Okay, so after no less than five posts dealing with anime and stuff related to it, I think it's time I go back to what I'm best at: game design and rants about it.
I've been thinking a lot about indie action games for two reasons: firstly, because I'm making one so I want to make it as good as it can be but also because my experience making this game and learning about the action genre have caused me to have an epiphany: what if indie action games are held back by priorities and not budget or skill?
Now, obviously, not every indie developer is a skilled, dedicated, or even passionate one. There are indie devs out there who push out prototypes on Steam Greenlight just to make easy money, which is being resolved but, that's not the point. The point is that I'm only going to be talking about games that have clearly shown to have developers with some level of skill behind them but didn't reach their full potential for whatever reason.
Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae is one that I felt had a lot of missed potential, Onechanbara Z2: Chaos is another that I've heard has a lot of potential, Furi met a lot of its potential but there's some left untapped, and the list goes on. RWBY: Grimm Eclipse doesn't really qualify for its own reasons so I won't be talking about that too much.
Now, when it comes to any indie action game, go ahead and pick one, what is one of the most obvious faults the game has? Depending on which one you pick, the answer will, in a lot of cases, be enemy design.
Enemies in several indie action games have been compared to Dynasty Warriors enemies, where there's a lot of them and they can take punishment but they don't dish out any. Of course, I didn't have as much of a problem with this in Mitsurugi because, while harder difficulties have a lot of enemies, in general different enemy types are proactive and have at least two moves they can make use of, with the exception for the default enemies which are intended to ease you into the combat system anyway.
However, ignoring that, these games clearly have quite a bit of potential and developers that, if given the opportunity, could certainly act on that potential. My question today is, why didn't they?
VashTheShellBullet initially answered that the reason is because of lack of funding and, initially I accepted that. But then, I came across two videos that changed my perspective a bit. The first is a kickstarter video about a game called Hercules: The Untold Story, and the second is a RabbidLuigi video titled Top Five Video Games that Changed Genres.
In Hercules: The Untold Story's kickstarter video, some gameplay is shown off and, it looks pretty not that good but toward the end of the video the director/lead designer for the game starts talking about some of the features and inspiration for the game and his inspirations were noteworthy to me, for reasons I'll talk more about when I get to RabbidLuigi's video. For now, his inspirations were God of War, Tomb Raider, and Dynasty Warriors. That last one is going to be pertinent in a little bit so I want you to keep it as a footnote in the back of your mind for now.
RabbidLuigi's Video, on the other hand talks about a number of different titles but, on the list is Dynasty Warriors. Of course, its spot on the list is more about how it went from a fighting game in the first installment to a hack'n slash in the rest of the series but what he says at the beginning of the segment stood out to me. "Dynasty Warriors is widely considered the pinnacle of the Hack'n Slash Genre."
So now we're going to talk about Dynasty Warriors. As a Hack'n Slash series, it's known for two things primarily: combat systems that have a lot of options, and enemies that don't really do anything. I've heard defenses of Dynasty Warriors being NOT a button masher because it has mechanics that you can master without having to resort to button mashing and I'll get to that in a little bit but let's get back on track for a moment.
The thing is, if Dynasty Warriors is considered the pinnacle of action games, what does this mean for indie games that fit these qualifiers? Well, bearing in mind that Dynasty Warriors came before any of these action games that can be criticized now, it's possible that Dynasty Warriors' success has led some of these developers to start making action games the way Dynasty Warriors is because they believe it is the best the genre has to offer.
This is quite obvious with not just Onechanbara but also Senran Kagura, and plenty of other musou style action games.
Of course, Mitsurugi is part of my argument because it doesn't fit the bill as well. Onechanbara is obviously a musou and therefore inspired by Dynasty Warriors but Mitsurugi has some clear parallels with Devil May Cry, and Lost Soul Aside, which is not out yet, is openly stated to be inspired by Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, and Final Fantasy XV. And, while one may think this counteracts the argument, it actually enhances it if you think about it.
Now obviously Mitsurugi didn't get the same amount of funding that Lost Soul Aside is getting because the former was entirely funded in-house, while the latter is funded by Sony currently, so there's a disparity between these two games. However, for as flawed as Mitsurugi is, it is a step in the right direction compared to many Musou games.
The thing about button mashing and games that are called button mashers is not so much that button mashing is a viable option, as it's a viable option in a lot of action games, even some of the best in the genre like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden. The reason they're called button mashers is that they don't do anything to encourage you to learn the mechanics because button mashing, while not the only option, is far too viable.
In Devil May Cry, button mashing is viable in a lot of cases but it's not going to get you the best rank because of the style meter. In Ninja Gaiden, you can button mash to a point but some enemies, particularly the Vigoorian Berserkers, the Epigonos, and many of the bosses will punish you for doing so. Metal Gear Rising discourages button mashing by having that negate the usefulness of the omni-directional parry, as you can't parry while an attack animation is playing, and Bayonetta discourages button mashing both with enemies that require you to think and act and a scoring system that encourages you to learn and master the large variety of combos.
In many Musou games and Dynasty Warriors especially, it's not that button mashing is the only option, it's that the enemies or the game in general don't encourage you to use any of the other options. So I genuinely wonder if some of these games that have lackluster enemies do so not because of a lack of budget but due to lack of priorities.
Devil May Cry 1 doesn't exactly have the simplest combat system in the world but the fine balance of style meter, enemy variety, punishing difficulty, and other touches have made Devil May Cry a classic and a very highly revered game even if its combat system is a lot more simplistic than many action games that came after it.
It's taken me long enough to say it so I'll just say it: instead of a lot of options that are not required or even encouraged, it's better to have a smaller number of options that are all equally viable and have at least a certain number of cases where they are optimal so that it encourages playing the game well and getting better at the mechanics.
That's all for now, have a wonderful day.
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