmies: One Quest at a Time

Ghost here, and thanks for joining me today.

With a brand new year comes a brand new segment that I've decided to call "Rustled Jimmies."  I've called it that because I lack creativity and I enjoy that gorilla meme more than I probably should.  Anyway... basically this is a shorter set of posts that will just pop up randomly when I feel like complaining about things that will, most likely, not be important at all.  It's kind of like Jim Sterling's Nitpick Theater except, also most likely, not as funny.  This doesn't necessarily have to be about video games though I guarantee most of them will be.  Hope you enjoy my informal rantings as often as they show up.

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So here's something that irritates me.

You are playing a video game that you are quite enjoying.  You've decided to take your time with it and really soak up the atmosphere of this fantastic game.  As you play, you discover a way to do some side missions for this game.  Since side quests can be an excellent way to gain additional items, gain experience, or lengthen the play time of a game, you decide to take part of the side mission offerings.  You take a look at the message board, wanted list, or whatever format the game may offer this side content and... WHAT'S THIS????  Despite your full intention on doing all of the side missions, you are hindered from taking more than one of them at a time for no foreseeable reason whatsoever.

While this sort of thing has always annoyed me, it came to the forefront of my mind over my Christmas break.  I received a Playstation 4 for Christmas along with several games.  Two of these games were Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and Final Fantasy XV... and you guessed it!  Both of these games, while being very good games, have chosen to only allow you one case (Digimon) or one hunt (FFXV) at a time. Now you may be asking yourself why this is such an irritation.  Well, I'll gladly tell you!

You know what actively makes for engaging content?  When you actually get to do things that enhance the story, make your life easier, increase challenge, or add to the lore of the universe.  You know what absolutely doesn't make for engaging content?  Wasting precious time walking back and forth across the same exact pathway over and over until my thumbs want to bleed.  Time which could be spent doing literally anything else more fun.  This drudgery is the majority of your experience doing side missions when someone on the development team decides that it's a good idea to only allow you to have one side mission at a time.  Lets talk specific examples so you can really feel what I'm talking about.

In Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth you have a whiteboard which has various cases for you to investigate and take on.  You have to make your way to the detective agency in the back area of the mall, pick a case from the white board in the back of the room, head into the digital space (or wherever the case takes place), solve the case, head back to the detective agency and investigate the white board to close the case... which starts the whole process all over again.  This option was apparently chosen as more beneficial despite the fact that all available cases at a single time are given to you in bulk and can be taken on in any order.  With this being the case, one would think you should be able to grab all of them and complete them at once but apparently that's NOT beneficial for some reason unknown to man.  Similarly, Final Fantasy XV has side content where you must go to various diners, take on one of several monster hunts available, walk all the way to where the mission takes place, walk all the way back to the diner to close the mission and do the process over again instead of just grabbing all the missions and making a singular trip out to maximize time and experience.  The main difference with FFXV as opposed to Digimon is that the monster hunt missions increase in difficulty and many of the hunts available you can't take on when you first encounter that diner.   While that does help with only picking one at a time, that also creates an entirely different problem as now you have to not only take one mission at a time but now you have to remember where every diner is, waste gas to travel across the whole region to get back when you're at a much higher level and then STILL only take on one at a time!

Why is it that I'm having to waste literal minutes out of my play experience to walk back and forth when I shouldn't have to?  I don't get this sort of incompetence with a Bethesda title.  You can pick up as many side missions in Fallout and The Elder Scrolls as you please and are at full liberty to take them on in any order you like.  "Now hang on", you may be saying.  "There's a very real possibility that the side content you are complaining about doesn't get generated in-game until you actually take on the quest hence the need to do them one by one so two quests don't accidentally spawn on top of each other or something."   Yes, that may very well be true, but that doesn't necessarily mean we need to be required to waste our time traveling back and forth to the area of origin to collect and turn back in side missions over and over.  Games should just allow us to collect all of them at once and restrict us to only activating one at a time if they don't get generated until we take the quest on.  This would eliminate the waste of time and make for a better experience overall.

So...that's something that mildly annoys me occasionally.

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If you want to see my other Rustled Jimmies rants then simply click here.